The Human Behavior Formula with Joe Polish, BJ Fogg, Michael Fishman and Mastin Kipp - Genius Network #85

Help people do what they already want to do. If you don't do that, your product or service will fail. The Fogg Behavior Model is a formula for understanding human behavior and getting the results you want. Join Joe Polish for a conversation with Michael Fishman, Mastin KIPP, and Professor BJ Fogg. BJ Fogg has a PhD in psychology, teaches at Stanford, and his courses are constantly in demand and always oversold. If you'd like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 85 that's geniusnetwork.com 85 hello.

This is Joe Polish and I'm here at a really awesome conference, one of the top in the world called the Consumer Health Summit, put on by Michael Fishman, who happens to be sitting with me and Professor BJ Fogg. And so before I introduce bj, I'm just going to say, Michael, you bring together some of the top health experts in the world for this summit in beautiful Arizona, which is where I live. And you know BJ Fogg is attending this year, as am I, and you've had him speak and present in the past. So I would like you to introduce who BJ Fogg is and then I'm going to ask him a couple of questions. And by the way, people listening, if you hear any background noise, we snuck into a corner of a room with Mastin Kip. Say hello Masten. Hello Mastin. That was Masten Kip, who's going to lead a session tomorrow here. He's awesome and he has his podcast equipment. So we just decided to. So if you hear any background noise, just deal with it. It'll be fine. Okay, who's BJ Fogg?

All right, well, this is like the 40th honor of the last three days. You're about to hear from BJ Fogg, who is a PhD, a psychology PhD, who teaches at Stanford. His courses are brand new, newly designed, newly crafted courses. Every single year, people have to, after they apply to Stanford, they then have to apply to get into BJ's courses because they're always oversold and like way like huge hu. BJ has a lot of star alumni students, including one of the founders of Instagram. He himself hosts a behavior design workshop which is a brilliant two day program at his home in the Napa Valley somewhere. And he is a playful, brilliant, wise, amazing, amazing teacher and human being. And what an honor to know this man for the last five or six years. An honor to have you here. And I'm Excited to watch this unfold.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is going to be a setup. This is a teaser, BJ because we only got a limited amount of time. But you said during yesterday, which was day one of Consumer Health Summit, you summarized a couple of most important things related to persuasion and behaving people. The first one being along the lines of, I'll have you say it correctly. But I wrote down help people do what they already want to do and to boil that down into tools and a set of behaviors. And I was like, wow, every entrepreneur that would be listening to this right now would really find that. And then your second point. Useful.

Yeah. So I've taken, what, 20 years of research and innovation and teaching and boiled it into two maxims. Essentially, maxim number one is help people do what they already want to do. And if you don't do that, your product or service will fail. I would say 15 years ago, as I was figuring this out, I was in denial around that principle. It was like, oh, you could persuade people to do stuff that only works temporarily. The only thing that works in the long term is helping people do what they already want to do. And that's the maxim.

So now, okay, so to take that. Well, being in the field of marketing and stuff, I've always loved this line, which is it takes enormous amounts of persuasion to get people to do the things they want to do, let alone the things they don't want to do. And so a lot of times people are like, well, someone wants this. Why don't they just do it? So let's go a little deeper.

Yeah. There's two levels to this. Somebody may want to reduce their stress, but they may not want to use your app. So the persuasion comes in. There's a role for persuasion. It's not persuading people to want to reduce their stress or be healthier. We can assume most everybody wants that. The persuasion piece comes in to convince people that you have the best product or service to help them reduce their stress or eat better or be physically fit.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So now you then said to boil it down to tools and a useful set of behaviors. So my thinking is, if you can just help people do that, you. Whatever your product or services, experience, but then you have to set it. Boil it down to a set of behaviors. If you just. You're like, most people seem to be leaving the other part out because they haven't really boiled it down. So what does that even mean?

A few things. And you can follow some questions. First of all, what people are Everyday people are really bad at taking an abstraction like reduced stress and putting that into practice. Or eat more leafy. Even something that sounds specific like eat more leafy greens. How do they put that into practice? And the problem with innovators and experts is they just assume, oh, eat more leafy greens. Everybody knows how to do that. They have forgotten what it's like not to know because they're experts or they've been working in the domain for a while. So really one of the jobs of the behavior designer is to come up with very specific behaviors and match people with the right behavior for them for stress reduction, eating better, being physically active, and so on. So you don't give somebody an abstraction and try to motivate them toward the abstraction. You match them with a very specific behavior or set of behaviors and you make those easy to do.

Gotcha. So what do you recommend that a person do to get. We're gonna do a much longer version of this down the road. But you've written about a lot of tiny habits you're very well known for. For someone to go deep in this area and to learn how to do this, what recommendations would you have?

