BJ Fogg is an American behavior scientist who is currently an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and a New York Times best-selling author. He is the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab. BJ Fogg and James Currier talk to uncover how startup Founders can create better systems, both within themselves and within their companies and communities, so they can level up what we’re doing and put more good into the world. They cover topics like behavior design in tech and tech companies, mindset for Founders, examples of companies doing these things well, and tiny habits for Founders to focus on. Pick up BJ Fogg's popular book here - https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Habits-Changes-Change-Everything/dp/0358003326 Follow BJ on Twitter - https://twitter.com/bjfogg
So congratulations on the Tiny Habits book. It's everywhere right now. Right here, New York Times Best Sellers, the number one top Amazon pick for the whole year of 2020. And it's so well-deserved, because you've been doing this for 25 years, right? You've been running the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford. And you've been thinking about this deeply for a long time. And so I'm so pleased that when you consolidate it at all, it's resonating with people, and it's getting to people, and helping people. Today I was hoping that we could talk about tiny habits for startup founders, and for startups, and for early-stage endeavors.
Yeah, for sure. It's been about the last, I'd say 12 years where I was focused on habits specifically. Before that, it was other things that my lab would work on and other... But yeah, the last 12 years, it's really been about how do we help people be happier and healthier? And it turns out there's a new way of thinking about behavior and habits and there's new methods. And the old stuff does not work very well.
And I think that's why my lab shifted away from persuasive technology, and we got interested, in about 2008, 2009, in just human behavior in general. It's like, "Oh my gosh." Even though human behaviors all around us, there's thousands and thousands of studies on human behavior. We still haven't cracked the nut as academics. And with the behavior model and other work, we laid a new foundation.
And I think that was so compelling for us, that we left persuasive technology behind. And I feel like we did what we needed to do there. And we look just at how do we understand human behavior in a new practical, accurate way? And how do we help people change their behavior, reliably, to be happier and healthier?
It seems also that you're bringing with this... I mean, earlier you were studying how does technology persuade people, maybe to do some good things in their lives, but now you're looking at how do people persuade themselves to do good things in their life. And you're really bringing to this a sense of stewardship of people where you want to be a force for good in the lives of others. And that helping them create better systems is going to help them bring the good into the world.
Yes, exactly. And that's... If you ask me, "Why is that important to you?" I'm just wired that way. Probably from my early upbringing. And probably so many people listening to us are the same. Yes, there's excitement in starting a company, and it's great to have a vision and make it a reality and all that, but I would say most of the entrepreneurs I know are driven by a genuine desire to help people. And I think that's probably why you and I have gravitated toward that and our interest in connecting with founders and startups.
Yeah, definitely. And it's not a soft trying to help others, it's not a sort of overly empathetic, it's more of a dynamic attempt to impact the world and make the world move forward. It's not about a softness, it's about a strength in helping others. I know you grew up in a family with a strong moral code and as did I. And I think that that really helps too. Wen we're in the fervor of building our behavioral labs and companies and whatnot, you can still keep your eye on the ball, which is ultimately it's about the impact we have on others. So this is a great place to start. Can you talk about the Stanford Lab and what it's like to go through that course there. I'm your student, what am I doing?
Well, let me distinguish between the classes I teach at Stanford and then my research lab. And those are two different entities. And they're actually two different appointments, but they work together. So we'll start with the class. So every year I teach a class at Stanford. And I always teach a new class. Like in 2020, it was going to be about saving the planet, but because of coronavirus we shifted to behavior design for coronavirus challenges.
The year before that, it was about helping people with screen time. The year before that, it was about helping people connect with nature. So every year I try to find what's the hardest most important problem that we can tackle, that relates to behavior change, and I create a course around it. And that
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course is very much like a startup. Because I picked something I've never done before, and I know I have some confidence I can manage the process, but I do not know where we're going in the course. And then students apply, and they have to do a project as they apply for the class.
And so I look at their application, which includes their project, an audition, project of sorts, and I pick the students that I think are going to benefit most from the class and the students that will also bring the most of the class. And have to send the way at least half the students who applied. And then, first of all, even in the application, James, I say, "Hey, nobody's ever taught this class before. I'm going to make mistakes. There's going to be twists and turns. It's like a startup. If you don't like this, then go take a traditional class. This is not the class for you."
And what's great about that is I'm setting the expectations that we're going to go week by week in the class. I'll outline the syllabus, but I know that's going to change. I mean, that should sound familiar to everybody listening. There's a plan, but we know it's going to change. And then the students who are afraid of that, they go take a traditional class, go get a traditional job, but it really inspires. I think the right kind of students get even more excited about them, they join in.
So then the class becomes, they don't know this, but it's an audition to be in my lab. So the students that I feel are the strongest and that fill an important spot in my lab, I invite to join my research lab. So I've run the research labs since 1999, I guess, maybe 1998. And the lab is eight to 10 students. And we meet once a week, year-round. So the lab keeps going. We have weekly meetings on Zoom where we've done that for years. And we work on three different research projects at a time, up to three.
And it's very driven by what interests the students, because they don't get paid for it. And I've learned over the years that pick projects, the students are interested in, but also relate to the bigger themes in my work, which has to do with health, and behavior change, and peace and wellness, and so on. And so those two things work together. And then often, I turned to my lab and I pick somebody to be a TA for the next class I teach. So even though those are, in my case, separate appointments at Stanford, they work together really well. And it's a wonderful fun thing to do.
And you've had some big names in your lab, right? Often, [inaudible 00:06:26] with Elad Gil or Mike Krieger from Instagram.
And some VCs have spun out of my classes and my lab and they're doing really well. Maybe proud is not quite the right word I should be using, but I'll say it. When I see one of my students, either doing a startup or making great investments in important companies, I do feel proud. And I feel like, okay, I've had at least perhaps a little bit of influence on helping them move forward and create innovations in the world.
