BJ Fogg

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to our chair experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard, joined by a miniature modman.

Hello. Hi. Hi. You're wearing a cape today.

A dress. Yeah. It's real pretty. It looks kind of like, um, handmade tail.

Yeah. That's right. I was going to say Amish, but yeah, same world. Yeah.

It's great looking. Thank you. Today we have, first of all, what a great name he has, BJ Fogg. Can you think of a better name?

No. He's a doctor, I believe. Dr. B.

J. Fogg is a doctor. Yeah. B.

J. Fogg is a social science research associate at Stanford and author. He is the founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. He has a new book called Tiny Habits, The Small Changes That Change Everything.

Now this is a very useful, pragmatic episode. It is. It really can teach you how to trick yourself into doing things you normally wouldn't want to do. Yeah.

How to achieve your goals little by little. Mm hmm. I've already started to implement some of the tactics attaching that behavior to something you already do. Yeah.

It's really genius to be honest. He was fascinating. So BJ Fogg is going to blow your mind. He's going to help you achieve all the things you've ever dreamt of.

Also, we are live in Los Angeles on April 4th. So if you want to come see armchair expert live, I implore you to go to our website armchairexpertpod.com and follow the link for tickets. Come see us in party hardy on April 4th. Please enjoy BJ Fogg.

He's in our church. So I kind of fantasize. I already have, you know, by all measures, one of the greatest jobs someone can have. I stay lines in front of this camera and then they pay me too much.

It couldn't be better. But this job and then this job is even better and more preposterous that there's money associated with it. But I do fantasize about being a professor because it does seem like you can kind of craft your world that a lot of other occupations don't allow you to do. Is that is my fantasy accurate?

Maybe. Maybe. I'm a really weird breed. Okay.

So I'm not full time. Oh, okay. Well, that's helpful. So my design is I'm trying to craft my life.

I have a foot in academics when a research lab is Stanford and teach, frankly, whatever I want, whenever I want, I have tons of flexibility. Yeah. And then I have a foot in industry and that pays for everything. We got paid for everything.

Well, I like to think of it. It informs my research questions and academics. It helps me understand what's going to really move the needle in the real world. Yeah.

And so let's bring that in. And the things that need to be studied more rigorously academically, I can do it within Stanford. And I love teaching. Oh, my gosh.

I am just crazy about teaching. Do you do like huge intro classes or you just do very specific kind of small ones, like graduate student stuff? Or I want to get a big mix of students. Okay.

Oh, wide mix of students. So typically classes 12 people about 50 students will apply. So you have to apply. I want to be in this class.

I don't know if it's that's like, and then I pick and it's hard. Oh, I would hate to start. I think 12 that I think are the best fit for the class. Yeah.

And I don't really distinguish between, are they graduate students or not? And I want a balance of that. Yeah. But you know, the undergraduates can just be rock stars.

And maybe more and more as a pattern is that a lot of people bail at some point during their undergrad, right? There's now a lot of famous cases of entrepreneurs who don't don't even make sure. I think that's been sort of exaggerated. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's yeah.

There have been cases, but the few that have been publicized make it look like big in the really one of my students called me two days ago. He's doing a thing in South Africa interning down there. And he called me and he basically said, Oh, I want to do blah, blah, blah. And it wasn't about coming back to Stanford.

And I just said, look, there's so much still waiting for you at Stanford. Come back, do the work, get it done. And then you have your whole life to do these other things. Yeah, just helping them understand.

Well, what we learned from Sam Harris is that you can virtually just leave Stanford for 10 years and then just return as if nothing ever happened. They seem to have a very liberal policy on coming going. What's one of the great things about Stanford is they're really about the students and helping the students succeed. And the students actually don't know how much power they have.

Yeah. If students want something, it can happen. It's amazing. We love college.

We really come up and guess lecture. Yes, lecture. Oh, my God. What a waste of everyone's time.

Not ours. We could run our death. But we thought we thought of class. Yeah, we both have the fantasy Monica and I of when we retire, just taking classes recreationally and just never writing the papers.

Just kind of, you know, just learning. That's what I did. That's an undergraduate. So I was at Brigham Young.

So I was raised in Mormon family in California and did the Good Mormon Boy thing. I went to Brigham Young and I was in no hurry to get through. So I would just every semester I'd open the course catalog and say, Oh, I like this, this, this, this, with no career trajectory in mind. Yeah, I felt really lucky because then I took some time off and traveled literally around the world of the backpack and I just went back to this music class.

I want to take this hard class and, you know, technically I was pre-med English major, technically. But I made so little progress toward the major that I ended up with twice the number of units you would need to graduate with no regrets, but also no debt because the university was so inexpensive. And I was also running my own little business and working. So it worked.

Now, Stanford students can't do that, you know, because it's the workloads. And too, well, it's expensive. Oh, yeah. What are we looking at now?

