BJ Fogg: Stanford Behavior Scientist and NYT Best Selling Author of Tiny Habits

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Remarkable People Podcast Here I want to give a shout out to the My First Million podcast. It's hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Pury. It's now available on the HubSpot podcast network. Just like Remarkable People, My First Million features guests discussing how they made their first million. Duh. And brainstorming about the hottest trends and opportunities. They recently made an episode called How Venture Capitalists Make Money. They interviewed solo capitalist Brian Kimmel in that episode. Listen to My First Million Wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. My guest today is BJ Fogg. He's the author of the New York Times best selling book Tiny Habits. He founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford over 20 years ago. BJ has his Bachelor's and master's degree in English from Brigham Young university and a PhD in communications from Stanford. BJ's theory is that behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt come together at the same moment. If you want to change some behavior and add a good habit or two, keep listening. Back in 2007, he conducted what has become known as the Facebook class Platform apps were just becoming a thing. Then 500 people, including many venture capitalists, attended the last session of his class. The students amassed tens of millions of users over the course of that semester for their apps. I must say that because of this interview, I developed a new habit. Every night I take out my contact lenses and throw them in the trash. The act of throwing them in the trash triggers my next action. My habit, which is to put my iPhone in a charger in the bathroom. And then I say, I'm going to have a great sleep. This means that I have a much better sleep because I never use the phone in the middle of the night anymore. And finally, I learned to appreciate that quote every day is a great day by interviewing BJ Fogg. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable man of Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, let's start with Phil Zimbardo. So what did you do with him or for him?

Back in the day, in the 90s, I went to Stanford to study how computers could influence attitudes and behaviors. And this was 1993 when I arrived at Stanford. And I thought people were already studying this. Right. To me it seems so obvious growing up in a very tech forward home that it was like, yeah, people are studying how computers are going to influence us. And I get to Stanford and it turns out nobody was. There were a few products and a few isolated studies on it, but really nothing systematic. So after a year of fumbling around looking for other people's dies, well, I guess it's up to me. And so as I started running these experiments on how computers could influence us through praise, through reciprocity, through team relationships and so on, then as I geared up for my dissertation, you put together a committee. Typically there's four people at least where I was. And I thought, man, what if I could get Phil Zimbardo to be on my committee? So I didn't know him. The psych building is, you know, just across the way from the communication research building. And I was in communication research. So I was like, okay, I'm going to email him. I don't know him, but he'll probably say no. I emailed him and he says, yes, I would love to. He says, I'm so crazy busy, but this is so interesting and intriguing. I will be a thesis advisor. Which was a huge day. And then that led me him to inviting me to be a TA in one of his classes. And so that's how I got to know him. That's right. What a great guy. I mean, oh my gosh. So giving, so smart, so savvy. Yeah.

What year was this?

1995. 96. Yeah.

Oh, you're a baby. I was his head proctor for the Psych 1 class. You know how people had little groups and you had take tests and read it, Self paced learning and all that. There was one guy who was like the COO of that and Phil was a CEO and I was the COO in 1976 for that. So that's how you were quite a.

Bit ahead of me. I mean, I love so many things about working with Phil, including his generosity, but he was like a big thinker and he wasn't afraid to do things in unconventional ways. And I love that. I love that.

You mean like simulate a person?

Oh my gosh. Yes, yes. I was not involved with that. And I don't I think that was before your time as well. But, you know, he wasn't. He wasn't very persuaded by convention. And I like that. I like that he was open to doing things in new ways, including research and innovation.

Yeah, yeah, he was the man. Or he is the man. So now let's Fast forward to 2007, the famous Facebook class.

Oh, my gosh.

Tell me about the Facebook class. Was that your prison experiment?

I think it's going to end up being that, unfortunately. So the context is, after I got my doctorate from Stanford, yeah, I got a job in industry, but I kept a foot in the door at Stanford, and I started my research lab there, which is very unusual. Typically, Stanford wants people to move on, but people championed me and my work, and I was able to start a research lab and begin teaching there. And at first, I was teaching in computer science within Terry Winograd's program. And every year, ever since I started teaching, what, 1999, I'd come up with a new class, a new class every year. I never teach the same class twice because it wasn't that interesting to me to teach the same thing. And part of the classes I pick to teach, I think about it for months and months, is on a topic that I want to learn about. Not a topic I'm an expert on, but what I want to learn about. And I tell the students, yeah, this is new. Nobody's ever taught a class on this. It could be a total failure. But we're going to explore it together and. But just expect it to be like a startup. A lot of twists and turns. I know I'm going to make mistakes. Da da da da da. So I'd done some classes that related to different types of media, and I did a class on mobile. And what would happen with mobile when they became. This is pre iPhone, when mobile devices became little computers that were connected and the next things, this thing called platform. Facebook announced platform. And this was, if I'm remembering right, of that year, about June, they announced Platform. And I was. I went to the platform launch in San Francisco and I was like, oh, my gosh, this is new, this is different. We've never seen this before where you can create an app. And at the time, I wanted to call it widget, but Mark Zuckerberg insisted we call them apps. And you can put it into this existing ecosystem and you could get metrics at that time. You couldn't get them instantly, but you could get metrics every day. And I was like, this has never existed before. And I said, this Is interesting. This is powerful. I want to understand this. So I was like to teach a class on this. So I emailed Terry Winograd and I said, hey, there's this new thing at Facebook. It's called Platform. Anybody can create apps, put in an ecosystem. I want to do this. I want to teach a class in it at Explore. And he said, well, I don't know, because that was at the time of MySpace and social networks were really up in the air. And I said, no, this is important, Terry. I think it's really important. He says, okay, I trust you, bj, Go for it. And then within a few weeks, pulled together the class and started teaching it. And mainly the teaching of it was just to say students put something into the ecosystem. What I preached, I didn't. I preached simplicity. Make it. Really the mantra at the time was simple social fun. Make it simple, social fun. That's your key. And you can kind of see that throughout my work, even up to today in tiny habits, simplicity changes behavior. So, yeah, that Facebook class had bigger impact than anybody expected. It was like students got 10 million people to install their apps over the course of 10 weeks. And then I continued to track for about. I remember stopping on February 14th, so that'd be about two and a half months further. They ended up with 24 million people who had engaged with their apps. And these are students. I know, crazy. Nobody expected that. And guy, it took me months to recover from that class. I mean, exhausting, because some of the students did really well. You wanted to build companies. Some of the just the media covered the class all wrong. It's like, this class is all about making money. And it's like, no, you know, they get it wrong. And it was just a lot of follow up and cleanup after the class. And then they said, oh, teach a class on MySpace. So MySpace was just coming up like, no way am I teaching it on MySpace. No way am I teaching about Twitter. I am done. I am moving on. And then the next class was about peace innovation and peace technology. Because once I saw the power that individuals could have now in social networks to reach and influence people, then it was like, well, how are we going to use this? Let's use it to create world peace. And so the next class was Peace Innovation, which then led to the Peace Innovation Lab, which still exists at Stanford with an arm in the Hague. So that was. So my immediate response wasn't, oh, I'm going to do this again or make tons of money. It's like, what can we do with this power let's shoot for world peace. Very ambitious. And I give talks at Xerox parc and people laughed at me and stuff, but I was sincere and still am. I think we have so much potential to do good in the world. Yeah, it involves taking risks and going places where people haven't gone before and making mistakes along the way.

