Former New York Times team journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Duhigg delves into how we can change our lives for the better by mastering our habits from day to day.

Former New York Times team journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Duhigg describes, discusses, and delves into how we can change our respective lives for the better by mastering our habits from day to day.

Charles Duhigg (2014)

The Power of Habit: why we do what we do in life and business

 

Former New York Times team journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Duhigg describes, discusses, and delves into how we can change our own respective lives for the better by mastering our habits from day to day. Duhigg analyzes the central question in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship: Why do some people maintain healthy habits and lifestyles, realize professional achievements, and seek to innovate better products and services for the social good, whereas, many others flail and fail in their best conscious efforts? In response to this bigger, brighter, and broader question, Duhigg attributes this dichotomy to the power of habit. As Duhigg explains in detail, successful people have often learned to control-and-change their habits for the better. Specifically, Duhigg describes, discusses, and delves into the 3 major components of the positive habit loop. These 3 major components include the cue for a particular habitual change, the routine process for self-improvement and habitual reinforcement, and the reward system for long-run habitual adaptation. By analyzing why and how many people over-eat, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and so on, Duhigg provides several plausible explanations and actionable insights for these people to break the habit loop. In time, these people form better habits in controlling their human desires. By force of habit, people learn new critical success factors, lessons, insights, and hard truths from Duhigg’s emphasis on the power of habit. In due course, these people embark on a new relentless life journey for better self-improvement.

 

What are the mainstream takeaways from this new self-improvement book review?

Habits refer to several major recurrent actions, lifestyles, and behaviors for people to navigate through new threats, risks, challenges, and opportunities in the modern life journey. People first decide to deliberately engage in these key habits by choice, and these people keep these key habits subconsciously over a longer time horizon. People can change their bad habits if they learn how habits operate in the positive habit loop. The habit loop comprises 3 major components: cue, routine, and reward. Some habitual cue motivates someone into a routine process to reap results in the broader reward system. Better understanding how habits fit into these 3 habit loop stages can help each one of us change habits for the better. It is often hard, tough, and difficult for people to change their respective habits because these habits fulfill human desires with sound satisfaction. However, people can learn not to respond to the initial cue for some habit, as well as the potential rewards for this habit, with the same old routine process. For instance, Starbucks teaches all of its employees willpower by training them to remain calm in response to some inflection points, or some situations where these employees would probably experience substantially weaker self-discipline. Altering some keystone habits helps start good new actions, mindsets, and behaviors in place of bad old habits.

 

The biggest American retailers, Amazon, Target, Walmart, P&G, and Home Depot often sell to consumers by analyzing their shopping habits. From month to month, these shopping habits help reinforce some specific patterns of retail commerce in the major metropolitan cities and regions across the country. Paul O’Neill of Alcoa, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, former American football safety coach Tony Dungy, and Martin Luther King continue to shape social changes and cultural movements by building new good habits, mindsets, values, cultures, actions, and behaviors as a replacement for old bad ones.

 

Habits arise, emerge, and persist often because the human brain constantly looks for new and optimal ways, lifestyles, and solutions to save time, effort, energy, and consideration. The human brain often cannot tell the difference between bad and good habits. If we have a bad habit, this bad habit always lurks there in the human brain, waiting for the right cues and rewards. As we associate the central cues with some potential rewards, some subconscious human desire emerges in the human brain. This human desire starts, spins, and sustains the positive habit loop. Human desires drive habits. For this reason, it is easier for us to develop a new habit when we figure out how we can better spark some human desire.

 

To change an old bad habit, we should address some old human desire. We would need to keep the same cues and rewards as before. At the same time, we should feed the same human desire by inserting a new routine process. This new routine process connects the dots between the same cues and rewards in support of better human satisfaction with respect to the same human desire. In clinical trials, doctors ask patients to describe what triggers their habitual actions, desires, and behaviors with greater focus, self-awareness, internal motivation, persistence, and resilience. For instance, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) recovery programs insist on forcing their alcoholics to recognize their initial cues. This greater self-awareness serves as the first step in habit reversal.

