32 Things You May Regret 10 years From Now

Some of us are just existing and not living. Wouldn’t you rather set the world on fire and do something that challenged you, caused you to get up out of bed each morning actually looking forward to the day ahead, do something about that dream you’ve always had, start that business you’ve been talking about for years, or write that book?

We’ve all got something we’d love to do. It would be fantastic to say to your grandchildren, I gave it my best shot, instead of saying ‘I sat in and watched TV a lot and didn’t really do much with my life.

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of doing nothing, which actually drains your energy more than doing something; anything.

Here are 32 Things you may regret 10 years from now

1. Caring what other people might think

2. Doing what you thought would please others

3. Staying in that job you’ve hated for so long

4. Not going after a dream

5. Giving up at the last hurdle

6. Settling for second best

7. Putting others before yourself

8. Sitting on your arse watching TV

9. Not paying attention to the people who really do matter

10. Not taking risks to do something you’ve always wanted to do

11. Thinking that it’s all about the money

12. Not getting over your fears in life

13. Staying in a relationship you knew had ended a long time ago

14. Not taking care of your body

15. Not finding enough time to sit and enjoy the journey

16. Not laughing at yourself enough

17. Not opening your mind to new possibilities

18. Always thinking about the past

19. Chasing money instead of seeking happiness

20. Always thinking ‘mañana, mañana’ – you’ve got to make your own tomorrows

21. Accepting only the love you think you deserve, when you should have set your standards higher

22. Not realising that it’s your own thoughts that create your world

23. Thinking that the world owes you a favour

24. Listening to reason ALL the time, sometimes you’ve got to just follow your heart

25. Not being braver

26. Not trusting yourself enough

27. Not realising that something good comes out of every bad situation

28. Knowing that you chose this life and that it’s up to you to manage it the way YOU would like

29. Letting someone else use you as a way to realise their dreams

30. Allowing yourself to follow someone else’s beliefs instead of investigating your beliefs for yourself

31. Not being honest ALL THE TIME with yourself and with others

32. Not letting the small things go, and focus on the things that really matter

What about you, is there anything you would add to this list? leave a comment below with your thoughts

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Being Honest with Yourself is Hard

I remember talking to a psychologist once about the difficulties of social science. She told me that the easy thing about being a physicist is that most people aren’t very familiar with physics—stars, quarks and gamma rays—so if you’ve done the research and have good reasons to believe something to be true, people will take you at your word.

In contrast, most people are incredibly familiar with the subject of social sciences: people. They already have many beliefs and intuitions about how people are. Therefore, when you do the research and find out something about how people behave that contradicts their intuitions, they won’t believe you.

There’s a similar phenomenon with self-knowledge. Knowing things about yourself should be the easiest thing in the world. After all, each of us has a lifetime of research on the subject of ourselves. We are our own experts.

But that expertise can also be misleading. Not only do human brains suffer from a wide variety of well-documented biases: overconfidence, placebo, loss-aversion and prototype effects, it may even be that we are hard-wired to be self-deceptive.

Built to Lie
A common problem in doing research via surveys is that people will lie to create a favourable impression of themselves. Social desirability bias is so widespread that it can suggest conclusions which are mathematically impossible.

A 1994 survey of men and women asked them to count the number of sexual partners they have had. In this survey, men were found to have 74% more sexual partners than women.

Counting only heterosexual partners, however, you can demonstrate mathematically that the average number of partners for men and women has to be exactly the same (assuming an equal gender ratio). It takes two to tango, and likewise, for every man who has had a female partner there must also be a woman who has had a male partner.

Here we don’t need sophisticated methods to show people are lying, the math does it for us.

People don’t just lie to experimenters however, we lie to ourselves. Being willfully deceptive is hard work. There’s a chance your story will crack and the lie will be discovered. Police interviewers have long known that talking to someone long enough will often lead to them incriminating themselves because they couldn’t sustain their lie.

Lying is a lot easier if you don’t know you’re doing it. Social desirability bias doesn’t just influence what we tell other people, but what we tell ourselves. After all, if we want to maintain a rosier picture of ourselves than we actually possess, it helps if we believe that rosier picture as well.

This results in absurd statistics, such as most drivers claiming to be above average in ability. If you believe you’re the best, it’s easier to get others to believe it too.