Is it in the 80s? Probably something like, Oh, but the good news here's the good. It's really awesome. And a lot of people don't know this based on your parents income.

And I don't want to give the exact numbers here, but I'll just make one up. If your parents make less than $60,000 a year, so you can fact check me out. But it's something like this, then Stanford pays all your tuition and other costs. So basically, you can go to Stanford for free.

And then there's another year higher up at about 100, 100, 10, and there's another tier. So in other words, for me, as somebody who I just want to work with the most interesting young people, that just opens the door. And a lot of people don't know this. It is cheaper for some people to go to Stanford than like I started Fresno City College.

It is cheaper to go to Stanford than Fresno City College. Yeah, that's not that. You don't make that a part of the headline. And I'm hearing that increasingly, we just didn't event at UCLA.

And kind of, you know, there's a lot of that going on there as well. And yeah, I guess it is a nice way to kind of redistribute the opportunity. Well, in Stanford, as I see it, it's all about let's create the leaders of the future who will solve the big, hard problems. Yeah.

And the assumption there is the solutions are between the disciplines and you've got all the different perspectives. Yeah. Yeah. So let's bring people together with all these perspectives and backgrounds to tackle the hardest problems.

I like that. I was looking at your background. And as you just said, you were Mormon, you went to BYU, you got your undergrad there and your master's. Yeah.

Yep. And you published in some kind of Mormons swaying outlets, right? Yeah. So when I go to Utah, and then just even speaking from the data, not my own anecdotal thing, low is rate of smoking in Utah, right?

Generally, very low levels of obesity compared to the national average, low levels of drinking compared to the national average. There seems to be within the Mormon foundation a kind of group goal of betterment. Is that fair to say? You're right on.

Yeah. Starts well before the university starts when you're like this big, tiny. Yeah. Yeah.

I've been friends with several Mormons over the years, and there is this kind of valued sense of industry and just kind of this self-improvement. So the fact that you would have gone into behavioral science, and specifically how to create habits that you need. But let me build on that a little bit. Yeah.

Because you're right on. You're exactly right on. I think that's why that's built into me. Now, fast forward to today, I'm a gay man, I've been partnered for 25 years.

I'm obviously not an active practicing Mormon, but growing up, I grew up in a super faithful Mormon family in Fresno, California, the most glamorous of places in California. It truly is. And there's a saying, it's not in the scripture, I don't think, but there's a saying among Mormonism, and this doesn't get publicized, but here we go. As man is, God once was, as God is, man may become.

So from the beginning, you're instilled with the sense of you can progress and reach perfection. Yeah. That's part of it, which has a real downside. Sure.

You know, like, oh, you've got to just keep doing better and you've got to be perfect. People blazing perfection in all these things. And in some ways, tiny habits is a reaction to that, because you don't have to be perfect. Yeah.

Right. And so part of that is like, no, push that aside. And do you think that notion that as man is God once was and as God is, man can become, my education on the incredible success of the Mormon faith was one that empowered people individually more than the other religions did, that you were, you know, I have this right, your average parishioner can receive a message from God, which kind of differs from some of the other religions. And they credit that for being one of the reasons it spread in the way that it did, because it was an empowering relationship with God, maybe.

Yeah. You know, there is that sense, I think, but also you have the missionary effort. And so, good woman boy, doing the thing that my ancestors had done and all of my relatives, I want to, to your mission, I went to Peru, to the poorest parts of Peru, which even now, I so value, you know, I'm not active practicing, leaving Mormon, but I so value that two year experience serving people in Peru who were totally different from me, sure, and just seeing the world from their perspective. And it's not like two weeks, it's two years when I returned home, the culture shock was coming home, not going to Peru, just the opulence, just the indulgence.

And I just could not believe carpet on the floor and the size of the homes and whatever. So it really was a wonderful way to broaden my horizon. Well, I'm going to add to that, of my Mormon friends who went on mission, the conversion rate is horrendously low, right? I mean, you're knocking on hundreds of doors.

And being rejected. Yes. So I'll say on top of it that you probably pick up some grip in that two years. That's kind of a good character builder, yeah?

Yeah, it is. And it's no accident. A lot of Mormons are great salespeople. And they also train you young to get up in front of people and speak and give these little talks.

Okay. And that benefits me now, because I love speaking, I love teaching. I mean, if I had to give a keynote at a moment's notice, like you have a 60 minutes to get up, there's, I would love it. Right.

Yeah. I think it comes from that. But also, you know, having a passion, sharing it and not getting set back if people say no, sure. Yeah, Monica, buckle up.

I'm ready. I'm ready. Bog was a teacher aid or assistant to Philip Zimbardo who created the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. Wow.

Is that accurate? Yes. What a juicy, tutelage. Just remind people.

