Book Review: Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

Do you have habits you would like to make a part of your routine? What about bad habits you would like to change?

BJ Fogg is a social scientist and stanford professor, and he founded the Stanford Behavior Design lab. In tiny habits, Fogg creates systems that help you achieve the creation of a lifestyle of your design. The four first chapters are on the Fogg Behavior Model, which looks like this:

Essentially, for a behavior to occur, you need three elements to converge: A trigger, motivation, and ability. If a trigger is highly motivating and you have high ability, chances are you will succeed in the behavior. If there's low motivation and low ability, the behavior probably won't occur. Anything that falls above the action line will occur, and what falls below it will not.

These three elements can be altered to achieve behavior creation or destruction. Examples of each would be:

Motivation: You reasses the pros vs cons of the behavior, and realize it's not appealing. Or, you make it more appealing.

Ability: You make the behavior more difficult to do, or more easy.

Trigger: You avoid situations with the trigger, or remove the trigger from your enviroment. Or vice versa, put the trigger where you'll see it.

Fogg supplies many tools to manipulate the variables of the behavior model. He also talks about, as the title implies, starting with tiny habits and stringing them together. He suggests to start flossing one tooth, then making the behaviors progressively more difficult. Anchoring is mentioned as a method to start a new behavior, which is attaching the new behavior to something you already do. An example would be to do 10 pushups plus one every morning before you shower.

Fogg has many great visuals for his concepts, and this is a very applicable book you can start gaining value from immediately. The tiny habits you start will all compound into massive change as you build self-efficacy, or your belief in your ability to perform behaviors. The appendix has master plans that are useful for breaking bad habits and replacing them with new habits. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to change something about their lives or behaviors.