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Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
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Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

BJ Fogg 2020 11 references

BJ Fogg's behavior design system for creating lasting habits through tiny behaviors, anchored prompts, and emotional encoding via celebration.

behavior-design habit-formation behavior-change motivation dopamine self-improvement behavioral-psychology

Overview

The Core Framework (B=MAP)

  • Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt — all three must converge simultaneously
  • Start absurdly tiny — two pushups, floss one tooth, three breaths — bypass motivation's unreliability
  • Anchor to existing routines — "After I [existing habit], I will [tiny behavior]"
  • Celebrate immediately — positive emotion (Shine) is what encodes habits, not repetition
  • Troubleshoot in order — Prompt first, then Ability, then Motivation (never start with motivation)

Quick Lookup

Situation Do This Avoid This
Want to start a new habit Find a Golden Behavior, make it tiny, anchor it Picking a behavior you "should" do but don't want to
Habit isn't sticking Check: is the prompt firing? Then check ability Trying harder or boosting motivation
Want to stop a bad habit Remove prompt, add friction, then swap Using willpower to resist
Helping others change Make it easier for them (ability + prompts) Lecturing about why they should change
Motivation is high Use the surge to set up systems, not make commitments Starting big and expecting to sustain it
Habit feels stale Re-celebrate to refresh the Shine encoding Forcing yourself through guilt

The Key Insight

"People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad." — BJ Fogg, Chapter 1

References

1

Celebration and Shine: The Encoding Mechanism

Emotions, not repetition, wire habits into the brain. The causal chain is: Celebration (immediate and felt) produces Shine (authentic positive…

5
celebration shine emotion +5
CRITICAL
2

How We Change Together

B=MAP applies to groups, but the leverage point shifts: when changing someone else's behavior, ability -- not motivation -- is almost always the…

8
group-change behavior-design segmentation +4
MEDIUM
3

The Fogg Behavior Model (B=MAP)

Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt, simultaneously. All three components must converge at the same moment or the behavior does not occur. This…

Introduction, 1-2
behavior-model B=MAP action-line +2
CRITICAL
4

Finding Golden Behaviors

Behavior Design replaces guesswork with a structured pipeline: clarify an aspiration, generate a wide swarm of candidate behaviors, then filter them…

2
behavior-design focus-mapping golden-behaviors +3
HIGH
5

Growing Habits from Tiny to Transformative

Tiny habits scale through two distinct paths: growth (the same behavior expands in duration or intensity) and multiplication (success with one habit…

6-7
growth multiplication success-momentum +6
HIGH
6

Implementation Playbook

The Tiny Habits implementation sequence has seven steps. Each step depends on the output of the previous one. Skipping or reordering steps is the…

2-5
implementation sequence recipe +2
HIGH
7

Making Behaviors Tiny: Ability as the Design Lever

Of the three B=MAP variables, ability is the only one you can reliably engineer. Motivation fluctuates and prompts only fire when the other…

3
ability simplicity starter-step +4
CRITICAL
8

Motivation: Why It Fails and What to Do Instead

Motivation is volatile by nature. It spikes on emotion, crashes on schedule, and leaves people blaming themselves for a structural inevitability. The…

2-3
motivation motivation-wave burst-and-bust +3
CRITICAL
9

Prompts, Anchors, and the Trailing Edge

Prompts are the binary gate of behavior. Unlike motivation and ability (which exist on continua), a prompt either fires or it does not. Even when…

4-5
prompts anchors action-prompts +4
HIGH
10

Rules of Thumb

The entire Tiny Habits system compresses into two maxims: help people do what they already want to do, and help people feel successful. Every design…

1-8
heuristics maxims decision-rules +2
HIGH
11

Untangling Bad Habits

Stopping a bad habit is not a single forceful act -- it is a systematic untangling. Every unwanted habit obeys the same B=MAP model as a good habit,…

7
bad-habits behavior-change-masterplan downhill-habits +6
HIGH