Book review: Tiny Habits

Tiny Habits is the most valuable nonfiction book I read this year. I don't expect that to change by December. It's really fucking good.

I find this fascinating, because although it presents a great model and a lot of good advice, only maybe 30% of it is news to me. Many of the bits and pieces have been familiar to me for years in other forms. So what's so valuable about it?

Well, I wasn't using those things I "knew" in part they didn't fit together into a coherent system like the one Tiny Habits presents. The book also provides a lot pithy phrases that capture those things I "knew" to make them more memorable. It has inspiring stories of people using the ideas to change their lives, in ways that I find plausible.

But maybe most importantly it's a challenging book. I have not taken habits or "principles of habit formation" very seriously as a vector for general change. It seemed like a thing that you do if you're trying to lose weight or solve certain narrow problems, but not so much a hammer that works for big changes. For those I would have to use, uh, Intentionality or something. Granted, many of the book's stories do follow people hitting the familiar habit notes — healthy eating, weight loss, exercise, meditation — but enough of the stories and examples are different and familiar to challenge the idea that that's all they're good for. If the whole Tiny Habits system is dakka, B. J. Fogg recommends using a lot more dakka than I have dreamed of, and to my surprise it seems like it actually makes sense.

Tiny Habits is a book about behavior and how to change it. The core idea of changing behavior is to form tiny habits: Find some well-defined, sharp-edged trigger you'll recognize easily or a thing you already do ("Anchor"), tack on a clearly defined action that you can definitely easily do regardless of how motivated you feel on a given day ("Behavior"), and then 'celebrate' immediately when you succeed at doing the thing (the "Celebrate" in "ABC"). It presents a model of behavior with a nice concise equation form. Then it goes into a whole lot more detail about how to design behaviors you'll actually want to do and feel able to, how to learn behaviors by feeling good about having done them (celebration), how to grow tiny habits into bigger ones over time, how to address habits you want to get rid of, and how to cooperate with other people on behavior change.

It's a book about behavior change, and it's a really good one. Because it's so good, it compliments any other book you might read with hopes to learn and change. It makes the whole process of change so much clearer and easier to get started on. I started reading the book in the last week of January or first week of February and since Feb 3 I have been brainstorming habits I might want to learn. I've written down over 57 such ideas so far. What surprises me is how neatly this toolbox addresses changes I wanted to make anyway.

When starting a partner dance as the lead, it's good technique to get into frame and connect with the follow. For a smooth dance like Waltz or Foxtrot, that means assuming a wide frame, lowering so both legs are slightly bent (soft knees) and my weight is on my right heel, and giving the follow slight upward pressure with my right hand/wrist. For rumba or salsa I have a rounder frame, but I also want to send my left knee and hip forward (right leg should end up straight), lean in so my weight is on the ball of my right foot and gently connect or squeeze the follow's right hand my left hand. In other words, there's a lot of stuff to do every time.

I have learned to do a lot of this already, automatically, but not all of it. I pretty much always assume the right frame. I generally get my legs right. Sometimes I forget to connect or to lean in. I've gotten a lot better over the eight months I've been learning.

But — hey, look, these are habits, these are exactly the kind of thing the behavior model is good for. They're things I want to do and can do and feel comfortable doing, but I could celebrate more when I do them and maybe that would help me learn faster. Or maybe it would help to design better prompts and explicitly specify extra habits, like getting back into frame after a turn, so I can work on those. It seems like there's room here to use this system to change in ways that matter to me.

And it's not only dancing. I have lots of other ideas for behavior changes that might make my life better in various ways. Some of those are dating-related. Some are "taking care of my people" related. Some are social or confidence-related, like "when I join a group conversation, I will get in line with the circle of people talking" (instead of hanging out on the periphery, slightly outside of the circle). There are lots of different things I could do in each of these ares.

I won't want to implement all of the ideas I came up with, but just thinking about each of these areas in terms of concrete habits I could build is already a huge win. It makes them feel less like an amorphous blob of skills I don't have and maybe never will, and more like a heap of habits that I can develop over time. This way of breaking down behavior change might be the most valuable thing I got from Tiny Habits, and it's worth a lot.

These changes accumulate. If I made half of these changes, I would feel like a very different person — and I would be. That's the atomic power of tiny habits.