Quotes from B.J. Fogg

When something is tiny, it's easy to do—which means you don't need to rely on the unreliable nature of motivation.

When you celebrate effectively, you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain. By feeling good at the right moment, you cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed.

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.

By keeping the bar low, you keep the habit alive.

Context Prompts can be helpful for one-time actions, like registering to vote. However, using Context Prompts for daily habits can be both stressful and ineffective.

landscape effectively is one of the biggest challenges in our modern lives. When you set up too many Context Prompts, they can actually have the opposite effect—you become desensitized and fail to heed the prompt. You end up not hearing notification dings and not seeing sticky notes. It's like living next to train tracks—at first the noise of a train is deafening, then . . . what train?

Using Anchors is a great approach to designing prompts because anyone can do it. There's no need for fancy watches or whizzy apps to prompt new habits. You can do it yourself more effectively, and you will discover how transformative a simple design hack can be. The power of after is not magic, it's closer to chemistry. Combine the right behaviors with the right chronology, and, poof, a new habit is created.

Narrative drama comes from bold action, not from the incremental progress that leads to sustainable success.

After I (ANCHOR), I will (NEW HABIT).

Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions is freeing because if the change program doesn't satisfy these two requirements, it's not worth your time.

It's time for someone to say it: You've got to lower your expectations.

The important thing to remember about procrastination is that the perception of difficulty can be just as important as the actual difficulty. In addition, every day you don't do the task, it grows in your head, which makes the task seem more and more difficult.

I found that people typically have the most routines in the morning. This makes morning fertile soil for cultivating new habits.

Other lives are more unpredictable. No matter how haphazard your day might seem, I guarantee that you already have many routines that occur consistently enough to be used as an Anchor.

Good feelings spur the production of a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger in the brain) called dopamine that controls the brain's "reward system" and helps us remember what behavior led to feeling good so we will do it again. With the help of dopamine, the brain encodes the cause-and-effect relationship, and this creates expectations for the future.

Location is the most important factor when you pair Anchors and new habits.

But remember that you hear about people making big changes because this is the exception, not the rule.

Simplicity changes behavior.

To find the Trailing Edge, we look at the Anchor under a microscope to see what the end of an action looks like. This is particularly important for Anchors that are rather fuzzy.

Doing two push-ups against a wall is easy to accomplish so you're much more

When I first teach people my Behavior Model, they are sometimes a little dubious when I tell them this is a universal model. They wonder how one model with just four letters could possibly account for every kind of behavior in every culture.

And demotivators can push us into self-criticism. If you want to cut down on calories, putting a note on your fridge that says, STOP! YOU'RE OVERWEIGHT would certainly be demotivating, but it's also demoralizing. We change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so make sure your attempts at demotivating behavior don't morph into guilt trips.

You are doing something worthy of celebration This is the most important answer because recognizing that you are doing something worthy of celebration will change so much for you. Your ability to ignore self-criticism and embrace feeling good about your successes will ripple out into your life in positive ways that go far beyond the habits you create and celebrate.

If you do the Maui Habit and feel that it won't be a great day, I advise you to still say this phrase. I say it even on mornings when I feel exhausted or overwhelmed or anxious about the day ahead. In that moment, sitting on the edge of my bed, I try to feel optimistic. But if this feels phony, then I adjust the phrase and my intonation as I say, "It's going to be a great day—somehow.