Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(23)
Chapter 3
Ability—Easy Does It
What’s the difference between Yahoo! and Google? Between Blogger and Twitter? Why does one innovation fade and another take over the world? Talent? Vision? Money? Luck?
All of those things and plenty more. But the biggest one is perhaps the most overlooked.
Simplicity.
When Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom started talking about creating a new app in 2009, they began by examining the previous year’s failure—a location-sharing app called Burbn. They did a thorough digital autopsy, analyzing not only what went wrong but also what went right. Inside the analytics of failure, they found a multibillion-dollar seed: photo sharing.
Even though few people had liked the checkin part of Burbn (the app shared your whereabouts in real time with your friends), they had loved the sharing pictures part of the app. So the partners decided they would create an app that allowed people to capitalize on the iPhone cameras conveniently stashed in their pockets. Photo sharing was the Golden Behavior for Systrom and Krieger—their potential customers already wanted to do it. Sharing pictures with other people is fun, and everyone likes positive feedback. Another important Golden Behavior for the duo was allowing people to add filters to make their pictures of food and sunsets and puppies look much better. This would make users feel good about the pictures they were sharing, which encouraged them to do it more often. Notice that Krieger and Systrom nailed the motivation component by choosing a behavior that people already wanted to do. According to the Behavior Model, they were already in good shape. That alone might have brought them some success. But what they did next catapulted them into the pantheon of Silicon Valley demigods—they made their Golden Behaviors easy to do.
Krieger was fresh out of one of my classes at Stanford. He knew how human behavior worked and how important it was to make things easy to do if you wanted people to do them. This was another place where Burbn had fallen short. There were a lot of features that people didn’t need or couldn’t figure out how to use. This realization reinforced Krieger and Systrom’s desire to make the new photo-sharing app simple. So that’s what they did.
When Instagram launched in 2010, it took only three clicks to post a photo. According to the original description in the app store, Instagram was as “easy as pie,” which is notable when you look at their early competition. Krieger and Systrom weren’t the first people to understand that people love photos and might want to share them. Their biggest competitors when they launched were Flickr, Facebook, and Hipstamatic. All three offered users great full-feature experiences, and Facebook and Flickr had the advantage of money and infrastructure. Instagram, on the other hand, was a free app built by a couple of dudes in a coffee shop. All you could do was take a picture, put a filter on it, and share it with people. That kind of simplicity was not (and still isn’t) the norm. While all of Instagram’s competitors had features that people wanted, none of them cracked the code on photo sharing. Less than eighteen months after the app’s launch, Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars. (At the time, the behemoth social network was openly mocked for overpaying. Today, Instagram’s estimated value is more than $100 billion.)
So why was Instagram’s simple approach so successful? Why doesn’t every app developer do that? It seems pretty obvious. Right?
Not exactly.
Most people operate under the assumption that they’ve got to go big or go home. They think that in order to kick a bad habit, destress, or make a pile of money they’ve got to do something radical. Go cold turkey. Sell their house and move to the beach. Put all their chips on the table. Go all in. Those who take these extreme measures and succeed are lionized. If you’ve ever watched a special about an Olympic athlete who’s been training twelve hours a day since she was three or a successful businessperson who sold everything and moved to Italy to find true happiness, you know what I’m talking about. There’s nothing wrong with taking bold action. Life and happiness occasionally demand it. But remember that you hear about people making big changes because this is the exception, not the rule. Narrative drama comes from bold action, not from the incremental progress that leads to sustainable success. Which is why I don’t have a camera crew following me around while I do my two post-pee push-ups. (Okay, maybe that’s not the only reason.) My point is that big bold actions on the balance are not as effective as many of us are led to believe.
While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big bold moves actually don’t work as well as small stealthy ones. 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.
Despite all this, go big or go home is the way many people approach change. As a result, most people don’t know how to think tiny. Designing simple behaviors is not a skill everyone has. If they do break things down into steps, those steps are often too big or complicated. The result is that people become overwhelmed and find themselves without a way to correct their course when they get caught in bursts and busts of motivation because their ebbing Motivation Wave leaves them high and dry.