Yeah. And it sounds just in this few short minutes here with you BJ, you're reminding me that you do such a great job of creating context for people. Meaning by introducing the idea, by saying, look, this class is like a startup, or by creating a series of classes and then bringing a research lab and the creating a lab in which those people can do well. Through language, it's almost as if that's a huge part of setting ourselves on the road to wellness and being better at setting the context mentally for ourselves. Is that how you approach it?
I think you're right, but I don't probably think of it in those exact terms. I think my view is... Wow, I don't know how deep to go on this. Life is short. We only have so many days on this planet. And only a subset of those days are going to be good days where we can do stuff. And only a subset of those days, are we going to be working on the best projects? So when you're having a good day, you're healthy, you're happy, you're with a great team and you're working on the right project, you just got to do the best you can to move forward.
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And I think that gives me a lot of courage. Even my lab at Stanford was a startup. Nobody came to me and said, "BJ started lab. Here's the funding, here's your space." It was me saying, "Oh, students, you want to do research with me? Let's meet in Tresidder." Which is the student union. And we did that for a while. And then a faculty member gave us a quarter. He heard what was going on and he gave us a corner in his office. And then they gave me a whole room. And then they offered more space.
So I think just saying, "Hey, at one point, you're not going to be on this planet." And so, bam, be brave, be bold, take big steps. And the other piece for me is, work with good people and train them and help them so they can have a massive impact. So my strategy of my life at Stanford and outside of Stanford and personal life, isn't to be like the Tony Robbins or this celebrity personality, it's to teach other people how behavior works so they can have positive impact in the world. And again, I think that's driven by, "I'm not always going to be around, but if I teach people effectively, then my influence can continue."
Right. It's almost like you're encouraging them and giving them tools to push on this new levels of responsibility for themselves and the people around them. I've got to say, BJ, today is January, 2021, we are surrounded more and more with a culture that doesn't think about that tone, that doesn't think about that responsibility or that stewardship, whether it's our politicians or whether it's our business leaders. Do you feel that distance between what you're saying and what we see in the news every day?
A lot. And even more so because I've gathered people around me or people attracted to what I'm doing, who are different than that. They're mission-driven. They're willing to make sacrifices. It's not about greed or becoming wealthy, it's about impact. And, everybody listening, you really should bring those people into your life and into your ventures. I'm sure you've heard, elsewhere and on this show, the importance of the teammates you're working with.
So when you're surrounded by those kinds of people, and then you read the news or you watch something going on on TV, you're just like, "How could this possibly be happening?" And you have to remember, you've created kind of your own social bubble, your own social reality, and not everybody has had that kind of opportunity.
Yeah. It does feel like people are trapped in their war of all against all bubbles, and we are trapped or we try to trap ourselves in a creation event, a context-setting, and a tone-creating, and a sharing, and a paying it forward. It's a whole different mindset. It's very interesting.
Let me share one thing I say to my students and then industry people I trained as well, which I think is going to be relevant here. And this is more like a concluding statement. For some reason, James, it just felt like this is a good moment to do this. So yes, I trained industry people outside of Stanford who were creating products and services. And yesterday it was a health company and they were going to change healthcare in a big way. And they were identified young talent. So they sort of felt like my students, and my students at Stanford.
And the point I made yesterday was, "Hey, don't feel like these problems have been figured out or that people older than the answers. And you should feel empowered, maybe even responsible that these are problems for you to solve. And if it's not you that's solving this problem, then who? Who do you think is going to do it if it's not you?"
And I hope that helps my students. And then people I train understand that they can't wait around to be invited, to have a research lab, or invited to do XYZ. Take the initiative. If it's not us making the difference, who do we think is going to make the difference? Well, lets us it's us. And so let's do it, and let's be brave, and doing it. And let's cooperate and let's help each other.
And, James, that's something I've always admired about you. Every time I've reached out to you over the years, and I knew how busy you were and stuff, you were always so generous with your time and your help. Thank you.
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Oh, you're welcome BJ. And you inspire that in me and in many others. I'd love to start to dig in on of this stuff for the startup founders. They are rushing to ship something quickly. If you talk about a world in which it's non-zero-sum, meaning we've got this sort of endless plane of opportunities to create something new. If it's not you, who's going to do it? We're not struggling over some sort of zero-sum game where there's one slot that we have to fight over it. We're actually trying to expand our knowledge.
And these startup founders are doing that. They're rushing to build things, they're, by nature, builders, but we're also seeing some times that the impulse to build first is sometimes flawed. You have to come up with what people are going to want and use regularly and actually maybe pay for it, of course, before you actually build something. Do you have a framework for what a product has to be able to do before it deserves a bunch of funding and development? Do you help people think that through?
I do. I have various. And I'll start at the highest level. And I won't get to all of them, but this is exactly what I teach, not so much in my Stanford class, there was a time when I did that, but outside of Stanford, what I call my behavior design bootcamp with industry innovators. The highest level, there's two principles that I've found over the years that matter more than anything else. And I called the maxims. Maxim number one is help people do what they already want to do.
And, James, I have to confess, it took me 10 years to come to grips with it. That was the reality. I started studying persuasive technology. Well, I had named the whole domain of computers that influence us, our attitudes and behaviors, and hopefully for the better, but to call that persuasive technology. So I'm just thinking, "Well, how do you persuade or influence people?"
And then later, this is part of the shift in my lab, 2008, 2009, I was like, "No, the only thing that really works in the longterm." And so this means if you want your venture to last, or if you want your product to engage people, if you want your platform to change behavior, and I'm using those more or less as synonyms, you've got to help people do what they already want to do. And that pattern, everything that's gone big and persisted, does that. Notice it's not persuading people to do what they don't want to do. No, it's help people do what they already want to do.
