PNTV: Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg (#393)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Subtitled the Small Changes that Change Everything. Tiny Habits. BJ Fogg out of Stanford. He has a behavior design lab up there. He is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of behavior change. And of course if you want to change your life, you need to change the things you do on a day to day basis. Now I am passionate about behavior change, self mastery, etc. In our optimized membership we have a ton of notes, similar themes. Now BJ Fogg is the guy all the other habit experts go to, whether it's atomic habits or mini habits or the power of habit. Charles Duhigg reflects on some similar themes, but BJ Fogg brings it all together in a really powerful academic perspective. I highly recommend the book. It's good. Of course we've got a philosopher's note on it. Got my notes on this on it. We've actually also got a very playful sketch that my son, my seven year old son Emerson did on this is awesome on BJ's it's called the fog behavioral design map which we'll talk about in a moment. But again, this is super important. Check out the optimized membership for the notes. We've got 600 of them, a bunch on habits, but we also have 101s. So we have 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects including habits 101, willpower 101 and something we call algorithms 101. And then in our Coach program, Optimize Coach. So optimize me and then optimize me Coach. We spend a full month helping you cultivate what we would call self mastery. Getting really good at using your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. And again, BJ is the man when it comes to creating these habits. So I'm thrilled that he finally wrote a book that we can enjoy and I'm excited to give you a super quick overview of those ideas. Now it's always absurd to try to pack a book into a six page note. I don't even try. I just pull out those ideas that I think can be most life changing and then encourage you to go check out the book if you resonate. And then to try to boil this down into a quick video here is just simply not possible on one level. But that's why? You pay me the big books. Big bucks. More wisdom and less time. We start with the fog behavior design. What does he call that? Technically, the Fog behavior model is what he calls it. B behavior equals map. He says there are only three variables. That would be two. There are only three variables to changing a behavior, whether it's positive or negative. Your motivation, your ability to do the thing, and the prompt that triggers you to do it. So he has an awesome little model that we will quickly walk through. Right? So here you go. You've got your ability, the X axis, and then you have your motivation on the Y axis. Right? Notice your ability can either be low or it can be high. In other words, it can be hard for you to do or it can be easy. I'm sorry, it can be hard for you to do or easy for you to do. You want it to be easy for you to do, not hard. Then you got your motivation. That can either be high or low. Then you've got a prompt. The prompt shows up somewhere in this equation. This little line here is what he calls the action line. Motivation, ability, action line. Then the prompt can either show up here or it can show up here. If the prompt shows up here, you will take action. If it doesn't show up above the action line, you won't. That's the super simple take on this model. But it's amazingly robust and powerful. You can put any habit that you want to create into that model or. Or that you want to get rid of into that model, which we'll do a quick take on installing and deleting, we call it. Right. Install the number one habit that could most change your life. Think about it. What do you think could be the thing that if you actually installed the habit, would most change your life? What is that? What just came in your head doesn't mean perfect, but what is it? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could install that? What about delete? We call it kryptonites. We've all got kryptonites. The things we do that don't work for us. What would your life be like if you could delete that habit again? This is where we can go. And again, Google BJ Fogg. Check out the behavior design model here. But yeah, there we go. Let's walk through it though. Let's walk through an actual little behavior. And I'll use an example that I used with my son Emerson, which is what led him at seven years old to draw basically his. Tough to see that, but his little seven year old version of this, let's say that I don't want to use my smartphone at night, which is precisely the example that I talk about in the note. I don't want to use my smartphone at night. Now, the problem is that I'm actually rather motivated. I have a high motivation to do that behavior. And I've got a prompt, which is the phone is out. And I see it. It triggers my behavior, it cues my behavior. Charles Duhigg calls it a habit loop. You have a cue, you have a behavior, and you have a reward. Right. James Clear echoes that basic idea. Tweaks it a little bit in atomic habits. All the same idea. Right. And then is it easy for me to use my phone? Yeah. If it's sitting out in plain sight, I can pick it up and boom, I'm distracted. I'm not connected with my family. So my son Emerson said, after I picked it up, I don't even use my phone. I actually use Alexandra's