Self-Honesty is Hard
Because we’re designed to lie to ourselves, truly knowing oneself can often be difficult. Are the motivations you pursue the genuine logic behind your actions? Or are they self-deceptions, elaborately constructed to help you pursue different goals while you can honestly claim to be pursuing something else?

One common pattern of self-deception is claiming to pursue higher motivations, while actually being driven by baser ones.

Consider drinking wine. A high motivation for only wanting to drink the finest wine is that you have well-developed and discerning taste. You, as a sophisticated, cultured individual can readily tell the difference between a bottle which costs $100 and $10. The price may be higher, but with it, comes higher quality.

Except in random, blinded taste tests, many so-called wine experts couldn’t even tell the difference between red wine and white wine.

Maybe a more cynical story is that your love of fine wine is an elaborate self-deception. The intrinsic qualities of the wine aren’t what make it taste good, but the fact that it is rare and expensive. Your brain fakes discernment on flavor, when it really cares about boosting the image that you are cultured and sophisticated.

The simple view of this story is that the two wines have no difference, and therefore you’re a gullible fool for purchasing the expensive one.

But I don’t think the simple view is correct either. When you include knowledge about the vintage and price, people will actually enjoy the expensive one more. The deception isn’t that there is no difference between the quality of the two wines, because there is. Instead, the deception is that the quality of the two wines depends solely on the flavor, omitting the knowledge surrounding it.

Picking on wine lovers is an easy target, but I believe this kind of self-deception is commonplace. Why do people prefer books to blogs? Shakespeare to soap operas? Is it actually intrinsic differences in quality or is it hidden signalling?

Untangling Self-Deception
My instinctual reaction to learning that there may be large patterns of self-deception is to correct it. After all, if we lie to ourselves constantly, how much better off would we be if we could just be honest with ourselves?

However, many of these self-deceptions are probably useful. They evolved because they were more adaptive than having to know the truth about yourself, and many of them likely remain adaptive to this day. Radical honesty is not the best policy.

Consider a friend of mine who enjoys drinking excellent wine. Does my careful explanation of the fact that his appreciation for good wine is heavily influenced by price and status help him enjoy the wine any more? It probably does the opposite, making him feel angry at me for revealing this truth or foolish for believing it. Both of us are worse off.

But even if a lot of self-deception probably is useful, an inconsistent theory of life makes decisions a lot harder. When you can’t be entirely sure of your own motivations for your behaviour, its much harder to have a stable theory of how you should try to live in the world.

The constant popularity of life philosophy, from religion to self-help, shows that most of us grapple constantly with uncertainty over the best way to live our lives. The fact that we may be hardwired with built-in self-deception seems to make that path much foggier.

Conducting Experiments on Your Own Behaviour
Science, of course, is a potent tool in helping us understand ourselves. But a science of human nature often only gives broad principles, and even those are often riddled with exceptions.

Instead, I think each of us needs to treat our own behaviour and motivations as something worth investigating. Not merely through introspection, which runs the risk of bumping into the numerous hard-wired self-deceptions, but through observation.

One way to do that is to keep a journal of your thinking about things. Write down your supposed motivations, then ask what those motivations would actually predict. Then, when you’ve had more experience, look back and see whether those predictions are true.

Maybe you believe you fear switching your career because it might set you back financially. However, when you actually make the switch you are earning less money but it doesn’t bother you. Digging deeper, you realize that you were actually worried about being criticized by the people around you.

Journalling is probably one of the best tools for combating self-deception, since you aren’t able to creatively reinterpret past experiences with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, you can examine exactly what you were thinking at the time.

Getting this kind of self-understanding may be difficult, but I can’t think of a better subject to study.

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7 Tips to get your Brain Energized in the Morning

Okay, it's Tuesday morning and you're brain is still just not awake... then maybe it's time to look at these 7 tips to get your brain awake and energized!

1. Get up straight away. I am also guilty of hitting the alarm and snooze a little longer, but your brain will not wake up and it's the recipe for a "lazy" day. So set you alarm and commit to get out immediately, for me it's useful to have the alarm lying on the other side of the room. 

