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.

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.

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.

After experimenting with several habits, she finally found one—the Maui Habit—that she says “literally saved my life.” It turned out that this tiny tweak, this pivotal behavior, was a fulcrum. Every morning, she woke up, put her feet on the floor, and said seven words out loud: “It’s going to be a great day.”

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.

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). To help you visualize this, I created a model called the PAC Person. You’ll see him pop up again and again—it turns out that Person, Action, and Context are fundamental for understanding human behavior.

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.

No behavior happens without a prompt.

Fogg Maxim #1: Help yourself do what you already want to do.

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

In psychology, learning is the process by which your brain facilitates a change in behavior in response to your environment. The evolutionary aim of these changes is to make us more likely to survive, thrive, and reproduce.

Emotions create habits.

The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again.

When supporting other people in the change process, let my two maxims be your guide. #1 Help people do what they already want to do. #2 Help people feel successful.

After I notice a call going on for longer than expected, I’ll say this script: “It’s been great to talk, but I need to wrap up. What haven’t we covered yet that’s important?”