Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

Tiny Habits—the quickest, easiest vehicle for personal transformation.

We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification.

Willpower decreases from morning to evening. Complex decisions get harder by late in the day.

MOTIVATING TOWARD AN ABSTRACTION DOESN’T YIELD RESULTS

People often believe that motivating themselves toward an aspiration will lead to lasting change. So people focus on aspirations. And they focus on motivation. And that combo doesn’t produce results.

MOTIVATION IS NOT THE WINNING TICKET FOR LONG-TERM CHANGE

The more vividly you can picture what you want, the better. You usually have to know where you’re going in order to get there.

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. You can turn off your phone. You can eat a carrot. You can open a textbook and read five pages. These are actions that you can do at any given moment. In contrast, you can’t achieve an aspiration or outcome at any given moment. You cannot suddenly get better sleep. You cannot lose twelve pounds at dinner tonight. You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.

People use the word “goal” when they are talking about aspirations or outcomes. If someone says “goal,” you can’t be sure what they are talking about since the word is ambiguous. For that reason, “goal” is not part of the vocabulary in Behavior Design. Use either “aspiration” or “outcome” for precision.

STEP 1: GET CLEAR ON YOUR ASPIRATIONS

STEP 2: EXPLORE BEHAVIOR OPTIONS

How to Find Your Best New Habit

Wrong way #1: Just guessing, no methodology

Wrong way #2: Inspiration from the Internet

Wrong way #3: Doing what worked for a friend

THE RIGHT WAY: MATCH YOURSELF WITH SPECIFIC BEHAVIORS

One big difference in Behavior Design versus other approaches is that with my methods you focus on habits you already have motivation to do. You don’t pick a habit and try to bolt on motivation later. In Behavior Design, motivation is already embedded in the new habit. In other approaches you will struggle to maintain a habit you think you should do. And that doesn’t work very well.

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

We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there. Behaviors are grounded. Concrete. They are the handholds and footholds that get you up the rock face. Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing. Matching yourself with the right behaviors is the most critical step in the Behavior Design process and an important place to return to when troubleshooting.

To review: Clarify your aspiration or outcome, generate a big set of behavior options, and match yourself with specific Golden Behaviors.

it’s easier to pick things up again when they are small. There is no mountain to climb, only a little hill. Simple. Easy to do.

In order to do a behavior, motivation and ability have to exist in sufficient amounts to put you above the Action Line in the Behavior Model. We’ve already established that motivation is unreliable. Luckily, ability is not. By looking at where our ability lands on the Behavior Model, we get a good idea of what behaviors are more or less likely to become habit.

When you are designing a new habit, you are really designing for consistency. And for that result, you’ll find that simplicity is the key.

you should always start with this question: What is making this behavior hard to do? What I’ve found in my research and years of experience is that your answer will involve at least one of five factors. I call them the 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?

the second critical question we should ask about any behavior or habit we want to cultivate: How can I make this behavior easier to do?

Regardless of what your aspiration is, increasing your skills, getting tools and resources, and making the behavior tiny are what makes things easier to do.

The Starter Step is a kind of mental jujitsu—it has a surprising impact for such a small move because the momentum it creates often propels you to the next steps with less friction. The key is not to raise the bar. Doing the Starter Step is success. Every time you do it, you are keeping that habit alive and cultivating the possibility of growth.

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.

No behavior happens without a prompt.

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

For some habits, it’s all about finding out where a new habit fits into your day. Where a habit is located in your daily routine can make the difference between action and inaction, success and failure.

Relying on yourself to remember to do a new behavior every day is unlikely to lead to meaningful change. Ditto for trying to help someone else cultivate a habit.

already do that can remind you to do a new habit you want to cultivate.

Action Prompts are so much more useful than Person Prompts and Context Prompts that I’ve given them a pet name: Anchors. When talking about Tiny Habits, I use the term Anchor to describe something in your life that is already stable and solid. The concept is pretty simple. If there is a habit you want, find the right Anchor within your current routine to serve as your prompt, your reminder. I selected the term “anchor” because you are attaching your new habit to something solid and reliable.

A fuzzy Anchor (“after dinner” or “whenever I feel stress”) doesn’t work. Make them precise.

Match the physical location First, consider the physical location of your new habit. Find an Anchor you already do in that location.

Match the frequency Next, as you look at your existing routine, decide how often you want to do your new habit. If you want to do it once a day, then sequence it after an Anchor that happens once a day. If you want to do your new habit four times a day, then sequence it after an Anchor that happens four times a day.

Match the theme/purpose Finally—and this element is less vital than the previous two—the best Anchors will have the same theme or purpose as the new habit.

To find the Trailing Edge, we look at the Anchor under a microscope to see what the end of an action looks like. This is particularly important for Anchors that are rather fuzzy.

Starting with your reliable daily routines—your Anchors—you can find what new tiny behavior to insert after them.

This waiting period creates an opportunity: After I turn on the shower (and while I wait), I will . . . I call this type of habit a Meanwhile Habit.

I call these habits Pearl Habits because they use prompts that start out as irritants then turn into something beautiful.

the underlying secret to why Tiny Habits works so beautifully: People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

adults have many ways to tell themselves, “I did a bad job,” and very few ways of saying, “I did a good job.” We rarely recognize our successes and feel good about what we’ve done.

There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.

For too long people have believed the old myth that repetition creates habits, focusing on the number of days it requires.

In my own research, I found that habits can form very quickly, often in just a few days, as long as people have a strong positive emotion connected to the behavior. In fact, some habits seem to get wired in immediately: You do the behavior once, and then you don’t consider other options again. You’ve created an instant habit.

When I teach people about human behavior, I boil it down to three words to make the point crystal clear: Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.

When you are designing for habit formation—for yourself or for someone else—you are really designing for emotions.