So when people call me for help, I counted 42,000 phone calls over the years, just free 15-minute phone calls, and people pitch an idea or they say, we're doing X, Y, Z, what I'm listening for is, "Are you helping people do what they already want to do?" And then I'll share the next maxim and the second. For example, a woman from Singapore called me and she says, "Oh, we're creating this book reading club and we're going to get non-readers to read." And I was like, "Well, do they want to read?" She's like, "No, but we're going to persuade them to." And I was like, "Nope, not going to work." She's like, "Well, but we're going to persuade them. Brittany's gamification did it.
And I said, "No, you're not going to have a successful venture on getting people who don't want to read to read, no matter how much you think you can use technology, or gamification, or whatever. So I'm listening for that. And then I try not to crush her hopes and other people hopes. I try to turn it and take [inaudible 00:14:44], "Here's a direction you go."
Number two, and this one is also important, you got to do both. You got to help people feel successful. So as they use your product or service, they need to feel successful doing it. Now, Instagram is a really clear example on this. So when Mike Krieger was in my class, he was an amazing student. He was on a team following a design brief I gave them about mobile. And they came up with this concept for sharing photos. They called it Send the Sunshine and so on. And I consider that really the seed that then became Instagram years later.
And the vision of the project was a good one. Actually I went back and looked at my grading. They got 18 out of 20. And I wrote something like, "Very interesting." I didn't say billions of people are going to use
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this. It did impress me. Now when they launched Instagram, how did they help people feel successful? Yes, you could share photos and you could get likes and followers, but I don't think that was the key. I think the filters, you could take a picture, apply a filter, and then your photo transformed from just a photo anybody could take to something with a point of view, something with a perspective, something that might even be like a work of art.
And so those filters, as people put them on, allow them to go, "Oh my gosh, that looks great. That looks terrible. Oh, that looks wonderful. Let me post that one." And that's Maxim number three, simplicity changes behavior. I don't talk about that very much. But it's, number one, help people do what they already want to do. Instagram didn't go out and try to get people to share photos who didn't want to. Facebook didn't go out and try to get people that didn't want to be connected to connect.
Number two, help people feel successful. That's what wires in the habit. It's not repetition that wires in habits. When people say that, they are either, well, probably inadvertently misleading you. But it's not that, it's emotions. And then simplicity. Those are the keys.
Well, it's interesting too, because how you describe what a product does matters a lot then. Because if you say people want to apply filters to photos and send them out over the internet, people might say, how do you know that? Whereas what you might say is people want others to admire them and tell them that they liked them. You're like, "Oh yeah, people already do want that." You know what I mean? You could describe the Instagram product and various ways, in which it sounds like you're covering something people want to do. You're not clear that they want to. Like Airbnb, do people really want to sleep on an air bed in someone's spare room? It turns out they don't, but they do want to rent out an empty apartment like you would run out an empty hotel room. And so, do you ever find that when talking with people about their startup ideas?
Absolutely. Because often, especially if they're technical founders, they're describing what they're doing in technical terms not in terms of helping people do what they already want to do. If I'm remembering right, and when Instagram first launched their website, set a fun and quirky way to share photos. Instagram is tiny, but I looked at, it was like, "Oh man, and there's tons of competition, but I think they're going to win." And so I made that part of the keynotes and stuff I did. And I pointed out I used... The reason I remember, because it was part of my slide deck back then. And I gave that example.
And so they didn't say fun and quirky way. Now, did they test that? Maybe, maybe not. But at the time that was the angle. Now Instagram is quite a different thing. But to your point, James, yeah. Whether you're pitching a VC or putting it on a website for everyday people to look at, they don't care that you've solved the technical problem. Because they don't wake up in the morning saying, "Oh my gosh, I wish I had a secure way of doing X, Y, I wish I could get an API working for something."
So Instagram set a fun and quirky way to share photos, they didn't say over 48 top filters with a 19% AI accuracy?
That's a technical thing. And yesterday I saw three healthcare ideas. And two of the projects kind of missed the boat. Their project name and subtitle and stuff just really didn't position it, what's the benefit to the patient? What's the benefit to the doctor? What problem are we solving for those people? So idea is a common mistake because we get excited about, "Wow, it's a technical innovation. We couldn't do this before. Wow." But that's not what the market's looking for.
And then in terms of helping people feel successful, you might say that Instagram gave people these filters which made them feel like they were doing something they hadn't been able to do before, except they're using Hipstamatic, which had come a few months before Instagram, but they didn't give them so many filters that they then felt incompetent on the other side?
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Yes. You hit two really, really important points that are about feeling successful. I'll go to the first one. The filters allow help people to... And you need to help them feel successful in ways that matter. And I'm going to make a guess, what was Instagram tapping into? People want to feel like they are admired by their friends. Note, people want to be admired by their friends. Because if they don't feel like they are, it doesn't matter. They want to feel like they're admired by their friends.
So the filter is like, "Oh, that's cool." So instantly you get the feeling of, "My friends are going to think I'm so cool." And that sounds a little crass, but I'm just trying to boil it down. So that end, that helps you feel successful. But also simplicity. If you have too much going on... Everyone listening knows this. That so many new ventures over-complicate things. And then new customers try to use it and they're overwhelmed, they're like, "Nope, not for me. I feel unsuccessful. I feel stupid. I feel overwhelmed. I don't want to do it."
Yeah. So that simplicity also helps them feel successful. So number three maxim helps with number two as well.
Technically, it's simplicity changes behavior. Now that's not in my book, but it is appropriate right now to share.