 

Further, some habits have the power to start a chain reaction. These habits change other habits as they move through a new organization. Keystone habits start a new routine process in support of gradual transformation in all major aspects of modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. New positive cultures grow out of these keystone habits in every new organization, whether leaders are aware of the new cultures and keystone habits or not. Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create radical and revolutionary positive changes in human mindsets, insights, actions, and behaviors, the wrong keystone habits can create human disasters too. In our global society, a new social movement starts because of the positive habits of friendship, as well as the social ties of rapport between close friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances. This fresh social movement grows substantially within a short time frame due to the weak ties for holding clans and neighborhoods together, as well as the positive habits of a broader community. In theory, in practice, or both, this new social movement endures often because the leaders often tend to provide participants with new, non-obvious, useful, and creative habits, cultures, mindsets, insights, actions, and behaviors. In turn, these new habits create a fresh sense of identity. In time, this fresh sense of identity often empowers numerous participants to feel their broader, better, and greater ownership of the new social movement. In this new routine process, these various participants become part of the social good. At the same time, these participants gently learn to apply this new routine process to connect the dots between the same cues and rewards. In the rare unique fashion, human willpower becomes a new habit. By choosing a new set of mindsets, actions, and behaviors well ahead of time, participants follow some new routine process in support of the broader social movement. This new positive social movement arises at particular inflection points, junctures, and episodes of human history.

 

By harnessing the new modern science of habitual power, we can better transform our lives, businesses, and communities worldwide.

A habit is a human activity in our modern life. At first, a person deliberately decides to perform this habit once and then continues this habit with substantially less focus frequently. Habits develop over time because the human brain seeks new creative ways to conserve time, effort, energy, and consideration. In many scientific studies of habits, the vast majority of patients who lose their memories due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, or other injuries, retain the ability to carry out their daily habits. In many cases, someone who cannot remember his own age, birthday, and almost anything else, can develop his or her own respective habits over time. On a regular and recurrent basis, these habits are often quite complex. For this reason, many medical scientists infer that many people rely upon some similar neurological processes to carry out their habits from day to day. These habits and several other automatic behaviors reside in the deep human brain’s basal ganglia. By chunking many sorts of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile data and information, the basal ganglia can often help translate human habits and deeds into customary actions, responses, and behaviors. For instance, picking up car keys is a particular chunk of action that immediately triggers the other chunks in relation to driving the car. As a result, human habits help us save time, effort, energy, and consideration as we shift our mental focus, attention, and capacity to more important matters in our modern life. In a rare and unique fundamental sense, many of our neurological processes evolve and adapt to help develop human habits in response to structural changes in our external circumstances, scenarios, and vicissitudes of life.

 

The classic 3-stage positive habit loop further develops in the basal ganglia. In the first stage, the human brain seeks some particular cue that puts the brain into auto-pilot. This initial cue indicates what the brain should tell the human body to respond to external circumstances. Hence, the human brain and body coordinate to perform some habit in response to the original cue. The second stage is the routine process in support of habitual formation. The third stage involves the outside reward system for further habitual reinforcement. Specifically, this external reward system teaches the human brain whether this new positive habit loop is worth remembering for the foreseeable future. When the routine process connects the dots between the initial cue and the subsequent reward, the human brain develops a strong sense of fresh expectation about greater joy, happiness, and satisfaction for some human desire. Repeating the new routine process further helps strengthen habitual reinforcement. Unfortunately, the human brain fails to judge whether the new habit is beneficial or detrimental at the outset. Sometimes the new routine process further reshapes and reinforces bad habits, and it can become hard for people to break these bad habits. However, most people can often identify the 3 different stages and components of the positive habit loop. These people can make their best conscious efforts to alter some or even all of these 3 stages and components of the same habit loop. In time, this deliberate alternation helps people adopt, apply, and develop new good habits as a replacement for bad habits. In practice, many people can create a new routine process to connect the dots between the initial cue and the subsequent reward for some human desire. This new routine process can help better satisfy some human desire in a healthy way. With this new routine process, these people often learn to better respond to many different cues and rewards through different facets, stages, and episodes of life. By harnessing the new modern science of habitual power, we can better transform our lives, businesses, and communities worldwide.

 

In the 1920s, Claude Hopkins made a fortune by marketing Pepsodent toothpaste by inventing new tactics for direct mail advertisements in North America. Hopkins designed these new ads to trigger a new habit among American consumers. Back in the 1920s, brushing teeth was not a nationwide habit. Hopkins understood that he could make Pepsodent toothpaste a new indispensable part of the daily lives of Americans if he marketed a new human habit to brush teeth worldwide. Specifically, he successfully triggered the new human desire for American consumers to brush off tooth film, as the initial cue, in order to attain the subsequent reward of beautiful teeth. Pepsodent provided a new routine process for American consumers to brush teeth on a daily basis. In addition, Pepsodent provided a new, pristine, and minty-fresh sense in the mouth. Hopkins marketed the new minty-fresh sense, created a key national toothpaste habit, and eventually made a fortune by selling Pepsodent on this new toothpaste campaign.