Is it not ironic that your discovery of the app impact on a platform led you to the desire to use that platform for world peace? But I could make the case that what it led to it being apps, not your course, what it led to was Russia using Facebook to foster the lack of world peace. Didn't it go kind of, Kind of went off the rails there?

Yeah, I. In the 90s, as I was thinking a lot about, I first call it persuasive computing, persuasive computers. And I later. In fact, I remember these are notes when I was teaching for Zimbardo, what should I call this thing? And I decided to call it persuasive technology because it had a broader scope than just computers, because I clearly saw that devices in a smart environment were to be part of the picture. In 1998, I published a paper at Chi, which is a human computer interaction conference, about. I think at the time I was still calling it persuasive computing. And part of that paper was like, you guys, this is scary. There are serious ethical implications. We need to get on top of this. We need to understand that. And then I wrote about the ethics and spoke about it and so on. But even so, at the time, guy, people really focused on usability. Nobody, I was like, nobody really cared very much. And then when my book Persuasive Technology came out in 2002, I was like, okay, now policymaker is going to call me. I'm kind of a earnest, naive kind of guy. So I was like, okay, now I'm going to get phone calls from policymakers. And nothing. It was like crickets. Then in 2006, I was invited to give a testimony at FTC hearing. And at that time, this was a really interesting three months of my life. I was teaching a class. This was a class about mobile and persuasion. In my class was Mike Krieger, who would later go on to found Instagram. In my class was Tristan Harris, who would later go on to do Time well Spent and all of that. And I created. I couldn't go to D.C. to do the testimony, so I created a video that I said, here are the three problems I see coming up. So this was 2006. And then I thought finally, finally, finally, policymakers were, oh, my gosh, we need to do something about this. I got one polite question and they went to break and nobody followed up with me. And anyways, I was. I was sad. It was like, okay, I and some of the students helped me. We put together these dangers that are coming. They are coming. And you can still find the video online if you type fog ftc. I'm embarrassed by it. I shave my head. I have like this huge head on the screen. I was doing sort of a something weird, but. And I had little stuffed animals in the video because I'm a goofball. But at that time, it just wasn't relevant. Had it been 10 years later, then people would have really listened. But in 2006, and then from there, my work pivoted away from technology. I went into habits and health habits and those kinds of things. So I just left technology behind, feeling a little bit like, I've done my work here. I've spotlighted the dangers, I've shown the potentials and the pitfalls, and I'm moving on. Which I probably should have hung in there a lot longer. I probably should have written a manifesto, etc. But we didn't. We moved on and we started studying other things in my lab. And then my classes were like, health habits and Technology for Calm and Better Sleep and things like that.

So you can make the case that that was the precursor for the Social Dilemma movie. Right?

Social Dilemma gets it really wrong. About me. There is something. And you're an innovator, and you with a lot of innovators, if you're too far ahead of the curve, it can be really frustrating. Like, people don't care about what you're doing. And then you move on. And they're like. And I think of it. So I surf every morning here. I now think of it as, like, you got to be surfing where the waves are breaking, when they're breaking. You cannot anticipate a swell somewhere else and go there too early because then you're just like this person saying, hey. And you don't get traction. So those were pretty hard lessons to learn that you can be right about predicting something, but the timing matters.

You could make that case about Xerox PARC with graphical user interface for a while. You could make that case about Macintosh when it didn't exactly reach critical mass. But wait, I must digress. So are you a longboarder or short boarder?

Stand up, paddler. My board's nine and a half. Jimmy Lewis board, so. Which is considered quite A small board for standup.

Yeah, yeah, that is. That's. That's a high performance board, unless it's 36 inches wide. But, I mean, that's a. It.

It's. It's called Super Frank Lean, so it's the narrow version. Yeah. I go pretty much every morning. Even this morning, the. The sharks are out and stuff. But the waves where I surfer, mostly small. They're mostly small. We're not talking Kanaha. We're not talking Jaws, so.

But, I mean, you're not just paddling around looking at turtles. You're catching waves, right?

Oh, wave after wave after wave. Yeah. Yeah. 20, 30, 40 waves a morning. Yeah. Wow.

And I. I once went paddle surfing in Maui, and it was at a beach that it looked like it was a desert and there was driftwood trees sticking out of it. It was like it was a desert, but there was a beach there. And I.

It's like.

I mean, some thousand.

That was probably Kanaha. That's a great spot.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Good for you.

Yeah.

If you could see Kanaha, you're good.

Well, no, this was. Whenever it was a calm time, it was.

Okay.

The person who took me, her name is Susie Coney. You probably go out there with Kyle any.