Yeah. No, it's interesting. We've had some people say that, some VCs say that all pitch decks need to include the problem that you're solving. And I'm not sure that that's quite accurate because we've seen some great companies... It would be hard to say what problem are you solving. Like what does Twitter solve? What does Instagram solve? What it does is it creates a new thing that I already wanted to do. It might be that instead of saying what problem it is people should have in their deck, like what am I helping people do that they already want to do? That might be a better way of thinking about it.
Yes. B, the simplest way that people can solve a problem. They have Amazon did that, right? Twitter did that. People want to interact. People want to share. So one, it's not the only angle, but one is, we are the simplest, easiest, most satisfying way to do X. And those are slightly different things. But yeah, the easiest way to do X... One of just the overriding principle of human nature is that people are lazy. Now, there's more sophisticated ways to say it, but we generally choose the easiest path to do something.
Well, nature does, right? The Law Of Least Effort. It's why all the capillaries in our bodies conform with the same ratios that the capillaries of a tree. It's like the Law Of Least Effort means that we all go to this lazy state. And we see that everywhere. That's just nature. It's nothing immoral.
Yeah. And I like calling it lazy just because it alarms some people and it parks them up. But there's kind of an exception. And maybe I'll give an example. I won't stereotype or so. I was having a colleague of mine code something for me. This was 15 years ago. Creating something, he's like, "Oh, BJ. I did this, and then I added some features to it as well." And I was like, 'Jonathan, I didn't want those features." He said, "Don't worry. I'm not going to charge you. I just did it for free." And I was like, "No, Jonathan, I'm sorry. You have to remove those features.
In his mind, more was better. And the fact that he could do it meant that he should do it. And that's not the case. And I know a lot of my students think that. It's like, "We can do this and this and this and this." It's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." Simplicity wins. It's not a feature-full complicated thing. Now, some people, a very, very small part of the market, I would guess, makes their decision based on, "Here's this new product and it's offering me all these features and I'm willing to enter the complexity of it." But normal people don't think in that way. It's like, "What's the simplest way that I can get this thing done that I want to get done?"
All right. More is not better. Generally not.
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Yes. Okay. This is, everybody, was the breakthrough. And I didn't know who I was headed toward a breakthrough. But it's a model, it's written like an equation. It's not like a math equation, but it's all human behavior, is this. A behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment, there's a motivation to do the behavior, there's ability to the behavior, there's this simplicity thing, and there's a prompt. And the prompt is the cue, the reminder of the call to action. I use to call it trigger, but then I decided to change the same concept. I decided to change it to the word prompt because it was less ambiguous.
And all behavior, any culture of people at any age, those are the components. And then it's that simple, motivation, ability, prompt. Any one of those things is missing, then the behavior will not happen.
Got it. And when you say this is the breakthrough, when did this occur to you?
I looked back, James. I really tried to... Because in my book, Tiny Habits, I really wanted to give... People love genesis stories. Like, how did this come together? So I dug back and... There's some stuff I couldn't find, because it was on computers from like 2003 that are in my garage somewhere. But what I did find, a slide deck that I was doing some work for eBay. I was helping them with customer support, which at the time they called site user assistance.
And on that project, I said, "Hey, look, you've got this dimension of motivation and you have this dimension of ability." And to me, that was pretty obvious. And there's other research out there that talks about motivation and ability. Nobody's put it together model before me quite like mine. There's been some imitators after me. But that was pretty straightforward. And I use that to map out what I now call the diamond of emotions, or I called it back then. I don't talk about it much. But I go back and I think that diamond of user emotion put those two pieces together.
And then I knew there was another component, because you could be motivate and enable, like I'm motivated and able to do lots of things right now, but I don't do them unless I'm prompted, unless there's something that says do this behavior now. And so there was some moment when that came together for me and I was like, "Oh my gosh." Then I ran kind my thought experiments like, "Okay, does it apply to this, this, this?" I could not find any exception. And I had to live with it for awhile. It's like,
"No, can't be this simple. This age old puzzle, age-old of what causes human behavior, does it really come down to only these three things?" And then fast forward, the answer is, yes, it's three components that characterize every behavior.
How do you know when somebody is motivated? Let's say that you're a startup founder and you're trying to create a product around something, how do you know when people are motivated?
That is a $64 billion question, James. There's no perfect answer, but there's practical answers. If you have a Twitter account that's devoted to helping first, say, first-time moms who are also working manage the complexity and they follow you, guess what? That person's motivated. If you have a website on that topic and they go to your website, they're motivated for what you're offering. They found you on Google. In some, ways Google Search is an engine that figures out what are people motivated to do? What do people want? And then the ad words and they've built an empire based on figuring out what people want and then selling ad spots to offer it to those people.
So that a little more sophisticated answer is, if people are willing to do work, like input effort, the more effort they put into something, the more motivated they are to do it. So the more time they spend, maybe filling out an application to join my class, the application where my class is not an accident. I want to filter out all those people who are not motivated to do a three-hour project.
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So the more time they put into something, that is a direct measure of motivation. The more money they pay for something, that's not a perfect measure because people have different resources, but the more they stretch their finances to do something, let's put it there, the more motivated they're, the more physical effort they put in, the more mental effort, and the more they violate their routine. Like my partner needed to get vaccinated two days ago. So I was like, "Oh, I guess I can't go surfing, which is my routine. I surf every morning. And instead I went with him to give emotional support and get him through the vaccination process because I was so motivated.
So you really have those five components. And those five components are a different model that I call the ability chain. But the point is the harder the behaviors somebody does, the more motivated they are. And the components of ability are time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine violating, changing your routine up.