So the Stanford Prison Experiment famously was they made some students guards and some students inmates and then they just observed them for some time in a base. It wasn't a true experiment. It was an experience. Yeah.

It was an experience. Yes. It became under all kinds of critique and what I add. My favorite part of the whole thing that was pointed out is that the orchestrators of the experiment, he too is an experiment that he's not realizing or maybe he was realizing.

But he too is a, he is a guard in this experiment, ultimately, because he's in, he's the God of this whole thing is created. So he too is probably making decisions. He wouldn't normally make it. And it's in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford.

And it starts going right quickly. And he so absorbed in it. It took his wife to go, uh, fill. Really?

This is, this is not going well. And so they had to call it off. There was violence, right? There was like people got physical with each other.

The details. But people adopted these roles and they played these roles and it just grew and grew and expanded and had this dynamic so quickly that nobody expected. He was like a micro, a Lord of the flies like a micro birdie. And what were the big takeaways of that?

Like was it that if you're labeled something, you become that thing? Is that? Identity and context has surprising power over how we behave. And we don't even recognize that.

You know, that the context around us, the roles were given and the identity, the way we think about ourselves then leads to a whole bunch of behaviors. Now there's an upside to this and in tiny habits, in some ways, that's what you do. You unlock your positive potential by shifting your identity. But in this case, it was quite negative.

But that was, that was how dramatic it was. It was the big surprise. Yeah. Well, I think all of our egos would tell us, no, I'm me and I know who I am and you could put me in any situation and I would, I would do as I normally would do.

But in fact, none of us pretty much would do what we would normally do if the context radically changed or our role radically changed. Yeah. And you know, when it comes to changing your behavior, there's only three ways. One, have an epiphany, which you can't design really for yourself and others too, is tiny habits, tiny changes.

We'll talk about that. But three, the third way is to redesign your environment or your context. Yeah. And that reliably works.

Now, if you need a big, fast change, that's what you got to do. But not all of us can go, I'm going to move, I'm going to change my friends, I'm going to be wearing a suit and a tie and a name badge and, you know, be a preacher in Peru, right? Yeah. So I've watched over 15 years, tens of thousands of people attempt sobriety.

And then I've watched certain things result in certain, you know, outcomes. Geographical cures is what we call it. A lot of addicts will try a geographical cure. So they just can't break their addiction.

They're not ready to admit that they are powerless over it. But they'll do some radical thing. I'm moving to Texas and I'm going to be a rancher. These are grandiose schemes that are going to shake them out of this pattern.

So at least in sobriety, the geographical cure rarely bears any fruit. When I was reading about your three ways and the environment changing, one of them, I was thinking of this interesting thing I read about the London two being shut down and that all these people that would normally commute to work on it were forced to either ride bikes or walk in that when it resumes service, they lost a ton of passengers because all these people discovered, Oh, I like walking to work or I like biking. And then I stopped at this thing. So in that case, it did radically shift people's behavior to and from work.

So the key of redesigning your environment, whether you actually move or just readjust and stay in the same place is to do it in a way that it makes the new behaviors you want to do really easy or it's the only way you can get it done. I can't ride the tube now. I have to buy a cup to walk and then the unwanted behaviors make them harder or impossible. So it's not just go to a new place.

It's you've got to have that in mind. New behaviors do I want to facilitate or make mandatory and the flip side of that right? Because if you're an addict and you go somewhere else, there's still substances in that place and they're probably the same amount. Yeah, there's there's some bag in every city.

You know where she is. Yeah. Well, and you can do it even in the smallest of ways where you turn off notifications, right? Or you put water by you and import tiny habits is an interplay with environment change because you can go very simple thing like turn off notifications, which is tiny that then leads to a big impact because then you're not getting interrupted or pouring water, put it right in your work test.

So part of the fun of change and I know people aren't going to think change is fun, but it can be is it's almost like this puzzle or this challenge. Like how do I redesign this to make it so easy to do the things that I want to do to help me. And so just in general, I think most people can relate to wanting to change as New Year's Proves. People make resolutions and quite often people pursue a goal and they fall at that goal and then it lowers their self-esteem and everything else.

It kind of results in, you know, it's not good. Maybe a worst place and you started and there's so many errors in the way that we pursue goals that you've discovered in your lab. You've studied how people change, you study behavior and then you study habits. And so you have a very different approach than the conventional.

I'm stopping all calorie intake that you know, I'm going to work out six days a week. All these things that I think we can all relate to. You have a much kinder, softer approach, which you have proven is more effective. So in behavior design, which is what I describe my work as behavior design behaviors defined as a certain type of person doing an action in a given context or environment.

So it's not just the action, it's the type of person in an environment doing a specific action. Like this morning, for example, I didn't do my usual surfing workout that I'd be doing in Maui. Every morning in Maui I go surfing as my workout. This morning I did three sets of push-ups, right?

