How to Achieve Anything — Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
Do you find yourself procrastinating from getting the body you want? or is it something about business idea that you keep postponing then BJ Fogg is here to help you to take actions on your goals with his book Tiny habits. Here some of the key insights from the book.
Change your Approach towards a Change:
Whenever you fail to accomplish something you are mostly to relate it to lack motivation. This is not exactly the truth and you should stop blaming it on you. You have to dig deep on understanding human behavior to understand that motivation is not the reason for long time growth and habits. In short term motivation does play a role but for life long good habits it does not matter much.
Break your goals into manageable chunks, this makes your goal less complex and gives you small actionable items to start working.
Habit Formation:
Fogg describes habit forming in three different ways.
- Epiphanies — A quick revelation or to understand everything magically, Which is practically not possible.
- Environmental Changes — If you are trying to get to gym then make other people around you to make same changes in their lifestyle. By this way the environment keeps you going with the goal. But it is not easy to convince other to make lifestyle changes.
- Tiny Habits — These are habits that take only few minutes to do and overtime leads to life changing habits. Example if you are trying to get fit then instead of joining the gym you can start by doing few push ups everyday after you wake up from your bed. These tiny habits wire your brain to prepare for next challenges.
There Factors of an Action
There are there factors to every action that we perform.
- Motivation/willingness perform an action.
- The capability to perform the action.
- Prompt which triggers you to perform the action.
If it’s easier you are more likely to do it
Author shares real life example from Instagram. Instagram founders knew that people have the motivation to share their photos, but did not have the capability (a user friendly platform) to share it. Instagram fixed the problem and within the first 18 months of it’s inception Instagram was sold to $1 billion. Instagram gave user the capability to share photos with just few taps, which resulted in creating habit for millions of users.
In order to form a habit make the process easier. You can start with few pushups in your then joining the gym. Break your goal into manageable chucks which makes it easy to perform.
Design your Prompts
Prompts are triggers that initiate an action, example the Snooze button in alarm is also a prompt to make you sleep. You can design your prompts to perform certain action. If you want to drink more water then you keep a water bottle in front of you instead of keeping it in kitchen.
Like anchors, these prompts can prevent the day from dragging you across all places and keep you in a productive path. You have to be careful on where you are setting up your prompts it should be easy to notice. Example if you want to develop a habit of reading in the morning then you can keep a book next to your coffee cup so that it acts as a prompt to make you read books.
Hope this has given you some insights into what the book is about. Remember to keep your goals into small manageable chucks which makes it easy to start. And setup prompts to help you accomplish a task.