phone, which is kind of my bat phone that a few people can reach out to me on. But if I see that out, I just have this addictive little rat like tendency. You want to pick it up? Maybe you have the same tendency. Whole other chat we'll have, we do have all the time, but we'll have with Cal Newport's digital minimalism. Anyway, my son said, hey, look, I know how to get you to quit using that phone. He said, I'll put it in the drawer and I'll put a lock on it that you don't have. And I said, that's brilliant for a number of reasons. First of all, my motivation will still be high. Right. But you just removed the prompt. You took it out of sight. Right. So now the prompt is down here. And then you made it hard because I don't have the key. So now you move this prompt down here. It's hard for me to do. I do not have the ability to do it and I don't see it. So I'm not triggered by it. And that's what led me to sit down and say, buddy, that's a brilliant idea. Let me walk you through the science of behavior design and teach you how to install or delete habits. So there you go. You can map anything over that. It is super powerful. And I want to emphasize another point that BJ makes throughout the book. If you have had a tough time changing your life and changing your behaviors, it's not a character flaw or a personal flaw. It's a design flaw. You have not been taught how to design behavior Change how to design habit creation or deletion. So we just need to step back, quit shaming ourselves. But then we do need to do the work to study it and practice it, etc. So there you go. B equals map behavior equals motivation, ability prompt. You don't want to rely on motivation is the other point here. You want to make it super easy for you to do, which is why the book is called Tiny Habits. We'll talk more about it then. You want to make the prompt really obvious or you want to hide it, which again we'll talk about in Install delete. That's the high level ABCs. BJ tells us there are ABCs to behavior change. He says we want to have an anchor that's the A that triggers the behavior and then we want to celebrate it. Abc, anchor, behavior, celebration. So something like this anchor BJ tells us you want to anchor the behavior you want to install on something you already do. So I wake up in the morning. One of the things I do, thankfully, until I stop doing that now I do my normal morning hygiene stuff and then I do my little aura scores. But even while I'm doing the little aura reading, I put the supplements I want to take on top of the little ipod I use to look at my data. Oh, okay, cool. Trigger prompt made it easy for me to pour that into my little drink, right? And then take whatever I'm going to take that morning. That's awesome. And then after I do that, I meditate. I don't think about it. After I do my morning hygiene and supplements, I meditate. But only basically every single day. Over the last 12 plus years, I've missed one day over the last 12 years. Now some days I didn't quite do it in that perfect sequence, but they're very rare after this. Then I will do that. So your anchor is there. You want to find something you already do. For bj, it was after he goes to the bathroom while working from home. He walks to his little office bathroom. Then he will do. I think it was two pushups. He wanted to exercise more. He's having a tiny, tough time doing it. So he made it tiny. Anchor behavior. Two pushups. Did he say then I'm going to do 30 pushups or 50 pushups? No, two. It was easy. Doesn't require high levels of motivation to do two push ups. Even you right now could say even me. Let's go back to my meditation example. If I wanted to program meditation for myself, then I would actually put the meditation cushion in between me and My door on the way out of the bedroom by tripping over it. Oh, yeah, I got to meditate. There's the prompt. Nice and obvious. Then I would make it easy by not holding myself. I now meditate for like 22 plus minutes. I do whatever I do. We can talk about that another time. But I meditate to that level. I used to do 30 minutes or 60 minutes, but I certainly didn't start saying I have to meditate for 30 or 60 minutes. I made it easy. That's hard. That's hard. That requires a lot of motivation. Then, ah, man. Even if the prompt shows up, it shows up below that action line. I'm not likely to do it consistently. So then you make meditation easy how? One breath. I'm going to meditate for one breath. Tiny. Bj. I'm going to floss. One tooth. Tiny. What tends to happen when you take that tiny action is you tend to do a little bit more bonus style. But you always have that baseline and you're winning anchored your behavior anchor to something you're already doing. Behavior is super tiny and easy. Then what do you do? Then you celebrate. In this, BJ says is one of his greatest contributions. And I completely agree. He says, we'll talk about it more in the next idea that celebration will be viewed in the same realm as mindfulness and gratitude, daily practices that can literally fundamentally change your life celebration. We'll talk about how to do that in a moment. But after you do the simple behavior, then you say, yes, that's like me. We'll actually go straight there to the shine. He says, you want to celebrate. And he teaches us how to celebrate so we can feel this sense of what he calls shine. He said, I had to coin a word for this because the closest that scientists