Well, the best thing is to come to my two day boot camp on behavior design. But that's in limited quantities. You know, not everybody can show up for that. Short of that, there's some videos online and so on. And I will try to do a better job of sharing online.

Good. Yeah, Master, you're going to.

Could you talk about the motivation and like easy sort of scale? Because I think that's really.

Yeah. So what you're hearing, I'm giving you high level principles, but they draw off a model that I call the FOG behavior model. And that's behavior happens when any behavior, any specific behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together at the same moment. So when you're talking about help, people do what they already want to do, hopefully the motivation's already built in. Right. So they already want to do that. The help people part is how do you increase their ability? How do you make it easy to do? So in that phrase alone, and they made it a prompt or a reminder. So in that phrase alone, it brings together the three components in my behavior model. Thank you, master, for that question. So my work is a system and it's a system. It's not a random set of principles. There's a framework that underlies both the models and the methods. They work together. That's what I teach at Stanford and my boot camp and at the high Level, you can say the maxims in these sentences, but it comes from a system. And that's what I call behavior design.

Well, and so again, the key becomes if you install this system into what it is that you do, things are just going to be obviously much more effective. Because you take Consumer Health Summit, where we're at, Most people here are in the health field. Well, almost everyone here. It's just that they all are selling things. And almost everyone here that I've met, they are caring people that want to do really good in the world, that want to help people be healthier. From fitness to exercise, to mindset, to, you know, trauma work, to supplementation, to all kinds of different things. So this has, you know, helping people do what they already want to do. People are coming to them because they want to be in, have better health. And then the second maxim here is help people feel successful. Now that's. That sounds like such a simple line that is so profound. Help people feel successful. And then yesterday you said, if you do, they will continue with your product or service your business. And if they don't, they won't. And so that, to me, I was like, ah, that's the key right there.

Well, you know, and it's four words, right? Help people feel successful. How you actually implement it could be complicated or hard to figure out. But by helping people feel successful, when they feel successful using your product or service, they will continue to use it. When they run into roadblocks, they'll persevere. And also, which I didn't talk about yesterday, but it's a really important point. As people do a behavior and feel successful, their identity changes. So let's say somebody's making leafy greens every evening and they're feeling successful doing that, then they start thinking about themselves differently. I'm the kind of person who eats leafy greens. I'm the kind of person who eats fresh produce. I'm the kind of person who takes care of my health. Different levels of identity. So what you get by helping people feel successful is not only a passionate, excited customer, but you help them transform their lives in ways that your product may not even address. So in other words, there's this great. I don't want to call it magic because I'm a scientist, but there's this huge impact that comes from helping people feel. It's not be successful, it's feel successful. And another aspect to that is that's how the habit forms. When people do something and have a positive emotion around it, they're much more likely to do it in the future, your brain rewires and you do that behavior again when prompted.

Right, right. Well, okay, so let's go to some in actual behavior, which I've seen you adopt because it's always interesting see someone who, for a living, helps people with behavior adapt or take on a certain behavior. So my buddy Joe Decenta, who founded Spartan Races, he wanted to interview me for his podcast last year. So we did an interview, and before we started, he made me do burpees, which I did not like, and I hated it. But for some reason, I started thinking to myself, what would happen if I did burpees every day? So I just have taken on this path of doing anywhere between 30 to 40 on average, burpees a day. Sometimes the most I've ever done in one fell swoop without losing form and killing myself is which. I've tried to go past that a couple Times, but was 71 fell swoop.

That's a lot.

Well, he also made Randy Zuckerberg do burpees.

Yeah, I made Randy Zuckerberg at my conference last year. But you started doing burpees. And the time that we've been here, you've been working out each morning. Right. And a lot of people don't. So what is it? What causes you to actually take on a behavior like burpees?

Yeah, well, I try a lot of things. So part of the thing in transforming now, we're not talking about product. We're talking about your own personal life. Part of the key is finding behaviors that you like to do. So if you're going to the gym and you're walking on the treadmill and you don't like it, stop. Find something else. Same thing with food. If you're forcing yourself to eat quinoa or kale and you don't like it, stop and find what you do like. So a lot of my life, personal life, is about experimenting with different behaviors that I can turn into habits if I want. And some of them don't endure, and some of them do, and that's okay. It's just like decorating a room. I might bring something in and put a painting up and say, that doesn't work, and that's fine. Move it out. And I don't blame myself for not having willpower or motivation. It's just like, that wasn't a fit, and that's how we should be looking at transforming our lives. Try lots of things. And the things that fit and you, like, keep going, and the things that don't, move them out. And Move something else in. Like recently on the physical activity side, finally this year, after years of trying and feeling unsuccessful, I finally got the hang of stand up paddleboard surfing so I can actually go out and surf the waves, which is so amazing. And I need no, in fact, I have to be sort of held back to not go surfing, you know, and then I go in the morning and then I want to go back in the afternoon and all that. So that's not probably typical for most types of physical activity. But I found something I really, really love. And you get out there and it's a rush and I'm getting, I'm not as good as some of the other. I'm still learning, but I'm seeing my progress. And then other people out there will say, well, that was good, or you're ready to now try this and that. So I'm feeling like I'm progressing. So it's that feeling of being successful in part is what's made surfing become. It's almost like an addiction at this point.

