Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things. Stop judging yourself. Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors. Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

Once you remove any hint of judgment, changing your habits becomes an uplifting journey of self-discovery.

I’ve found that 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.

The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth.

With the Tiny Habits method, you focus on small actions that you can do in less than thirty seconds.

After you put your feet on the floor in the morning, immediately say this phrase, “It’s going to be a great day.” As you say these seven words, try to feel optimistic and positive.

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change.

Keeping changes small and expectations low is how you design around fair-weather friends like motivation and willpower. When something is tiny, it’s easy to do—which means you don’t need to rely on the unreliable nature of motivation.

The easier a behavior is to do, the more likely the behavior will become habit.

She started to think about her habits as if they were recipes. If the result wasn’t to her liking, she needed to change the ratios and fiddle with the ingredients, not beat herself up or give up.

Habit recipe

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. Here’s an easy way to differentiate behaviors from aspirations and outcomes: A behavior is something you can do right now or at another specific point in time.

Advice from a friend or family member is the most well-meaning of all, but it’s not the best way to match yourself with a new habit.

Friendly advice

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