BJ Fogg
Small Enough for Your Worst Day
Do not bet on motivation
BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits, 2019
On the day you decide, anything is possible. The problem is the day with nothing in the tank. What to do then.
What actually happened?
Fogg's formula says a behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt arrive at the same moment. Most people work only on motivation, and motivation moves like tide, not on your schedule; a habit resting on it will fall over. His own method was a rule: two push-ups after every trip to the bathroom. Two is so few that no state of mind prevents it, so he has never failed, and having done two he often does more. Months later he was doing dozens a day without once leaning on willpower. His principle: shrink the behaviour until you could do it on your worst day.
Set the standard by your worst day
Plans are made when motivation is high and carried out on the days when it is lowest. So the standard has to be set for the bad day. If it holds then, the rest of the days manage it easily and usually overshoot.
Buying the annual membership and the kit on the day you decide is borrowing against a high. What settles it is the empty day.
Starting is where the resistance is
The shrinking is not for the yield of that small amount. It is to get past the doorway. Once you have begun, most of the time you carry on. The resistance concentrates at zero to one, not at one to ten.
Change run three kilometres into put on the shoes and go out. Almost nobody puts the shoes on and stays in; plenty never touch them when the target is three kilometres.
Continuity beats volume
Being too small to fail protects the state of this is still going. Break it twice and it turns from in progress into something you once meant to do, and restarting costs far more than keeping it alive.
Missed today, so tomorrow is compulsory, even the smallest version. You are protecting the identity, not the quantity.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a habit you keep building and keep abandoning.
Ask first: could I hit this standard on my worst day? If not, shrink it again, and keep shrinking until it looks absurd.
Where it goes wrong: staying at the smallest version forever while expecting a large result. The tiny version is the entrance, not the destination.
Lines to keep
Behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together.
Most people fail by working on motivation, which naturally rises and falls.
Same situation, other people are asking
I practice constantly and I'm not getting better.There are six things I want to fix and I'm fixing none of them.I go hard for a week and then touch nothing for a month.I set the same resolution every January and land in the same place.I want to change a habit · all 6 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.