 

By the same token, Procter & Gamble mastered the new habit loop to sell Febreze as an air freshener. After many mistakes, trials, and errors, P&G marketers learned that shoppers often did not want to admit their homes smelled bad. Instead, these shoppers preferred to reward themselves for regular housework by making the air smell nice as a little mini-celebration. After the original Febreze ad campaign failed miserably, P&G’s next sets of ads portrayed Febreze the air freshener as providing a new creative way to add a clean, pristine, and fragrant final touch to a bathroom, a bedroom, and even the entire house. As a result, Febreze sales skyrocketed to new astronomically high figures.

 

When someone adopts and develops a new habit, the brain begins to look forward to the subsequent reward from the new habitual routine process. Encountering the right initial cue sends the human brain into a subconscious desire. In time, the sub-conscious desire sets off the new habit loop. In turn, this fresh habit loop results in the initial cue again, the routine process, and the subsequent reward. Nevertheless, this new routine process is not inevitable. People can analyze their own respective human desires to learn the cue, the habitual routine process, and the subsequent reward, all in support of the new habit. In essence, these 3 stages and components of the positive habit loop impel the new habit with additional reinforcement. By the same token, many people learn to manipulate their own respective human desires to better ends. For example, some athletes enjoy and value the endorphin rush of exercise. These athletes choose to keep the day-to-day routine process of taking a run every night. This run becomes an automatic habit loop in due course. Sunset becomes the first initial cue; the run becomes the new routine process from day to day; and the endorphin rush becomes the subsequent reward for each regular run. Over several years, the daily run turns into a fresh healthy habit for these athletes. As these athletes benefit from some further reinforcement, this habit continues to repeat from day to day. In the longer run, these athletes improve substantially their complete fitness and performance as this daily run repeats itself in a positive habit loop with iterative continuous improvements.

 

What is the golden rule of habit change?

Florida football coach Tony Dungy understood the power of habit. When he worked to manage the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with consistent under-performance, Dungy realized that the Bucs would win more often if they could gradually alter their habits without over-thinking their plays. Instead of modifying the initial cues, Dungy chose to change their new routine processes. Dungy believed the new routine processes could transform the plays if the Bucs kept the same initial cues and the subsequent rewards. Dungy taught his athletes a reasonably smaller number of new plays. At the same time, Dungy drilled his athletes in applying these new plays and routine processes whenever they got the right cues. Also known as Tampa 2 defense, this approach helped the Bucs succeed with better performance, but they still could not win big games in a pinch. When the Indianapolis Colts recruited Dungy as the head coach in 2001, he applied the same Tampa 2 defense strategy, built the team into a cohesive one, and ultimately led the Colts to complete final victory in Super Bowl. Through the history of National Football League (NFL), Dungy was the first African American head coach to win the Super Bowl.

 

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) adopts, applies, and leverages a similar approach to treating alcoholics in North America, Europe, East Asia, and many other parts and regions of the world. While alcohol additions can often cause adverse physiological effects, AA focuses on breaking the habit loop and so seeks to shift the new routine processes when someone encounters the cues in association with drinking alcohol. AA’s primary solution involves replacing the old routine process of drinking alcohol with a new routine process of companionship. Talking to other alcoholics about the basic human desire for friendship helps replace finding fatigue in a bottle. This rare unique approach helps better treat alcoholism and consequently has spread to the treatments of several other addictions for food, nicotine, medicine, and so on. AA teaches patients to first examine closely their respective human desires in order to determine what fundamentally drives these human desires at the outset.

 

In addition, people who wish to change their habits should embrace the chief belief that they are able to change for the better in time. For some people, this belief has a spiritual element. For instance, AA incorporates God into its famous 12 key steps for the proper treatment of alcohol addiction. Anyone who wishes to change his or her habit needs the vital capacity to believe that the best conscious efforts can lead better results. For many alcoholics, they should learn to remain confident that they can meet modern life challenges without drinking alcohol. For professional athletes from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Indianapolis Colts, they should learn to be confident that they could win under several severe, harsh, and adverse conditions. The positive sense of belief can often turn out to be more effective if it takes place in a group context, such as the broader AA regional community and a team in the National Football League (NFL).