No, I do. Yeah. I follow Kylani on Instagram and he's crazy. Wow. How about Dave Kalama? Dave was actually where I was surfing about a month ago with his son. So it was funny because he and I spoke at a TED conference together. So I met him and I was like, what is Dave doing here? So I go and like, dude, what are you doing here? Because these are small ways. And you think, Dave. It's like, oh, I'm teaching my son to surf. And I like. Awesome. Yeah. Dave is one of the huge innovators in water sports. Oh, he's innovated so many things. Big wave guy. And that's what. That was. The top. My topic of my TED Talk here was about tiny habits. His topic was surviving, like a massive wave that you follow. And the audience loved it. They just. Yeah, he's. He's pretty compelling.

Yeah, he is the man.

Yeah.

That's for sure. His. His surfboard brand is called Imagine. I used to. Okay, this is gonna really go deep into something. So I transitioned from paddle surfing to regular prone surfing. And I thought the key to prone surfing is stability. And the key to stability is, you know, flotation and width and all that. So why don't I take a high performance paddle board and prone surf it? So I took a 8 foot 4 inch. Imagine high performance Dave Kalama board. And I started prone surfing. That's how I began prone surfing. And I look like a total kook because everybody's wondering, what the hell is he doing on this board? It's so wide. But work for me. Enough about surfing. I could go the whole hour on this. So there comes a time in every podcast where you have to ask questions that you know the answer to. But could you just give us the gist of tiny Habits?

Tiny Habits is a new way to bring new habits into your life. And I developed it by just hacking my own behavior in 2010. So after I was done with teaching classes on habits and stuff at Stanford, I was like, yeah, I really need to change my own habits, and I want to figure out a great way of doing it. So after about eight months of hacking my own behavior and figuring out that you make the habit really tiny, and then you find where it fits naturally, what does it come after? So those are two hacks. You take whatever habit you want, whether it's meditation or doing squats or push ups or reading, and you make it super tiny. So maybe meditation is three breaths, maybe it's two squats. Maybe reading is just reading a paragraph. And then you design it into your existing routine. And so you figure out, what does this naturally come after? What does reading naturally come after in my existing routine? Well, maybe it comes after. Maybe it comes after I turn off my computer for the day. That's when I read. For me, I found that push ups come naturally after I pee. So after I pee, I do two push ups. That's the recipe. And so those are the two hacks. One, you make it tiny. Two, you don't use any external reminders. You use your existing routine to be your reminder. So you're. You're finding where it fits, where it will flow. And then the third hack is how you wire it in to make it become automatic. And that's by causing yourself to feel a positive emotion. So if you feel a positive emotion as you do a behavior, that behavior becomes more automatic. In other words, it becomes a habit. And in Tiny Habits, you don't leave that to chance. You hack your emotions. You deliberately feel a positive emotion, so the habit will wire in quickly. And it's those three hacks that I toyed around with and figured out in the course of the eight months. And then I started teaching it in 2011, because I thought, well, maybe you're just such a weirdo, bj, that this works for you, but maybe it won't work for anybody else. So I just put it out there and within a few weeks, two to 300 people a week would sign up just by word of mouth and I would coach them for the five day program. I'd measure the results, I'd improve it, take on another two to 300 people that I was coaching through email. So guy that I remember sitting in the Maui Prince here in McKenna, I don't know if you remember that hotel on the balcony. And I'm just not, I'm not in the water. I am just like coaching people in habits. My partner looks at me, it's like, what are you doing? We're here in Hawaii. And I'm like, I've got people that I'm teaching. So I did that week after week after week for, well, ever since 2011. And it's that hands on experience that really taught me what works in creating habits and what doesn't. So unlike maybe what people expect is, oh, you just read a bunch of scientific literature and then you know how to do it. No, it's hands on practice of coaching and coaching and coaching and iterating and refining and measuring. And then after, I remember, after I'd coached 10,000 people, this is, at this point, it's. I stopped counting at 40,000 years ago, but after 10,000, the Society for Behavioral Medicine invited me to give a keynote there. And I remember that because my talk was what I've Learned after coaching 10,000 people in habits. And I drew out what the patterns were. Here's what works, here's what doesn't work. And I think since that time I really didn't learn much else because after 10,000 people you've kind of seen it all and only rarely did I get a new insight or a new question. So it's really that hands on stuff combined with the academic insight and the academic research that then led to the method and the confidence in that method.

Sounds like BJ Fogg meets Malcolm Gladwell. But I digress. There's that 10,000 steps, 10,000 hours, 10,000 everything.

Yeah, so that's. There is something to. I really admire practitioners. I was talking to a clinician two days ago and she wants to do some training with me and she says I don't know if I'm the. And this is training I do outside of Stanford. And she said, I don't know if I'm the right kind of person. I don't have an academic background. And I was like, what are you doing? She said, I'm a clinician and I've helped people. I was like, you're perfect. We don't give practitioners the credit they deserve for understanding what really works. And we too often default to academics or scientists like they know the answers. There's a big difference between researching something and knowing how to actually change somebody's behavior. You do not want the food scientist to design your nutrition program. Those are different skills. The food scientist knows how to do the science of food and stuff like that. But behavior change is not that person's expertise and that's a common mistake. So by stumbling into me coaching people every day for years, that gave me the hands on practice and experience that just is not done in academics. So both academic and just a hands on practice of helping people create habits.

But what you just explained seems very simple. You take tiny behavior change, tiny habit, you celebrate. What do you need to coach? I mean what, what do you need to tell people?

