Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPLive: The Science of Habit Building with BJ Fogg | Cut Version

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Do you have trouble sticking to habits, but want to create sustainable behavioral change? Maybe you’re setting huge, life-changing goals that require daily motivation, or perhaps you're simply having trouble remembering to complete the action at all. This happens to all of us, but social scientist and New York Times bestselling author, BJ Fogg, has the solution. Start small. BJ is the mind behind the idea of the tiny habit. Which relies on his model, The Fogg Behavior Model to create lasting behaviors and habits that really stick through tiny actions that are easy to do each day. In this episode, Hala and BJ talk about why the traditional approaches to habit building don’t work, what a tiny habit is and why it works, why motivation is less important than we think, the ABCs of tiny habits, and the one habit BJ recommends to everyone.  Topics Include: - How BJ got interested in study of human habits  - Motivation and how traditional models don’t support us - Two things that matter when creating habits - Qualities of a tiny habit and why we should work with tiny habits  - The ABCs of tiny habits - The Maui Habit, the one habit BJ recommends to everyone - Is there an amount of time a tiny habit should take? - The Fogg Behavior Model, B = MAP - Why are behaviors, aspirations, and outcomes different? - The swarm of behaviors model  - The role of motivation and why it’s less important than we think  - Why it’s important to pick habits that you want - Queen Bee Behavior and sticking to difficult habits  - Untangling a destructive habit - BJ on the power of simplicity and the creation of Instagram - The three sources of prompt  - How do we create positive habits in our lives? - Q & A portion - And other topics… BJ Fogg is an American social scientist, author, and research associate at Stanford University. He founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, where he directs research and innovation. At Stanford, BJ was an appointed Lecturer and Consulting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, where he taught classes from 1997 - 2014. He has also been a Lecturer and Social Science Research Scholar at the Graduate School of education from 2001 to the present. BJ is the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, the co-editor of Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change, and the New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Habits. Fortune Magazine named BJ a “New Guru You Should Know” for his insights about mobile and social networks. Sponsored By: Open Door Capital - Go to investwithodc.com to learn more! Constant Contact - To start your free digital marketing trial today, visit constantcontact.com Wise - Join 13 million people and businesses who are already saving, and try Wise for free at Wise.com/yap iTrust Capital - Sign up today and receive a $100 funding bonus when you open and fund an account. Visit iTrustCapital.com to start investing today. ClickUp - Sign up today at ClickUp.com and use code YAP to get 15% off ClickUp's massive Unlimited Plan for a year! Resources Mentioned: #YAPLive:The Science of Habit Building with BJ Fogg on Clubhouse:https://www.youngandprofiting.com/yaplive-the-science-of-habit-building-with-bj-fogg-on-clubhouse/  Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg: https://tinyhabits.com/book/  Tiny Habits Recipe Maker: https://tinyhabits.com/recipecards/  Free 5-day program: tinyhabits.com/join  BJ’s Website: https://tinyhabits.com/  BJ’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjfogg/  BJ’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bjfogg/  BJ’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/bjfogg  Connect with Young and Profiting: Hala’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/     Hala’s Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/yapwithhala/     Hala’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yapwithhala  Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/@halataha   Website: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/  Text Hala: https://youngandprofiting.co/TextHala or text “YAP” to 28046 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com-profiting. Booba one will save you on all your eats. Savings can't be beat. Up to 10% off your order. Join Booba one and save.

$0 delivery fee and percentage off discounts subject to older Subjects to Old Minimums and Participating Source. Taxes and other fee still apply. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young & Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world.

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you'll love it here at Young & Profiting Podcast. This week on YAP, we're chatting with expert in human behavior and ground breaker and building habits at stick, Dr. BJ Fog. BJ is a social scientist and he's the founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, where he directs research and innovation. He also trains Fortune 500 companies on health, productivity, and financial well-being. But he's perhaps most well-known as the author of the New York Times bestseller, Tiny Habits. B.J. was named a new guru you should know by Fortune Magazine for his insights about mobile and social networks.

