The Power of Forgetting (7 page)

While it’s natural to think that habits are all about the things we remember to do, they are as much about forgetting. The whole purpose of a habit—a repeated pattern or activity—is to be able to perform a task without much mental
effort or thought. This allows you to then focus on other information that might enter the brain and that requires your undivided attention and concentration. In other words, we don’t have to think about certain patterns in our lives that make up our habits. We can be “forgetful” in that department so we can save our mental bandwidth for other potential details that may need special treatment to get incorporated and remembered.

In his brilliant treatise
The Power of Habit
, Charles Duhigg writes: “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.” He then cites a study from Duke University in 2006 that found that more than 40 percent of the actions we perform each day are not actual decisions—they are habits.

I couldn’t agree more with Duhigg, but I will also add that, in my view, the actions we perform daily are also the product of “forgetfulness.” The mere act of engaging in a habit means we’re utilizing and repeating old information in our brains. None of this activity necessitates decision making. The ingrained habit takes over and our actions become based on the ability to forget more than on the ability to decide.

In his book Duhigg shows us how to harness habits for the better—from improving our willpower to turning failing products in business to runaway successes. In one particularly
interesting case study, Duhigg tells the story of Procter & Gamble’s crusade in the mid-1990s to make an odor-killing spray that people could use on furniture and fabrics. Prior to launching its marketing campaign, P&G assembled a team of experts, including a former Wall Street mathematician and several so-called habit specialists. Their job was to make sure the ads for the product—Febreze—worked and could generate strong sales. But after several false starts, including ads that highlighted the product’s power over smoky, stinky clothes and couches that reeked of the family dog, Febreze was on the path to becoming a total dud. It wasn’t speaking to consumers.

Not until a panicked marketing team visited the home of a neat freak who also lived with nine cats did it dawn on them where they had gone wrong. The cat lover could not smell her home’s stench anymore, so she didn’t know she needed a product like Febreze. And this scenario played out in numerous other homes that P&G’s marketing team visited. At this point, P&G hired another gun, this time a professor from Harvard Business School who was charged with finding patterns in people’s daily habits that could inform the marketing of Febreze. After spending hours conducting interviews and reviewing footage of people cleaning their homes, the aha moment finally came when the team met a mother of four in suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, who kept a clean and tidy home and said she used Febreze as part of her normal cleaning routine even though she didn’t have to deal with smoke or pets. For her, spraying a room that she’d just finished cleaning was like “a little minicelebration.”

No sooner had the P&G team taken note of this “little” habit than they realized that they’d discovered the biggest
missing piece to the marketing campaign. Rather than trying to instill a whole new habit in people by adding the use of Febreze to their cleaning rituals, they simply needed to piggyback on the habits that were already established. In other words, P&G needed to position its product as something that finished the cleaning process and was part of the entire routine. Soon thereafter, the company rejiggered its ad strategy and added more perfume to the product’s formula. TV ads featured women using Febreze to christen their freshly made beds, clutter-free rooms, and newly laundered clothes. The ads implied that Febreze finished the job and conferred a reward—a reminder that you’d done well and that your home was a pleasant place, not a stink joint. So rather than being sold as the ultimate antiodor spray, Febreze became an air freshener and symbol of a clean environment. It was used once things were already clean as the icing on the cake. Two months after P&G changed its marketing strategy, sales doubled. Today Febreze is one of the top-selling products in the world and has generated numerous spin-offs (and knockoffs).

I bring Duhigg’s story of Febreze up for two good reasons: For one, it points to the power of habits in ways we often don’t think about. And if we were to break this particular case study down further, we could identify an untold number of patterns—habits—that played into the journey that Febreze had to take before it became a marketing darling, including a few forgetful ones. P&G not only had to understand the cleaning habits of people but also had to mine the mental habits of its prospective customers while forgetting obsolete, useless assumptions about people’s habits. What do people habitually think about when it comes to cleaning their homes today? What do they
not
think about
or
forget
to think about? And how do those answers inform marketing strategies that can speak to the consumer? Only after considering these questions could P&G arrive at a best-selling campaign.

