Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

“People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”

The bad feelings people get when they scold themselves for failing to change tend to extinguish the desire to improve. Instead, the author teaches that small changes, followed by small celebrations, gives people positive feedback that snowballs into larger, more lasting improvements.

“A behavior happens when the three elements of MAP—Motivation, Ability, and Prompt—come together at the same moment. Motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. And Prompt is your cue to do the behavior.”

According to the author, behaviors occur when all three MAP elements are present. His Tiny Habits system uses an Anchor as the Prompt—for example, placing floss next to your toothbrushes, so the brushes remind you to floss—then using a Tiny Habit Behavior as the Ability—anyone can do a small, easy thing, like flossing just one tooth—and finally encouraging Motivation with a short I-did-it! Celebration.

“1. Check to see if there’s a prompt to do the behavior. 2. See if the person has the ability to do the behavior. 3. See if the person is motivated to do the behavior.”

Most people, when they try to fix an unwanted behavior in a team member, go directly to motivation, using threats or scolding to force better behavior. The author believes this approach generally fails, and that it’s much more effective to fix the simple parts—prompts and abilities—first, because they’re more mechanical and easier to repair. Motivation, the most difficult aspect of behavior to alter, is the last resort.

“Motivation is like a party-animal friend. Great for a night out, but not someone you would rely on to pick you up from the airport.”

Motivation is inspiring but unreliable. The excitement of buying a fixer-upper house, for example, soon pales when the daunting tasks and hard work chip away at the good feelings. Motivation needs its own support system.

“Getting clear on your aspiration allows you to design efficiently for what you really want. You might assume your aspiration is to be more mindful. But when you think about this, you decide that what you really want is to reduce stress in your life. And reducing stress will be easier than being more mindful.”

It’s easy to confuse behaviors with outcomes. If reduced stress is the desired result but the person identifies that outcome with mindfulness training, then the purpose will shift from the outcome to the behavior, and the results won’t be as powerful. If, instead, mindfulness becomes one activity in a suite of behaviors designed to reduce stress, the person’s focus will be aimed correctly and the new habits will be more useful.

“You can’t get yourself to do what you don’t want to do. At least not reliably. You might do the behavior once or twice, but it’s unlikely to become a habit. When we match ourselves with behaviors that we already want to do, not what we think we should do, there is no need to fuss with motivational tricks or techniques later. We take the Motivation Monkey out of commission.”

The Behavior Matching approach to designing new habits disentangles users from their tendency to choose activities they feel they ought to do and replaces them with appropriate activities that they desire. Those are the behaviors that will become habits; properly designed, they may also encourage related, supporting habits.

“What you want to do and what you can do will converge into what you most likely will do, and that’s the most fertile ground for growing habits.”

Tiny Habits work because they’re designed to take advantage of behaviors that that are both desirable in themselves and possible to do. Each user can find those Golden Behaviors through Focus Mapping, which diagrams the search and makes clear which of many possible behaviors are the ones that meet both the can and want-to criteria.

“We should be dreamy about aspirations but not about the behaviors that will get us there. Behaviors are grounded. Concrete. They are the handholds and footholds that get you up the rock face. Your path to the top is your own, and you choose your behaviors according to the particular rock you are climbing.”

Sometimes people mistake the necessary process for the desired outcome, and they edit what they want instead of what they need to do to get what they want. Tiny Habits is a method for shaping and assembling the steps toward any aspiration; it’s not intended as a system for editing or delimiting our aspirations.

“Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment. We already know that the Motivation Monkey loves to help us make big moves, then slips away from us when the going gets tough. And doing big things can be painful. We often push ourselves beyond our physical, emotional, or mental capabilities. And while we might be able to keep up this effort for a while, humans don’t do things that are painful for very long. As you can imagine, this isn’t a good recipe for creating successful habits.”

Big, sudden changes are dramatic: They get our attention and seem heroic. Small changes, on the other hand, don’t thrill us and seem boring. The big changes, though, tend to fail, while small, incremental improvements add up surprisingly quickly to create big changes later on. The hare starts fast, but the tortoise wins the race.

“Look at Google, Instagram, Amazon, and Slack. When they first launched, each company started with something small and focused. Because they were simple to use, these products became firmly rooted in people’s lives. The companies added more features only when these products became solid habits. (Most products that launch with lots of features and complexity spiral down in flames.)”

We often think that more features will give us more of what we want, but an activity with lots of different parts can feel overwhelming. The success of major companies’ with easy-to-use online services demonstrates that simple is better, especially to start with. Complexity, if needed, is for later, in both products and habit-building.

“No behavior happens without a prompt.”

We notice our habits but not what triggers them. Without those signals—the stoplight turning green, the phone ringing, the sudden drops of rain—we don’t start driving, we don’t answer the phone, we don’t put up an umbrella. A good prompt is as important as strong motivation and ease of action in maintaining a habit.

