Body and daily life
BJ Fogg
Too small to fail
BJ Fogg (2019 · Stanford Behavior Design Lab) — Too small to fail.
What actually happened?
His standard illustration is flossing. Someone who resolves to floss properly every night does it for a week and stops, because the resolve was the only thing holding it up. Fogg's version is one tooth. After you brush, floss one tooth, and then celebrate on the spot. One tooth is small enough that no evening is too bad for it, so it never breaks, and almost nobody stops at one once the floss is in their hand. The habit gets built by the tooth that was never in doubt, not by the ones that got done.
Motivation is unreliable, so do not lean on it
Motivation moves like tide and not on your schedule. Demanding of a low day what was planned on a high one guarantees the break. The correct move is to lower the difficulty until the lowest day can still clear it, and let the anchor do the rest.
Buying the annual membership on the day you decide is borrowing against a high. What settles it is the empty day.
Anchor it behind something you already do
The hardest part of a new habit is remembering it exists. Fogg hangs it off an action that happens every day without fail: after I brush my teeth, I will. The anchor supplies the prompt, so you are no longer relying on memory or an alarm. A vague window of time is not an anchor.
After I pour the coffee I write three sentences beats write every morning, because it has a moment attached.
Too small to fail
Two push-ups, one page, three sentences: small enough to finish on the worst day. The point is not the yield of that amount, it is keeping the state of this is still going and clearing the doorway. Once started most people carry on, because the resistance sits at zero to one.
Change run three kilometres into put on the shoes and go out. Almost nobody puts them on and stays in.
Celebrate at the moment you finish
This is where he parts from most habit theory: he holds that the brain fixes behaviour by emotion rather than by repetition count. So the instant you finish, give yourself a clear positive signal, a fist or saying it out loud. It sounds silly and it is doing the work.
After the two push-ups, say I did it and mean it. Saving it for a big meal at the weekend helps almost nothing.
How do I use it today?
Take the habit that keeps breaking and shrink it until you could do it on your worst day, name the daily certainty it hangs off, and give yourself a signal the moment you finish. When it still fails, do not conclude that you need more discipline: work out which of the three broke, the prompt, the ability or the motivation, and repair that one.
Deep read
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Further
Lines to keep
Behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together.
Shrink the behaviour until you could do it on your worst day.
You change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.