50 pages • 1 hour read
B. J. FoggTiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Rewards, Not Condemnations
When people notice habits or behaviors that they don’t want—eating too much, not exercising, not getting enough sleep, being inconsiderate—they usually start by using willpower to force themselves to change. When this fails, they often condemn themselves for being weak or a bad person. The author insists that such methods don’t address the basic principle that people do things that reward them.
Many systems of behavior management use punishment as part of the incentive system. Penalties work to some degree, but it’s a weak method and quickly collapses when the punishment disappears: “People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad” (123).
A much stronger method is designing behaviors that reward a person for doing them. These new habits quickly become robust because they are reinforced in pleasing ways. The behavior itself, and not some outside agent, creates the reward.
One of the most powerful rewards is the feeling of self-worth that people get when they accomplish something. However, “[w]e rarely recognize our successes and feel good about what we’ve done” (130). The Tiny Habits system inserts rewards into new habits by celebrating every time the person performs the habit. The method uses self-praise. A quick, small gesture—saying "Awesome!", pumping a fist, even a simple smile—serves to induce a rewarding sense of self-approval.
Though the system’s habits start out very small, the ongoing rewards encourage users to grow those habits until they become full-sized and robust. Once the complete habit is in place, it’s no longer necessary always to celebrate, though there’s no harm in continuing to do so. By this time, the behavior will have established itself so firmly in the user’s mind that it would feel unnatural not to perform the new habit.
Each successful step forward encourages users to continue the process and, eventually, to begin creating more new habits. As problems and mistakes crop up, Habiteers no longer criticize or blame themselves but regard those events as feedback that they can use to improve the process.
A major side effect of this method is a growth in the user’s self-esteem. This increase in pride and sense of accomplishment leads to more efforts at self-improvement—which, in turn, generate yet more attempts in a virtuous cycle. In this way, the Tiny Habits method aims to replace self-criticism with self-nurturing, and brings an end to the constant negativity with which people traditionally punish themselves. The increase in self-esteem becomes a platform on which participants not only better their own lives but can reach out to create opportunities for others to improve theirs.
Simple Is Best
The author firmly believes that the simpler a process is, the easier it is to do, and that this is an important attribute of any system of behavior improvement. His research has shown him that people respond strongly to products and services that are simple to use. He therefore makes ease of use a cornerstone of his Tiny Habits method.
Simple is better than complex because it is easier. A system with lots of bells and whistles may offer more flexibility, but its complexity will discourage most users. It’s better if such systems start out simple and then offer more features if and when users becomes more proficient. The Tiny Habits method remains simple and users can employ it in more complex ways as they see fit.
The author demonstrated the power of simplicity when he taught a class at Stanford University on how to design and post attractive and appealing apps on Facebook. His students generated simple, pleasing apps that garnered 24 million users within six months. Another student went on to found Instagram; its success was greatly enhanced by its ease of use.
The Tiny Habits method highlights simplicity as a vital part of choosing new behaviors. The author believes easy ability is more important than high motivation in increasing the chances that a new habit will succeed: “a great way to set yourself up for success by making sure your behavior is as simple as it can be” (89). Ease of ability thus becomes one of the two main criteria, along with high impact, that define the Golden Behaviors most likely to prove useful to Habiteers.
Much or most of the simplicity of Tiny Habits lies in the fact that the habits created by the system are extremely small—for example, an exercise habit that begins with two pushups; a diet that begins with a sip of water; an improvement in sleep that starts by moving a distraction from the bedroom. Making new habits radically smaller makes them simpler and therefore easier to do.
According to Tiny Habits, simplicity works; if it didn’t, it would be abandoned, just as any habit that doesn’t work gets abandoned. Simple behaviors work for a simple reason: They’re easy to do, which takes less effort. Simplicity, then, is required if anyone expects a new behavior to become robust.
The Formal Rigor of Generating New Habits
The Tiny Habits method is based on theories of human behavior developed by the author at his Stanford lab. These theories hold that people tend to do what they want to do and can do. To help people choose workable habits, the method uses two formal processes—Magic Wanding and Focus Mapping—followed by field tests run by the people who will use the new habits, in a system that develops innovative solutions in a scientific manner. The method relies on the idea that a formal system of idea creation and testing will generate much better new behaviors than a random or impulsive process. The system can also be used in general problem-solving at home, in business, and elsewhere.
Magic Wanding is the author’s term for a type of brainstorming that asks a participant, “if you could wave a magic wand and get yourself to do any behavior that would reduce your stress, what would it be?” and, when that question is answered, asks, “Great. What else?” (54) This approach encourages participants to think as widely and deeply as they can; it doesn’t limit them to what they merely think they can accomplish, but permits them to dream about what they really wish to do. The resulting answers usually are surprisingly innovative, and many of them often prove, through later testing, to be highly useful.
The resulting ideas, the Swarm of Behaviors, are gathered up and entered into a second process called Focus Mapping. Each candidate behavior is written onto an index card and placed on a sheet of paper, higher up if believed more impactful and lower down if deemed less so. The behaviors are moved farther to the right of the page if easier to do or farther to the left if more difficult. This process places the best candidate behaviors in the upper-right quadrant of the page, where they become Golden Behaviors, or those most likely to be useful to the participant.
These candidates then undergo careful evaluation for fitness. Each habit is field-tested for ease of use in an iterative process, run repeatedly through daily use, until the virtues or flaws of each candidate behavior become clear. Each behavior is either accepted, altered, or abandoned. The author describes this process as “Troubleshoot, Iterate, & Expand” (180).
The entire system of habit design brings the rigors of logic and science to an otherwise chaotic process and generates precisely focused behaviors that have proven themselves through rigorous testing.
This system can be used in the Tiny Habits method for improving personal behaviors, but it can also be used by families, business teams, scientists, and anyone who needs a robust, methodical system of problem-solving. The author believes his approach can help people everywhere, and that it even might help solve intractable problems that face peoples and nations around the world.
Magic Wanding, Focus Mapping, and iterative field testing introduce formal, scientific methods into what, for most people, is a somewhat random process of personal behavior modification. These formal procedures aim to bring rational discipline to a process that transforms from unfocused to precise and effective.