Oh my gosh, I wish it were. That part of it guy is just, just get people to follow directions. Because there's so much old stuff about habits and habit change out there that even though I say, look, make it tiny, it should be less than 30 seconds. It should require no real effort. You should be able to do this even on days when you're not feeling well, you're rushed or bored. And then people still say, oh, I'm going to walk for 30 minutes and then getting the recipe right, like when am I going to read the paragraph from the book? Does take some guidance. You know, some people say, oh, as soon as I wake up, I'm going to read a book. That's not a very good time because most people need to go pee immediately after they wake up. So there is some coaching to help people design effective recipes. And then I would say about a third of the habitars, we call them habitat. So now I have a set of coaches that do the coaching still free five day program. So the habiteers, those are the people that sign up. About a third of them just resist or reject the celebration technique out of hand. They just because it's so unusual. They believe that repetition creates habits, which is not true. And they either don't read the instructions or they don't really buy into that. It's emotions that rewires your brain and creates habit. Or they're very uncomfortable living in that world of emotions or congratulating themselves for doing something simple like flossing one tooth or reading a paragraph. So there is coaching to be done to help people apply the method accurately and get over those old myths. Or those points of resistance, after you.

Pee, you do two pushups, but is there progression? So now that you've done this for 10 years now, after you pee, you do 200 push ups or you just keep doing 2?

What a good question. Here's how it works. Most people think Tiny habits is you do two and then you do three, and then you do five. That's not it. Okay. It's Tiny habits is you set the bar low and you keep it low. But anytime you want to do more than two push ups, or more than floss one tooth, or more than read one paragraph, you can do more, even on day one. But you count the extra as extra credit. So it's not that you raise the bar on yourself. That's the old fashioned way. The unusual way that works so well is you just set the bar low, you keep it low. And yes, people will naturally do more. They'll do more push ups, they'll read more, they'll meditate more naturally. But that day, when they're super rushed or they're tired or sick, they just do the push ups or read the one paragraph and they count it good and move on, right? So even years later, there's times when I only do two push ups and I'm like, I'm done. Good for me. Way to go. Move on with my day. There's time when I'll do 12 or 20. And if you're peeing, you know, five times a day, that really adds up. So the, the thing that's unexpected here and the thing that I don't think is clear enough in my book or I should have really, really, I should have put in the summary on Amazon or something. It's, it's not. You grow it and then eventually it gets bigger and bigger. You set the bar low and keep it low. So you can always succeed. You can always be consistent. So you're designing for consistency. And as long as you keep that habit alive, it has a chance to be bigger the next day and so on.

And using this push up example, is there an end goal in mind of, I don't know, bigger pecs or, I don't know, more bench presses? I mean, what's the goal of doing two push ups after you pee every time?

I'm going to give you a specific answer, but your question's really a bigger question than my answer. And I'll give you the bigger one. For me, I'm 58 now and I know it's important to build and keep muscle mass. And so for me, it Was like, here's a way that I can stress my muscles and tell my muscles to rebuild or build. So for me that's really important. But your bigger question, I'll answer it this way. The habits that wire in the best and fastest are the ones with the most meaning to you. So if pushups have no meaning for you, that's not a great habit to pick. If meditation has no meaning other than you just heard it in a TED Talk or somebody told you you should meditate, that's going to be really hard for you to nail the meditation habit. So I talk about help yourself, do what you already want to do. And I call that maxim number one. And what that means is pick habits that relate to what you already want. Don't pick habits that feel like shoulds or don't just pick randomly, like, oh, I heard kale was good. I don't know why I'm eating kale, but somebody said it, that's not a good way. So choosing your habit is part of the tiny habits method and part of what I talk about in the book. How do you choose the best habits for you? And that selection is really, really important.

Let's say that I really want to improve my pop up. You paddle boarders don't have that problem because you're already standing. But the rest of us, we need to pop up. So if, if I had a tiny habit, like every time I pee, I do one pop up on the floor.

Yeah.

And then when I do that pop up, I celebrate the pop up. That's kind of the theory there.

Yep, yep. So yeah, but you'll see this naturally on the waves. Actually, when people ride a wave or do a maneuver on the wave they really like, they'll often celebrate naturally. Yeah. Or other people will celebrate them. One of my friends is learning to surf and she caught one of her best waves of her life this morning. And I was like, woohoo. So notice how natural that is. But what that's doing is it's helping wire in what she just did. So that will become the habitual behavior. So yeah, with your pop up example, do that. Now there's an end point probably to that habit because at some point your pop up is going to be good enough. And so I think of that kind of habit as a temporary habit. Right here on my desk I have a little 2 pound dumbbell. This is the smallest dumbbell I've ever had. And why do I have it? Because my physical therapist said I might get some shoulder problems. So he's having me do this, I'm not going to be doing these little shoulder exercises forever. I'm making it a habit until my physical therapist thinks I'm out of the woods and I'm not going to have shoulder problems. So some, and that's a good way to think about some habits is this is a temporary habit until I achieve a certain outcome and then I'm done with it and I move on. So after you master the pop up, you might pick something else to do.

Up next on Remarkable People.

And I started doing this a couple years ago is after my partner starts talking to me, I will put the technology down. And not just down, I put it face down and I will look at him. That makes such a difference. So you know, tiny habit recipe. After my partner says something to me or after my partner needs my attention, if I'm using the phone or a tablet, I will put it down, face down and pay attention. And so I, I would prescribe that to everybody. Yes, I would. Because it makes a huge difference in a relationship.

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People with Guy Kawasaki.

Is it easier to form tiny good habits or tiny bad habits?

All habits form in the same way. Whether we call them good or bad, they start tiny. They find a place where they fit naturally and they get nurtured. Notice those are exact three hacks of tiny habits. It starts tiny, finds where it fits and it gets nurtured. That could be a smoking habit, it could be a snacking habit, it could be a push up habit, it could be a reading habit. And so which one is easier? I'm gonna say, I'm gonna kind of slip out of that question and Just say the habit that you want the most, or that is the habit that gives you the strongest feet. Positive emotion is the one that's gonna wire in the fastest. And that can be a good habit or a bad habit. For example, in my life, I won't go into this. It's kind of boring. Coffee mugs. I tend to be kind of a klutz in my work desk, and I knock over coffee. So then I get a different kind of coffee mug that's more stable. And I feel more successful using this because I don't spill it like I do my others. So I never pick the other ones anymore. So I would say the habit that wires in faster isn't so much a function of good and bad, but it's the one that gets. Gives you the emotion, a net gain in positive emotion. So the simplest way to describe it is a feeling of success. And that could be like Instagram, oh, I'm really stressed out. I got Instagram. I feel successful getting rid of my stress. Or it could be writing with a new pen. I write with a pen. It's like, oh, my gosh, my penmanship is so great, and it's so easy to use. Now, you can think of things we might call bad habits as something that quickly relieves anxiety. And a lot of habits that we call bad habits do that. So notice it is the release of anxiety that is wiring in that behavior that's making it become more part of your life. So it's the same dynamic for good habits or bad habits. Start small. It finds a place where it fits naturally, and then it gets nurtured, and the nurturing is through emotion.