 

New habits help change other habits.

When Paul O’Neill became the CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), he startled its employees by focusing on workplace safety. O’Neill did so because he recognized that organizational habits have the power to drive dramatic changes. Specifically, O’Neill focused on a particular keystone habit, and this keystone habit can cascade through Alcoa to force many other positive changes in organizational behaviors. The keystone habits that matter most are the ones in support of positive changes in organizational behaviors across the board. These keystone habits can help make many other mindsets, worldviews, actions, insights, and patterns across the entire organization. During his tenure at Alcoa, O’Neill targeted the zero-injury goal to better ensure psychological safety for all of its employees. Stringent safety protocols led to sound internal prevention processes, operations, and mechanisms for all sorts of near misses, hazards, and accidents in relation to workplace safety. As a result, this new positive culture of better psychological safety at Alcoa caused significant improvements in employee performance. At Alcoa, the vast majority of employees became more proactive in sharing key information about core business operations with the CEO and several other senior managers. In essence, keystone habits remake, reshape, and reinforce many other good and robust habits, positive patterns, growth mindsets, hard truths, worldviews, actions, and insights in iterative continuous performance improvements.

 

Many business organizations apply, design, and develop good habits to help many employees carry out the core business operations. In time, these good habits allow the CEO, senior managers, and all other employees to better accomplish their joint business goals. O’Neill’s focus on worker safety forced Alcoa to restructure several internal business processes, operations, and mechanisms. Within Alcoa, this new transformation not only promoted worker safety, but also led to leaner and meaner business operations. To the extent that Alcoa’s major changes in workplace safety procedures transformed almost all business operations, Alcoa’s costs decreased dramatically, product quality improved substantially, and productivity skyrocketed across all kinds of financial metrics. In essence, keystone habits can cause positive ripple effects on the modern lives of others. For instance, someone who maintains a regular exercise routine process drinks less alcohol, smokes less nicotine, eats more healthful food, fruits, and vegetables, and becomes more productive at work. In time, these keystone habits often force and lead to many small wins, and these transitional accomplishments help people come to the main realization that greater iterative continuous improvements are possible indeed. These small wins from vital keystone habits often translate into bigger, bolder, brighter, and broader successes in due course.

 

Starbucks’s core cultural values and rules for employees inculcate the key concept of willpower. As some research studies show, this key concept of willpower serves as the pre-eminent habit for broader personal success. Just as academic scholars achieve positive results in many other non-academic aspects of their modern lives when they meticulously practice self-discipline and persistence, Starbucks workers improve their own lives, careers, and relationships after they learn the willpower of remaining cheerful regardless of what crops up in their workdays. This key positive willpower is evocative of the famous marshmallow experiment. In the marshmallow experiments, psychologists told little children they could have a marshmallow right away, or they could have 2 marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes alone with the treat in front of them. In the subsequent years, the children who were able to wait for one more marshmallow proved to be substantially more successful throughout their elementary school, secondary school, college, and even the first ever job after college. Specifically, these children were able to apply their self-regulatory skills to delay gratification at a young age. By the same token, people can learn willpower as effectively as they make conscious efforts to learn to play a musical instrument, speak a foreign language, or adapt to many changes in external circumstances of life. Once people master willpower, they should continue to practice applying and improving their willpower, self-discipline, and perseverance, as they would work to exercise daily to keep their muscles firm, fit, brawny, active, and athletic in shape.

 

Starbucks teaches all its employees willpower by focusing on key inflection points. The key inflection points are day-to-day situations where these employees should exercise self-discipline to deal with difficult patrons. Starbucks employees learn to practice routines for handling unhappy customers so that these employees perform these routines habitually well. Starbucks refers to this approach the Latte method: Starbucks employees first listen, acknowledge, take actions, thank, and explain to the unhappy and difficult patrons. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz further institutes a new policy of giving all staffers a rare unique sense of agency. Starbucks staffers receive this assurance: As a company, Starbucks values their expert opinions and independent decisions.