And so after you peed? Yes, because I know your habit steps. Yes, after I pee, you have just really investigated me so well done. Yes, so sometimes when I travel, I won't do any workout.

Now it's not that I failed in the habit, but it's a different habit. So the habit I have in Maui is different than the habit I have in California, the workout habit. And then when you travel, it's entirely different because you're in a different context. Yeah.

And so behavior is not just the action. It's a certain kind of person in a context doing an action. And if you change any one of those things, it's a different behavior. Right.

And the ultimate goal is, if I understood everything correctly, is to have behavior that then becomes habit. That's Nirvana in tiny habits. Yeah, that's what we're talking about there. Now, there are 15 ways behaviors can change.

And of those 15, one of them is to create and sustain a habit. So I've mapped out here 15 ways behaviors can change. But if you want to boil it down to be quite simple and helpful, it's there's a one time behavior, something you do one and done. Okay, give an example.

But can you replace it? That's a that's why that's a one and done. It could be you sign up to work with a trainer. Okay, it could be you buy a steamer for vegetables, one and done.

Uh huh. Next habits, forming habits, and the third bucket is stopping habits. So those are the most practical ones that people mostly care about. Yeah, and you break them down into dot span and path, right?

Behavior grid outlines the 15 ways behaviors can change. And it's a three by five matrix. And it's kind of like the periodic table of elements, but for behaviors. And so I mapped this out because it didn't exist surprisingly.

I mean, we've worried about behavior for thousands of years and more rigorously 130 or so. But there had been no mapping of here are the different ways behaviors can change behavior types. And I tried to get a graduate student in Europe to do it, you know, my mentoring role helped them. And they didn't do it.

So I just did it myself. And start on done right. So so now there is this it's called fog behavior grid. There's 15 types.

Each one has a name. So like a new behavior you do one time is called a green dot behavior green that it's new dot one time, whereas habits are blue path blue familiar path means you keep doing it. So each of those 15 types has a name. Now, I used to share this in keynotes and stuff in the audience would just start snoring.

It's not a good model for designing behaviors. It's good for analyzing behaviors. But it's good. We have it working on the behavior grid in my lab about 2009.

We started writing a guide for each one of the 15 behaviors. And we finished that in 2010. Yeah, then we created this tool called behavior wizard that you can still find behavior wizard org. And it's like, tell us what behavior you want to change.

And here's the guide. Yeah. And it was at that time where my lab shifted dramatically away from the previous work looking at what we called persuasive technology. It was that exact project was like, we're not going back looking at technology.

We're interested in human behaviors. Right. And these 15 types and helping people learn how to create any behavior you want. But the starting point is understanding what type because each of those 15 cells, there's a different way to design for each one.

Yeah. Now, so quitting something's one thing, right? But just looking at a healthy behavior. And I think in your TED talk, you use this as an example, which would just be like overall health, right?

So instead of trying to pursue overall health, which might include exercise or weight loss or blood pressure reduction, all these things, right? If you pursue that as a goal, it's nearly impossible. But if you create a swarm of little habits around this goal, that they in turn will lead you to that goal. So you can kind of almost just scrap that huge top of the mountain goal and focus more on the little tiny things that would ultimately lead up to that.

Yeah, right on. And so the good news is the way you change behavior, there's a reliable way to do it. There's a process, there's a system and then tiny habits, I outline the system. And this is not obvious.

It's something we had to discover and test and it's like, boom, now here it is. They're set this way. But you do start with first, what's my aspiration? Right.

Some people call it a goal. I either call it an aspiration outcome. What is it that I want? Yeah.

Next steps is to do what you just said, Dax is then figure out what are all the different behaviors that can take me to my aspiration or my outcome or my goal. And you explore that in a method that I call magic wanding. And it's a fun, creative method where you say, okay, if I want strong relationships with my siblings, then you could come up with a whole bunch of different behaviors that could help you. Now, you're not committing to any of them at this point.

And then later in the process, you pick which of those options that you actually want to do. And there's a way to pick the best. Right, I was just going to say, so this is really, really key because this technique requires some honesty with yourself, which I love, which is you say that people aren't going to do behaviors that either a require an incredible amount of sustained motivation. Right.

So people feel very motivated on December 31st. They have a lot of gumption on that day. But over time and workload and all this stuff, your motivation is going to ebb and flow. So yep, exactly.

So not ideal, you're aiming for the bleachers. If you're going to rely on motivation to create a behavior, if you're within the military or some way, you know, if you go the crossbed box, you're going to be super motivated for that hour. But human motivation goes up and down. Yeah.

And the surprise to me is when you go and look at the academic work, who's studied this, this must has not been studied for very long. Even the acknowledgement that motivation fluctuates over time, just there's not a rich literature on that. In fact, it hadn't been named these shifts. And so one of my boot camps, a professional training I was doing, we named it, we called it the motivation wave.

Now the fact that our motivation goes down, does it mean we're bad? It just that's human nature. That's how it works. Yeah, that's the reality.

As your motivation is going down for one thing, it's going up for a different thing. And that's how it should be. Because if you're motivated to do everything all the time, that's not very adaptive. So the way you circumvent that is you design for yourself at the lowest point of motivation.

And this is why I went to, like, so as I started teaching tiny habits in 2011, after a year of hacking my own behavior, I was like, Oh my gosh, this has changed my life because I was in a really tough spot. I mean, I was so many things were going wrong in my life and found this way. What you were you tweeting your weight? Oh my gosh, I don't remember.

But by the way, people hate it when you tweet your weight. I learned that very shortly. Yeah, that was really early early Twitter days. You're tweeting every day as a potential motivation until 15 seconds go, I completely forgot that.

I suppress that memory that I learned quickly that you have people don't like that. Yeah, but everyone he could get on a scale and he would tweet it. And I would assume your operating theory at that point was, I'm going to kind of shame myself in a way, right? Or I'll be accountable to this big group of people that didn't work.

Well, say this was before I had figured things out. This was, you know, I was a behavior scientist. I was believing all the old stuff worked. Okay.

This was before the breakthrough and behavior design, the tiny habits of, Oh, okay, if I just do this, if I track it, if I put myself on the hook and public exposure, I will then naturally be shamed into eating differently than it is. Or the positive spin is that you would have created an artificial motivation. Yeah. And sometimes that works, but some, you know, there's just, it's so hard to create a way to sustain high levels of motivation.

So as a behavior scientist, studying all this stuff and understanding how human nature works and humans work and so on. And then the real breakthrough, I think in my work, did not happen in the research laboratory. It was me deciding to teach this quirky thing I called tiny habits, just to anybody that wanted to sign up. And I had no idea this would keep going for years and I would add up to be over 40,000 people.

But what I learned about 5,000 people in, so I was a few months in, so in 2011, a woman wrote me and she said, I now see, I've endured a lifetime of self trash talk. Thank you so much, B.J. for helping me flip this and embrace the positive feelings and celebrate. We're talking about celebration and it was Wednesday of the five day program that I was teaching.

And that, I mean, I guess I was just so naive or so sheltered. I didn't realize that's where everyday people are at, where they are defeated, discouraged, they beat themselves up, self trash talk and so on. It was that moment. And I remember exactly where I was sitting when I read her email.

I referred to her in tiny habits called a ronda. That's not her only name, I changed her name. And I was just, this is a lot about you that you picked ronda and I'm not to derail you. But interesting.

I just very early around. Yeah, I knew I came from somewhere. And it was just like, okay, so this is a quirky little side thing I was doing. I need to bring this out bigger.

So I just kept doing it and kept doing it and for years. So the fact that I then interacted with thousands of people and thousands of people after that, real people in their real lives with real habits and real struggles, talk me so much about what really works and what doesn't work, then you combine that with the academic rigor. And that is the thing that I just feel so well, I want to say, fortunate, but also have a huge duty to share. Sure.

Because I've had this opportunity to queue up, I was able to learn these things, learn this method that's transformative. And now I'm delighted to share it. But I also feel like I must share this. What I love about it.

And I'm here to help you as a non Stanford professor do that is it's actually not abstract. So it sounds a little abstract, I think, on the surface, like habits and behaviors and how they differ from resolutions and all this stuff. But what I'll say is there are actual steps, there are actual concrete actions you take that have a result. Stay tuned for more farm chair.

If you dare. But the thing that I really, really like, I'm going to have you explain to Monica, talk about your goal of, or you would say, aspiration of doing more pushups and what you decided to do to create that outcome. Oh, wow. Eight years ago, I never thought I'd be talking about this publicly, but so I'm now 56.

So I was probably getting toward 50. And I thought, Oh, you know, look at the research, I'm going to lose muscle mass and density. So I want to do strength training every day. Well, what can I do?

Well, I'll do pushups. Okay, I'll do pushups. So in tiny habits, what you do is you take whatever did you want, strength training, and you make it really, really small. So pushups, but not 20, not 10, but I picked two super, super tiny.

Then it's like, okay, that's tiny. Then next you to where does this fit naturally in my day? Where do I place this? What can it come after?

And I figured out after a few trying a number of things at a fence after IP. And so then, but really quick, this is key. This is the right. So he has what's called what can trigger behavior.

So he has this statement. I love this statement. It's after I blank, I will blank. So you're building on something you already do as opposed to introducing an entirely new way of life.

It's like, well, we already know the things we're going to do throughout the day. I'm going to drink coffee. I'm going to go pee for in my case, 25 plus times a day. I'm going to go pee for me.