2. Drink water. By drinking a glass of water after you get up you will activate your metabolism and feel refreshed.

3. Natural light. Open the curtains make sure there is sunlight, the brighter the better. When we don't have natural light our brains stay in a "sleep" mode, on the other hand bright sunlight triggers serotonin and dopamine to be released in the body. These give us a happy feeling, which boosts our brains to activity.

4. Exercise. I was never fond of this one and I still have an issue with heavy exercise in the morning. Since, starting the day with a good walk with the dog has proven to give me a massive impact on my energy levels. The dog loves it too!

5. Breakfast. Don't skip this one, it's like they say "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"! You need nutrition to get your mental processes running. Try to eat healthy in the morning, like oatmeal with some fresh blue berries, yummy! 

6. Shower (cold). It's not really funny, but it's extremely useful to wake up your whole body including your brain! 

7. Talk to people. A simple morning chat about the weather or so will boost your brain to wake up and be energized. For being social your brain has to work and will get you out of your "sleep" mode.

Boost your brain energy and start trying these tips for yourself!

How To Stay Focused: The Four Basic Requirements

Focusing is a lost skill, a casualty of the 21st century. People bury their noses in iDistracted and Distractdroid devices, practically salivating at the notifications which confirm their importance. Instead of commanding their day, they are controlled by their uncontrolled lust to be distracted.

And what purpose has distraction traditionally served? What result does it accomplish?

Escapism. Let’s escape from the reality of life, escape from the self-responsibility to pursue dreams, and escape from anything challenging. Distraction is the drug of choice of the 21st century, and supply is endless.

You may not be an alcoholic, but how much of your dissatisfaction is drowned with the web, Facebook, TV, text messaging, or video games? These things are not supposed to be core life activities, but enjoyable side trips. And they are much more fun as side trips.

Distraction Is The Plague, And Focus The Cure

Focus is power. It’s the ability to say I’m doing THIS and nothing else, and nobody is going to stop me. A focused mind is difficult to stop from doing exactly what it plans. In a free country like America, nobody wants to stop you anyways.

Who wants you to keep on the weight? Who wants your business to fail? Who wants you to be miserable? Who wants your dreams to go to waste? If there were positive answers for those, those people are your mortal enemies and I’m sure you avoid them anyways. Typical people won’t care, because we are all self-centered by nature. I care about getting my six-pack of beer.

There are certain subconscious thoughts and ideas you have that can make focusing extremely difficult, so what we need to do is pull those subconscious thoughts into the spotlight and address them.

There are four basic requirements for staying focused.

1. Accept that you may not succeed with the task at hand
Think about it. When you focus on something, you’re pouring all of your energy into it. Your brain will automatically label it as important. Focus is typically split up between several different tasks, ideas, and thoughts. So when you focus on a single cohesive idea, thought, or task, the brain says, “Whoa now, this task is getting special treatment. It must be important.”

It’s healthy to face failure and learn from it, rather than to bury it in other distractions, but it places more pressure on you to perform when you focus. Juggle six tasks at once, fail at one, and what happens? You keep going with your other five. Focus on one task and fail, and you have to face that failure. There’s nothing else to look at.

Sometimes, I hesitate to write. Before writing a story, I’ll consider how it might not turn out well or that I’m not as skilled as some of my favorite authors. The discomfort in potential failure pushes me back to burning time on Facebook, because there’s no pressure there. It’s easy, and fun, and a waste of my time.

To focus, give yourself a free pass on failing at the task. Make it ok to write a boring story, exercise with low energy, screw up your business launch, and embarrass yourself. If you only attempt things you’re 100% sure will end in success, you won’t do anything of significance.

2. Accept that you will not make progress in ALL other areas of your life (for the chosen time)
You have 50 areas of your life you know could be better, don’t you? And you want them done now! ALL OF THEM! Or you know that your reward if you succeed would be delayed significantly from the work (like writing a book).

The decision to focus is almost always slightly uncomfortable. Focus is commitment to a single task, and it can be very unsettling to commit to read your C++ book for your career when you know you need to get in shape too.

This is where Facebook rears its ugly blue and white head. “Hey, you don’t need to read your book or go to the gym, you have a new notification. Let’s just think about that in the background while we check this exciting, immediately rewarding message.”

I like to combat this tempting thought with another thought – whatever I do today is a projection for the rest of my life. If I spend 2 hours on Facebook today, I’m setting that standard for the rest of my days. But if I write 2,000 words today, I’ll have written more than 700,000 words per year at that pace. Did you know that the average novel length is 64,000 words? That means I could write TEN full books in a year! Even if I cut my pace in half to 1,000 words per day, it’s FIVE full books. It really hits home for me when I think about how much time it’d take me to write 1-2 thousand words – about two hours. So my choice is between trifling conversation on facebook and writing five books? Hmm…

This decision is what you need to make, and the next requirement is how you can make it.

3. Believe that your current task is worthy of #1 and #2
When a task is appealing enough that you’re willing to risk failure, and you’re willing to forego everything else for a time, it’s worthy of your full, unbroken attention.

Take a long-term view of your life to understand what is worth this honor. I would be so excited to have written one full-length book (five is fine, too), and that could easily happen with focused writing. What down-the-road reward makes you smile when you think about it? Is it your fit body in the mirror or on the beach? Is it having written a book? Is it having a clean house or going minimalist?

There are a number of different paths you can choose, and as I alluded to in this post, it is not about picking the BEST one. You could spend a lifetime trying to figure out whether to spend your time reading excellent books, working out, writing, volunteering, or anything else. Move forward and make progress in areas that matter to you. When you look at your six-pack, you’re not going to think, “I should have been learning Italian.” You’re going to think, “Wow, I have a six-pack… Maybe I’ll learn Italian now.”

4. Battle against distractions using weapons of time, location, and mindset
Once you have picked your task to focus on, get strategic with it. What time is best to read/write/exercise/learn karate? Where should you do it that will allow you to fully concentrate? What distractions could arise in this time and how will you react to them? Will you turn off your iDistractYou device or put it on silent?

Focus is inherently simple, but difficult too. Its simplicity can trick people into thinking it’s easy, but it takes strategy, dedication, and a commitment to see one thing through to the end at the cost of all other possibilities. The benefits, though, are among the most rewarding I have ever experienced.

The more rigid you are with your rules of focusing, the more skilled you will become at it. Sometimes people act like the world’s distractions are their boss. But remember, the world distracts you because it is not tuned in to you. Telemarketers don’t know you’re eating dinner (RIGHT?!). When your friend calls, she doesn’t know that you’re in the middle of something very important in your life. Call her back when you’re not in the zone.

Instant notifications are drugs that train you for a life of distraction.
Let people know that your focused time is important to you and your well-being, and any reasonable person will understand. Starting out, you can set aside just one hour per day to focus on a key area of your choice. If you say you don’t have time, I will punch your nose four times. You have time for the things that matter to you.

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Drawing Your Dreams into Reality

Amazing how our brains works and how we can use our creative right side of the brain to make our dreams real. 

Enjoy with Patti Dobrowolski's TedxRainier video!

The Mindset All Successful People Have in Common

More than any habit or talent, this particular way of thinking about the world will help you achieve your dreams.

What sets truly successful people apart from those who never realize their dreams? Is it a particular set of habits? An increased appetite for risk? Skill at networking? Plain old smarts? No doubt each of these factors plays a part in some people’s achievements, but perhaps underlying all of these differences is a particular and profoundly powerful mindset.

That’s the gist of several fascinating articles out recently; they argue the fundamental difference between the wildly successful and the merely mediocre is not any inborn characteristic or individual learned behaviour but how we think about skills and learning in general.

Can People Really Change?

Some folks, it seems, think that, basically, when it comes to skills and abilities, you get the hand you’re dealt, and that’s that. You are however smart you are, however hard working, and there’s little to nothing you can do to change these fundamental characteristics of your personality. That’s called a fixed mindset.

Other people know differently. Those with the opposite view, called a growth mindset, believe that with effort and perseverance, you can expand your intellect, broaden your skills, improve your character, and overcome obstacles. They see the key to getting ahead not as inherited talent or skill but good, old-fashioned hard work. Any guesses as to who ends up more successful?