Very interesting. This goes toward coming up with startup ideas. Because if you're looking around at where people are violating their patterns or doing something, or if you're going through the stacks of data around the Google Search and just playing around in the data, you might find something anonymous that will tip you off to some opportunity. But we wrote this essay called the Hidden Patterns to Great Startup Ideas. And what we said and what I believe very much is that the biggest waste in the world or in our startup VC ecosystem in particular is just great people working on mediocre ideas. And you've said that you've listened to 10,000 ideas or more. Do you have a sense about where truly great startup ideas come from at this point? You're so deeply into human psychology, I was wondering if there were some things you even know [inaudible 00:27:42].
You look for things that humans are fundamentally wired to do for sure. You remember this, James, back in the day, you sign up for LinkedIn and you would link to people. And there was nothing else you could do. I remember people saying, "Uh, now that I'm on LinkedIn, now what?" There really was nothing to do. But what it showed is it showed you had this little wheel or circle thing. And inside that, showed your number of connections. And what that was so smart in doing, it was tapping into what we're deeply wired to do. And that's to avoid looking like we are losers. Okay?
So if I started on LinkedIn and I have three connections, that means loser. But if I have 200 or 400... I remember, I think, Ellen Levy had 500, which was the max. At least the way I saw it, there was this boom that went through all of Silicon Valley like, "Ellen has 500 connections. We don't know what we're doing with these, but Oh my gosh, she's on this pedestal." And so what that tapped into was our deep-seated social motivators. We want to look like we're valued and we have status. And we certainly don't want to look like losers.
So one really safe guide is to always look at it in kind of primitive, fundamental ways, like we want to look good to others, we want to be financially secure, we want to feel love. Things like that that are just very deep wired into us as human beings and animals, frankly.
Yeah. Years ago, I said that behind every great consumer internet company is a insight about human psychology.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well said.
Looking at that level, I think you're right. I think that's where a lot of these really interesting ideas come from. And clearly something like Instagram came out of your lab through that type of thinking. So it can certainly be done. So this behavioral design for founders. You talk to so many founders. Do you work, BJ, with startups? Do you actually work with them on a regular basis or not?
Well, the short answer is no. Years ago I changed my policy, 10 or 15 years ago. No more consulting, no more work for hire. And I don't serve on advisory boards. Those were policies I made. That's hard, but it's good that I've done that and stuck to it. But what people can do is call me for these 15-minute phone
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calls. It's got to be JFON.com. And there's a way to schedule with me. If they schedule me for like, "Oh, I'm having a hard time exercising." Those aren't the people I work with. It's people that are creating products and services.
And I've done this, James, for so long. It's just twice a week. I take phone calls. I help people. 15 minutes, bam, I go to the next call. There's no upsell. There's no cross sell. I don't do homework before. I don't do follow up after. It's just in 15 minutes, help people. And gotten pretty fast at that because I know exactly what I'm listening for. So that's how, at least in my mind, I'd been able to help a whole bunch of founders, and, hopefully, help startups understand if they're on the right path or if they need to course- correct.
And sometimes I have to give really bad news. And I tried to do it in the nicest of ways. But I'm impartial here. I'm not investing in you. I'm not your brother or sister or dad. Why not tell the people the absolute truth as I see it. Sometimes nobody's told them the truth. And it's like, "Here's the problem. Here's how it's not going to work. And like I said earlier, then I always tried to suggest a path where they can make it work.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Are there things that you're noticing in these conversations that lead you to see what founders can do to level up in their day to day, idea creation, or product generation, or leadership, or running of the company being a force for good?
Not really in those short phone calls. That's like 15 minutes. I just tried to get them right to... Well, I say, "How can I help you?" And so it's just in 15 minutes. So it's been pretty much about helping them get the right psychology for their product. And there's not really time for me to understand them as people and individuals, but I certainly have experience, personally and with my friends and networks and stuff in this space. And I'll just go where I think your question is leading, take care of yourself, take care of your most important relationships. Bam.
I don't know which one I'd prioritize over the other. Most people say take care of yourself first, but I don't know. They kind of go hand in hand. If you don't take care of yourself and you get run down or sick or depressed or discouraged, not good. If your most important relationship that gets damaged, what's the point of having a super successful company if you lose that thing that's so valuable. So I'm definitely here to say, prioritize those things for sure.
Yeah. So are there some tiny habits? How could Tiny Habits help these startup founders level?
Oh, so much. Well, in the book, Tiny Habits, it's really about behavior design, the broader name from my work, and then one of the methods is the Tiny Habits method. So behavior design is a set of models, including the model we just talked about, I called Fogg Behavior Model. But there's other models as well, as the choice model, the engagement model, other things and methods. So models are ways of thinking, methods are ways of doing. And all of these are new. And together I call those Behavior Design. And that's what my lab is about for the last 10 years. And so Tiny Habits is a method.
Now, there is a broader set of methods for behavior design. And this is I teach in the bootcamp. And it's a system, boom, boom, boom, boom. And these steps come before MVP. People probably know a lot about Lean Startup and MVP. This comes before. At the end of my steps, then you look at MVP, or the last step in mine, and there are seven steps. It's called SNAP test. And with SNAP testing, you then test your concept in a very, very fast way. And ideally, it's four hours or faster. So you invest four hours testing it. And you're not testing whether you can build it. In fact, I advocate not building anything. Don't code anything. Just test.
If you've got the right psychology, if you do offer XYZ, well, people do it and be happy and feel successful and so on. And then what you're looking for as a signal in the tests. And you might just test with 10 people, maybe it's 20 people. So it's really fast just to get some sense of... Like if you have 10 people do
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this new thing and nobody likes it, that's a pretty clear signal that, not going to work, back up. If you get five or seven out of 10 people saying, "I love it. Can I use this more? Can I share it with friends?" Bam! That's a great signal. A great indicator that you should move forward.