And his work has been featured in major outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, and so many more. This episode was originally recorded live on Clubhouse back in July of 2021, but it's still as relevant as ever and evergreen content, and so we've cut it down to the most valuable parts so you guys can listen, learn, and profit even faster. In this episode, we cover why the traditional approaches to habit building just don't work. We understand what BJ means by a tiny habit and how tiny habits actually can help you create

habits that stick. And we also get into the revolutionary fog behavior model and the ABCs of tiny habits. And lastly, BJ lets us in on the one habit that he suggests everyone should pick up. So if you've tried everything and you can't seem to make those habits stick, turn up your volume and let's get right into it. BJ, you are one of the world's top experts. You wrote the breakout book, Tiny Habits. Considering your background in social sciences and behavior,

I'd love to know why you initially got interested in the study of human habits. Because I myself felt like I was slipping. I was gaining weight. I wasn't sleeping well. I wasn't feeling as productive as I wanted to be. And it was like ma'am VJ you're a behavior guy and

Your life seems to be going a direction that you don't like and it I was probably let's see I'm 57 now so I was in my 40s and I felt like if you don't turn the corner now you won't turn the corner Which is not true? You can you can turn the corner now, you won't turn the corner, which is not true. You can turn the corner, you can create habits that you need. So I felt a little bit of an urgency, like this is going the wrong direction, and I really need to figure out how to optimize my life. And so outside of Stanford, outside of my Stanford research, I just started, I call it goofing around with my own habits,

but it's basically experimenting and trying out different ways to change my behavior. So really was out of a personal need and concern that it's like now or never, which by the way, everybody, again, that's not true. You can form habits at any age, but that's how I felt. I love that. And so I know that you take a very unique approach

when it comes to habit building and you kind of turn the whole traditional models on its head. So most approaches to behavior believe that people, if they have enough information about why they should make a change, they'll make it and it's easy, it's immediate, but you say that behavior change changes really not that simple. So why don't these traditional approaches work and what you suggest is the alternative?

There's a variety of traditional views. When you were talking about right there, I called the information action fallacy and it doesn't work and it goes like this. If we just give people information about exercise or nutrition or stress, that will change their attitude around the importance of exercise or stress or whatever, which will then change their behavior. So it's a very logical model. You know, information will convince people about the importance and then they'll be motivated and change their behavior.

And as everyone listening knows, it went out that rational. And informational loan does a very poor job of changing our behavior. Now information might be a component. Now information itself is hard to define clearly, but what doesn't seem to work well are these steps. Information then leads to a change in your attitude or your opinion. That doesn't work very reliably. It works in some situations, but not extremely

well. Because you tend to believe what you want to believe. I mean, you could take a lot of social science and summarize it in that statement. People believe what they want to believe. I mean, look what happened with the elections in the US and all of that. People were seeing the same information, but interpreting it differently according to how they wanted to see it. So that's one link that doesn't work very well. And then the next link is if we can get attitudes to change, does that then lead to behavior change? And that sometimes works, but it's not that reliable. So when you have those two links in the system that are weak, both of them are weak, then that sequence of information cascading down to lasting behavior change is really precarious. And I gave it a name, so that's why

I gave it a name, so we were able to talk about it. And I called it the information action fallacy. Then there's other traditions that have to do with how habits work and repetition is the key. And you only can do one habit at a time and you have to track your behavior and things that are just missed and don't really matter. And we inherited those at least in the culture I grew up in thinking that's how you do have it. And some of those came, if you go back to William James, he kind of laid the foundation for a lot of good things, but some of the bad things. And then some of them just missed interpretations of academic studies.

So I'll stop there. I'm BJ, and I'll stop answering the question at that point. We all know you're BJ. You were the main star of this show. So then I guess that's really hurts our motivation, right? When we try to do these new habits, we're trying to follow the rules, but the traditional approaches, just like you said, are faulty.

So talk to us about motivation and how these types of traditional models don't support as building habits because we lose motivation and we feel like shame that we can't follow through. Yeah, and that's one of various problems, and I'll just give a really specific example. A lot of us were led to believe that you do one habit at a time and you track it daily. And that's essential. Only change one habit at a time. And you've got to track it daily. And I used to have wall charts up and check boxes

and things like that. I have come to believe that for most people, that is a bad idea. And here's why. My coaching of over 40,000, it's probably more like 60,000 people at the coach personally. I stopped counting at 40,000. So this is 10 years of coaching people in tiny habits,

week after week after week, two to 300 people a week, sometimes 600, but it was a new year. And just seeing the patterns and seeing the data, that the key to creating habits is the emotions that people feel when they do the behavior and the feeling of success, reinforces that behavior. In other words, it makes it more automatic. And when you put a wall chart up and you're tracking, like, going, going to run for an hour a day and you see that chart, you see all the gaps gaps that have X's or frowny faces

rather than checks or smiles. You're not feeling very successful seeing all those gaps. And that can be very discouraging. It's like, oh, I just don't have the willpower. I don't have the discipline and so on. So I never advocate that people put up a chart and track their habits daily. Now for some people, unusual people, it will help them feel successful. But for many people, when you see all those gaps, it's like, oh my gosh, it's not working. Once again, I'm failing and

you start blaming yourself and so on. So even techniques like tracking your behavior as much as people advocate for that and say, oh, you track it daily, I push back against that. And the techniques like making a public commitment or tracking are all those other techniques fall under two things matter. One, when creating habits, and I call this maximum number one, help yourself do what you already want to do. That's really important. So don't pick habits you don't want to do. And if you don't want to track your habit, don't do that. Help yourself do what you already want to do, and maximum of two is help yourself feel successful.

