BJ Fogg, director of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, explains how to catch motivation waves: natural peaks in drive (after holidays, before vacations) where you set up systems that make future behavior easier. He also covers proactive outreach for jobs and ventures by regularly sending useful analyses to people you want to work with.
One of the things I'd like to do is introduce you to some of my mentors, some of my advisors, some of the people that I call for advice, and the people that I study when I'm stuck. So BJ Fogg is one of my closest mentors. He's the director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. And I met him when I was a freshman at Stanford.
He.
I ended up working with him for years. I was a senior researcher in his lab and we've spoken at some of the same conferences here in the United States, in Japan, et cetera. He taught me a lot of what I know about persuasion, everything from how to write effective emails, how to run meetings, and of course, the deep theoretical knowledge when it comes to persuasion that I learned sitting in the bowels of libraries at Stanford. So I wanted to introduce you to bj. I want to show you a short excerpt of an interview that I recently did with him. When he speaks, you should listen because he is a true master at human behavior. Take a look.
I'm BJ Fogg. I direct a lab at Stanford University that's all about understanding how behavior works.
Thanks for coming in. You're a big hero to everyone watching this.
Happy to be here.
You also taught me an idea. A lot of people back at that time wanted to work at Google. A lot of people still do. And there was somebody in the lab who said, like, ah, it's like really hard to get hired. And you said, listen, find out the one person who does what you want to do there every week. Send them some kind of report or analysis and just say, look, I thought you might find this interesting. I'll write you back next Wednesday with the next analysis. And then you said, how long can they ignore you for? It's a totally. It's a transformatively different way of looking at getting a job, then knocking on the door and sending your resume in through a website. You're actually doing the work ahead of time. You're showing that you're worthy of being listened to. And you're right after a certain point. How can they ignore someone who is sort of that on top of it and ready to take a risk? What do you think about that?
You know, I think, yeah, whether it's personal needs or company needs, if you're trying to build a business or fill a niche, if you can understand what those needs are and start delivering, who's going to turn you away?
So how can people use that besides applying for a job? That principle of let's try to understand their needs and then address them before they even articulate them.
Well, it depends how you slice it. One could be starting a company. Another one might just be helping people. Say, in your family, let me start with the family one. And we can push back to the motherventure one if you want. It may be that you have somebody that you're married to or someone in your family that you think needs to get more active or eat better, what have you. What you will probably be incredibly unsuccessful at doing is nagging them until they get it done.
How did you know it doesn't work.
Or hyper motivating them or having them watch Biggest Loser or something like that. What you need to do. There are ways to motivate people. However, I'm more of a fan of waiting until something happens. And I call it the motivation wave. Where they naturally get motivated around an area, whether it's exercise more, eat better, save more money, and then when that moment's right, they're in a motivation wave, Then you help them take the steps they need to do to move forward.
So, for example, if it's a family member who wants to lose weight and they're constantly saying, oh, I feel bad, I feel fat, wait until perhaps right after Thanksgiving when they really are like, I really need to get a chance. Or right before a summer vacation.
Yeah.
And then what do you do?
Yeah, well, let's. So understanding when. So the role of motivation. Motivation only has one role in our lives, and that's to help us to do hard things. And if you don't have to do hard things, you really don't need much motivation. Okay, so some of these things, let's say a weight loss program, especially when people have failed before, it is very hard to get started again. So the motivation has to be high, the motivation's low, they're not going to do it. So I think the right thing to do is be ready. And this could work for a venture that's creating something in health or financial security or what have you. But when people are in the motivation wave and ready to do hard things to get them started down the path, step by step, and as the motivational wave will go away, motivation doesn't always stay high. So that's why I call it wave. It's motivational wave. It'll go back down. So what you need to do when the motivation's high is get people to do hard things that then make future good behaviors easier to do.
What's an example?
For example, let's take me and drinking the tea so during a motivation wave, I was like, oh, I'm going to gear up on the tea stuff, buy the tea, get it all set up, and then my motivation doesn't have to be very high to do tea. It's simple to do in the future, right?
You build that system so that when your motivation goes low, you still are able to do it.
It feels like a baby step later on rather than a big leap.
It's funny you say that. Just yesterday I got an email from someone that said, ramit, I watched your course on some site, I bought it, but then there was some storm and I lost motivation. That's exactly what you. I lost motivation. So now I'm trying to get back into it. I felt like, so interesting.
I think what really happens is that person probably didn't lose motivation as much as he or she thought. There's probably a competing motivator at the time. So there's a storm coming. I'm worried about my possessions, my family. So, yeah, I want to do this course, but, oh, guess what? Suddenly I have a competing behavior and a competing motivation wave. And so given these choices, this one's the bigger motivator right now. So I really do think we're choosing all the time between competing behaviors and motivation will go up and down on a certain topic, like eating better, being active. But in addition to that, we have competing motivations. That makes it all the more important to make those baby steps, make those possible, because you can still take the baby steps, the tiny, small things, even when something else is grabbing your attention.