had was something like authentic pride. I feel authentic pride that I did something great. He said, that's cool and that's close, but it's something deeper than that. There's like this energized shine that we feel. He says, you know what it is? If you make a great putt or you ace an exam or do something that really you feel great about, you feel a level of what he would call shine. Then he teaches us how to celebrate. And he says, literally, if I were teaching you in person, the first thing I would teach you is how to celebrate. Now, most people, including, like the habit loop where we've got cue behavior or routine and reward, we think of rewarding ourselves for building a habit. BJ says, you're playing it the wrong way. If you gotta meditate for 30 days in a row until you get a massage or a new yoga mat or whatever it is you're doing for yourself as a little treat, that reward is too disconnected from the behavior. And what you need to do is learn how to celebrate. And the way you learn how to celebrate is twofold. You do it intensely and you do it immediately. So right when you do the behavior. So imagine you're trying to install a meditation habit, right? BJ's doing his push ups, right? So you want to install a meditation habit the moment you breathe, for that one breath and you've done your meditation, maybe you do a minute or two or three, right? Then immediately you say yeah. Or do whatever you do to celebrate. Literally my thing is, yes. Oh yeah, I crushed that. That's awesome. That's like me is literally what I say and what we talk a lot about in the optimized world. But what is it for you when you do something awesome? What do you do? What's like your visceral physical movement? You want that celebration to be immediate and you want it to be intense. Why? Because then you connect the new behavior that you want to install with feeling good. You're squirting a little bit of dopamine in your reward center, in your nucleus accumbens is being used for good. You're not just triggering that with all your incessant dopamine rush on inputs and tech addictions. You're using it for positive behaviors. And in our mastery series for the coaches, I talk about in some plus ones for our community, that it's kind of like the neuroscience of ancient wisdom from Seneca. Seneca says you've got to fortify your pertinacity, you've got to be really disciplined, such that you get to a point where doing what's best for you is what you most enjoy. Because most people, when they think of meditating or exercising or eating well, think it's a chore. Well, the leading researchers tell us, no, no, no, you got to see that as a gift to yourself, not a chore. You want to make doing the right thing what you most love to do. And this is the way to do it. It's actually brilliant neuroscience of that ancient wisdom Seneca, I believe, would approve. Boom. I get great joy out of going to bed early, turning off my electronics, connecting with my family, waking up feeling great, meditating, doing deep, deep work without inputs, creating content like this for you to help you transform your life. This all gives me deep, profound joy. We want to learn how to celebrate and get our shine on. And the two things we want to know right now are immediately and intensely so, simultaneously covering a lot, but just getting going. Again, check out the notes, check out the book, and check out BJ's website, et cetera. So with that, let's think about installing and deleting Again, we go off on this in integrating a lot of different ideas in the optimize kind of world. But what habit would you like to install? What's a habit? And you may want to choose an easy one, or you may want to.

Choose one that you really, really want.

I'd actually lean toward. We want to change your life here. You got to have the humility to know it's going to take practice to master any skill. And this is a skill that we need to study and practice in order to master. But what's a habit that you'd like to install? Think about it. And then think about our map and think about the ABCs and see if you can plug it into that, right? So think about. We'll actually start with the ABCs. Think about the anchor. When could you do that behavior? Maybe it's working out, maybe it's meditating. Whatever positive behavior you just think would really change your life. Turning off your electronics would kind of be stopping doing something, right? We'll talk about that too. But something to install. When can you kind of hook it into your life? What anchor can you use? After I do this, then I will do this new behavior. Think about that. Then think about how you can make it easy. Because my hunch is if you failed to implement this habit, you've made it too hard, right? You've made it super hard for you to do. How do you make it super easy? Take Your big goal, 60 minutes of meditation, 30 minutes of meditation, even 20 or 10 is too much for the tiny model, right? Break it down into something super small. Stephen Guise, who wrote Mini Habits and has been deeply influenced by bj, says, make it stupid small. So small you think it's absurd. When you get to that point, you know you're winning. That's what you want to do. I also talked about in our work in Optymye's Coach that we moved out to the country, right? We were on eight and a half acres, blah, blah, blah. And we got kind of a beautiful little house with a little Zen kind of landscaping before it becomes kind of.