Now, in my view, you do other SNAP tests to further refine it. And then at some point you move out of what I would consider the behavior, at least my steps in Behavior Design. And you would move on to MVP Lean Startup, things like that that are more familiar. So within the book, Tiny Habits, those steps are there, except for they're geared toward everyday people to figure out how to change their own lives systematically. But there is a chapter. And that I couldn't put in the book. In fact, James, most of the business and product development stuff, I had to take out of the book. Because it would've made the book too long and my editors argued it would confuse people.
And so when Amazon editors picked it the number one business and leadership book of 2020, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I took out all the business and leadership stuff." At least I thought I did. But there is a very practical document. It's kind of hidden in the book. Here's this link. I'll just tell you. If you go to tinyhabits.com/business, you can then fill in a form and you get the business chapter that walks you through these seven steps of Behavior Design. And then if you compare that with the steps in the book, you'll see how they match. But this is what I teach in my class. This is what I teach in my bootcamp. It's like the early, early stages of when you're figuring out what you're doing, you don't have to guess, there's a systematic way to figure out what the best path forward is.
Wow. That's fantastic. Well, we will make sure to write that down on the text. Not only so that people can get that information, not only through listening to this, but by reading it. That's great. BJ, thanks for sharing that. And so is there a founder mindset that you would ideally like to see people have? Is this what the section lays out or no?
No. It's really written for people creating products and services. They may be within a big company like P&G, or USAA, or Capital One. They're creating something that's never been done before. And are those founders? Yes, sort of. They're innovators and they might be doing like a startup within Capital One or USAA. It's very tactical, this business chapter.
Can you give us one example of one of the tactics?
Number one, clarify your aspiration. That's step one. What are we trying to do here? What are we even trying to do here? In the case of financial institutions, I won't name them by name, they might say, "Oh, we're trying to get our customers to save money." And it's like, "No, let's get clear. Save what?" At least with one group, as I helped him clarify, it's like, "Oh, we're trying to help our 20 to 30-year-old customers have an emergency fund of $500." "Got it." That's very different than save money. Right? And it only takes a handful of minutes to get the team glare on what are we trying to do here?
And the next step I call magic wanding. And this is a creative step. It's a brainstorming stuff. I don't often call it brainstorming. But it's like if we could wave a magic wand to get anyone to do anything that would lead these young customers to saving $500 as an emergency fund, what would we wish for? Who would do what? And you come up with dozens of different wishes, "Oh, her boss would give her a raise. You would have payroll deduction automatically." Bam, bam, bam, bam. You come up with all these things.
I'll fast forward a few steps later. Then you prioritize those behaviors. And you prioritize them in a systematic way in a method I call it Focus Mapping. And you do that as a team. So at the end of the Focus Mapping step, your team has surfaced the best ideas or behaviors, and they've all agreed that that's one of the things about the group focus mapping process, is you're prioritizing but you're also aligning your team to say, "Okay, for our product for saving $500, it's going to do these three things. And these other 33 things, we're not doing them. We're just having them do these three things. And so that's
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what we're designing." And then from there you figure out how do you make that a reality? How do you
design for those patients?
Got it. And so those are two or three of the steps that you walk us through here. These are great. And have you seen companies implement these to great success? So there's some examples?
Yeah. It's a game changer for the product. To some extent, the company, depending. If it's P&G, I may not change the game for P&G the whole company, but if it's a small one, yes. And for people's careers. I just got an email this morning from a woman who was in my bootcamp that ran November and December and she got her dream job. And she got it after she ran this workshop for the company. And she was so effective in helping them get clear on what they're doing, understanding their options, focusing on the right ones, and then moving forward. She wrote me this morning just delighted that it had taken her to a new level in her career.
So these methods are not d.school and design thinking, but it's similar. And here's why. Back in the day before there was design thinking, this is mid-nineties, before there was the d.school. There was a guy named David Kelly teaching a class at Stanford. And I took the class along with a guy named George Kimball. There's like eight of us. And I don't even know what they call in the class. Just working with David.
Well, a few years later, David pulled George, my classmate, and they started the d.school. David had a huge influence on the way that I look at problems and structured them and tackle them. So it's almost like design thinking meets behavior change. That's what you're getting in behavior design.
Got it. And that's what's new. You said there's breakthroughs and this is new thinking. What was coming before? And now, what do you have now?
Oh my gosh. The science, the landscape about social science, about human behavior and habits is a total mess. And it has been for a very long time. Within business, you read a certain set of theories, and models, and approaches. In the school of medicine, it's different. In the school of education, it's different. In the school of art sciences, it's often different. It's a total mess. So what was before were all these, I think, limited models or theories that could apply in a situation but nothing universal and often not practical.
And then the kind of amazing thing about the behavior model, the B=MAP, is it's universal. So it applies to business, and art sciences, and education, and all that. And it's comprehensive. It accounts for everything. And there's variations of the behavior model. There's ways to look at how people make choices or create habits. So any behavior is a combination of different behavior models. And it's practical. So it was those three things that it's accurate, and comprehensive, and practical. It's like, "Oh my gosh." So that really changed the game. I mean that's the cornerstone of a larger foundation of models that then led me to creating these methods, and the models and methods work together.
Yeah. It's interesting. We've been talking with Dan Ariely, [inaudible 00:40:31]. Obviously everybody's reading Tim Ferriss's stuff and whatnot. We've had near [inaudible 00:40:38] on here. Are you guys all friends? Do you guys all hang out and talk or?
I wish. I think we're more like colleagues that might email each other on things from time to time. And we've either shared Mike Neer, despite what the media says, he was not my student. He came to my bootcamp. He came to my bootcamp in like 2013. And then even people... Like yesterday, a guy in the medical school reached out to me at Stanford Medical School and said, "Oh my gosh, I'm surprised I hadn't heard you before." Well, I've heard of him because we shared a student.