So if something like making a public commitment helps you feel successful, do it. If it makes you concerned or worries you or makes you feel unsuccessful, don't. If tracking helps you feel successful, do it. If tracking just highlights and, what shall I say, archives, the fact that you're failing, don't do it. And the tiny habits method, one of the things that I said early on, so I started teaching it and sharing it in 2011, so 10 years ago. And I would say practice and revise. Practice meaning you won't be perfect. And revise is iterate. You're not going to be perfect and you're going to have to revise. So the method is one that acknowledges

the Tiny Habits method acknowledges. There's going to be twist and. So the method is one that acknowledges that tiny habits method acknowledges. There's going to be twist and turns. You won't be perfect, but you just keep going. You keep practicing and revising, and you'll figure it out. So all those traditional things that you've heard, look at those through the lenses of the maxims. Is it helping you do what you already want to do? And is it helping you feel successful?

And if it's doing both, great. That technique is good for you. But if it's missing on either account or both then it's not a good match for you. Yeah I love the fact that your method is not like pass or fail it's like you can just keep trying and trying and trying until you get it right. Yeah I like talking about it for many of these domains of habits that people are looking at, whether it's stress reduction or sleep or changing how you eat, think of yourself as a little baby learning to walk. Yeah, you're not really a baby and you know how to walk, but within this domain of nutrition

or stress or sleeping, you may be a newbie like a baby and it's a process of learning how to do that. And as you're going along, do you think of yourself as a toddler, and you're going to stumble, you're going to fall, but that's okay, and that's part of the process. I think it helps you give yourself compassion, but it also describes how the process works. If you get up and keep going, you'll get better, and you'll get better, and pretty soon, you'll be able to do it without even thinking about it, which is what it is. You'll be able to eat on your game plan automatically

without thinking about it. You'll turn something that seemed very hard and challenging and create all these stumbles for you into something that seems effortless like walking is today. Awesome. We also have a guest that joined on stage, John Assarif, also came on my show before.

John, welcome to this stage. Thank you for joining. Hey there, Haalon. Hey, BJ, nice to connect with you again. Hey, so BJ, I love to start off with context. I love to give my listeners a real good foundation so that they can really understand the rest of the conversation.

So let's start off with something super basic. Let's talk about the qualities of a tiny habit and why we should work with tiny habits. All right, I'll give a quick summary. One way to think about it is A, B, C. That wasn't deliberate. I'm kind of suspicious of acronyms and things like that, but it turns out the ABC.

The B is the behavior part. So the behavior is something that you want to turn into a habit. So a habit is a type of behavior. It's a behavior you do quite automatically. You do without thinking or contemplating or deliberating. And so in tiny habits, you take whatever, have it you want, whatever that behavior is, and you make it super, super small, so it doesn't require much motivation.

If something's hard to do, it requires motivation. If something is super tiny, like tidying up one item in your living room, it doesn't require tons of motivation. So the hack in the tiny habits method is to make the behavior so small that you don't have to rely on motivation. So that's the B part. Backing up to A, that stands for anchor. In tiny habits, and I've given a TED talk on this, there was this breakthrough moment when I was goofing around with my own behavior, and I understood that I needed to make it tiny because I looked at my own behavior model and said, oh, it's easy to do.

Then motivation could be higher low and I don't have to keep sustaining motivation. Let's make it easy. But then it's like, what's going to prompt it? What's going to remind me to do it? I'll be quick on this, but there was a moment I'm getting out of the shower, going through my disk and then this and then this, but there was a moment I'm getting out of the shower going through my this and then this and then this, the sequence of things you do and it's like, oh, there it is. You figure out what the habit naturally comes after, after it's the key.

And so I call that anchoring. So you take the habit and you attach it, you anchor it to something that you already do in your life that's stable and reliable. Other people have taken that concept and they call it piggybacking or habit stacking. It's the same thing. I call it anchoring and other people have iterated on that. But you so you don't use alarms or post-it notes or just yourself to remember, you deliberately find something you already do reliably like brushing your teeth is the anchor that reminds you to floss. And so you find where it fits naturally.