“People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”

The Tiny Habits system rewards users with good feelings when they make a positive change. It avoids guilt or threats, which rarely encourage people to take positive action. The method allows habits to grow happily rather than staggering along under a heavy burden of guilt.

“There are plenty of behaviors that feel good (hello, video games!) and have slid into habits that we’d rather not have. The point is that your brain’s reward system is influenced directly by emotions and less directly by what society labels as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

Strongly positive feelings quickly make behaviors into habits. This is true whether or not those habits support our wellbeing or our social standing. That slice of cake at three in the morning soothes us, even as it adds to our waistline. A constructive habit can be created the same way, by using strong reinforcement to reward it.

“If you try a product and it makes you feel clumsy or stupid or unsuccessful, you will very likely abandon it. But when something makes you feel successful, you want more. You engage. You make it part of your life.”

A feeling of success is one of the most potent rewards a person can use in forming new habits. The popularity of the biggest companies—the pleasure they generate by simplifying the use of their products—testifies to this principle, which one can apply to their own lives by celebrating successful completion of a newly desired habit.

“Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.”

The emotional key to Tiny Habits is self-approval. Celebrating the little successes leads toward celebrating bigger ones; it also changes our attitude toward ourselves and unhooks us from self-criticism.

“When you apply the Tiny Habits method consistently, your habits will scale naturally.”

A Tiny Habit takes advantage of the principle that, once started, habits grow by themselves. A small effort at the front end produces a large outcome later: Two pushups soon becomes ten, and a clean counter often morphs into a clean kitchen and house. Every successful tiny beginning encourages more such habits. From such seeds, great gardens grow.

“Success leads to success. But here’s something that may surprise you. The size of the success doesn’t seem to matter very much.”

The feeling of success bolsters a person’s courage and motivation. This leads to more success. Tiny Habits favors many small achievements rather than one or two big ones: The small ones quickly inspire more positive behavior changes until the big ones happen by themselves.

“When you get rid of unwanted habits, what rises to fill that space could be more time to devote to a passion project, greater productivity at work, the deepening of a relationship, or the expansion of a new identity. Some of what fills that space you will choose, and some of it will come from those around you.”

One of the major benefits of improving our habitual behavior is that it opens up possibilities that were hidden from us. With bad habits removed, we can see and take advantage of opportunities we didn’t know were there. Our relationships improve spontaneously as well, and we experience more closeness and productive encounters. These good things seem to arrive out of nowhere, but in fact they were just waiting to get in.

“Each behavior that we design, each change that we make, is another drop in the pond that ripples out. We shape our families, communities, and societies through our actions. And they shape us. The habits we create and perpetuate matter.”

When we improve our behavior, we’re better able to contribute to our communities. Those people, in turn, discover new opportunities to be more creative and more loving. Thus, improving our own habits contributes to improving the world.

“We all know that social dynamics are powerful drivers of behavior. The effects are all around us: how we act watching a football game, how we talk about politics, how we treat one another online or in person. Since humans have pretty much always lived in communities, social influences have always been with us. But with social media magnifying and multiplying those influences, our lives have become increasingly connected. That’s why it’s more important than ever to think deeply about how those social forces are shaping our individual and collective behavior, and ultimately impacting all life on planet Earth.”

Social interactions are huge motivators for people; our behavior is shaped by our need to get along. Small adjustments in how we treat each other can go a long way toward improving relationships, creating harmony, and resolving issues that impact everyone. Working together in small ways, we plant seeds that grow into solutions.

“We live in a world with no lack of problems big and small. I believe that with the principles of Behavior Design, the methods of Tiny Habits, and the Skills of Change practiced and ready to use, you have everything you need to start solving whatever challenge you face.”

This is the author’s manifesto: His theory of incentives leads to his system of self-improvement through small, incremental habit change, which can be customized using his set of skills for designing useful change.

“Think about it. One person starts one habit that builds to two habits that builds to three habits that changes an identity that inspires a loved one who influences their peer group and changes their mindset, which spreads like wildfire and disrupts a culture of helplessness, empowering everyone and slowly changing the world. By starting small with yourself and your family, you initiate a natural process that can create a tidal wave of change.”

The author believes that Tiny Habits can have a transformative effect, not only on the individuals who use it, but on their communities and even out to the world at large. In the same way that a small habit becomes larger and inspires further habits, people who use the Tiny Habits system can inspire others to do the same.

“If an e-mail from a friend comes through about a new exercise or diet program, a quick scan will tell you all you need to know. Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions are freeing because if the change program doesn’t satisfy these two requirements, it’s not worth your time.”

The author sums up his system for designing behavior change with these two precepts: Effective programs should use methods that you want to do and that make you feel good about yourself. Armed with those two principles, anyone can develop effective behaviors.