So even within Stanford, I mean, it's been probably 20 years since we shared this student. I'd heard of him, but he hadn't heard of me. And now he was reaching out. So it would be kind of nice, I think, but
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probably not. I mean, we might cross paths at conferences, or send an email, or help each other out. Now there are people though, like Vic Strecher who studies purpose has come to Healdsburg, swim the river with me and we hang out.
So, sometimes yes, but I think everybody is so busy and passionate about their own work that they just do their own work and we just do it the best we can. And there's just kind of a lightweight sense of who's doing what. And then sometimes these things will come together. It's like, "Oh my gosh, why didn't we start collaborating three years ago?" Well, because I was super focused on my stuff and you were focused on your stuff.
What's interesting is just there's not that many people thinking deeply about the psychology and the behavioral stuff that goes on, particularly around startups and rapid growth transformation of society that's taking place as a result. We for a long time have said, with these startups, there is no corporate transformation without personal transformation. And there is a sense that behind all these companies, there are real human beings. And the number of you that are thinking about it right now. You guys are selling a ton of books. You're making a lot of impact. And it'd just be interesting if you're a cabal. And what you're saying is you're really not. You're doing your own work. You have respect for each other, but everyone's following their own line and their own research. It does feel as if over the last 10, 20 years we've been making some real new progress. And it feels to me like you're right on the cutting edge of that.
Yeah, I know. Other people may give you other answers, and they may say, "Oh, BJ's an isolationist. He just does his own thing. We're all hanging out together. And we're all on clubhouse together. We're all going to, not Maui, we go to the big Island together." That's just... My sense is, I think we're looking at an important challenge, or problem, or opportunity with the behavior from different perspectives. And we don't all have the same view. And that's okay. I believe as a scientist, especially as a social scientist that I am, you have to stay open to new possibilities.
And it's easy to say, "Oh, my way is the only way." But you've got to stay open to possibilities because somebody who spent a lot of time, smart person or smart set of people from a different perspective. And I think maybe that is the challenge on top of, "Yeah, we're not calling each other every weekend or having rooms on clubhouse all the time, but it's, "How then do I get into the head and see it from the perspective of this person or this school of thought or so on?" And I really don't think there's a great way to do that.
Yeah. Practically speaking again, BJ just... And I've got two more questions for you. Can we talk about the day-to-day life for founders and people who are short on time, big on ideas, always in a hurry? What habits are going to stand them in the best stead? What behavioral design or the things that you think make the biggest impact for people like Dan?
Dan such a great coach. I'll give a general answer and then not get down into specifics. The general answer is very practical, super, super practical. I just launched a tool about two weeks ago that helps people find the right habits for them and design tiny habit recipes. And you can find this at tinyhabits.com/recipes. It redirects to another thing that's longer to type in. And it's really best used on the mobile phone or tablet, but you can use it in any web browser.
So at the top there's categories. As admin, I can change the categories, I can change the order. So they're probably not going to be in this sort of it. It's like stress, brain health, productivity, relationships. So you pick a category. Then there's a card set below that it you swipe through the cards to say, "Oh my gosh, for productivity, I want to read more." Okay? You pick that.
And then the card below that is the anchor. When are you going to do this in your routine? So what you're doing is matching the new habit with where it fits in your routine, and then you push a button
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and you're done. So what I'm trying to do with that is optimize that so it really cues up the most impactful habits and it helps people design them into their lives. I do not have a category that says, "For founders." Though, I think founders can go through and say, oh, stress is an issue, or productivity, or relationships, or nutrition, what have you.
So that's a general answer. So check that out, people. The specifics though, I'll give some specifics categories, obviously, sleep. I am so glad, in the last 10 years, there's been quite a revolution, I think, around how people are valuing sleep. It used to be very, very low and it was bragging rights to say you only slept three hours. Now that is not bragging rights. At least among the people that I'm connected with. So sleep, of course. Nutrition, of course. Movement and relationships. All those are pretty obvious. So I'm going to give, form habits within those. And, James, if you want me to get specific in the categories, I will, but let me finish up with two more categories.
Sure.
Nature. The only class I've taught twice at Stanford was behavior designed to connect people to nature. Get away from the screen, the keyboard, leave your phone behind and get into nature however you can. There's a reason I moved out of the Silicon Valley area up to Sonoma County where I could live on the edge of a river. There's a reason we bought a place here in Maui where the ocean is right there and I can swim or surf all the time. Nature is just so important to our health and wellbeing in so many ways. It's quite difficult for me to start listing all the reasons. But the tip is, have a daily habit, routine, whatever you want to call it, of connecting with nature. And ideally more than once. So nature.
And the next one maybe is a little quirkier, but I'll put it out there. Play a musical instrument. And now, James, you sing, right?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Okay. So that might also count. But I think there's something about producing music that can be so restorative. Like this morning, I played, I call it a flute. It's really a recorder, a tenor recorder. And I played that for 30 minutes this morning. Some minutes it's five, some minutes it's 30. That is like a meditation for me. And then, times of the day, I'll just walk up and then I have a whole bunch of recorders. I have a whole bunch of musical instruments, but that's the one I play the most. And during the day I'll just walk out and play it for two or three minutes. And it resets me. It's so rounding and refreshing and music.
So music and nature are probably the categories that people aren't obvious to people. And if you're not good at playing music, there's simple instruments like ukulele, or kalimba, or even the recorder. Really simple instruments. And you'll progress very fast on those. And they'll start feeling successful quite quickly.
Very good. I got to ask you this as well. As a behavioral psychologist, we're watching a mass experiment of this pandemic sweep the Earth.
Yeah.
How are we doing? Where do you think we are mentally? Are we generally doing okay? Are we looking down the barrel of long-term crazy effects that will create significant behavioral change for five, 10, 15 years?