That's A and B, and the C is for celebration, which is a way that you cause yourself to feel a positive emotion as you do the behavior immediately after, and it's the emotion that reinforces that behavior. That makes it more likely to happen. That makes it automatic. So you're not leaving the emotion to chance. You're deliberately causing that in yourself through a technique called celebration. There's over 100 ways to do this. And you're hacking your emotions in order to cause the habit to wire in very quickly. So you got anchor, behavior, and celebration, and all three of them are hacks. You're hacking what reminds you by finding a routine, you're hacking the behavior by making it super tiny, so you don't have to worry about motivation, and you're hacking your emotion,

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all lowercase to take your business to the next level today. Again, that Shopify.com-profiting, Shopify.com-profiting, all lowercase. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. profiting all lower case. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. I want to dive deeper on this ABC pneumonic because I think it's really important. I know that you have something called the Maui habits and I think it will help people really understand what this is all about and start their

mornings right. So can you talk to us about that? Yeah, yeah, the Maui habit in the whole book, Tiny Habits. There's only one habit that I recommend for everybody. And it's the Maui habit. It goes like this, after my feet touch the floor in the morning, I will say it's going to be a great day. So you say those seven words and you anchor it to your feet touching the floor in the morning. And that's the tiny habit recipe. So the sequence of after I, I will, I've called a recipe. So after I brush, I will floss one tooth. After I set my breakfast plate on the counter, I will think my partner for breakfast.

After I pour glass of water, I'll set out my vitamins. So you have these after I will. So you're designing a habit into your life using this recipe format. So the recipe accounts for A and B. It doesn't include the celebration. Once the habit wires in, you no longer have to celebrate it. I mean, celebration, that emotion serves the purpose

of automating the behavior or making the behavior more automatic. And so you have, in tiny habits, you have, you design the habits by having these recipes. In the back of the tiny habits book, I have 300 sample recipes that people can browse through, but in the book itself, it's like, here's the one habit that I think you should be doing.

And then the rest of the book, the book is about creating any habit that you want. And I give you a step-by-step system for doing that. And I don't prescribe a bunch of habits for everybody because we're all different. But certainly the Maui habit is, oh my gosh, I just, I get emails and comments all the time about how it's those seven words have just transformed people's lives. So I'm really happy to prescribe that to everybody

listening here as well. Now, and there's different ways to do it. Some people say, I'm going to make it an awesome day. Some people do it after I look in the mirror, I will say it's going to be a great day, so there's variations on it. But starting your day with that, I guess it's you're like setting an intention to make it a great day. And I do it even when I don't think it's going to be a great day because I have found that just by saying that, even if I don't really believe it, like, oh my gosh, today is going to be like awful and terrible. I think it's going to be a great day than something to me

goes, okay, you're going to do what you can do to make this a great day. And usually, it does have to be a great day. I think that's super important to set intention in the morning and make that a habit. So, I'd love to move on to your famous fog behavior model. This is something that honestly, like I think five separate people have mentioned on my podcast in passing or just referring to you specifically, and it's a really simple formula

that helps you pick apart the components of any particular behavior. So this helps us to understand the causes of behavior. It lets us pinpoint any problems to address these behaviors directly. And it boils down to behavior equals motivation, ability, and prompt. So be equals map.

Could you break down these four things? So behavior, motivation, ability, and prompt. So the behavior model came together for me in 2007. And I didn't realize I was doing this, but at the time, I think I was feeling quite discouraged by how confusing the academic and research landscape was around human behavior and social science in general. I mean, it is. I mean, social science is really hard. Social science research is much harder than physical sciences. And I'm not the first to say that.

I think Mae Jameson gave a talk and she talked about why. And when I heard that talk, I remember exactly where I was. It's Canford. I was driving. I remember exactly where I was. And I was like, oh my gosh, she's exactly right. And I'm a social scientist. And that means that the research findings may not all fit together.

You can get conflicting findings. Even from great experiments, you might be, well, this shows this and this shows this and they don't add up. And after, I guess, 12 years of that, I guess what I did, I didn't deliberately do this was like, I'm going to push all of that aside over a decade of studying social science and running my own experiments and so on and start over. I just went back to what comprises a behavior. A new motivation was a component. Then I knew ability was a component. Then at one point, prompt dropped in and that was it. It was like all behavior. And I write it out as an equation, B equals MAP, but it's not really an equation, like a math equation. And I call it a model. I don't call it an equation. So behavior happens when motivation,

ability and prompt come together at the same moment. And if any one of those elements, components is missing, it does not happen. So for example, let's say this morning, I wanted to call my mom and let's say I had the ability to call my mom, but nothing prompted me. It didn't happen. So without a prompt, it doesn't happen. Or let's say right now, I really want to call my mom. And I'm seeing it, I post it, note Note this is called your mom. But I can't do it right now because I'm talking to you also. I don't have the ability. So you can analyze behaviors that happen in terms of what was the motivator, what were the ability factors, and what was the prompt. I used to call that trigger, but I changed it to prompt, so it would be clear.

