Think Small Quotes

“is the small changes you make that will add up to something bigger. But in this case, small doesn’t mean easy. It requires focus, dedication and effort that, over time, will start to pay off.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“In other words, ‘if money doesn’t make you happy, you probably aren’t spending it right’.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“social isolation has a similar effect to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Reflect and celebrate success. Take some time to reflect on what has worked well (and not so well), and make sure you celebrate what you have achieved before moving on to the next goal.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Social norms are the values, actions and expectations of a particular society or group, and they offer guides to our behaviour”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“And finally, it’s clear that simply praising people for being inherently good at something isn’t as effective as encouraging effort and persistence with a task.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“The other mindset, encouraged in those who were given praise based on their effort, is the ‘growth mindset’, and it is founded on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Feedback doesn’t just show us where we are going wrong, then; it enables us to understand better the impact and the progress we are making in relation to our ultimate goals.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“you are trying to achieve – your goal. The problem is that, in most areas of life, we don’t get feedback of this kind. We charge ahead with our personal and work projects but don’t get a chance to step back and think about the progress we’re making towards the goals we set ourselves. And this is because most of the things we set out to achieve aren’t set up like a driving lesson, in which you get an instant understanding of the relationship between your actions and their consequences.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“underlying the ‘share’ principle is the fact that human beings are social animals. And when we recognize this fully, we will come to realize that we are better off working together if we want to achieve our individual objectives.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Whether you like it or not, your friends, family and colleagues will already be having a major influence upon your life, but you might not have thought before about how you can use the reach of that to help you achieve your goals.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“People are giving up smoking not as individuals, but collectively in groups. Yet smokers rarely start by thinking about how to draw on the group dynamic from the outset to help them to achieve their goal.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“We wouldn’t be able to achieve such great feats without working together as a team. But too often we think about goals as individual activities, pursued in isolation from other people, despite the fact that in most areas of our working life, working in groups is the norm.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Even at three degrees of separation, you are still influenced by those within your social network.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Smoking, alcohol-cessation and weight-loss programmes that provide peer support work better than those that do not.13 If you’re in any way sporty, you might have noticed that you are able to exercise faster or harder when you’re working out with another person.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Most people are really surprised when they hear how many people say yes when asked to do something that apparently comes with no benefits to the person saying yes.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“You are more likely to achieve your goal if you get someone to help you. You may be surprised at how willing others will be to support you.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“You wake up one morning, reach for a cigarette and suddenly you realize you’re not a social smoker any more,’ Andy later reflected. ‘Suddenly you’re an actual smoker.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“But for now it’s enough to know that making a commitment – to go the gym, to attend your language lessons – is the important, first step.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“substitute the old routine for a new one. Electronic cigarettes, for example, are being used increasingly by smokers to substitute a more pernicious habit (smoking tobacco) for one with much less severe health implications (vaping electronic cigarettes). In these instances, note that the cue that triggers the behaviour can remain. It’s just your response to the cue that changes. This of course can be especially useful in those situations in which it’s going to be tricky to change the cue – for example, if you smoke in response to stressful situations.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“The key to disrupting the cue is to think about ways of altering your day-to-day environment. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, try getting rid of all the unhealthy food from your fridge and cupboards and replacing it with food that will help reinforce more positive eating behaviours. Or if that sounds like too much of a strain in the first instance, at the very least try moving the unhealthy stuff to the top shelf so that it’s out of reach – you will be surprised by the effect that this has in disrupting the automaticity of your response to the cue.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“The first is that habits require a cue or a trigger (going to the cinema). The second is that habits require a ‘routine’, the act that is performed (buying and eating the popcorn). Third, and most important, the routine needs then to be repeated in a consistent context, and it is this repetition that starts to create an automatic link between the situation that you encounter and the behaviour you perform.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“For many people, eating popcorn at the cinema constitutes a habit – a regular practice, developed over time, that is hard to give up. To test just how strong a habit eating popcorn in the cinema is, researchers devised a fun experiment in which people entering a cinema were given a bucket of either fresh or stale popcorn. Nobody would claim to like stale popcorn. But the researchers surmised that those who had developed a popcorn-eating habit would be impervious to the taste, whereas those who rarely bought popcorn wouldn’t be so quick to reach for the next handful. Just to make sure that the stale stuff did actually taste worse, they got everyone to rate the taste of the popcorn they’d eaten: the fresh popcorn, unsurprisingly, won hands down.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“Making a simple plan that sets out when, how and where you are going to follow through on your intentions has been shown to be effective at helping people to eat more fruit, increase public transport use, reduce discrimination, get more exercise, diet, improve academic performance, quit smoking and recycle more.13”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“But there was a danger that he was slipping into a bad habit described in the media as ‘middle-class drinking’5 in which a glass of wine or beer was no longer an occasional treat, but part of the daily routine”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“The second variant of chunking involves breaking down your overall objective into pockets of time or repeated tasks. So instead of thinking about all the different tasks you need to undertake, you might think about how much time you need to set aside every week to achieve your overall objective.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“If we set out to achieve a long list of activities over an extended period of time, we are less likely to achieve them than if we break them down into a series of discrete steps.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“In other words, for most of us, the problem is not a lack of goals, it’s too many of them.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“However, there is growing evidence that learning later in life can improve your self-esteem, life satisfaction and sense of optimism.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

“To put it another way, social isolation has a similar effect to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. So you may wish to focus your goal on broadening or deepening your social relationships.”
― Owain Service, Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals