by Janus Boye
How do we to turn New Year’s resolutions into sustainable habits?
BJ Fogg is the world’s leading expert on habit formation and he was our guest star for the 1st member conference call of 2020. According to BJ, we are doing resolutions the wrong way and we need to take a new approach to changing habits.
Tiny Habits is the title of BJ’s new book, which came out on the final days of 2019 and landed as the #1 book in Personal Time Management (and #2 and #3) on Amazon. The book shows how to have a happier, healthier life: by starting small.
A tiny habit is not working out for an hour everyday. Or a slow and home-cooked meal every day. A tiny habit is much smaller. A good example is the one and only habit that BJ actually prescribes in the book. The Maui habit, which takes just a few seconds when you get out of bed every morning. It’s the one "tiny habit" that BJ says is the most powerful and most effective to come from his work at Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab.
Debunking myths on change and habits
BJ leads the behaviour design lab at Stanford and is really interested in human behavior and habits. Over the years, he has coached over 40,000 people on how how habits work.
You’ve probably heard some of the myths that BJ addresses in his book:
Change is hard
It’s all about willpower
You have to make a plan and stick to it
With the book, you’ll get simple and proven ways to make change easy. It’s not about willpower according to BJ and you need to start small and be flexible.
Specifically on New Year’s resolutions, BJ says that we are doing it the wrong way by picking something abstract or difficult and then trying to motivate ourselves. Like: I’m going to work out every day for an hour. This approach is likely to fail.
The better way is to find a new habit. Make it small and easy and find where it fits naturally in life. Start with tiny workout for less than 2 minutes as an example.
Here’s some additional notable takeaways from the call:
Repetition does not create habits. This is another myth and confusing correlation with causation
We can change together and this can be used in a corporate context as well to impact culture.
You can stop unwanted behaviour. BJ has a plan in the book and also shared examples in the call.
You can view the full 23-minute recording below. It’s without slides, so all you’ll see is the beautiful book cover and BJ talking. A few minutes in he does a small dance act to get our attention.
Learn more about changing habits
As a part of the book launch tour, BJ visited the Today show, where he was tasked to troubleshoot 4 peoples habits in just 4 minutes. You can view the brief 5 minute piece: How to keep your New Year’s resolutions all year long.
The book was also featured on Wall Street Journal: On the Journey to New Habits, Take Tiny Steps
At TEDxMaui in 2014 he shared more details, also about the Maui habit. See Tiny surprises for happiness and health.
BJ was a speaker at the 2007 and 2009 Boye conferences in Aarhus. Here’s the notes from his 2009 session: Design for Behavior Change: Why Facebook and Twitter Are Winning.
Finally, we also covered behavior change in our 2022 member call on making the sustainable thing the right thing.