And you could, like you said, you can also look at behaviors that didn't happen, say, why didn't that behavior happen? And there's a troubleshooting order to it. And what's fun about the behavior model is you can say it in one sentence, behavior happens when these things come together. But now, what, 13, 14 years, after working with the behavior model, I'm still discovering other ways to use it. So, it's really simple to learn on the surface, but it's a really rich and powerful model that it's just fun. It's up to blast to get clarity around analyzing behaviors or designing for behaviors when you know exactly what the components are.

It's motivation, it's a building prompt. And within each of those categories, I've defined what motivation is. I've defined what ability is and I've defined the sources of prompts. So I've gone deeper and mapped out what those things are. Yeah, and I definitely, I'm going to pick your brain in a bit. So let's kind of dive deep on each one of these parts of your model, not equation I said it wrong before. So most people confuse behaviors, aspirations, and outcomes.

So why don't we start there? Why are those things not the same? Yeah, and so that's a different model that I have, but a really important one. In fact, that one's so important. It's on my business card. I have two models on my business card. I have the Fog Behavior Model, and I have this model that I call the swarm of behaviors. And what the swarm of behavior model helps people distinguish between really two categories.

These aspirations and outcomes that I kind of put in the same category. And then specific behaviors. So to reach any aspiration or to reach any outcome, you've got to do specific behaviors to get there. And so as you're looking at, wow, this aspiration of I want to sleep better or this outcome is, I want to finish writing a novel, Aspiration of I want to sleep better or this outcome is I want to finish writing a novel. Any aspiration outcome is a function of doing behaviors. And so that's what the swarm of behaviors model, a swarm of bees, swarm of behaviors models shows is, you've got these behaviors with arrows leading to this cloud like shape.

That inside the cloud is your aspiration or your outcome. Now you can start either with an aspiration or with an outcome either way is fine, but to make progress you've got to break it down into specific behaviors and then pick the best behaviors to get there. So there's a difference between what's in the cloud, the aspiration outcome, and specific behaviors. You can design for specific behaviors. That's the B and vehicles MAP. You can't design directly for an aspiration. You can't design directly for an outcome. You have to break it down into the behaviors,

and then you can use the behavior model and a subset of that tiny habit to get there. Now, let's go to the difference between aspiration and outcome. And aspiration is something that isn't quite measurable, and you may not know when you've actually achieved it. Like, oh, I want to sleep better, or I want to be closer to my parents. And you might sense you've made progress,

but there's no way to say, yep, I did it. Where an outcome, like finished writing a book, or getting a certain score on the GRE, an outcome is something that like, check, I did it. I arrived. I landed there. In our ordinary language, we use the word goal to refer to both things. When you say, hey, what's your goal?

People might say, oh, I want to sleep better. And other people might say, oh, I want to sleep eight hours a night. And we consider both of those goals, but those are different things. And so in behavior design and in my work, I don't use the word goal. And I instead will use the word aspiration or use the word outcome, depending on what we're talking about. But for most people listening, you can think of the word goal and there's two types of goals. Asperations and outcomes, and those are good starting points. But then you've got to figure out what the behavior is that will take you to that aspiration outcome.

Awesome. So let's move on to motivation, because I think this is really important. And I think motivation is less important than most of us think. So talk to us about that. What is the role that motivation plays and why is it less important than most of us think. So talk to us about that, what is a role that motivation plays and why is it less important? Yeah. It's both more important and less important. It's more important that you need to pick new habits

that you actually want. So from the beginning, don't pick habits that you don't want. Don't pick the sheds that you're not motivated to do. So it's like so important motivation that you select new habits based on what you actually want, not based on the sheds. The mistake that gets made is people will pick a new habit that you don't really want, and they think they can somehow magically motivate themselves to do it. That's a huge mistake. Like somehow we're going to tack on motivation after the fact by gamifying it or making a public

commitment or guilt tripping yourself or having a friend guilt trip you and so on. Those things work temporarily, but they don't reliably form habits. So it's more important than people think, pick habits that you want. But then it's less important. Once you do that, motivation, tacking on motivation after the fact, is not the key to creating habits. So, but that's how a lot of people think about it. It's like, have I just keep myself motivated?