Okay, I got it. I have to wrap my mind around that is a lot to swallow there.

It's very different than traditional ways, right? I mean, this is just radically different than the traditional way of thinking about habits and behavior change. And then in my book, because I needed to make so clear that it's not repetition that creates habits, it's emotion. That was a title, so I made that the title, Emotions Create Habits of a chapter. And because that's so unconventional, I thought I would be so criticized for that. And it's been the opposite. There has just been so much resonance with that that the kind of critiques I thought I would get just haven't happened. It's been sort of like a. Well, of course, that's how it works. And so I'm really happy about that, because when people understand that it's emotions that create habits, then it relieves them from the Sense of, oh, I have to just drudge through this for 30 days or 66 days and if I can just get to that point, it'll be habit. It also helps them see, at least if they do in the tiny habits way, that you can create habits and change your behavior and feel good, that when you feel bad or guilty or shameful, you're not doing it in the best way, that you change best by feeling good and that you can use positive emotions to create the habits. And not only does that wire in the habit and it helps change your identity. I'm the kind of person who eats healthy snacks or I'm the kind of person that exercises throughout the day and that identity shift then has, seems to have a ripple effect in the five day program. Even since the beginning I measured, were there other behaviors you changed during this week? And the vast majority of people said yes. And about 20% of the people report they made a big change within five days. So there clearly is, as you do a behavior, new habit and feel successful, it has a ripple effect on your other behaviors and your attitude as well. And so that's why I'm really excited that people are understanding and resonating with the idea that it's emotions that create habits and you can use positive emotions to do that.

So to put this back into my surfing context, if I understand this correctly, so now I find some prompt, let's continue with the taking a leak example. So every time I take a leak, I do two pop ups and I celebrate the two pop ups. So now there's a positive joyous emotion with doing pop ups. So now that it's associated with the joy of popping up, it will become a habit because of the emotion and I'll start doing more pop ups and better pop ups and pretty soon it's Guy Lenny as opposed to Kylie and I'll bet Piahi one day.

And, and yeah, the way it works is as you celebrate, as you hack your emotion to wire in the habit, once it becomes a habit, you don't have to celebrate it anymore. It's become a habit. Right. So you use the emotion to wire it in. So, so yes, but let me go to surfing since you understand that. So the first few years surfing here and the surfers don't really talk very much where I typically surf. And so I was kind of like on the edge and just kind of running.

You are Holly, I mean, riding the.

Shoulder of the waves. I'm now more, a little more integrated. But I would hear people say, oh man, I'm Addicted. I have to be out here. Like, it's terrible weather. It's stormy, it's awful. And it's like, I have to be. I'm addicted. And I was like, oh, good research topic. Maybe I could get a grant from Stanford to study addictions. Here's what I think. Here's what I think's going on, guy. There's a moment when you go to catch a wave. There's a sliding or slipping feeling. There's that moment, and you. Bam. That's the moment. So the celebration, the emotional reaction is built into surfing. You don't have to say, good for me. I caught the wave. There is that physical thing you feel that reinforces the behavior, and that's the thing that makes people want to go back. And I think that's the thing that causes people to sit. They don't even know that I'm a behavior guy. They don't know who I am, and they're talking about it. I'm just kind of listening and observing. But that's, that's the people that have become very, very into surfing. I think it's that feeling that slipping, that sliding, that dropping in the first instance, and you're like, oh, man. Yeah.

I surf every day. Well, almost every day. And I, I took it up at the age of 60, which is about 55 years too late.

Yeah.

And it is the most difficult thing I've ever tried to learn because I.60 is not ideal, but I, I know a lot of, you know, good surfers, and the good older ones always say it's not about who can turn the best and do all this. It's about who's having the most joy.

Yeah.

And if you're having the most joy.

You are a good surfer.

That's just, that's how it is.

Yeah.

I love that Bob Pearson throwing that.

I, I, I really respect and admire you. You went from paddle surfing to prone. That's harder. It is harder. So good for you.

I was humiliated into that.

There is kind of this, like, whole status thing. What kind of board do you have?

I think it's less true in Hawaii. I think in Hawaii, people appreciate just board sports, whether it's boogie boarding, bodyboarding, paddleboarding, or prone surfing or I don't know about foiling, but foiling, you know, Mark Zuckerberg on electric foil, that's my idea of something I would never want to do. But anyway. But in California, there is definitely a pecking order that at the bottom is the paddle border. Right above that is the long border. Above that Is, you know, kind of the fish. And above that is the short border. So I'm near the bottom of that pecking order.

Well, and then I would be at the bottom being a stand up paddle. But man, I catch more waves. I catch, I get back on. I mean, there's disadvantages. There's just. Yeah, definitely. And I have more fun. I definitely. Okay, so before I shifted to stand up paddle surfing, I was working on prone surfing. Cal, we should just cut this. This is boring. 3 years I broke ribs or dislocated different places doing prone surfing.

What?

Boom. Then, you know, you're out for 12 weeks. And then I go back next year and something weird happens. And so after the third time that I got injured prone surfing, it was like, I am done. I'm not built for this. That's why I shifted to stand up. And I'm so glad I did because I have so much fun. And if the waves aren't firing, you can paddle around. So you can paddle around and just goof around paddling. So go out and somebody told you.

That as a beginner you shouldn't start at Piahi or Jaws. That conversation ever happen?