If you haven’t guessed yet, achievers generally have a growth mindset, a fact proven in large part by the research of renowned Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In a lengthy and fascinating article, PolicyMic recently delved into her findings in depth, but the basic takeaway is short and sweet: "It's all about your mindset. Successful people tend to focus on growth, solving problems, and self-improvement, while unsuccessful people think of their abilities as fixed assets and avoid challenges."



How to Get a Growth Mindset

Dweck may be a pioneer in this line of research, but she’s not the only scientist studying the profound effects of our mindset on success. Another recent study built on her work by polling high school students about their attitudes. Some students told the research team that they believed people fell into particular categories--some were geeks, for instance, others jocks--and that in general they’re unlikely to change over time. Others told the scientists that people generally adapt and grow.

What effect did the belief that people can change have on students? Though Dweck’s work suggests those with a growth mindset will be more successful in the long term, this recent study also found big effects in the short term. In short, those with a growth mindset had less stress and anxiety and more self-esteem, and they were in generally better physical health.

That’s even more compelling evidence you should strive for a growth mindset. But is it possible to change your outlook if you’ve previously been more of a believer that abilities are fixed? Yup, according to the same research team’s follow-up experiment. Simply telling the high school students in a single session that evidence shows people can change had large positive effects both physically and psychologically a year later, with no other follow-up.

"Our research shows that adolescents can learn to tell themselves a different story, a story in which people have the potential to change," the authors conclude.

If they can do it, so can you. You’ll be more successful for it.

If you like to know more about Carol Dwecks work, then have a look at her bestselling book: "Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential"



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5 Habits that lead to more Happiness

Happier people are more productive. Way more productive.

According to psychologist (and happiness researcher) Shawn Achor, when your brain is happy, it “performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral, or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, [and] your energy levels rise”.

Achor has deeply explored the topic, and has uncovered that happy people:

Are 31% more productive (this one’s my favourite)
Have 37% better sales figures
Have better, more secure jobs
Are better at keeping their jobs
Are more resilient
Have less burnout
And more. Happy doctors are even “19% faster, [and] more accurate at coming up right the right diagnosis at positive instead of negative, neutral, or stressed”.

According to Achor, “if we can find a way of become positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster, and more intelligently.” Luckily, there are a number of scientifically-proven ways that you can rewire your brain to become happier. Achor suggests five of them you should do every day:

1. Recall three things you’re grateful for. In Achor’s studies, after doing this for 21 days, people’s brains begin to “retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first”, making them much happier.
2. Journal one great experience you had. “Journalling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it.”
3. Exercise. “Exercise teaches your brain that your behaviour matters”, and it helps you solidify the connection between your actions and their rewards. Exercise is also a great way to focus better.
4. Meditate. Achor: “We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once. It allows our brains to focus on the task at hand.”
5. Perform a random act of kindness. It doesn't matter if your act of kindness is buying a coffee for the person after you in line, volunteering, or sending a positive email. Achor gets “people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email, praising or thanking someone in their social support network.”

According to Achor, these activities done “in just a two-minute span of time, [for] 21 days in a row, [can] actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually rework more optimistically and more successfully. Happiness “turns on all of the learning centers in your brain, allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way”.

Even though two minutes appears to be enough to rewire how you think, I personally think that’s the least you can do, particularly when happier, positive people are 31% more productive.

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Our Personalities Are Constantly Changing, Even if We Think They’re Not

We admit we've changed in the past, but mistakenly believe we'll be the same person in the future.

It’s rare that scientific journals explicitly engage philosophical conundrums, but a paper in this week’s Science magazine begins with the question: “Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?” At age 18, that skull-and-crossbones tattoo seems like an unimpeachably cool idea; at 28, it’s mortifying. You meet the man of your dreams at 25 — except that your dreams have become so different by 35 that you end up divorced.

“Even at 68, people think, Ugh, I'm not the person I was at 58, but I'm sure I’ll be this way at 78,” says one of the Science study authors, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness.

An obvious answer to the question is that people mature — that “change is inevitable,” as British politician Benjamin Disraeli said, that “change is constant.” But after examining the responses of more than 19,000 people gathered over four months in 2011 and 2012, the researchers— Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson — discovered that even though most people acknowledge that their lives have changed over the past decade, they don’t believe change is constant. Against all evidence, most people seem to believe that who they are now is pretty much who they will be forever.