Well, that's a sign that you didn't pick the right habit to begin with. So back up, pick something you actually want. Let me give an example. In the world of physical activity, a lot of people think that running is a good, you know, oh, I'm going to run. I don't like to run, but I'm going to get myself to run this year. I'm going to keep myself motivated to run. Anyway, running, and that's a bad idea.

So instead, look at other ways to be physically active. It might be rowing, it might be dancing, it might be vigorous sex, it might be walking your dog. So pick a form of physical activity you actually want to do. And it's okay if you thought you wanted to run, but then you start running and you're like, man, I hate this. It's okay to back out of that and say, nope, that's not for me. I learned something. There's no shame in that. In fact, the traditional way of forming habits,

somehow we get the message of like, once you set this goal, you must stick to this goal or you're a loser or a failure. And that's why practice and revise. It's like, oh, I tried running. I hate it. I'm not going to run. I'm going to revise and I'm going to pick something else like paddle boarding or riding my bike or playing touch with my dog. So amping up motivation, tacking it on, bolting it on after the fact is not how to create habits. So in that regard, it's less important than people think. Because a lot of people think if I can just motivate myself, I get this habit. And in behavior design, you go way upstream and you select the habit based on what you actually want to do.

And I just want to reiterate that. So when it comes to motivation, you want to use the phrase, I want to rather than I should. because that's truly what you desire and you have a better chance, I guess, of actually getting that happen, right? Yeah, and it's not just a wording shift, really pick habits that you want. And in the food domain, this is pretty easy. Like you might have heard kale is really good

and you should be eating kale. If you don't like kale, don't pick kale, don't make that a habit. And even just rewording it, don't pick kale. Don't make that a habit. And even just rewording it, don't just reword it. Truly pick foods that you like and create habits run foods that you like eating. And it could be a discovery process. It could be a process of trial and error. And that's all part of it. That's all part of this quest of optimizing your life. My sister, who runs the tiny habits academy

and it's just a superb tiny habits trainer. She talks about it as like trying on shoes and so, hey you go in and don't expect the first shoe you try and to be the shoe. It's like oh I don't, that one didn't feel like expected and that one didn't really fit my life and so on. That's how she talks about trying out habits. Plan on that your first attempt won't be like that perfect shoe for you. That you will have to try and up you and figure it out. Now the more you practice creating habits, the better you get. It is a skill. So the good news is the more you practice in the right way. The faster and better you'll be up. Yep, that'll be the right habit for me. That one I can wire quickly and that one, you know, like other skills.

You can get better with practice, but you got to practice in the right way. And I guess the takeaway point here is it's not about bolting on or somehow magically sustaining motivation after the fact that is a losing direction, a losing approach to creating habits. Hold tight, everyone. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsors. Yeah, bam. If you're ready to take your business to new heights,

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Let's take a little question break from the mods on stage. It's going to Jeremy then John. Awesome. Appreciate it. So just to piggyback off what you just said, BJ about the running, you know, if that's something that you try, you really dislike it, try something else.

So, I'm going to use a personal example for Hala. I know she was looking at implementing a cold shower habit in the morning. And, of course, that's the most comfortable thing, right? Whether it's an ice bath or a cold shower, there's a lot of discomfort, which is why most people don't maintain that habit, yet it is super beneficial both physiologically and mentally. So where does the point come where it's like, okay, yes, you might not like this thing, but you know it's very beneficial for you.

So stick with it. Yeah, you're getting into a domain that I call a Queen B behavior, which is a little bit in the tiny habit spoke, but not much. Like how do you get yourself to do stuff that at least part of you doesn't want to do? When you look at motivation, I've mapped this out. The behavior model can be used to understand how motivation works. There's things that are motivating you to do stuff, and with my hand I'm pointing upward like an arrow that's boosting your motivation.

And there's things that are demotivating you to do that behavior, and you have these two forces pressing against each other. And the case of the cold shower, you have hope that's like, oh my gosh, I've heard from these fitness gurus or Vimha for somebody that if I take cold showers, that I'll sleep better and I'll think better. So you have hope. Hope is the motivator. Hope to achieve better thinking or better health or something.

But then you have the pain of the cold shower, which is demotivating you. So hope and pain are, there are six components of motivation. Hope and pain are two of them. So you've got hope, inspiring or motivating, you've got pain pushing it down. And you can look at those as physics vectors and maybe at the beginning you do it where it's like, oh my gosh,

during the pain because my hope is strong enough and I believe them off or I believe other, my friends who have done this enough that it's going to overwrite the pain. But maybe after a few times of doing it it's so painful that that downward arrow, that downward force gets strong enough to push you below the action line. Now that said there may be a phase where the pain becomes not so much pain, but becomes invigorating. So there may be a period where it's like, oh my gosh, what was painful the first five days

is now not so painful. And now, I mean, I took cold showers for two years when I lived in Peru. So I didn't do it because of them, off or whatever I did, because we didn't have heated water. And I do know that yes, it's painful at the beginning. I had no choice of the matter because it was called and eventually you get used to it and eventually it starts feeling kind of invigorating.

