Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(9)

Adrenaline races, stakes are high, hard things get done.

When motivation is middling, people will do a behavior only if it’s fairly easy—like Katie’s desk tidying.





2. The harder a behavior is to do, the less likely you are to do it


If someone asked you to show them the cover of the book you’re reading right now, would you do it? Probably. It requires a flick of the wrist and an interruption of your reading, which is a minor annoyance but no big deal. It’s easy to do. However, if someone asked you to read this entire book aloud to them, then your response would probably be different. You would need a lot of motivation to do this behavior. Perhaps the person asking is visually impaired. Perhaps you are offered one thousand dollars to do it. Those things could work. My point: You need serious motivation to do something difficult.





Fogg Behavior Model





Here’s a related insight that might begin to transform your life (it transformed mine): The easier a behavior is to do, the more likely the behavior will become habit.

This applies to habits we consider “good” and “bad.” It doesn’t matter. Behavior is behavior. It all works the same way.

Consider Katie’s scrolling-in-bed habit. She already has her phone in hand, thanks to her alarm. So scrolling, as a next step, is really easy to do.





3. Motivation and ability work together like teammates


You need to have both motivation and ability for a behavior to land above the Action Line, but motivation and ability can work together like teammates. If one is weak, the other needs to be strong to get you above the curve. In other words: The amount you have of one affects the amount you need of the other. Understanding the relationship of motivation and ability opens the door to new ways of analyzing and designing behaviors. If you have only a little bit of one, then you need more of the other—i.e., they compensate each other.

In Katie’s case, her desk-tidying habit is fairly motivated but also easy to do. She told me that it takes less than three minutes for her to complete her tidying routine, which means it’s not something that is going to make her late for picking up her kids. Her ability to do this behavior started out in the easy zone, and the more she does it, the more streamlined her process becomes. In general, the more you do a behavior, the easier it gets.

The Fogg Behavior Model describes a snapshot in time: one specific behavior at a specific moment. But I’ve also used this model to show how behavior happens over time: Behavior 1 Behavior 2 Behavior 3. That’s a powerful extension of this model. But here I simply want to point out how most behaviors become easier to do when repeated.





Fogg Behavior Model





Even on days when Katie’s motivation dips, the tidying task is still easy enough to make up the difference. An important point: if she had started by cleaning her whole office she wouldn’t have developed this behavior into a habit. When she felt rushed, she’d skip it.





4. No behavior happens without a prompt


If you don’t have a prompt, your levels of motivation and ability don’t matter. Either you are prompted to act or you’re not. No prompt, no behavior. Simple yet powerful.

Motivation and ability are continuous variables. You always have some level of motivation and ability for any given behavior. When the phone rings, your motivation and ability to answer it are always there in the background. But a prompt is like lightning. It comes and goes. If you don’t hear the phone ring, you don’t answer it.

You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening.

A year or so ago I went to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. I walked into my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. When I scanned the room, I saw something on the bureau.

“Oh nooooo,” I said out loud to absolutely no one.

There was an overflowing basket of goodies. Pringles. Blue chips. A giant lollipop. A granola bar. Peanuts. I try to eat healthy foods, but salty snacks are delicious. I knew the goody bin would be a problem for me at the end of every long day. It would serve as a prompt: Eat me! I knew that if the basket sat there I would eventually cave. The blue chips would be the first to go. Then I would eat those peanuts. So I asked myself what I had to do to stop this behavior from happening. Could I demotivate myself? No way, I love salty snacks. Can I make it harder to do? Maybe. I could ask the front desk to raise the price on the snacks or remove them from the room. But that might be slightly awkward. So what I did was remove the prompt. I put the beautiful basket of temptations on the lowest shelf in the TV cabinet and shut the door. I knew the basket was still in the room, but the treats were no longer screaming EAT ME at full volume. By the next morning, I had forgotten about those salty snacks. I’m happy to report that I survived three days in Austin without opening the cabinet again.

Notice that my one-time action disrupted the behavior by removing the prompt. If that hadn’t worked, there were other dials I could have adjusted—but prompts are the low-hanging fruit of Behavior Design.





Teaching the Behavior Model


Now that you’ve seen how my Behavior Model applies to various types of behavior, I’ll show you more ways to use this model in the pages that follow. When I work with students at Stanford or train industry innovators, I teach them how to explain my Behavior Model in two minutes or less. I first give a demonstration, drawing on the whiteboard as I explain each part. After I finish the two-minute demo, I outline the steps that work best, including some specific phrases to use. Finally, I have each person step up to a whiteboard or get out a piece of paper and explain the model to someone else while sketching it out in real time. Learning to explain the Behavior Model quickly and clearly is one of the most useful skills in Behavior Design.