I'm going to take a couple hundred milligrams of nicotine. I'm going to watch TV. I'm going to put the kids down. I know what things I'm predictably going to do on any day.

Okay. Okay. So, so for me, I figured out after I pee, I will do two pushups. Okay.

And that was it. I got a little bog down in the particulars of that. I'm like, are you doing them in the bathroom? Yeah, none of my business?

No, you have been so forthcoming on this podcast. I am willing to go. So I'm working mostly from home. So half of my body is in the bathroom, half of it's in the hall, and my little dog is looking me right here.

When I'm traveling, like in hotel, I'll put towels on the floor. When I'm at Stanford, no, I don't do it. I don't do it. I look in the mirror or maybe I do squats.

But so mostly the mechanics of it to at home. I can do more than two if I want, almost all the time I do more than two. But the habit is to and if I do two, that's a success and I move on. But next to your earlier point, this is so important.

Every routine you already have is like real estate where you can place something after it. So after you start the coffee maker, what new habit would you put there after you buckle your seatbelt? What new habit could go there after you walk in the door after working with your back down? You can add a new habit there.

So sometimes you start with the tiny habit and look around where does it fit? And other times you could just say, what routines do I have? And what new thing can I place just after that? So a really good one for that is after I start the shower, what new habit could fit there?

Because we all do that and we have a few seconds to do something. For some people, it's longer than a few seconds. I have a gratitude habit that I do about my body. Some weird aspect of my body.

One of my MD friends does pull up. So he put pull up bar in his bathroom. He does pull up. Some people do squats.

But I do have a question because I feel like a lot of people, let's say they did yours, two pushups after pink. And then like you said, so when you're at Stanford, you're like, no, I'm not going to do that. Right? I feel like a lot of people will just get derailed and say like, well, I didn't do it earlier day when I paid at Stanford.

And then it just all goes to shit. How do you combat the showers good because they're always in normally in one position. Well, there's a mindset that goes and it goes against the tradition. So so much of what I'm sharing here is just not what people have heard before.

Part of it is a mindset. There's a mindset to change. And part of it is, hey, when I do what I intended, awesome, good for me, way to go, keep going. And when you don't do what you intended, you just let it go.

There's nothing about guilt or shame where I messed up. You just let it go and move on. He also encourages people to celebrate. Right?

I'm awesome. Yeah, I'm awesome. So if you do UP and then you pop up two pushups and then you go, I'm awesome. Or whatever.

I'm awesome fist pump, little dance. Anything that causes a positive emotion, and you do that to why you're in the habit. So that's what creates the habit is the emotion you feel. So when your brain associates a positive emotion with this behavior, the behavior becomes more automatic.

So it's not repetition. It's not number of repetitions. It's the association relation. Oh, so interesting.

I got to say my knee jerk to all this was like, no way. I'm cold turkey guy. I'm extreme. I'm so addicty.

You know, I'm like, no, no, we got to go ballistic on everything. But then it just it's ultimately most of those things are completely unsustainable in my experience. Like the nuclear option can be done for some months for me, but it really can't be done in perpetuity, you know, and going tiny and just in fact, I say it in the book, hey, people lower the bar, lower your expectations, which is like kind of the opposite of what we're hearing. Yeah.

But but the key, I mean, there's two keys. One is help yourself do what you already want to do. And the second is help yourself feel successful, feel not me. And part of setting yourself up to feel successful is lowering the bar, lowering your expectations.

And when you exceed it, extra credit, I'm a rock star, I'm a plus student, but man, pretty much always floss one, two, three, two pushups or poor glass of water. Yeah, I advise this all the time, people will go, oh, I'm going to get you. I'm going to go to the gym for an hour every other day or whatever. And I'm like, what if you just committed to like 10 minutes, just to start there for something to build on it's just such a big swing to like, so you're going to do four hours of strength training a week and you're likely not achieve that.

And then you'll end up doing nothing. So, you know, black and white thinking, you know, that's not very helpful. Perfection. Like I have to be perfect doing this.

And this is why I don't advocate tracking, you know, oh, tracking, if it helps. So back to the two, I call them maxims. If it helps you feel successful, do it. But if tracking is going to make you feel unsuccessful, it's not right for you.

It's not right for you with that particular change. Accountability. Does it help you feel successful or not? Setting a goal as a lot of people talk about does that help you feel successful?

So you can take everything I think that you've heard about behavior behavior change. And those two things are your limits, does it helping you do what you want to do? And is it helping you feel successful? Well, Monica's a type A overachiever.

That's right. So what do you think what method lends itself to that personality type? This one. Yeah, so, yes.

So for sure where you're energized and you're used to focusing, I mean, I think all of us in the room are this, right? But when motivation's high, take that energy that you have and focus on redesigning your environment. Now, do the one time behavior before the motivation drops and invest in training yourself to do stuff, getting the equipment you need, and so on. So then future good behaviors are super easy, right?