For example, the average 33-year-old surveyed expected less change over the next decade than the average 43-year-old reported actually had occurred over the past decade. As the paper says, “People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person[s] they will be for the rest of their lives.” Although personality and values do tend to become more stable with age, people generally underestimate the extent of future personality shifts. The researchers call this phenomenon “the end of history illusion.”

Proving an illusion is a giant epistemological problem, which is one reason the authors recruited so many participants for their study — although many of the thousands were recruited from a website sponsored by a French reality show, Leurs Secrets du Bonheur (The Secrets of Happiness). Analyzing the answers that the volunteers provided to questions about their favorite music, food, hobbies, as well as about choices concerning friends and vacations, Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson compared people at different stages of life and came to a couple of conclusions:

1. The older you get, the less you believe you have changed or will change. This finding isn’t surprising: for years, researchers have confirmed the common-sense idea that one’s personality and preferences become more stable with age. At 80, your grandfather will likely disparage whichever political party he opposes with more ferocity than he did at 65. As the Science research explains, even young people feel their current qualities are good qualities. They find it hard to imagine their beliefs and values could significantly change — even though most of us actually change our views often as time progresses.

2. In a similar vein, people have a tendency to recognize that their personalities and preferences have changed in the past but misunderstand that personalities and preferences often change in the future. As part of the research, the researchers compared how self-reported personality traits had changed among 3,808 adults recruited not by that French TV show but by the MacArthur Foundation. The participants had completed a personality survey (as part of a larger study called MIDUS, or Midlife Development in the United States) in the mid-1990s and then again in the mid-2000s. Among other things, MIDUS measures what are called the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability (sometimes called neuroticism), openness to experience and extroversion. (You can test your Big Five here.)

The MIDUS surveys are widely accepted for their reliability, so the scientists assumed that any difference between scores in the mid-1990s and those in the mid-2000s accurately captured changes in how much people are conscientious, agreeable, stable, open and extroverted today vs. 10 years ago. The researchers then asked the participants to estimate how much their MIDUS measures would have changed from 10 years ago and how much they will change in 10 years. Most people were pretty good at estimating the difference in average MIDUS scores over the past decade, but they dramatically underestimated how much MIDUS scores change for most people in the future. In short, people may commit errors of prediction more often than they succumb to errors of memory.

As further insurance that the effect they were tracking was real, the researchers conducted another study with a smaller group of volunteers. In the original experiment, the researchers assigned the participants to either make predictions of how much they would change in the future or how much they had changed in the past — but not both — so the scientists couldn’t be sure that different people were interpreting the personality criteria in the same way. They focused on 613 adults who provided answers about both future change and past change, and the discrepancy between predictive and past change remained. Most of them predicted that they would change less over the next decade than the majority of people who reported they had actually changed. Their predictions fell short, however. In other words, people who thought they “loved” and would always prefer Rice Chex to Corn Chex became less adamant by their 50s. By their late 60s, they seemed not to care so much, which may owe partly to declining mental acuity, but may also reflect a real change in the strength and intensity of personality and preferences.

The paper shows other data: older people are less willing to pay for the same concerts and meals than younger people anticipate they would, and they are less likely to remember the name of their best friend. But that could be because older people are simply bored by familiar pleasures and have worse memories.

Whether people change — can change, do change, actually change — is surely one of the most important questions in psychobiology. The Science paper advances our understanding of the answer incrementally: we understand that we have changed, but we are uncomfortable with the idea that we will change any further. The need to change implies another question: Do we need to correct a flaw? It’s not likely that any amount of science can answer that question.

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Tiny Habits

Behaviour scientist BJ Fogg explains a painless strategy to personal growth.


For years, I've aspired to achieve the same simple goal: Floss daily.

It seems so easy. But time and again, after being faithful for a few days, I fall off the flossing wagon. And each failed attempt makes me feel lousier about myself. After all, it’s just flossing! Then earlier this year, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled upon the social scientist who may have found the secrets of human motivation and behaviour.

Professor BJ Fogg, Ph.D., has spent close to two decades founding and directing the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, studying how human behaviour works. His expertise is in creating systems that change human behaviour—as he calls his work, Behaviour Design. In exploring a few shortcuts to creating positive behaviour, Fogg found a particular method that worked extremely well. He called it Tiny Habits. “I started doing it on my own, and decided to share it with friends and had no idea it would keep going and going,” Fogg says. “It is a way to change your behaviour without relying on willpower.”