So you can still think of these two vectors where they win the pain diminishes. Then the hope can emerge and keep you above the actual and keep you consistent. So there may be a period of time where that transition happens. Now for runners, it might even be more clear. So those people that run a lot, I don't, that's not my exercise of choice, but you run as high. But you don't get that right away. But after a while, the pain of running that flips around

and it becomes a kind of pleasure that the described is run as high. So one way to look at any habit is the process of what happens over time. And maybe Vemma, for somebody said, look, people, it's going to be painful from 14 days or five days. But once you get through this period,

notice how the pain diminishes and you're going to find it invigorating. So for any behavior, really, it's not just what's motivating you, but it's also what's demotivating that behavior. And it's helpful to understand both of those and think of them as vectors pushing against each other. And you can increase the level of motivation by removing the demotivator. In this case, pain.

I'll stop there. It's kind of a long-winded geeky response to an excellent question. It was an excellent question, and I think it's super relevant. So thank you so much, Jeremy, for thinking about the awful question. If you guys have a question for BJ, just raise your hand in about 15-ish minutes. We're going to bring some folks up on stage. If they have a question and have the mods kind of ask some more questions, if they have questions for BJ. But for now, I really want to get back to the fog behavior model. We just went over motivation and detail. If you guys weren't here before, the formula is really behavior equals motivation,

ability and prompt. And so we just went over motivation and detail, but I do want to talk about ability. So ability is how easy or difficult it is for us to do any behavior. And ability is actually something a lot of successful companies do to create their business ideas. So they'll find a product or a service that makes life super easy. And they offer something really small and really specific and that simplicity encourages people to use the product and develop a habit that they really rely on. So B.J., I came to find out that you actually taught one of your former students was the founder of Instagram. So can you walk us through how you use the dimension or the ability dimension to come

up with this groundbreaking idea of Instagram, which is now, you know, a hundred billion dollar company. Yeah. And let me add to that, one of the co-founders of Clubhouse is my former student. Wow. I wish I was your former student. Yeah. Now, when my trigger took my class, that was 2006. I hadn't fully figured out the behavior model because that came to me in 2007.

But I was a huge advocate since about the mid-90s about simplicity. Simplicity changes behaviors. Make it easy, make it easy, make it easy. So I certainly was preaching that gospel of simplicity. And what they did with Instagram was they made it really, really simple to share photos. And at the time when they launched, there were different ways of sharing and posting photos, but Instagram came in and you would only do it on your phone at the beginning. It was only iOS.

They didn't have Android. I mean, there are only Apple phones. And you would just take a picture and apply filter and share it. It was dropped in simple. And they were competing at the time against apps that were more sophisticated. They were competing against Flickr and other photo services that were way more complicated. And when tech analysts look at things, they're often looking at feature sets. And it's like, oh, feature parity. Are they offering the same features? But what might trigger and his co-founder were able to do was keep it really simple and they had to encourage the courage to keep it drop-dead simple. Only square photos, only 12 filters, only on iOS and so on, and despite all the pressures to add features and add complexity,

they resisted that. And what's striking to me is not just Instagram. When you look at everything that's gone big, Google, Twitter, TikTok, everything that's gone big started really, really small and simple. Google started with the search box. That's all it was. And I remember I was working for, I remember very, very specifically, I was working for a company in San Jose, a research center, and they were laughing at Google how simple it was. And as I got this is ridiculous. You know, you've got out of this then Yahoo, and you had all these, what they were called portals That all this information and you could also search but Google just had a search box and people were making fun of it

It was so simple and then when Twitter launched Tech crunch came out and said it was idiotic Because it was just so stupid and so lame because it was so simple and So when you look at the pattern of what works, everything that has gone big in recent times, everything started out with the exception of games. Video games are an exception. They're an exception to lots of things. Started out really, really simple.

And Clubhouse did this as well. And then only after you start getting traction, then you add features in more complexity. And so that is, and that's the pattern for tiny habits as well. You started out really, really simple. And after the habit wires in, then you can reliably grow it. You can floss more than one two. You can do more than walk to the mailbox and so on. So it's the same pattern as what helps company go big as the tiny habits method.

