Dr. BJ Fogg
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. BJ Fogg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If you focus on new habits that you want, there's a way to design them into your life. And that's what finding habits is all about. That's what the book's all about. And so the book is doing two things at once. Number one, it's presenting an absolutely new way of thinking about how behavior works, a new model and a new set of models, which I think is really groundbreaking.
A behavior model is a big deal. And then it's also telling people how to apply this in a really easy way in their everyday lives. So in writing the book, I'm starting to do both at once, then I hope that you see.
Yeah. Well, right now, there are two medical doctors who are part of my boot camp this month. And one of them is from Ireland. And he, after class three, I think, or after class two, he emailed me and said, BJ, I now see for the last 20 years, I've been doing this exactly wrong. And I felt kind of bad.
but also he is creating a behavior change program for his patients and other physicians, so now he can do it right. One of the systematic problems is focusing people or yourself on something abstract, like, oh, I got to exercise. That's an abstract thing. It's not a behavior. We'll often call those things behaviors. They're abstractions.
And then the next thing that goes wrong is people are saying, I just need to motivate myself. That combination of trying to motivate yourself towards something abstract does not work very well at all. Whether it's your own behavior or somebody else's.
In fact, with kind of an oversimplification, in my work in Tiny Habits, rather than motivating the abstraction, make something very specific really easy. So I do three jumping jacks, right? Yep. They make it really easy to do. And so you're not worried about motivation and you know exactly what the behavior is.
One of the differences between, and I think this doctor, this would be one of the issues, an expert, when you say, you know, eat more leafy grains, an expert in his or her mind knows what that means. But an amateur might go, I don't know what that means. Grass. The grass.
So experts that are prescribing, like, hey, you need to change your diet, you need more leaky grains, they're not understanding that perhaps their patients are totally confused. So instead, they need to be very, very specific. Here's what I want you to do. I would eat bok choy and eat broccoli. Have 17 leaves of kale. Yes, every evening and steam it or saute it. Put it this way, right?
So really it's what is exactly the meat of the yard and here's how to do it. And that is a much more successful approach.
You know, I don't know if you want to go that. I'm going to go here and you can change it if you want, but. Just everyday people don't even have the right guidance. I mean, for most people, if I were to walk out on the street and say, oh, how do you lose weight? I would wager 90% plus would say, oh, I just have to exercise more. And that's, you know, that's what.
Which is actually a false idea, right? Right. And so, so people, so they're like, oh, if I only could get myself to exercise more, I could lose weight. Well, they're headed in the wrong direction. They haven't been given the right behavior, which is mostly nutrition behaviors, as you know, and the right way to make those into habits.
So there is, and why that idea that exercise is the key to weight loss? Why that keeps living on and on? I'll tell you why. Why is that so persistent?
I didn't understand that's where everyday people are until about coaching with probably 2,000 or 3,000 people. This would be 2011. You're a slow learner. I was in my little bubble of Stanford and high achievers and CrossFit type people. I'm in a very selective kind of world.
And I'm coaching, you know, 300 people a week about in tiny habits through email, but there's email exchanges and about two, 3000 people. And somebody wrote me and she said, Oh my gosh, BJ, thanks to you. I now see that I've endured a lifetime of self trash talk and tiny habits. What we do is we teach people to say good for me and feel successful and raise it. And so she wrote to thank me.
She says, this, this bam has changed my life. And I paused. This was a huge moment for me, Mark. It's like, that is where people are really at. And then I started reading all the emails and my interactions with them were different. And I was like, people, they have so many ways to say, I did a bad job. I'm insufficient. I lack willpower.
And that's why in the book when I say that, that was in some ways a little bit risky because it's just inviting a lot of criticism, but it's true and it's accurate. And so to say, look, if you haven't changed, it's not your fault. You just didn't have the right way to do it yet. That's right. Now you do. Welcome to tiny habits. Now you do. Now you can do it.
And it's not about willpower or discipline. It's about design. You design things. new habits into your life. You don't force them or you don't use just plan, motivation or willpower. It's a design challenge, not a test of somebody's character.
Well, first, we talked about the idea of people even focusing on the wrong thing. Like if your aspiration is weight loss, and you think it's about walking on the treadmill at the gym, focused on the wrong behavior. So that's one of the systematic problems. Another one of the problems is the idea that you set this really lofty goal
And then you just have to keep yourself motivated toward that lofty goal. Now, in my work, I don't use the word goal. In fact, in the book, I talk about why I think it's a bad idea to use that word. Are you going to put a whole bunch of goal-setting people out of business?
Not totally as opposed to the goal thing, but it's not a winning strategy. The fact that I've even written down a goal and I'm like, now I'm going to just keep myself motivated toward this goal. It's hard to do. you're not facing the reality that your motivation is going to shift over time. The idea, and we can come back to that if you want, and
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