Eventually, Fogg launched a week long Tiny Habits test program online, asking participants only to stick to the methods, and offer constructive feedback. The results have been ground breaking. Perform a quick search on Twitter and you’ll find hundreds of #tinyhabits testimonials, an underground stir that earned Fogg a platform at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year, to present his “life hack.”


Three Baby Steps

Fogg’s research has taught him that human behaviour is systematic. Each of our actions and decisions is fuelled by three components—motivation, ability and triggers. Our behaviour, particularly our habits, comes from an underlying motivation, the ability to complete the particular action and a stimulus that provokes the action.

For example, your morning alarm blares and you immediately turn it off and get out of bed—or you do after a couple rounds of hitting the snooze button. Getting up to start the day is your motivation, locating your alarm clock within arm’s reach creates your ability to fulfil it, and the loud, incessant beeps are the triggers, reminders to your instincts that the next action is to turn off the alarm.

The road to any desired behaviour—say, increasing productivity on the weekends, making more sales calls or eating healthier—can be jump-started with three baby steps:

1. Start small. “Pick a small step toward your goal—a step so tiny, you’ll think it’s ridiculous,” Fogg says. Because it’s radically easy, you’re more likely to actually complete the behaviour, regardless of how much or how little motivation you feel.

2. Find an anchor. Choose an existing routine in your life to act as a trigger for your new behaviour. Parking your car, brushing your teeth or taking a shower are all routines that can act as great anchors to trigger a new habit. “Whether you realize it or not, you have all sorts of routines,” Fogg says. “I call these anchors that you can connect to your tiny behaviour. The key is to pick which routine is the right trigger for your small, simple behaviour.”

The blueprint for your new behaviour should complete the following sentence: After I (routine), I will (tiny behaviour).

“I've created all these tiny habits in my life, from really practical to kind of crazy,” Fogg says. “One practical habit is, as soon as the phone rings, I put on my headset and I start walking. This has grown to lifting kettlebells or doing little one-leg squats while I'm on the phone. The desired behaviour is to be active and working out in these small ways. I'm on the phone two to three hours a day, and now it’s a habit that I probably can’t stop. When I take calls, I'm up and walking around.”

Another habit Fogg has introduced into his life—one that might be considered crazy—is meant to build his upper-body strength. “After I pee, I do push-ups,” Fogg says with a big laugh. “And then I promptly wash my hands. I mostly work from home—I wouldn't do it in a public restroom.”

In the beginning, Fogg would do only two push-ups after using the restroom. Because doing two push-ups was almost effortless, it quickly became a habit for Fogg to hit the floor right after using the restroom. Once two push-ups became too easy, he started doing five. When doing five became really easy, Fogg increased it to eight. Eight push-ups became habitual, and soon he was doing 12 to 15 push-ups every time. Now he effortlessly incorporates north of 100 push-ups into his daily routine.

He’s since transitioned into lifting kettlebells. “My arms have gotten so much stronger,” Fogg says. “Since I focused on these Tiny Habits, I've lost 25 pounds and am back to my college weight. And frankly, it has not been hard. It’s a lot of little teeny things. I'm drinking more water, I'm doing push-ups, and just little by little as you do these things, you start seeing progress.”

Part of good behaviour design is evaluating which existing routines to use as anchors for new habits. Because the average adult uses the restroom seven times a day, it was the perfect anchor for Fogg’s habit of doing push-ups.

Fogg advises that someone like me, who aspires to floss every day, anchor the new habit to its natural trigger, teeth-brushing. Like a seed flourishing under favourable conditions, if you plant your new behaviour in the right spot, it’ll naturally grow without further coaxing. “If you try to start a habit and it hurts, you’re making it too hard. It has to be something that’s not a big deal, where you just think, Oh, it’s just two curls with the kettlebells. And after it’s over, be happy that you did it when you had planned to do it.”

3. Celebrate immediately. In building a habit, it helps to reward yourself in positive ways that are as small as your tiny behaviours themselves—give yourself a thumbs-up, a smile in the mirror, or tell yourself good job! “Notice how often athletes celebrate and when they do it—immediately,” Fogg says.

