Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

there are only three things we can do that will create lasting change: Have an epiphany, change our environment, or change our habits in tiny ways.

I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

A behavior happens when the three elements of MAP—Motivation, Ability, and Prompt—come together at the same moment. Motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. And Prompt is your cue to do the behavior.

You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening.

Learning to explain the Behavior Model quickly and clearly is one of the most useful skills in Behavior Design.

Motivation is often unreliable when it comes to home improvement. And it’s also unreliable with diets, exercise routines, creative projects, filing taxes, opening businesses, searching for jobs, planning conferences—self-improvement of all types.

Here’s the unfortunate thing—most people believe motivation is the true engine of behavior change. Words like “rewards” and “incentives” get thrown around with such regularity that most people think you can create whatever habits you want if you find the right carrot to dangle in front of yourself. This kind of thinking is understandable, but it also happens to be wrong.

Motivation is like a party-animal friend. Great for a night out, but not someone you would rely on to pick you up from the airport.

Aspirations are abstract desires, like wanting your kids to succeed in school. Outcomes are more measurable, like getting straight As second semester. Both of these are great places to start the process of Behavior Design. But aspirations and outcomes are not behaviors.

A behavior is something you can do right now or at another specific point in time.

You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.

Fogg Maxim #1: Help people do what they already want to do.

Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing.

What’s the difference between Yahoo! and Google? Between Blogger and Twitter? Why does one innovation fade and another take over the world? Talent? Vision? Money? Luck? All of those things and plenty more. But the biggest one is perhaps the most overlooked. Simplicity.

Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment.

This is one of the hacks in the Tiny Habits method: Make the behavior so tiny that you don’t need much motivation. Doing two push-ups against a wall is easy to accomplish so you’re much more likely to keep it as a habit.

If you want to do a habit consistently, you’ve got to adjust the most reliable thing in the B=MAP model—ability.

Whether natural or designed, a prompt says, “Do this behavior now.”

No behavior happens without a prompt.

People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

people who embraced celebrations turned out to be the most successful at creating habits quickly.

Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.

Why do we clap for a baby when she is taking her first step? Not because she is doing it perfectly, or because she “earned it,” or because she did it bigger and better than the baby next door. We clap because we know it is the first small step that she is taking toward a lifetime of walking and running—and that is hugely important.

If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes.

We change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so make sure your attempts at demotivating behavior don’t morph into guilt trips.