Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(55)

Now fifty-one, Sukumar regularly does fifty push-ups in the morning to kick off his one-hour workout routine that ends with a five-minute plank. He still has back pain on occasion, but he manages any flare-ups with strength training and stretches.

When I recently checked with Sukumar about sharing his story, he told me, “BJ, I’ve transformed myself.”

In this book I’ve shared true stories from people who have gone from tiny to transformative. In each case, we’ve looked at one key aspect of their Behavior Design journey—whether it was motivation matching, increasing ability, designing prompts, or embracing celebration. I’ve walked you through the process of designing new habits, and I’ve introduced some vital skills that can make you a true Habit Ninja.

But how on earth do you go from doing two push-ups to fifty push-ups? How do you win the battle of the paunch for good? How do you run that 10K you’ve been dreaming of for years? How do you finally save up enough money to cover your bills in case of an emergency? How do you start that business you’ve been talking about for months? How do you lower your cholesterol levels and keep them there?

I can answer all these questions with good news: When you apply the Tiny Habits method consistently, your habits will scale naturally.

This chapter will explain how habits grow and multiply. I will also lay out a framework that will help you to recognize the change skills you already have and how to troubleshoot habits that have gone astray. All of this will help you clearly see your own path from tiny to transformative.

Let’s start by revisiting the metaphor I used in chapter 1.

Cultivating habits—good or bad—is a lot like cultivating a garden.

Think of it this way: You could stand on your back porch and wish that your scraggly yard would somehow become beautiful. As the weeks go by, weeds begin to grow. You pull a few out here and there, but this becomes laborious so you stop. But you keep wishing that beautiful things would grow instead.

A much better approach is to design the garden (habits) you want. You identify what vegetables and flowers you’d love to have in your garden (motivation), you choose plants you can easily support (ability), and you consider which spot in the yard is best for each plant (finding a place in your routine).

It takes a bit of planning and care in the beginning to get those delicate little sprouts up and out of the ground, but you’ve made sure the roots are strong by celebrating your tiny successes. Soon it’s time to let your rooted habits do their natural thing—grow bigger.

You’re still there doing things, of course. You are watering and weeding, but you’re not engaging in a different process or straining yourself. It’s the same with your new habits. It may take some extra experimentation and attention at the beginning, but once you’ve established new habits in the right way, it doesn’t take much beyond doing them consistently for them to flourish.

After you’ve established your garden, the sunflowers will grow bright and tall, and the strawberries will stretch and spread.

Like plants, each of your habits will scale differently and at its own pace. A push-up habit might grow from two to fifty, but the final size of each habit will vary depending on time and individual human limitations. An eat-an-avocado-every-morning habit may never get any bigger, but this habit might propagate a blueberries-after-dinner habit or a celery-with-lunch habit.



How long does it take for habits to grow to their full expression? There is no universal answer. Any advice you hear about a habit taking twenty-one or sixty days to fully form is not entirely accurate. There is no magic number of days.

Why? Because the formation time of a habit depends on three things.

The person doing the habit



The habit itself (the action)



The context





In fact, it’s the interaction between these elements that determines how difficult (or easy) it is to form the habit. That’s why no one can say for sure that habit X takes Y number of days to become fully realized.





Change is a process, just like growing a flower in the garden or healing a cut on your finger. And like any process, there are things we can do to optimize it—to speed things along and make course corrections along the way. By understanding how our habits grow and what our role is in the growth process, we can reliably design for the change—the transformation—we want in our life.

Let’s dig into specifics.





Grow and Multiply


When it comes to the process of scaling habits, there are two general categories: habits that grow and habits that multiply.

When I use the word “grow” in this context, I mean that the habit gets bigger. You meditate for thirty minutes each day instead of only taking three breaths. You clean the entire kitchen, not just one counter. The essence of these behaviors is the same, but you do more of them. The habits expand.





Like a plant, habits can grow naturally.





As you look at how habits grow, you’ll see that each habit will grow only so big. (Same thing with plants.) Sukumar’s daily plank habit topped out at five minutes, which is pretty impressive. He either couldn’t do it any longer without straining himself or he didn’t want to do it anymore—both things that will weaken a habit. Sukumar had found the natural growth boundary of his planking habit.