Not only do small celebrations reinforce desired behaviour, but they design for what Fogg calls “tiny thrills.”

“Our brains are very bad at distinguishing between I did this huge thing and I'm feeling awesome about it and I did this tiny thing and I'm still feeling awesome about it,” Fogg says. “Somehow in our heads we exaggerate, which is a good thing. That’s part of the hack—building success momentum, allowing yourself to feel successful, allowing that success to be larger than it rationally should be, then growing and leveraging that attitude into bigger things.”


Forward Progress

Perhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. When participants in Fogg’s Tiny Habits online program were asked whether the strategies affected their confidence in creating good habits in the future, a whopping 91 percent said it increased or greatly increased. When participants were polled on whether the Tiny Habits had rippled out to create other positive changes in their lives during the week of the program, 65 percent said yes.

There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce.

“Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, I believe your ability to change in the future decreases. In other words, they are stealing away from you the ability to change,” Fogg says. “We've all been there and experienced it. If you set somebody up on a path where they’re likely not to succeed, or you set yourself up to ‘run two hours every day, no matter what,’ when you stop, it’s not a neutral event—you come back worse. That’s one of the problems in our culture—we overreach.”

Overreaching and falling short is the antithesis of Fogg’s Tiny Habits method. Unless your environment or social circle drastically changes, it’s almost impossible to implement radical changes or big leaps. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically.

“One thing we have to move away from is this idea of big and brittle—I'm going to do this big thing and if I fail once, it’s over,” Fogg says. “It’s not that [high achievers] are necessarily in better condition, it’s their routine that makes the behaviour easier to follow. This is true of virtually all behaviours that are simple. They’re easier the more you do them.”

That’s what I'm finding on my ongoing quest to become a daily flosser. I started by flossing one tooth a day, and now, 2½ weeks later, I'm currently flossing exactly 10 teeth a day.

Yes, of course it felt silly to floss a single tooth for the first week. In and of itself, flossing one tooth probably didn't go a long way in warding off gingivitis. But I haven’t missed a single day of flossing since I began my tiny habit. So I've successfully created an ongoing behaviour, and I have confidence that it’ll continue to work.

“It’s more than a feeling,” Fogg says. “When you [create a habit], you're signalling to yourself, Yes! I can change my behaviour. I'm doing it right now! You’re telling yourself this at least once a day. Just have patience, keep going and don’t give up.”


And really, who doesn't have the patience to floss one tooth?

Fogg-y Thoughts

Almost 20 years ago, before iPhones and way before Google Glass, Stanford professor BJ Fogg coined a term for the potential of computers to influence human behaviour—“captology,” from the acronym Computers As Persuasive Technologies.

When Fogg first posited that computers could shape human behaviour, people thought him preposterous. “When I came to Stanford in ’93 to specifically look at how computers can be designed to influence people, nobody had ever done any systematic work in that area,” Fogg tells success. “That was considered kind of freaky and scary by some people; they just didn't think of computers as that instrumental.”

Indeed, everywhere digital technology touches our lives—purchasing something online, going on Facebook, reading a text message—we are being persuaded to take action. The technology is molding our behaviour. “My bias is that a positive use of technology can bring out good outcomes in the world,” says Fogg, “not to enslave people or to separate people from their money.” Why we need to study captology, Fogg argues, is that “we are creating machines that control humans and human behaviour.” Kind of gives you pause, right?

Fortune has named Fogg, 50, one of the “10 New Gurus You Should Know,” and Forbes states that “no one [else] has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience designers,” the architects of our new interconnected society.

As a professor, he’s never taught the same class twice; there was one that explored how social media can promote world peace and another teaching students how to use online videos to persuade people. Perhaps Fogg’s most famous curriculum, the “Facebook Class,” built apps and, for some students, fortunes. (Among his former pupils is a co-founder of Instagram.)

“I think every good business is about helping people do what they already want to do,” Fogg says. “That’s what we’re figuring out: What do people want to do and how do we make it simple for them to do it? That’s one of the things I teach a lot now to my students—help people do what they already want to do.”



Sounds like the secret to entrepreneurial success.

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