More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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. If you want to create long-term change, it’s best to start small.
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.
We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change. People get frustrated and demoralized when things don’t happen quickly. It’s natural. It’s normal. But it’s another way we’re set up to fail.
The problem is that both motivation and willpower are shape-shifters by nature, which makes them unreliable.
her new habits were tiny seeds of positivity that she planted in the cracks of her life. And they grew and grew. Even as new cracks kept appearing,
some mysteries are like riddles. When you don’t know the answers, riddles seem hard to solve. But once you see the answer, the solution seems obvious.
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.
From now on, I want you to look at your behavior the way a scientist looks at what’s growing in a petri dish — with curiosity and objective distance. This is going to be a different mindset than the ones in many of the change books you might have read.
I hope you see that you can’t rely on motivation alone to create lasting change because you probably can’t sustain it and you might not be able to manipulate or design for it reliably. And I hope you see that this is not a character flaw. It’s human nature.
Humans are dreamers by nature, so we’ve all got a few moon shots tucked into our back pocket at all times.
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)
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.
By asking what I call the Discovery Question, What is making this behavior hard to do? we are lasering in on which factor is likely to cause us the most trouble.
When you are better at something, it’s easier to do. By gaining skills, you’re turning up the volume on ability.
Do not raise the bar prematurely. Don’t rush to make the behavior bigger. It’s always okay to not walk after putting on your shoes if that’s all you want to do for the day. By keeping the bar low, you keep the habit alive. You’ll ensure that you’re always capable of doing the behavior no matter how your motivation fluctuates.
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.
The important thing to remember about procrastination is that the perception of difficulty can be just as important as the actual difficulty. In addition, every day you don’t do the task, it grows in your head, which makes the task seem more and more difficult.
No behavior happens without a prompt.
You already have a lot of reliable routines, and each of them can serve as an Action Prompt for a new habit. You put your feet on the floor in the morning. You boil water for tea or turn on the coffee maker. You flush the toilet. You drop your kid off at school. You hang your coat up when you walk through the door at the end of the day. You put your head on a pillow every night. These actions are already embedded in your life so seamlessly and naturally that you don’t have to think about them. And because of that, they make fantastic prompts. It’s an elegant design solution because it’s so
...more
People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.
Your ability to ignore self-criticism and embrace feeling good about your successes will ripple out into your life in positive ways that go far beyond the Tiny Habits you create and celebrate.
Remember that you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.
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.
Picture a tangled rope that’s full of knots. That’s how you should think about unwanted habits like stressing out, too much screen time, and procrastinating. You cannot untangle those knots all at once. Yanking on the rope will probably make things worse in the long run. You have to untangle the rope step by step instead. And you don’t focus on the hardest part first. Why? Because the toughest tangle is deep inside the knot. You have to approach it systematically and find the easiest knot to untangle.
Change leads to change.
What is making this daily routine hard to do? You can get even more specific, asking about each link in the Ability Chain: Do you have enough time? Money? Mental capacity? Physical capacity? Does this conflict with our existing routines?
Don’t worry too much about the health benefits of just one sun salutation because getting someone started on a healthy habit — no matter how tiny — is a big deal.
