Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

We are not the problem. Our approach to change is.

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.

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.

Remember, for a behavior (B) to occur, three elements must converge at the same moment: Motivation, Ability, and Prompt.

You need serious motivation to do something difficult.

You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt.

Check to see if there’s a prompt to do the behavior. See if the person has the ability to do the behavior. See if the person is motivated to do the behavior.

In many cases, you’ll find your lack of doing a behavior is not a motivation issue at all. You can solve for the behavior by finding a good prompt or by making the behavior easier to do.

You can’t achieve outcomes or aspirations solely through high levels of motivation, which is the least predictable and reliable of the three components in my Behavior Model.

Getting clear on your aspiration allows you to design efficiently for what you really want.

We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there.

What is making this behavior hard to do?

Shore up the weakest link in your Ability Chain by making your new workout habit radically easy to do.

By going tiny, you create consistency; by staying tiny, you get your new habit firmly rooted.

Think of making something easy to do as a pond with three different ways to enter the water. Whether you jump off the dock, wade in at the beach, or drop in from a rope swing, you’ll soon be swimming in the same water.

The objective here is to begin with a crucial step in the process of doing the desired behavior.

The key is that I never feel bad about it because I’ve done my habit—I know one tooth is enough to keep the habit alive.

We’re not aiming for perfection here, only consistency. Keeping the habit alive means keeping it rooted in your routine no matter how tiny it is.

She was either overthinking or underacting, but either way she wasn’t getting the work done.

Relying on yourself to remember to do a new behavior every day is unlikely to lead to meaningful change.

I selected the term “anchor” because you are attaching your new habit to something solid and reliable.

It was an incentive.

Each individual celebration strengthens the roots of a specific habit, but the accumulation of celebrations over time is what fertilizes the entire habit garden. By cultivating feelings of success and confidence, we make the soil more inviting and nourishing for all the other habit seeds we want to plant.

But you can’t succeed with starting small if you’re looking down your nose at it.

Celebrate your tiny successes.

Feeling successful isn’t just a skill we use to lock in a habit—it’s also an antidote to the go-big-or-go-home culture and a new lens through which to see yourself.

(That’s worth repeating. You made your life better.)

Having been through enough grief and loss to drown anyone, Linda had learned that you need to let yourself wallow in it sometimes but you can’t stay there.

Your confidence grows when you celebrate not only because you are now a habit-creating machine but also because you are getting better and better at being nice to yourself.

Fear is the anticipation of bad outcomes.

Find the smallest, easiest change you can make that will have the biggest meaning to you.

Behavior is behavior; it’s always a result of motivation, ability, and a prompt coming together at the same moment.

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

By scaling back, you won’t freak out that part of yourself that wants to keep the habit.

When you get rid of unwanted habits, what rises to fill that space could be more time to devote to a passion project, greater productivity at work, the deepening of a relationship, or the expansion of a new identity.

Behavior Design is about creating change and venturing in the direction of our best selves.