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, your behavior becomes a science experiment.

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.

Creating positive habits is the place to start, and creating tiny positive habits is the path to developing much bigger ones. Once you know how Tiny Habits works — and why it works — you can make big

one-time changes. You can disrupt unwanted habits. You can work up to bucket-list behaviors like running a marathon.

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.

Think of the Maui Habit as a simple practice you do each morning in about three seconds. This will show you how easy it is to get started, and it will help you learn the single most important skill in behavior change — feeling successful.

With Tiny Habits, risk doesn’t have to factor into the equation. Tiny can also be undercover. You can start to change without making a big scene. No one will sabotage you. This reduces the pressure on you.

Because these behaviors are so small and the program so flexible, emotional risk is eliminated. There is no real failure in Tiny Habits. There are little stumbles, but if you get up again, that’s not failure — that’s a habit in the making.

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.

It’s a model that has profound implications. Each person’s motivation, ability, and prompt will be different in any given situation. The specifics of motivation or ability may differ by culture or age. And that’s okay. The universe is unendingly complex, yet we can observe a phenomenon and break it down using some basic principles that apply to every circumstance.

Behaviors that ultimately become habits will reliably fall above the Action Line.

The more motivated you are to do a behavior, the more likely you are to do the behavior

The harder a behavior is to do, the less likely you are to do it

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

Motivation and ability work together like teammates

The amount you have of one affects the amount you need of the other. Understanding the relationship of motivation and ability opens the door to new ways of analyzing and designing behaviors.

In general, the more you do a behavior, the easier it gets.

No behavior happens without a prompt

Motivation and ability are continuous variables. You always have some level of motivation and ability for any given

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.

Learning to explain the Behavior Model quickly and clearly is one of the most useful skills in Behavior Design.

Months after Behavior Design Boot Camp, Katie told me how happy she was to finally have a solid workout habit in her life. She still got sucked into her phone on occasion over breakfast or while waiting in line, but it didn’t have the same iron grip on her. Most days, she was the master of her mornings. She felt physically stronger than ever, but most important, she was learning that Behavior Design could improve any area of her life.

When you apply this troubleshooting method to your own behavior, you’ll find that it stops you from blaming yourself. Let’s say you don’t meditate in the mornings as you’d hoped.

Tiny Habits method because it’s the foundation for creating positive habits and it contains all the key principles you’ll need to design for other behaviors down the road.

And the first step to creating a pack of positive habits is to decide which ones to cultivate.

Motivation is a desire to do a specific behavior (eat spinach tonight) or a general class of behaviors (eat vegetables and other healthy foods each night). Some psychologists talk about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. No offense to all those psychologists, but I’ve found this to be a weak distinction that is not very helpful in the real world.

sources of motivation: yourself (what you already want), a benefit or punishment you would receive by doing the action (the carrot and stick), and

context (e.g., all your friends a...

Changing, invisible, competing, and conflicting motivations make this element of behavior hard to pin down and control.

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

These enduring motivations I call aspirations, and that’s exactly what I will explain next.

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.

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.

So how do we pull our aspirations out of our pockets and start making them happen without relying on motivation?

You can only achieve aspirations and outcomes over time if you execute the right specific behaviors.

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

I like aspirations as a starting point because they are more flexible and less intimidating than specific outcomes.)

No matter what kind of change you want to make, matching yourself with the right behaviors is the key to changing your life for good.

A Golden Behavior has three criteria. + The behavior is effective in realizing your aspiration (impact) + You want to do the behavior (motivation) + You can do the behavior (ability)

In Behavior Design we match ourselves with new habits we can do even when we are at our most hurried, unmotivated, and beautifully imperfect.

He knew how human behavior worked and how important it was to make things easy to do if you wanted people to do them.

While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable.

We often push ourselves beyond our physical, emotional, or mental capabilities. And while

The result is that people become overwhelmed and find themselves without a way to correct their course when they get caught in bursts and busts of motivation because their ebbing Motivation Wave leaves them high and dry.

So it made sense to her that daily habits would be a great way for her to gauge how she was feeling.

Sarika built skills and confidence and wired in these Tiny Behaviors until they took root as habits.