This has been your hardest question of all, but I'll take a stab at it. In June of 2020, I took a snapshot of how people were doing. And that was not a perfect snapshot, but the surprise was, people were doing pretty good. Like, oh my gosh, a lot of people are doing okay. Now, I've not taken a snapshot recently, but my sense is people are doing a lot worse. Yes, there are people that are thriving and doing well. And
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a lot of those people aren't speaking up, because it's kind of awkward and embarrassing and just doesn't
feel right to say, "Oh my gosh, I'm really thriving right now." When so many people are in trouble.
So yes, it's possible to thrive right now. Absolutely. And habits can help you with that. Relationships, nature, playing music, et cetera. But so many people are suffering. So the bigger snapshot to answer that, James, is hard. So let me give it a stab though. I like hard questions. I am hoping that, on a broader level, what we're learning is resilience. How do I get through something tough? And how do I support others through something tough? Because we all have this challenge. And guess what? We have no choice we've been put in COVID bootcamp whether we liked it or not. So we got to gear up.
And I'm hoping that people have developed practices of stress reduction, and on the other side productivity, that are working now and we'll make them stronger once this goes away. That's a hope. I'm sure that's true for people, but I don't want to say it's true for everybody. I do think there are some people that are drinking more, watching more TV, more tension in the home, and that's going the wrong direction. Those are the people that, yes, you can change that, you can use this time to move in positive directions, but it takes a little care and feeding just like growing a garden. You can have weeds grow in it. You can invest a little bit of time and energy and design. And that's how I see this period right now.
The one thing that I would've never imagined happening, I have long been an advocate of working from home. Yeah, I live two hours from Stanford and I have for... I kept it a secret for awhile. But 18 years, two hours away. And so I learned how to work through Google Hangouts, and then BlueJeans, and Zoom. It did it, did it fast. Slack all that. And I was a big advocate of working from home. Because, why would I drive to Stanford and back, I lose four hours, plus all the stress, when I can just stay home and crank it out?
And so I talked about that, but now, it wasn't because I was so persuasive or created some solution because of COVID, so many people have learned to work from home. And I hope a lot of us continue to do so. I do think it's much better for us all in all. I see that as a really healthy shift that's been forced upon us that I would have loved to have been more influential like in 2015 on that, but you can't get a billion people to work from home necessarily by just me sitting down and figuring it out. So I think that is one of the good trends. There's other small ones that everybody knows, like the cooking at home and baking and reengaging with creating your own food, and it's like, "That's a great one." So it's a mixed bag right now.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I love this metaphor you've got of, if you've got a garden, you can let weeds grow in it, which will just happen if you don't tend to it. But if you do tend to it, you can actually grow these beautiful garden. And that's your geared up, that's your life, that's your home situation. It's true everywhere. And I also really appreciate this idea that being at home more and commuting less is going to provide us with more time to grow our gardens, to develop these habits, rather than fall into the habits created by the building you worked in, or the company that you work for. As our work becomes more half us, half our work, versus almost all of our work when we were going into the office. And there's an opportunity there to bring more healthy habits to how we do our work. It's great.
And I want to say, James, that creating habits... And this is how my work, I thought, was going to be super controversial, but I've been teaching Tiny Habits, that method, since 2011. Way back when James Claire, who has a huge book on habits, he took my course in 2013 and then got interested in habits. And so I've been teaching it week, after week, after week, to thousands of people. And I stopped counting at 40,000. Because, here's this way to create habits that was like really easy and really reliable. Meaning, if you follow directions, it will work. And this is very reliable and fast.
And then I developed this analogy, the metaphor to the garden, and it does function. Your habits function very much like you're designing a garden. Or you have this opportunity to design a garden. You
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take the habit, you start at super tiny. So when you look at the Recipe Maker, or my book, or anything, it's not like, read a chapter a day. It's to read a paragraph. It's not 20 pushups. It's two pushups. You make it really, really tiny, and then you find a good spot for it. Just like you would in a garden, where will this basil grow well? Where will tomato grow well? And where will this habit fit into my life?
And that's what that Recipe Maker tool that I referred to before where you swiped, that's what that's doing. So it's giving you the tiny version of the habit. It's helping you find where you're going to place it or plant it. And then you nurture it, you wired in through emotions. So what I've found in my research is emotions create habits. It's not repetition. There's no scientific evidence I can find that says repetition creates the habit. That correlates with habit does not cause it to form.
So when you understand that, maxim number to help people feel successful in your own life, if you want habits to wire and help yourself feel successful. And there's techniques for that in Tiny Habits that I talk about. So you can look at habit formation, not as drudgery, not something you have to endure for 66 days, not something that you use willpower for. Those are all the wrong directions. It should be fun. You should pick habits that you like. You should be playful in your approach and revise as you go along.
And so I think a startup mentality. Like, James, if you've been coaching people, they understand, they got to revise, and shift, and shift, and pivot. That's kind of what you do with habits as well. You start out with something, you design it into your life. And if it doesn't work, you adjust it, and you adjust it until you find how does this fit. So like if I plant a plant here and it grows a little bit and doesn't flourish, it's like, "Oh my gosh, maybe I need to move it where has more sun, or the soil has different characteristics."
So, habit formation is not a motivation challenge, it's not a willpower challenge, it's a design challenge. It's the design process. And if you're relying on willpower or if you're lacking motivation for the habit, you're headed in the wrong direction. And that's what makes Tiny Habits just really very, very, very different than traditional ways. And it should feel pretty familiar to founders and people in startups. It's like, "Oh my gosh. Yeah. The way, there's definitely parallels." The way that you figure out and make your venture work, the way you figure out habits and make those work.
That's fantastic. Well, that's probably a good place to end, BJ. It's just been a delight to talk to you. And thank you so much for the time.
Thank you, James.
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