Atomic Habits

* The discovery of variable rewards happened by accident. One

day in the lab, the famous Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner was

running low on food pellets during one experiment and making

more was a time-consuming process because he had to manually

press the pellets in a machine. This situation led him to “ask myself

why every press of the lever had to be reinforced.” He decided to

only give treats to the rats intermittently and, to his surprise,

varying the delivery of food did not decrease behavior, but actually

increased it.