 

Good organizational habits, actions, insights, and behaviors can grow substantially from crises. At Rhode Island Hospital, one mistake in the operating room showed that employees used a keystone habit incorrectly. To avoid major conflicts, nurses had flagged the names of doctors with color codes. These nurses knew if a doctor’s name was in black, they had to capitulate to that doctor’s demands with no further questions. This mistake led to a major crisis that ultimately spurred operating-room teams to develop better habits. Today, these teams would need to complete a vital checklist together before any medical procedure.

 

Good organizational habits, actions, insights, and behaviors often empower teams to function well. Without these good habits, several companies would descend into squabbling factions. These good habits allow truces. Rhode Island Hospital’s new operating-room checklist allows doctors and nurses to set aside disagreements to practice more safely. Back in 1987, a serious fire in London’s King’s Cross subway station spurred the Underground’s authorities to teach better employee habits with a new disaster recovery plan to ensure future passenger safety. These examples demonstrate the vital importance and practical relevance of better employee habits within each organization.

 

In some subtle ways, many companies foretell, control, and influence the habits of their customers. A good example is the American retailer Target. Each year, Target carries out and updates its statistical analysis of consumer data. This analysis can often shine fresh light on retail consumer needs, demands, and other preferences. Specifically, this analysis allows Target to correctly predict when customers expect babies in the next 6-12 months. Target’s flagship Guest ID data program can show that the frequent habits of Target’s shoppers change most dramatically when these shoppers undergo some major milestones in their lives. Good examples of a major milestone include tying the knot, starting a family, and moving to a new residence. The shopping habits of expectant mothers often follow some predictable changes. Target sends these retail shoppers coupons for baby items via snail mail. To avoid concerns about privacy protection, Target would mix multiple coupons to sandwich the baby discounts among other items. In this rare unique fashion, Target provides tailor-made coupons, discounts, and many other benefits and solutions for different groups of retail shoppers. In recent years, Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot start to apply similar statistical models, tools, and machines for their special predictions of consumer habits. In practice, the major American financial institutions from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase to Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley learn to leverage similar statistical models for both better financial risk management and strategic loan pricing implementation.

 

Habits can turn into social movements in our global human society.

The black reverend Martin Luther King served as a key leader in the American Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. After the unique bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in December, 1955, King advocated for non-violent resistance and civil disobedience to achieve better, broader, and greater equality for American people of color. His approach involved creating social movements across several different parts and regions of America by encouraging the critical formation of new actions, habits, values, insights, and behaviors within regional communities. His leadership, philosophy, and advocacy inspired widespread social habits, changes, movements, values, and cultures, all in support of equality for American people of color. These social habits, worldviews, values, and insights continue to influence numerous civil rights activists today.

 

King’s strategy emphasized non-violent resistance for American people of color to refuse to comply with unfair, unjust, and discriminatory laws, rules, and regulations. This strategy called for peaceful protests, social movements, and demonstrations. King employed a fair amount of civil disobedience to deliberately challenge unfair, unjust, and discriminatory laws, rules, and regulations to draw broader attention to the vital issue of racial equality. King understood the vital importance and practical relevance of social movements in driving deeper, widespread, and pervasive social changes in American habits, values, worldviews, actions, and behaviors in relation to the fair treatment of American people of color. In time, these social movements built large-scale collective actions, peaceful protests, and demonstrations to better achieve social goals. With his best conscious efforts, King organized and mobilized regional communities to participate in these key peaceful protests, campaigns, and demonstrations. These collective actions fostered a rare unique sense of common identity for American people of color. With strong and steadfast Christian faith, King believed in the power of inter-racial cooperation. As a result, King advocated for a new global society where American people of all races could work together toward their respective common social goals such as mutual trust, respect, fair treatment, equality, and courtesy.

 

In a similar fashion, Pastor Rick Warren built his Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Warren wrote his best-seller, The Purpose Driven Life, in 2002, to offer readers a 40-day personal spiritual journey. Through this spiritual journey, Warren presented the 5 life principles and purposes for human life on earth. These 5 main life principles and purposes revolve around the common spiritual quest: all humans seek to be part of God’s pleasure through Christian worship, God’s family through Christian fellowship, God’s image through discipleship, God’s servanthood through Christian ministry, and God’s mission on earth for greater evangelism.