Oh my gosh, the power. I mean, I go look and watch and yeah, PI Jaws, everybody. That's like where the big, big, huge waves happen. And why, that is just stunning. To think that somebody could go do that. Just. Oh my gosh. One of the things we have out where I surf, which is smaller is, oh, it's just water. So a big wave's coming and you fall in, it's like, oh, it's just water. That works where I surf. But man, at PI Jaws, that is not an accurate thing to have a tiny habit of. And you fall into that. It's just water when that next wave's coming at you. Yeah.

By the way, while we're on this topic, why do you call the Maui Habit the Maui Habit?

When I got accepted to give a TED Talk here in Maui, they wanted it to be just one idea. Okay. I tend to, like, try to cram in too many things and they're like, no, just one idea. That's all you're doing. And so I thought, well, let me share this habit that I've been doing and I'll give you the origin of it. And it does go back to Oahu, by the way, and let me just call it the Maui Habit. So in this talk, I will christen this habit the Maui Habit, and so on. So it was that TEDx TEDx Maui conference that gave me the Opportunity to name it. Where does the name come from? I moved out of Silicon Valley in 2001, and I moved up north because I guess this is okay. Because I felt like Silicon Valley was greedy, and I felt like my soul was being corrupt. Just. It was just gutting me. And I was like, I can't. I can't live in this environment. I love Stanford. I want to keep teaching and researching here. So we moved up north onto a river, and our neighbor was born in Honolulu. Her mother taught there. She wasn't Hawaiian, but she was very into the islands. And she became our dear, dear friend. She gave me her mother's ukulele that she used in the classroom for one of my birthdays. She comes over playing the ukulele and said, this is yours? It's my mom's.

Wow.

Oh, my gosh. She. She lived alone. She'd never married. And one day, for one of my birthdays, she gave me a card that had a sailboat on the front. And it said, every day is a gift. And I like that card. And I put on the fridge. It was about six weeks later that she invited myself and my partner to go to a doctor's appointment with her. And we're like, okay, Charlotte, we'll go to the appointment with you. We go there. So remember, she gave me a card that said every day as a gift. And so we go to the doctor's appointment, and the doctor puts up the. The X rays or the. Wasn't X rays, but it was CAT scan or something. And she had stage four liver cancer. And she knew that, and she'd known that for a few years. She just didn't tell us. We're her closest friends, but that was her way of saying, yeah, I'm going to die soon. And so then that card on the fridge. Every day is a gift became a big part of our lives. And we were caregivers for Charlotte. We helped her pass on and so on. I played ukulele when she was through those. Even though I'm not a good singer, I sang to her because I thought she would appreciate that. Played her mother's ukulele. It was really quite an honor to help to care for somebody, help somebody transition. So then as my partner and I, we would get up and say. We would say, it's going to be a great day. Every day is a gift. So building on that card. So the Maui habit is after my feet touch the floor, I will say, it's going to be a great day. That came directly from the inspiration from the card that Charlotte gave us. And we just started saying that to ourselves and each other. And I just felt the power of that. I mean, I'm not a big intention setting kind of person. There's other people that do that, but there was something about that. And then I started sharing it and getting enough feedback that I was very confident about doing a TED Talk just on that. Like, hey, everybody, I'm not going to prescribe any habits for you. You pick whatever habit you want. I'll. I can give you the how to form the habit, but you pick the what. Tiny habits is the how. You pick whatever habit you want. But exception Maui habit. First thing in the morning, say it's going to be a great day. And that is the only habit that I prescribe. So it's really Charlotte's influence. And then it was the opportunity at TEDx Maui to give it a name and to kind of shine a spotlight on that and acknowledge Charlotte's important role in our lives. Yeah, it's a great story.

Great story. I bet many people listening to this because there have many been many guests who discuss this want to reduce screen time. They are addicted. So case study. Best practices Tiny habits to reduce screen time.

The good news here is I did a Stanford class on this and a whole class again, I'd pick any topic that relates to behavior change that I think is hard and cutting edge. As a result of the class and some of the subsequent work in my lab, there is a resource for everybody at screentime Stanford. Edu, where you go in and answer. There's a little genie, like a little character, and she asks you what kind of screen time, what devices. And based on that, it draws on our database of over 150 different ways to reduce screen time. And so what we built is an algorithm where we then match people with ways to reduce their screen time. And so that's available. And that was 2017 or 18 that we did that. But that's available and it's running but in the tiny habit. So but that's there in tiny habits. Let me suggest a couple. One is to create the habit of charging your phone somewhere that's not in your bedroom. Okay. So that could be after we turn off the TV at night. I will charge my phone here in the kitchen or the front entry or the office. Okay. Phone in the bedroom. Probably don't have the gun. Details on that. Not a great thing. So change that. And that might mean you get an alarm clock. Everybody, my students push back on that. Like, how will I wake up? It's like, oh, you can buy an alarm clock.

That's the first thing my son said. I suggested this because I interviewed someone named Catherine Price and she said the same thing. Yeah, don't sleep at your phone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I pushed that out there through Virgin Pulse a while. I mean, I was like, this is simple, but let's not have the phones in the bedrooms. Let's charge them elsewhere. Another specific one is, and this is what I do, and I started doing this a couple years ago, is after my partner starts talking to me, I will put the technology down. And not just down, I put it face down. And I will look at him. And that, that makes such a difference. So, you know, tiny habit recipe. After my partner says something to me or after my partner needs my attention, if I'm using the phone or a tablet, I will put it down, face down and pay attention. And so I, I would prescribe that to everybody. Yes, I would. Because it makes a huge difference in a relationship. And then there's others. There's more dramatic things people can do. You can make your password really hard, you can delete the app, et cetera. What we found in the screen time work, both in the class and in the lab, is that a lot of people say they want to reduce screen time, but it's in other people. Okay. They're usually talking about my son, my daughter. And that was a little discouraging, to be honest, because we did all this work. We pulled together the largest collection of screen time reduction strategies and tools we think anywhere, and we created this tool. And people like, yeah, yeah, but I want somebody else to reduce screen time. My screen time is fine. So there is that, that little twist there. Yeah.