Right, Right.

Yeah. Okay, Master, I have a question.

So I've been dying to ask you this question. We got recording it now. So you're in Stanford, Silicon Valley, innovation hub. It's where all tech is. And you look at what Elon's doing, you look at what Naveen Jain's doing, all these exponential technologies that are coming out, these huge paradigm shifts. It's also hard for the consumer to understand artificial intelligence or metatranscriptomic sequencing. And it's also hard for the entrepreneur to describe what they do to a way that makes it a habit or makes it something that is use even though it's extremely useful. So how could an innovative entrepreneur who has a tech that nobody understands everybody needs make that a habit and make it simple for people. Do you have any principles or thinking around that?

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Make it very, very easy to take the first step with your product or service. Certainly you want to tap into something they already want to do. If it's about the microbiome, you know, explain it in terms of something they already aspire to and then make it really easy to do. I call that enticement. So you want to entice people to take the first step. Then once they've taken the first step, you want to propel them to take the subsequent step. Too often, like let's take apps, people install apps, they use it once, they never go back. So they got enticed, but the first step didn't propel them forward. And so you can propel them forward by making it really easy to take the next step. So notice I'm going through my behavior model. That's the ability piece. Or by motivating to take the next step, or by prompting them, setting a prompt or trigger to move forward. So there's a lot to answer your question. Well, Masten, but if you don't get the first step right, designing the first step right, then you lose. Yeah.

Okay. So for timing purposes and because Michael, has we decided to do this right before. Right. During the lunch break. Michael, you bring people like Vijay Fogg, who's a professor, to the entrepreneurial world in this particular health niche.

Why? Why?

Well, we've had. I mean, Vijay presented here a couple years ago and has come back as a participant for which we're honored. He and colleagues like him are scientists, as he said. So they're looking at human behavior. They're looking at prompting behavior and sustaining that behavior and supporting compliance, supporting value through ingenious experiments, through scientific validation, and teaching it and presenting it in a way that people in business can actually use it. So it's this confluence and this bridge between the academic world and the world of rigorous experimentation and the marketing and business growth and business strategy world, where there's this bridge of entrepreneurs who appreciate the neuroscience, who appreciate and have a layman's grasp of the psychology and can actually put it to work. And so, you know, as I said, I'm honored to be a friend and a fan and a cheerer for everything that BJ does, and he's really been embraced by this community, and I think that's the reason why.

Yeah. Awesome. What could or should we have asked you that we did not that you would like to talk about.

Wow.

So much. Do we have two days here just, you know, changing behavior, changing your own behavior, others is easier than most people think if you do it in the right way. Unfortunately, there's a lot of products and programs that rely on sort of a traditional way that doesn't work. Well. People have these assumptions about behavior that are wrong. And so, in part, people need to put aside their assumptions and look at it afresh, what really works in influencing behavior. And so you could have asked me, what are the top mistakes in behavior change? And maybe that's.

That will be our future longer podcast that we'll do. And so what. What I will say, first off, thank you, Michael, for putting on this event, Masten, for bringing. And you've got to listen to my. Wherever you're listening to this podcast, listen to the one I did with Masten Kip and Michael Fishman because both of them have been on Genius, the Genius Network podcast and the I Love Marketing podcast. And so you should listen to both these guys because they're both doing amazing stuff. And there's going to be this will just be the teaser for the longer version. And people, any place you would direct people to to find out more about you.

These are fogg.com or tinyhabits.com those are the starting points.

Or you could apply to Stanford.

Yes, apply to Stanford and then apply to my class.

Awesome. Awesome. And so thank you. And for those of you that happen to be in the health niche, if you're one of the top in the world, you can apply to be at a future consumer health summit because that's where the best people are brought together. And you all meet us in person if you want to see it because we'll probably all be here again next year, too. So thank you. B.J.

Thanks, Joe. Thanks everybody.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 85 that's geniusnetwork.com 85.