 

Warren built, designed, and developed his Saddleback mega church on the basis of social habits. Warren applied these social habits to make Sunday services, small groups, and bible study lessons part of the vital social lives of Christian Americans. Warren taught people his mainstream purpose-driven life principles, social habits, and missions of Christian faith. He created, invented, and organized self-run small groups outside Sunday services, so many Christian Americans could benefit from Christian spiritual insights and bible study lessons as part of their daily social lives. These Christian Americans read and discussed the bible together in a highly social context. In this broader social context, these Christian Americans shared their day-to-day issues, prayed together, and supported one another. In due time, the weak social ties of the main congregation branched out to small groups with strong social ties. These social ties, habits, insights, worldviews, actions, and behaviors further built, shaped, and developed Saddleback small group leaders into servant-leaders in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

 

In his popular non-fiction book The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren explains how our life metaphors and perspectives shape our lives. How we define life determines our destiny. These perspectives can often influence how we invest our time, spend our money, use our talents, and value our relationships. People view life as a circus, a minefield, a roller coaster, a puzzle, a symphony, or a journey. People have said: *Life is a carousel; sometimes we are up, sometimes we are down, and sometimes we just go round and round;* *Life is a triple-speed bicycle with gears that we never use;* or *Life is a game of cards, and we have to play the hand that we are dealt.* Our unspoken life metaphors reflect our values, beliefs, expectations, relationships, goals, and priorities. For instance, if we think life is a party, the primary value in life would be having fun. If we think life is a race, we would value speed so much that we might be in a hurry most of the time. If we regard life as a marathon, we would value endurance and perseverance. If we view life as a battle, it would be important for us to win.

 

Warren offers 3 informative life metaphors: life is a test; life is a trust; and life is a temporary assignment. Life can be viewed as a test in the sense that we often go through many trials and tribulations as God tests our faith, love, character, integrity, obedience, or loyalty etc. For instance, God tested Abraham by asking him to offer his son Isaac. God tested Jacob when he had to work several more years to earn Rachel as a wife. Adam and Eve failed their test in the Garden of Eden, and David failed his tests on several occasions; but the bible offers many examples of people who passed great tests, such as Joseph, Ruth, Esther, and Daniel. We reveal our character through these tests in life. God watches our reaction to people, problems, conflicts, setbacks, obstacles, difficulties, and disappointments. God even watches several simple actions when we open the door for others, when we pick up a piece of trash, or when we are polite toward a clerk or a waitress. At the same time, we may need to go through major changes, disruptions, broken promises, impossible problems, unfair criticisms, and even senseless tragedies.

 

An important test pertains to how we act when we cannot feel the divine presence of God in our lives. Sometimes God intentionally draws back, and we can no longer sense his presence. In ancient times, the king Hezekiah experienced this main test. God withdrew from Hezekiah in order to test him to see what was really in his heart. Hezekiah had enjoyed a close fellowship with God. At a crucial and pivotal point in his life, God left Hezekiah alone to test his character. In the meantime, God wanted to reveal his own personal human weaknesses, limitations, and vulnerabilities, and then God prepared Hezekiah for greater responsibilities.

 

When we start to view life as a test, we can come to the realization that nothing is insignificant in life. Even the smallest incidence has significance for our character development, every single day is an important day, and every second is a growth opportunity for us to deepen our love, faith, character, vision, and dependence on God. The good news is that God wants us to pass the myriad tests of life, so God never allows these tests to be greater than his love and grace for us. In effect, God keeps his promise, and God cannot permit the tests of life to be beyond our power to remain firm. God gives us the strength to endure the tests of life so that we can find an important way out. When we pass the tests of life, we can receive the crown of life that God has promised to us.

 

Life can further be regarded as a trust. Our time, energy, intelligence, opportunities, relationships, and resources are all gifts from God that he entrusts to both our care and management. We are stewards of these unique gifts and talents from God. In fact, this concept of stewardship begins with the universal view that God provides these gifts, talents, and resources etc for our effective servant-leadership on earth. God owns everything and everyone on earth. We never really own anything during our brief stay on earth. God empowers all people to make productive uses of these gifts, talents, and resources through our individual life journeys. With clear purpose, we can serve as faithful stewards and ambassadors for God, just as founders and entrepreneurs strive to fulfill their bold goals of a fantastic future for humankind.

