Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(8)

Katie told me that it all starts because her phone is her alarm clock. When it goes off, she plucks it off the nightstand, rolls over on her side, and starts tapping and scrolling. I asked when her alarm is set to wake her.

Four thirty a.m.

“Whoa,” I said.

At the beginning of the year, Katie had made a resolution to work out every day. Some days she did, but most days she didn’t. It wasn’t because she’d decided not to; it was because she got sucked into the digital vortex despite her early wake-up time. Those red notification numbers demanded attention. One click would lead to a video, which would lead to a feed from someone she didn’t even know, then to another video, and then to the five thirty alarm going off.

Another day had begun by not doing the workout she had promised herself she would do. Cue the self-criticism and guilt. She didn’t like the pattern that she’d fallen into, but she told herself that she was on top of her life in so many ways that maybe this was where her “togetherness” ran out.

Let’s consider both of Katie’s habits together: desk tidying and binge scrolling.

Two behaviors, two wildly different feelings.

One behavior makes Katie feel good and helps her to achieve her larger aspiration of being productive. This tidiness habit has become so automatic that she hardly even thinks about it. In contrast, the scrolling habit is enjoyable in the moment but makes her feel disappointed in herself afterward. Scrolling in bed drives her crazy, but she often can’t resist doing it.

These behaviors feel very different to Katie. Yet the components aren’t. All behavior is driven by the same three elements. I wanted Katie to know that she hadn’t run out of “togetherness,” or willpower. She merely had a third habit—a scrolling habit—that was getting in the way of a poorly designed exercise habit.

Remember, for a behavior (B) to occur, three elements must converge at the same moment: Motivation, Ability, and Prompt.

It’s a model that has profound implications. Each person’s motivation, ability, and prompt will be different in any given situation. The specifics of motivation or ability may differ by culture or age. And that’s okay. The universe is unendingly complex, yet we can observe a phenomenon and break it down using some basic principles that apply to every circumstance.

Consider this visual representation of B=MAP, which shows how motivation and ability work in relationship to each other.





Fogg Behavior Model





The first thing to notice is the big dot. That’s Katie’s habit of tidying her desk. The dot’s location tells us where her motivation and ability are when she is prompted to act. You can see that her motivation is in the middle and that her ability to tidy her desk is on the easy-to-do side of the spectrum.

Now take a look at the curved Action Line.

True to its smiling shape, the Action Line is our buddy. If I were to have only one thing engraved on my headstone, it would be this happy little curve.

When a behavior is prompted above the Action Line, it happens. Suppose you have high motivation but no ability (you weigh 120 pounds, but you want to bench-press 500 pounds). You’re going to fall below the Action Line and feel frustrated when you are prompted. On the other hand, if you are capable of the behavior but have zero motivation, a prompt won’t get you to do the behavior; it will only be an annoyance. What causes the behavior to be above or below the line is a combination of motivation pushing you up and ability moving you to the right. Here’s a key insight: Behaviors that ultimately become habits will reliably fall above the Action Line.

Let’s plot Katie’s scrolling behavior.





Fogg Behavior Model





Yikes! Look at that big dot. Sky-high motivation and high ability—easy to do. On top of that, you know that Katie’s prompt is reliable. Her phone blasts an alarm every morning at four thirty a.m.

When you see it on the model, it makes sense why Katie, a successful, accomplished, and capable person, is having a hard time kicking this scrolling habit. You can see why it’s wired in. Unless something changes, she’s likely to keep scrolling and not exercising.

We have to do two things: redesign her scrolling habit, then redesign her exercise habit. The first thing to remember is that there is no one solution for every behavior challenge. Our job is to adjust the components—M, A, and P—and find out what combination works best in each circumstance to get the behavior we want. We have to make her scrolling hard to do or change her motivation to scroll, then we can look at her exercise habit. There are two core principles that we can rely on when we analyze behavior by turning the dials of motivation, ability, and prompt.





MOTIVATION AND ABILITY HAVE A COMPENSATORY RELATIONSHIP


Once you understand how this principle works, you can design for almost any behavior you want.

The curved Action Line on our graphs visually represents this principle, but here’s the explanation in plain English.





1. The more motivated you are to do a behavior, the more likely you are to do the behavior


Fogg Behavior Model





When motivation is high, people not only take action when prompted, they can also do difficult things. If you’ve ever read about a mother fighting off a bear to save her child or an ordinary person pulling someone out of the path of an oncoming subway car, you get the point.