So I can be prompted by it's time to go to sleep. My tiny habit will be take the phone outside the room, charge it someplace else, and then say to myself, it's going to be a great sleep.

Yeah, you could do that. Exactly. And let me fine tune it a little bit. So I'll give you a little coaching. What As a tiny habits coach. And we train coaches and we have a wonderful set and they're doing great work on Clubhouse. And you'll see more of the coaches. They're incredible. So the habit of the actual behavior of plugging in your phone, that's tiny enough. Right. You don't have to make that any tinier. But then you want that first part that what we call an anchor, the routine you already do. You want that to be more specific. So what you want to do is look at your. What you typically do in the evening and what is this specific moment? Like after I click off the TV or after I put my floss down or after I pull down the COVID So think about your existing nighttime routine. Like something really specific, an ink. A very specific routine. And that's how you want to think about it. Does anything come to mind for you? What is something you do in the evening that's very specific? That right after.

That's where I go to bed.

Yeah, but something that you do, something that you do not something, something that can come after. Do you get a drink of water? Do you set out vitamins? Do you prepare the coffee machine?

I don't know if I want to admit this because.

Okay, you don't have to admit it, but as long as. No, no, it's not.

No, no, it's not. It's not in the TMI category. But I, I like to take all the. Conservation is going to go crazy about this. But I like to take a hot shower before I go to bed.

So. Okay, so it could be after I hang up my towel. Right. So it's not even after I take a shower because that might work. But we in the tiny habits world, among the tiny habits experts, you find the last action. We call it the trailing edge. What's the trailing edge? The last action. And like, it could be hang up the towel or it might be put on your pajama bottoms or whatever. That's what you find. And let's say it's hang up the towel. Then it's after I hang up the towel, I will then plug in my phone to charge. So then you're kind of writing computer code for yourself after this, then this. And you want that routine, what we call an anchor, because it's solid. You want it to be very specific. So something like after dinner, I will. That doesn't work very well. But after I push the button on the dishwasher, I will that. So that's part of the fine tuning of the recipe. And it will make a big difference from thinking, after I shower, I will plug in my phone to after I hang up my towel or throw the towel in the dirty clothes, I will plug in my phone.

Yeah, first I have to establish the habit of hanging up the towel.

But.

Yeah, I get your point.

Okay, but for you and others, watch yourself. Habit formation is a skill. It's a set of skills. Oh, I know.

I have a better one.

Okay, go.

If I may be so rude, I'll do it after I take out my contact Lenses.

There we go. And as you're taking out your contact lenses, think of that's a series of behavior. What's the very last thing you do?

I have disposable lenses that you throw away every day. And so you're not supposed to just flush them down the toilet. Because imagine 30 million people flushing two lenses down a day, 60 million lenses. That's adding up to the plastic problem. So I. I have two used lenses in my hand, and I drop them in the trash can.

There we go. So after I put my lenses in the trash, and then I would put your charging station in your bathroom. There are three things that matter here. One is the location. So you want that anchor moment, that routine to be in the same location as the new habit. So because you've identified taking out contact lenses, don't cause yourself to walk upstairs to your office or whatever, then have that new habit happen right there. So you can just turn and plug in your phone. That matters. There's two other factors that matter, but the location of the anchor and the new habit. That matters a lot. So, yeah, so try that. If that doesn't work for some reason, like, I never have my phone in the bathroom, then look for a routine that you do where you want to charge your phone. It might be in the front entry. So it might be after I lock the door, I will plug my phone in. Right. And so creating a habit is a design process. It's not a willpower challenge. And so part of it is you come up with a plan. Like, after contacts, throw them away, I'll plug in my phone. If that works, keeps going. If it doesn't work, you don't beat yourself up. You don't say, oh, I can't do this. You redesign it. And so it's an iterative process. It's a design challenge.

I love this. Starting tonight, I can hardly wait to take out my contacts.

You know what? And that's a good sign. There are people. And this baffled me at first. When I was coaching the first year, somebody would, oh, let me think of a specific example. I can't think of one that far back. I don't have that kind of memory. But let's say that pouring the glass of water, what's their habit? And so it's like, after I start the coffee maker, after I take my finger off the button of the coffee maker, I will pour a glass of water. So notice, not even drink the water. It's just pour it, make it tinier. And then people would write me and say, bj, I am so excited. I can't wait to start my coffee maker again. Am I going insane? You know, because I just am. And it's like, no. And well, at first I was puzzled but then I learned like, no, it's normal and it's actually a very good sign. Your brain is anticipating this good feeling and so your brain is anticipating, when can I start the coffee maker again? Just like you said, when can I take all my contacts? Because then it knows there's good feelings coming soon after. This is not in the tiny habits book, but among the tiny habits coaches, we call it anchor anticipation where you are excited, you're anticipating the anchor. So that's anchor anticipation. Yeah.

I have never been so excited about taking out my contacts or taking a leak ever. I'm going to mark my life before BJ and after bj. So. Oh my lord. Okay, so one more question. So I understand this and I think I can pull it off for myself. But now I'm a parent and let's just say, well here we'll word it this way. I have a friend who has a 16 year old son and I love this concept. But if I said to him, if my friend said to his son, okay, son, so what you need to do is you need to have a routine anchor point that triggers this tiny habit and then you celebrate. You think a 60 year old boy is going to say, what a great idea. So whenever I brush my teeth from now on, I'm going to pick up the towel on the floor and hang it and say celebrate and go to bed. I mean, how do you do this in other people?

Yeah, I'm going to go back to the maxims. There are two maxims. So for anytime you think of habits, behavior change, engagement, I'm using all those as synonyms. There are two things that matter. Help people do what they already want to do. Help people feel successful. So we've talked some about the feeling and the emotions. So yeah, you could get your son really excited. If it's a habit.

Is someone I know.