 

Life can be metaphorically viewed as a temporary assignment. The bible teaches us the brief, transient, and temporary nature of life on earth. Some poets describe life as a mist, a fast runner, a breath, and a wisp of smoke. In comparison to eternity, life is extremely brief. Our earth is only a temporary residence. Life on earth is like temporarily living in a foreign country. Our earth is not our permanent home or final destination. We just pass through the tests of life during our brief time on earth. In practice, we live our current time as temporary visitors, travelers, and residents on earth. Over time, we can come to the realization that our social identity is in eternity as our homeland is in heaven. With this realization, our life purpose motivates our core values, habits, beliefs, goals, worldviews, lifestyles, and priorities.

 

Most business cofounders and entrepreneurs can enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After all, life is a test, a trust, and a temporary assignment. We need to make productive uses of our Christian faith, love, time, energy, gifts, talents, and resources from God to help enrich the lives of others. The fact that earth is not our ultimate home explains why we experience sorrow, rejection, and difficulty in this world. This fact also explains why we sometimes experience broken promises and unfair circumstances. These challenges are not the end of the story. From time to time, God allows us to feel a significant amount of discontent and dissatisfaction in life. We cannot be completely happy because earth is not our final home. Indeed, we need to strive to achieve better, bigger, and broader life purposes to help one another.

 

The Hebrew phrase Tikkun Olam means world repair. In modern Christian circles, Tikkun Olam has become synonymous with the meaningful notion of constructive social actions that contribute to a better world. God provides us with fire and wheat so that we can come up with bread. In a similar vein, God provides us with fire and clay so that we can bake the bricks ourselves. In this unique way, we can become partners in completing the act of creation. In this positive light, our time on earth is important. We are not just passive observers, but also active participants in helping make the world a better place. Christians bear a sense of individual responsibility in accordance with the concept of Tikkun Olam. In the modern age, entrepreneurs share the same sense of individual responsibility for their advisors, specialists, and other team members to enrich the lives of others with positive contributions. From time to time, many founders and entrepreneurs should learn to reconcile what they want with what they can risk in order to accomplish their longer-term goals. In this important way, these cofounders and entrepreneurs pass the tests of life, fulfill lofty social causes and purposes, and make productive uses of gifts, talents, skills, core competences, and dynamic capabilities from God in accordance with his love and grace. By harnessing the new science of habitual power, we can better transform our own day-to-day lives, businesses, and communities worldwide.

 

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This analytic essay cannot constitute any form of financial advice, analyst opinion, recommendation, or endorsement. We refrain from engaging in financial advisory services, and we seek to offer our analytic insights into the latest economic trends, stock market topics, investment memes, personal finance tools, and other self-help inspirations. Our proprietary alpha investment algorithmic system helps enrich our AYA fintech network platform as a new social community for stock market investors: https://ayafintech.network.

We share and circulate these informative posts and essays with hyperlinks through our blogs, podcasts, emails, social media channels, and patent specifications. Our goal is to help promote better financial literacy, inclusion, and freedom of the global general public. While we make a conscious effort to optimize our global reach, this optimization retains our current focus on the American stock market.

This free ebook, AYA Analytica, shares new economic insights, investment memes, and stock portfolio strategies through both blog posts and patent specifications on our AYA fintech network platform. AYA fintech network platform is every investor's social toolkit for profitable investment management. We can help empower stock market investors through technology, education, and social integration.

We hope you enjoy the substantive content of this essay! AYA!

 

Andy Yeh

Co-Chair

Brass Ring International Density Enterprise (BRIDE) © 

 

Do you find it difficult to beat the long-term average 11% stock market return?

It took us 20+ years to design a new profitable algorithmic asset investment model and its proprietary software technology with U.S. fintech patent protection over 20 years. Our new AYA fintech network platform serves as everyone’s first aid for his or her personal stock investment portfolio. In practice, our own proprietary software technology empowers each investor to apply real-time data, intelligence, and other information without exorbitant time commitment. Our alpha stock signals can help substantially boost the typical win rate from 60%-70% to more than 90%.

Our new alpha model empowers members to be a wiser stock market investor with profitable alpha signals! The proprietary quantitative analysis applies the collective wisdom of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Carl Icahn, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, and Nobel Laureates in finance such as Robert Engle, Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen, Robert Lucas, Robert Merton, Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, William Sharpe, Robert Shiller, and Christopher Sims.

 

Our Brass Ring Facebook page helps stock market investors learn more about the latest financial news, stock investment ideas, and asset portfolio strategies:

http://www.facebook.com/brassring2013

 

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