But the other lesson in this story is about how P&G’s marketing team changed their approach to solve the problem, effectively forgetting old strategies. Relying on their usual marketing “habits” clearly wasn’t working. They had to change the way they viewed the problem and accept a totally new perspective from which to derive their solution. This can be challenging when we’re so used to doing things a certain way—and thinking a certain way. In addition to assessing consumers’ habits to glean insight into their problem, the P&G team had to rethink their own problem-solving habits in the wake of failure to arrive at a marketing strategy that would strike a chord with their customers. This meant employing the power of forgetting on the level at which outdated models were forgotten to make room for an entirely new sales model.

Today, any company that hopes to reach the biggest audience possible spends a great portion of its marketing budget on seeking patterns in potential customers. And some have gone to great lengths to collect certain data for future marketing purposes. By spying on people’s purchasing habits online or through traditional channels in brick-and-mortar stores, companies can tell who is expecting a baby or already has children, who is a fan of hockey, who is a runner, who favors organic foods, and even who will likely vote for candidate X in the next presidential election. In fact, President Obama’s campaign once hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns
among different constituencies. (So the next time you receive a catalog in the mail addressed to you from a company you’ve never heard about but that seems to sell items that you’d like, you can thank your recorded buying habits.)

Before I bring this back to the realm of your brain’s processing speed and mental acuity, let me share how Duhigg explains the brain’s habit-creating methods. He writes:

And that’s the whole point of this book: to show you how to build automatic behaviors into your brain that support a
fast-processing mind that has an infinite capacity to handle new information and know instantly what to do with it. This will indeed entail honoring your brain’s inherent habit loops, which involve cues, routines, and rewards. At first you might not see how my exercises have direct connections to developing a more agile, nimble brain, but all of them reinforce the pattern recognition that lies at the center of streamlining your brain’s operations. Even the ability to forget is itself a habit. You’ll need to train your brain to rapidly decipher between valuable details and mere junk—or just temporary information—so you can keep your mind moving swiftly through incoming data while at the same time minimizing the amount of mental energy expended.

One of the best starting points for greasing your mind to find patterns in virtually every facet of life is to just consider the patterns in the world of language. I love to invent or identify patterns in my life using letters. I’ll be driving down the street and looking for objects or other visuals whose names are long and don’t have a repeat letter. Example: playground. Or I’ll try to find things in passing that have double letters: Observing a man on a corner wearing glasses, I’ll say to myself,
Guy with glasses
(double
g
’s and, as a bonus, double
s
’s!). I know, it’s a weird habit to have. But it really gets my mind into pattern awareness like you wouldn’t believe. Suddenly, I can find myself coming up with some wildly fun trivia, such as:

On the surface, it may not seem that these admittedly arbitrary facts are rooted in patterns. But they are. By letting my mind think in terms of patterns, I managed to discover these strange oddities and, while doing so, work my brain in peculiar ways that brought my focus and attention to a much higher level. (Granted, others have probably found these fun facts, too.)

I recommend that you try it sometime—force your brain to seek patterns in things that don’t seem to follow any pattern. Try to learn something without being taught. If you need a place to begin, look no further than your favorite Web sites and search for patterns in their design. Are company logos placed in similar spots? Do they advertise in roughly the same area? Why do you think this is the case?

You can learn a lot by studying patterns. Making a habit of recognizing patterns can be a game changer in the real world, because not only does the practice cultivate deep levels of concentration, but it can unleash more creativity, improve your logical thinking, and encourage you to think outside the box, see things differently, and perhaps find some solutions that work better than others.

Moreover, you’ll bring fresh perspectives to conversations, you’ll notice characteristics in other people that can enhance your connections to and relationships with them, and you’ll be able to pay attention for longer periods of time when you most need to do that.

In fact, being able to find patterns can ultimately help you collect the information you need to make good decisions, leverage your assets, and pave a pathway with fewer detours and obstacles. All of this may seem too good to be true, but what many people don’t realize is that patterns shape who we are and how we behave. There’s a reason why it’s said that history repeats itself.

As humans, we reflect patterns in all that we do, and I don’t have to think hard to come up with an example from my own life.

Back when I was a trader, I could sum up my whole job as relying on my ability to find patterns. I made money by seeking patterns in what other people did in their buying and selling of commodities on the market. I also sought patterns in the traders around me, predicting what they were buying so that I could accurately strategize my next move. It’s the same type of pattern recognition common among the top
Wall Street stock traders, who manage to buy low and sell high by “outsmarting” the market’s wild vagaries.