Whatever the Texan forest is.

I forget what they call that. Not quite savannah, but something more than that. So we had this little trail that had weeds in it, right? Now, I'm not typically a landscaping kind of guy and a weeding guy, but I wanted to pull out the weeds. I had a lot of pride. It's beautiful. I want to pull out some weeds Now. I didn't say to myself that I got to weed the whole thing tomorrow. Overwhelming. No, thank you. I'm not going to do that. What I did was I ran it through the behavior model here and I made the anchor. After I see a weed while walking into the house or out of the house, into the studio or wherever, then I will pull out one weed. Crazy easy. One weed. One weed. That's all it takes. That's easy to do. It doesn't take a lot of motivation. Boom. I can do that now. Celebrate it. Boom. That's like me pulled out a weed. Now, that's a less meaningful goal than some of the things we could install, but that's a great way to practice silly little things like that. Boom. I'm practicing the model, etc. So what's your install? Think about it. Think about your anchor, think about the behavior, and then think about how you can celebrate it then. Also remember that the thing you want to manipulate the most is the prompt. You want to make. Well, the prompt and the ease. The prompt, just make it present. So again, meditation. Trip over your cushion. Running shoes. Trip over them as you get out of the. Out of bed in the morning. Oh, yeah, there it is. When you put them on, I'm going to get ready. Make your prompt easy. Which leads us to the delete. Delete. Well, I'll actually break it down one other way, which is how we do it in our Mastery series algorithms. I say three things for install. Make it obvious. Make the prompt really obvious for you. Then make it easy. Then say yes, that's like me. Celebrate it. Now, to delete, we basically invert that. The first thing we do. And this is a James Clear idea. You want to make the prompt or the trigger or the cue invisible. So to go back to my smartphone usage, if I want to not use my smartphone because I want to go deep in work or in love, good idea. Make it invisible. Out of sight, out of touch. My smartphone lives in my closet, in my office, on a shelf, in airplane mode, turned off, it's invisible to me. The prompt is not constantly seducing me. Do the same thing with food. You don't want to eat junk food. Throw it all out of your house. Literally. That is the first recommended step by all nutrition experts. You gotta purge your pantry. Make it invisible. Right? And then you make it hard. If your ice cream run. If your ice cream requires you to go, drive to the store and come back, it's invisible and it's hard. If my son locks my phone into a cabinet so I can't get it, it's invisible and it's hard. That's really good for deleting habits. You don't want to drink alcohol, get rid of it invisible, make it hard to go. Get longer, chat about 100% commitments and all those things as well. And then you celebrate it. When you don't do the bad habit or if you do slip, you say, needs work. This is a Lanny Basham idea. No shame. You look at it and go, I got some interesting data. How can I optimize my little deal here? Because I know that life is about evolving and. And I know that when I set an ambitious goal, Ray Dalio tells me the first thing I do I need to be prepared for is to fail. Oh, no big deal. Let me redesign it. Let me get a little bit better. And then I go and I loop up and I spiral up. And he says, you get so excited about the data and getting better that you have a mistake. Learner's high. We call that needs work. Let me see what I could have done differently than when we celebrate learners, win or learn. I got a little bit better. That's delete and install so we can get our shine on. We got the ABC's anchor behavior celebrating. We got that map, and hopefully we've got you fired up to go deeper into this. And then the final idea here is a little bonus one. I like to talk about the power of what happens if you can alchemize. Epictetus talks about Hermes had a magic wand, right? The joke was Hermes that could turn anything into gold, right? And Epictetus said, no, no, no. The real magic wand is that which can turn something negative into something positive. So can you take your negative behavior and turn it into a positive? I draw that like this. So Abraham Maslow says, in any given moment, you're either stepping forward into growth or back into safety. I would say you're either high fiving your inner daimon and doing what you're capable of doing and closing the gap between what you're capable of being and what you're actually being, moment to moment to moment. But plus one or minus one, right? If you're going minus one, you're doing a kryptonite. It's enervating you. If you can figure out how to take that same cue that same feeling internally that leads to addictive behaviors and turn it into a positive, you can literally unbelievably change your life. I say minus one plus one in this context is plus three. It's actually a two point gain, right? You get to zero and then you get up to point two plus one from minus