Because you've scaled up, you have the equipment and the know-how and so on. And that is the best investment of a motivation peak. Like when the motivation wave goes up, don't go out and run for five hours. Because that doesn't then have, I mean, you're going to be sore the next day.

Take that time and put in the work you need in order to create a sustainable system. Yeah, exactly. I think I'll find the exact quote and say it on the fact check. But I think Stephen King had some tip about this for reading because people are like, I don't have time, which I'm so guilty of.

And he has something about don't wait till you have a half hour to read. If you have five minutes, take that five minutes. Like reading two pages is better than waiting to read 50. Yeah.

And then that's how you actually finish a book is two pages at a time. Lower the bar. So in my own life, on summer when I wanted to do a lot of reading, all I had to do was open the book. Yeah, I know.

And then I had a bookmark in there with a smiley face. I was all happy. That was my to help me feel successful. And so open the book and I would usually read more than just a sentence or two, but the habit was just open the book.

Yeah, I had one time had a goal or a rule, which was just all you had to do is put on your workout gear. Perfect. Yeah. Like just one on then you can lounge about if you want.

But most times once that gear was on, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get into it. Now, you don't state this or maybe you do and I just didn't do enough research. But as I was thinking about all this, I couldn't help but imagine that the Nirvana for all this would be someone just illustrated the greatest example of this. I wish I could credit them.

But they were trying to explain like the subconscious versus the conscious and the example they gave was when you're operating a car on the highway at 80 miles an hour, it's actually very complicated task. It takes people years to get good at that and often some accidents, but you are in that car and everything that's happening is subconscious. Like you're just you're turning the wheel and you need to you're accelerating, you're breaking, you're signaling, but you are your conscious brain is thinking about God knows what like, you know, in fact, I think it was saying those points. But your conscious brain is so busy thinking about other things that you're mostly completely unconscious of what you're doing to operate the vehicle.

And I would imagine that these habits, the best version of them would be like, you just do them and you're not even aware of them. The analogy I've used to describe this, because a lot of people say, Hey, what are the tiny habits you used to lose weight or be more productive or whatever? And it's like, they become so seamless in my life that it's I could think hard and pull them out, but they don't feel like things that created it. I used to be the president of the pottery club at Stanford, and I was a graduate student.

And the analogy is that when you're hand building with clay and you want to add to a pot, you take a piece of clay and you add it and you rub it in and eventually the seams go away and it's indistinguishable from the rest of the vase. And that's how it feels when these habits are just so part of your life, you kind of forget you actually created as a habit. It's just what you do. And so you can do many of these and it doesn't feel like, Oh, I'm sustaining 200 habits.

It's they just become part of your life part of your routine. Yeah, just kind of fades away in the background. So yeah, you changed your so originally he was tweeting his way, not ideal. He went from I want to say like 182 to 194.

I was just the fact that people were upset. Like, it's his Twitter. If he can catalog his way, people need to relax. Only I'm here to say.

That was the reason I eat that was I'm gonna go look that up. Yeah, that's a bad idea of people do not do that. But kind of if you could and again, you'll as you just said, you're probably they've been filed into the white noise of your brain. But what are some of the things that you change your approach, you do a tiny habits approach.

And now you've reached a way that you like it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of it. It's one you like. So what was the swarm of bees that surrounded that a big part of it was dialing in what foods were healthy for me. And I hesitate to say what those are.

I can take that as a prescription. I think it's different for different people. Yeah, but certainly I'm gonna go to the bus on cookies and cake. Oh, yeah.

I'm really sustaining on that. I'll give some that I think are applicable to everybody had to have it of filling up a water glass and putting it on my work desk, not drinking the water, just putting it there. And there's certain supplements that I think are good for me. I had a habit of putting them on a dish and putting it on my work desk.

When I travel, I have the habit of packing my travel food because I can't rely on what's gonna be in the plane or I got in the hotel last night at two in the morning. And so there's certain foods I bring I bring nuts and I bring boiled eggs and some vegetables ready to go and so on. So it's just figuring out I think the foods that work for you and then making it really easy to do and winding those in as habits. And so really quick, what is your habit or your routine to prepare your food?

Is that happen on the same day every week? Does it happen in preparation for a trip? Well, it depends. But on a day-to-day basis, my partner loves cooking and most of the time, yeah, I know.

He will not let me in the kitchen very often. I get to fix lunch once in a while, but he fixes breakfast. We've dialed in the breakfast exactly what it is. And so he fixes the breakfast and but the fridge is designed in a way once a week.

We call it super fridge where everything in there is on our game plan. There's nothing in the fridge that's off limits at any time. So any time I can open the fridge, eat whatever I want, as much as I want. That's such a good feeling.