What helps you wire in habits, small, simple, get them firmly rooted, and then you can worry about what's above ground, what the manifestation of that habit is. So I thought this was so interesting. It was one of my favorite parts of your book. So everybody who's listening, remember, when you're coming up with a new product or a service, you got an aim for simplicity to start, like you said. And then you can add on features and make it super fancy. So let's move on to prompt. I just would like you to kind of give a deeper overview

of that. And for my understanding, if the prompt does not exist, the habit or behavior will see it exist as well. So do I have that right? Yes, yes, you're right. And there are three sources of prompt. So prompt is anything that you can use the word Q. Some people still use my word trigger, which I think is become a more complicated word, so I really avoid it or call to action.

It's anything that says do this behavior now and there's three sources. One is something in your context. So it can be a post-it note, it can be in alarm, it can be a person reminding you. So it's something contextual, you can have contextual prompts, and we have lots of those, way too many. Another one, what I call a person prompt, where you simply remember, oh, I just remembered to call my mom, where I remembered to grade my students' papers or something like that. That's different than a contextual one.

It comes from inside of you. And the third source of prompt, I call an action prompt is this is what you use in tiny habits. You use an existing action to be the reminder to do the habit. So brushing becomes the reminder reminder prompt for flossing. And we use all three of those types of prompts in our everyday life, but for habits, the breakthrough on the hack is to use action prompts,

to use a routine you already do, to be the prompt to reminder, not to use context prompts. Don't use alarms, don't use post-in notes, don't use whatever. I mean, because that doesn't scale. And you really want to create dozens and hundreds of habits eventually. And if you have alarms in post-in notes that you're relying on to remind you, you could kind of blind to those or you know, we're

welding number of alarms and both it. So you can learn to use an existing routine you already do to be your prompt for a new habit that you want. And that is the most powerful way to do it when it comes to habits. When it comes to one time actions, like things you're just doing once, like let's say I have to make a phone call and schedule an appointment with my dentist. Well then I'm just going to use a context prompt. I'm going to write it down a little post it, put it in a little place. So for a one-time action, that's great solution, but for a habit, which is a different type of behavior, you really want to use an action prompt.

In other words, a routine you already do. So as you, loyal listeners may know, I've done several episodes on forming habits. And that's because habits are super hard to stick with, but they're so important when it comes to becoming a successful person. And let me tell you, BJ's tiny habit technique really works, and it was so much fun to have

him on the show. What really got my gears turning in this conversation is a relationship between motivation and ability. The more motivation you need to accomplish or complete a habit, the harder it's going to be to maintain it in the long term. If you're relying on motivation to keep you on track to meet your goals or set your habits, you're going to run out of steam eventually. So it's no wonder why these big, intimidating changes are super hard to stick with. So BJ says that your habits should be so small and easy that you have no excuse not to

do them. This way you're not relying on motivation, which is variable from your day to day. Now here's the actionable advice. To get that tiny habit to stick, you've got to use those ABCs. A stands for anchor, meaning anchor your new activity and something you're already doing consistently and reliably every single day. And remember to think, after I blank, I will blank. So after I pour my cup of morning coffee, I will take my vitamins.

Or after I shut down my computer for the day, I'll take my vitamins. Or after I shut down my computer for the day, I'll take a walk. Now, be stands for behavior. As in the behavior you want to turn into a habit. Remember, this must be something that you actually want to do, not something that you think you should be doing. And don't be afraid to try something out, decide you don't like it, and then try something else.

This is trial and error. And it's your life. Your habit's aspiration and goals should all be things that you actually like and want to do. Not things that you feel obligated to do. And finally, see the stands for celebrate. Once you've completed your habit or your action, you need to celebrate. The key to creating habits is emotion and tying it to emotion. And by celebrating your successes, you reinforce your new behavior. So tell yourself, way to go and throw up a fist bump. Now that you've got your tiny habit down

and it's something you're doing reliably each day, you can start to grow it in complexity and layer it on. Big changes happen when you start small, so let's keep profiting one tiny habit at a time. I wanna hear your experiences with tiny habits. Go ahead and DM me on Instagram or Twitter at YappwithHalla. You can also find me on LinkedIn if you search for my name. It's Halla Taha. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, I do want your feedback. I read my reviews every single

day. I'm obsessed with reading my reviews. So if you want to tell me how much you love the show and how much you appreciate us working on this show drop us a Five-star review on your favorite podcast platform Apple podcasts reviews mean the most to us and they provide a lot of social proof for our show Thanks so much for listening to another awesome episode of a gap podcast with BJ fog and Thanks to my great team at Yap Media keep on it. Catch you next time. This is your host, Halataha, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative?

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