one. And just to state the obvious, I say this all the time, but if you have a day in which you constantly go negative 1, negative 1, negative 1, negative one and you're going like this down, those are the days that you want to numb yourself with all the other things. Whatever you do, right? The days when you can close the gap in plus one, you feel great, you know you're doing your best, et cetera. So we want to get really good at alchemizing the minus ones and the plus ones. I use the example in our work in Optimize of the habit. I wanted to delete when I taught this particular idea was my tech usage, particularly tech news. I started. I never do tech news except when I started to again with COVID and the social justice issues, etc. And I was just doing too much tech inputs and it was starting to enervate me. So I said, you know what, done. I'm going to read my Economist on a weekly basis print form, non hysterical. There we go. Good. I'm up to date. Fantastic. And what I did was I said that's the thing I want to delete. But then what I did was I said when I feel tempted to go look online, I am going to transition that into a positive behavior. For me, it's walking around. We've got. The first thing I did when we landed here was carve a half a mile walking, hiking, running trail around our property. So now in those times when I used to go do tech, I'm now doing a restorative, energizing activity, walking, meditating, something like that. That's a huge gain. And you get the benefit of going from the innervator to the energizer. And most importantly, you get the benefit of being the type of person who has the self mastery to go from the innovator to the energizer. And that's our extended yet quick look at tiny habits again. Fantastic. BJ Fogg, thank you for your lifetime dedication to mastering your craft one more time. Philosopher's notes at Optimize Me Optimize Coach, if you want to go deep with us, what'd you get out of this? What's one practical idea you can take and implement in Your life starting today. Get on that and make today another awesome day. See you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optymyze Me.

Hey guys, this is Bry. Hope you enjoyed that video. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about. So I just wanted to give you a super quick tour of our site, tell you what we do. We do two primary things. We have an Optimize core membership and we have an optimized coach certification program for people that want to go from theory to practice to mastery. So the core membership is basically 10 bucks a month depending on whether you do monthly or annual. And you get instant access to over 500 philosopher's notes, the six page PDF, you know, 25 minute or so MP3 recordings of these great books. And then you get over a thousand optimized plus ones, 50 optimal living 101 masterclasses, et cetera. And we have a free trial the team set up, get it, you know, free for 14 days and then go from there if you like it. So we're blessed to have a lot of people who subscribe to this, including some of my friends who happen to be some world class peak performance gurus like Tal Ben Shahar, who taught the two of the largest classes in Harvard's history. Starts every day with Optimize. Ben Greenfield, friend and coach optimizes, bar none. My go to source for taking a deep efficient dive into some of the world's best books via the Philosopher's Notes. It's an indispensable resource. Thank you Ben. Marcy Shimoff loves Philosopher's Notes. Mark Devine, retired U.S. navy Seal commander, dear friend who starts his days with Optimize + one winning win in the mind routine to charge him up for the day's battle. If you're serious about leading heroically, I recommend you use them too.

Huya.

Thank you. And 10,000 plus other awesome humans around the world. That's the core membership. Then we have, and I should say we have apps. Excuse me, you can get apps, iOS and Android. You know, we feel pretty proud and blessed to have basically a 4.9 ranking and people saying some great things. You can check that at Optimize Me Apps and then our coach program is all about helping you master yourself so you can serve heroically so you can empower others to do the same. We have trained over a thousand optimized coaches from over 50 countries and yeah, really excited about this. This is one of the core levers for us to fulfill our mission. To change the world, one person at a time, together. Starting with you and us today. We've been told that here's one little thought, and we have hundreds of testimonials you can check out about how it's transformed people's lives and. And if you want to be a coach, your coaching practice. Now, half the people who do this want to be coaches. The other half just want to master their lives. But Barb, a coach of ours, says, I already had two coaching certifications, but Optimize Coach was indisputably the most valuable I have taken. Thank you, Barb. Honored to be part of your life. You can learn more about what we're doing with Optymyze Coach at Optimize Me Coach. There you go. Hope you're doing great. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See you.