Oh yes, your friend's son would be really excited about it. If it's a habit that they want. Let's say it's eating a chocolate snack, let's say it's flying a drone. Let's say it's who knows what. That's why it's maxim number one. Help people do what they already want to do. There's no magical way to create habits in people that they don't want that habit. You can get compliance out of them, but that's not a habit, that's compliance.

But what if my friend's son doesn't want to do anything that my friend wants him to do?

Let me give an example of how somebody solved a similar problem. And this is my friend, her name is Boo and she lives in South Africa. And so she was learning this and here's what she did. So she has two boys, they would leave their clothes on the floor. And she had read my book and she's like, I, you know, I can nag him into putting their clothes in hand printed. And then when she read my maxim that help people do what they already want to do, she was like, what do my boys want to do? They want to throw things. So she got the insight. I'm going to put a little basketball backboard just over the hamper. And then I'm going to tell my boys, every after you see something sitting on the floor, clothing, see if you can make a shot. And she called me. She didn't just email me, she called me. She was so excited. Oh my gosh, my boys are totally doing this. So notice how she shifted it from trying to get her boys to do something they didn't want to do to now. It's the same action, but it's framed differently. In a way they want to do it.

I'm going to go to Big five right now and buy a. Oh, no, no. My friend is going to go buy a.

Yes, but the reality is, the reality is whether we're creating habits for ourselves or trying to get other people, if it's a behavior or a habit they do not want, there's no magical way to make that happen as a habit. You can bribe, you can punish, you can constrain, you can get compliance. But that's not a habit. Let me give an example from my own life. And I won't say a friend, I'll just use my own life. My partner, My partner is 19 years older than I am. We've been together 30 years. And he grew up working very physical labor. So he was used to being very physically active. So he didn't have a tradition of working out. In fact, he thought it was kind of crazy because, you know, you'd go dig and do physical labor. And so of course I wanted him to work out. I wanted him, he's older than me, to stay as young and healthy as he can for as long as he can. But I knew I couldn't manipulate him into it or cause him to create a habit that he didn't want. And then One day I would not have expected this guy. He sat down on a rowing machine and he liked it. I was like, what? Rowing? I would have never expected that. And he talked about rowing. I said, fine, we're going to buy a rowing machine. We're going to get the best rowing machine. We're putting it in. And we did. So notice I'm helping him do what he already wants to. He wants to row. I wanted him to just work out. And so fast forward, he rose every single day, in fact, today on the hydro platform. So then we've shifted to hydro, which I've gotten into as well. It's really quite awesome. So today he hit his 500,000 meter mark. He's rode 500,000 meters just on hydro. This is before he was on the Concept 2 and now he's on hydro. He was so proud of that.

Is hydro the thing with the water in the plastic bucket thing?

No, no, no. You've got a screen and you've got coaches, some are Olympians that say, okay, we're gonna go up to a 24 and so on. It's really, really well done.

Okay.

He was so excited about that. He texted out the little 500k badge to all his kids and to me. And they're just to tell him that he can't row would be so upsetting to him. So notice the pattern. You know, I wasn't going to nag a browbeat him into working out and how I thought he should work out. Instead, when I got insight into what he already wanted to do, I helped him do that. And in this case it was by buying the machine and getting it set up and saying, here you go. And he just. What a game changer that is. So that didn't happen instantly. Guy I had to pay attention for a few years to finally get that insight of what is the habit, the workout habit. And then now he stepped up to other things. So. And that's what I saw in tiny habits. Year, week after week, as you feel successful in one area, then you start doing other things, related workouts. So, yeah, so there may not be a solution right now for your friend to get their teenage son to pick up their clothes off the bathroom floor, but help them form habits in the areas that they want because change will lead to change. And the more confident they feel in changing the habit they may not have wanted might suddenly go, oh my gosh, I do want a tidy bathroom. I don't want to look like a slob to my girlfriends, therefore I'm going to start Picking up. So start people where they want to start. That would be my friend.

I can hardly wait to tell him.

B.J.

Fantastic. Oh, I love this. Oh, I learned so much. I am going to take off my contact lens, pee and get a basket hoop.

Bam. There we go. What's fun about this and studying this is it's so practical to so many parts of our lives and it, it does feel like a superpower. When you know how to create habits quickly and easily, there's almost nothing that you can't do. And sharing that with people and teaching them to do that and getting the feedback is just as you saw in the book. I just feel like it's absolutely my responsibility, I am to share this and impact as many lives as I can and make people happier and healthier. So thank you so much for inviting me to be here. It's fun talking about surfing, but helping people understand, yes, you can change. It's not as hard as you think. There is a breakthrough method that makes it quick and easy and even fun.

It is a good thing you had that dream where you were going down in the airplane because a lot of this might not have happened were it not for that dream.

Right? It wouldn't have. I mean, the context is I do a lot at Stanford, I do a lot outside of Stanford. And I'm always pursuing projects that I love. I have that flexibility and especially thanks to Tiny Habits, I can kind of pick and choose. And people had been asking for a book from me since probably 2012. Where's your book? Where's your book? And I thought, I'm too busy. I'm doing this conference now. I'm doing this project now. And I just felt like with the innovation and the research, there just wasn't time. And then that night I had a dream I was going to die in a plane crash. And my reaction in the dream was a sense of deep regret and a sense of shame and deep sadness that I had not yet shared my insights and these methods in a bigger way. Yes, there was the free five day program. I'd spoken about it. People could go find videos and stuff, but not in a way like now. Tiny habits is in 25 languages and so on. And when I woke up from that dream, it was very clear that I had to set aside other things and get the book and get it done and get it out into the world. So yeah, without the dream there probably wouldn't be the Tiny Habits book and.

My pop up would continue to suck. So thank God for that dream. And there you have it. BJ Fogg, the remarkable person who is enabling me to put down my phone at night. That is a remarkable new habit. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Madison Drop In Queen Nismer, Luis Magana and Alexis Nishimura. It's 2022 May. The habits that you have resolved to create this year continue. For now and forever. All the best. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.