And then for lunch, often I get to do my own lunch, of course, which will be fresh greens, sardines. My partner doesn't like sardines. I kind of love them. And then, for example, then I'll bring something in like mustard or a cilantro pesto or something like that, which I know is on my game plan.

And then there's some things I go back and forth. I'm like, she's wasn't and it is and it's not. I know it's bad for me just from my own body, not everyone else's. But for mine, yeah, I get tons of flam, all kinds of disturbing things from dairy.

And then I go off it for long enough that I remember. No, I don't think that did give me all that stuff. And then I go back for a long time. Yeah, I like to relearn lessons over and over again.

That's kind of my hobby. But I think one of the most helpful things people can do in this domain and if the aspiration is lose weight, stop and pause and say, is that really what you're going after? Well, first step is clarify. Is it really weight loss, or is it more vigor or energy or whatever?

And so the first step in behavior design is to get clear on your aspiration. That might mean revising it. Yes. Okay, great.

So this is the getting honest with yourself. So you say that behavior needs to have impact. It needs to be a behavior you can do. And it has to be a behavior you actually want to.

So this is all crazy key. So the example I think of all the time is I get in debates with a couple different friends of mine who have expressed goals of they want to family. Okay. And I will say to them quite often, either you don't really want to family.

Does that mean like have kids? Yeah, a partner. Okay, got it. Right.

But all the behavior is demonstrating the opposite pursuit. And I will say to them, you should feel no obligation to want a family. It's fine if you don't want a family. If you just in theory want a family, we have to first figure out like, do you really?

Because if you really want one, then these behaviors are antithetical to that. So you just got to be honest about one or the other, in my opinion. It's like, you're free to live however the fuck you want and pursue whatever you want. I'm so great with it.

But if you're telling me you have this goal and I'm your friend, I feel obligated to point out these are the steps you take to get to that goal. And this is just a circular debate for happens quite often. But I don't think people are dreadfully honest about what they actually want. They want some things in theory.

And then tiny habits the way I break it down is once versus should's. I should have a family because my parents want grandkids and did it or somehow I just should. The shoulds are very hard to turn into habits and they don't reliably become habits. The wants is what you focus on.

That's why that first statement help yourself do what you already want to do. And if it's not that, then don't do the show. It's hard to sometimes differentiate should and want you think you want that because you've been ingrained to feel like you should. It's on the same continuum as want to need.

Like we all say we need this and it's like, no, you want that. But what about the person that's driving by the way this if you have I heard this when I was 27 and just leaving 7 11 to have my second set of hot dogs that I would get there almost every day hung over and then making plans to get fucked up soon. I would think, well, what if you don't want anything that is on the healthy spectrum or the productive spectrum that some people must be sitting with themselves going, there's nothing I want that is healthy. Well, but there's other domains.

So, okay, tightiness, creativity, relationships. All right. There's other areas in the even if you're partying, well, you want relationships, you want to go home or create music. So I'm a huge and so in tiny habits, I only prescribe one habit and everything else is about a system to do any habit you want.

If I were pressed to prescribe other habits, because they like, oh my God, tell people how it's happened. There's one or but if I were pressed, I would say create a habit of playing a musical instrument daily. Oh, wow. I think that there's so many reasons and what's worked really well for people, guitar, just play three chords on the guitar.

That's all so find where that fits in your day, play those three chords. And if you want to do more, do more. And if you don't want to, don't time to set it aside, celebrate my awesome idea to have it and so on. Why is that the one that you think is, by the way, Monica, are you so I'm using music right now?

I know three chords. Oh, good for you. It could be P and O, it could be ukulele, it can be guitar, it could be recorder, which I love and everyone hates, but I love it'll be single. No one's with someone.

Music. Oh, how do I talk about this? The vibration, the creativity, the expressing yourself, the fantasy that maybe you perform for somebody someday. There's just lots of things.

I had a voice disability growing up. And in the audio version of my book, I recorded a special preface where I talked about that disability because it was not guaranteed I would narrate my own book. I had to audition for it. Sure.

And I tried to negotiate. Like, I'm going to be the narrator. I went back and forth and find my agent said, PJ, they're not going to guarantee you narrating this because they're investing in the book. Can I quickly ask, was it a physiological thing?

Do you have a vocal cord issue or do you have a speech issue? I talk like this until I was 18. Oh, no. I had no lower register.

We call that an academia mini mouseitis. Yes. And that's what I know that Monica. But it was painful.

So all through high school, having a voice like this, I was made fun of, bullied and so on. And so as I was narrating the book, and I was getting to the end of it, it was the last day I thought, I'm going to write a preface just for this, just for this because it doesn't really print versions done and out. And so I told the story. And I wrote it up.

I wrote it up. And then I went out to read it to my partner and I said, okay, I'm going to be narrating this or recording this. But let me read it to you to make sure it works. And as I started reading it, I broke down and started crying.