Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

by B.J. Fogg

Search for celebrations that feel authentic to you.

When you rehearse in Tiny Habits, you are both training muscle memory and rewiring your brain to remember. And you can drill and wire in a habit quickly if you have an effective celebration.

Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.

You will be more optimistic about your day and your tasks ahead.

our brains want to feel good. Celebrating small wins gives them something to repattern our life around.

When people feel successful, even with small things, their overall level of motivation goes up dramatically, and with higher levels of motivation, people can do harder behaviors.

want you to be able to envision any aspiration and achieve it reliably and confidently. Instead of guessing or being distracted by flashy dead-end paths, you will know exactly what to do. To become a Habit Ninja, you do something familiar: You learn skills.

Identity shifts are change boosters because they help us cultivate constellations of behavior — not just one or two habits here and there. This is important because most aspirations

new habits that will get you where you

want to be — especially in the areas of fitness, s...

Shifting identity helps you consider other new habits you might not have thought of doing that will move you closer to your aspiration.

To help you get rid of your Downhill Habits, I’ve created a new system called the Behavior Change Masterplan. This system provides a comprehensive approach to follow step by step so you don’t need to guess at solutions.

Instead of building in effective prompts, you’ll look for ways to remove them. Instead of trying to ramp up your motivation, you’ll consider ways to reduce it for an unwanted habit.

In many cultures there is a lot of weight put on personal responsibility — the idea that if you can’t do the right thing you must be suffering from some weakness of character.

The first thing to remember is this: If you’ve followed some misguided advice on breaking habits and failed, I’m here to say it’s not your fault. You have inherited a flawed way of thinking and approaching the problem that has led to a cycle of frustration and dysfunction. The second thing to remember is that you can design for the change you want in a smarter, better way. And that’s why I’m writing this chapter for you. It’s time to set the record straight and acknowledge that bad habits are not fundamentally different from good habits when it comes to basic components. Behavior is behavior; it’s always a result of motivation, ability, and a prompt coming together at the same moment.

Create habits that relate to some other domain instead — tidiness, relationships, creativity, or anything that doesn’t relate to your body weight.

But by picking up a bunch of positive habits that helped him embrace a new identity, he changed the landscape of his life so drastically that many bad habits no longer fit.

Get specific to stop a habit When it comes to stopping

do. In chapter 3, I explained the five factors in my Ability Chain model: time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine. We used this chain to help us make a new habit easier to do, but now we’re going to weaken or break the chain to

interacting with others, having a work ethic, showing up reliably, and being accountable —

Help people feel successful.

We all know that social dynamics are powerful drivers of behavior.

What you’ve learned in this book gives you the power to defend yourself against undermining influences and design new habits that lead to a more harmonious, healthy, and meaningful life for everyone around you.

By using Tiny Habits and Behavior Design, you can be a force for good in the lives of others.

It takes only one skilled and caring individual (you!) to transform a group, but I would suggest that you not start by trying to change your entire country even though with Behavior Design you could transform culture.

We live and work with others, and every change has a general effect on everyone for better or worse. We are always changing together whether we design for it or not.

Design for your future deliberately and efficiently so things change for the better in every part of your life.

Change leads to change.

You start people on the path to change from the place they want to begin.

As they build confidence and skills, they will open up to other types ...

tidier home, or any aspiration that you and your spouse

a process, not a prescription.

we are influencing the behavior of others all the time, often without realizing it — that’s the nature of living

Once you feel good about the change you want to help others implement, you’re ready to jump in.

You’ve helped everyone go beyond the abstract by focusing the meeting on a specific objective. And you’ve helped everyone see many potential solutions. As a result, the group won’t settle on the first idea.

The best way to match your team with Golden Behaviors is with the Focus Mapping method.

One of my hopes for this book is to change how leaders interact with their teams,

how parents interact with their children,

and how doctors interact with their patients. When you understand one of my key points — that people change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad — you can put that into practice in your own life, but you can also use this to help people around ...

Behavior Design is not a solitary pursuit. With each habit we design, each tiny success we celebrate, and each change we make, we reach beyond our personal lives. We shape our families, communities, and societies through our actions. And they shape us. The behaviors we perpetuate matter. Behavior Design is not just about losing ten pounds or putting the phone down during dinner. It’s about becoming the person you want to be — and creating the kind of family, team, community, and world we want to live in.

What I knew from coaching people in Tiny Habits was that it makes you happy. It’s very simple. You’re helping people change their lives, and you see the positive impact of that every day. That feels good — it gives you Shine.

you change best by feeling good. She is living proof of a life transformed.