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.

information alone does not reliably change behavior.

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.

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.

the pervasive idea that you’ve got to go big or go home.

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In my own work, I focus on three sources of motivation: yourself (what you already want), a benefit or punishment you would receive by doing the action (the carrot and stick), and your context (e.g., all your friends are doing it).

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.

Swarm of Behaviors

The other thing to consider is that the videos you’re watching and the articles you’re reading and the bloggers you’re following may or may not be credible sources of information.

Focus Map.

While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones.

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

Ability Factors. Here’s how they break down. Do you have enough time to do the behavior? Do you have enough money to do the behavior? Are you physically capable of doing the behavior? Does the behavior require a lot of creative or mental energy? Does the behavior fit into your current routine or does it require you to make adjustments?

Look at Google, Instagram, Amazon, and Slack. When they first launched, each company started with something small and focused. Because they were simple to use, these products became firmly rooted in people’s lives.

The companies added more features only when these products became solid habits.

People respond reliably to prompts when they are motivated and able, which is exactly what makes well-timed prompts so powerful. The writers who create clickbait headlines and the designers who craft the apps on our phones know this.

Designing a good prompt is a key part of Fogg Maxim #1: Help yourself do what you already want to do.

She didn’t need a text alert or a calendar notification to tell her to take Rachel to school, which meant she didn’t need an artificial reminder to write her Post-it.

You’ve made a checklist. You’ve asked someone to remind you. You’ve set up a calendar notification in your work e-mail. In each case, you are adding a prompt to influence your behavior.

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

This prompt is anything in your environment that cues you to take action: sticky notes, app notifications, your phone ringing, a colleague reminding you to join a meeting.

Context Prompts can be helpful for one-time actions, like registering to vote. However, using Context Prompts for daily habits can be both stressful and ineffective.

Other than getting off the grid, we may never find a perfect way to stop unwanted prompts from companies with business models that depend on us to click, read, watch, rate, share, or react.

An Action Prompt is a behavior you already do that can remind you to do a new habit you want to cultivate.

You already have a lot of reliable routines, and each of them can serve as an Action Prompt for a new habit.

No prompt means no action. To succeed with your product or service, you need to figure out what will prompt your customer at the right moment.

For your business to succeed, I predict that you will need to find a better way to prompt your customer since Context Prompts are losing their effectiveness.

Ask them, “Which one of these times would work best for you?” In this way, you help your patients find where the new habit fits naturally in their lives.

Sometimes we have to put up with people who treat us unfairly, get on our nerves, or behave badly. But we can take control of our side of the equation.

When you celebrate effectively, you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain. By feeling good at the right moment, you cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed.

With the help of dopamine, the brain encodes the cause-and-effect relationship, and this creates expectations for the future.

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

Fogg Maxim #2: Help people feel successful.

Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being.

So with Tiny Habits you are shooting for a bunch of tiny successes done quickly. Not a big one that takes a long time.

When you design new habits, invest time in redesigning your environment so they’re easier to do.

SuperFridge. When I open our fridge, I see a bunch of glass containers filled with food ready to eat. The broccoli is in one container already washed and cut up. Same with the cauliflower, celery, peppers, and onions. There’s a container with cooked quinoa. I see fresh fruit and boiled eggs ready for a quick snack. We have plain full-fat yogurt, various krauts, and condiments like mustard. You get the idea.

Identity shift When you create a host of positive changes, you move closer to the person you want to become. If you feel successful in these changes, you will naturally view yourself differently and begin to embrace a new identity.

One way to do this, he says, is to change our phone screens to show only grayscale. When you don’t see vivid colors on your screen, his hypothesis goes, those Internet memes and social media posts become much less exciting and less motivating to your brain.

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