The Exchanges

Q When I was talking with Daniel Common on the podcast, he said there was two ways to sort of like make behaviors easier in a way you have a carrot and a stick kind of approach where you sort of add force or you remove force. In your experience, is there a better approach?

A Yeah, I have a different model for that. I mean, I, I totally, I get that, and I like that, but I have a different model of how to think about how to make something easier to do, and in my model, and I call it the pack person model, there are three approaches. Number one is you train the person so that person gets more capable. You skill them up. Now, that doesn't always work because a lot of people don't want to be skilled up, they don't want to be trained, but you consider that option first. If we're trying to help people, say, cook more vegetables, or eat more vegetables for dinner, well, train them, skill them up, teach them how to acquire them, how to cook them, and so on. So that's one option, is you change the person, you make them more capable, and in that way the behavior becomes easier to do. Number two, And the next thing to consider, and there's a sequence, and all of my work, it's all a system. Every, there's a sequence, and how, how you think can solve these problems. Number two has to do with redesigning the environment or the context to make it easier to do. And so you put tools or resources into somebody's context. Now notice this is different than skilling somebody up. You're not changing the person, you're changing their environment. Or if you're designing for your own behavior, you change your own environment. So you get the gear you need to wash the vegetab…

AI assessment note: “I have a different model of how to think about how to make something easier”

Q And does it get formed by repetition then?

A Yeah. There has been a lot of stuff out in the world that says repetition creates habits, but that's actually not how it works. If you look at the study that people cite most when they're making that claim, it's a 2009, 2010 study. It was, you will see that that study showed that habit strength correlates with repetition. It wasn't even designed to show causal relationships. So yes, habit strength correlates with repetition, but repetition is not what creates the habit. Um, that would be like saying I'm going to do a study of fit people, and oh, guess what? Hanging out in the gym leads to being fit. Okay, everybody, go hang out in the gym, because my study shows that the fittest people are the people that spend the most time in the gym, so go hang out in the gym. So you go to the gym, or I go to the gym, or somebody goes to the gym, they hang out at the snack bar and watching TV and whatever, and they're like, I'm not getting fit. What's going on? That's how this research is being misapplied. And so, to set the record straight, as you saw in the book, I have a chapter called Emotions Create Habits. So it's emotions that cause our brain to rewire. They go, oh my gosh, that helped me feel successful, or that, that was instrumental. So the problem, and I knew That would be controversial, and that would upset people, because some people have established their whole careers around t…

AI assessment note: “repetition creates habits, but that's actually not how it works.”

Q I like that a lot. Is there a relationship between Sort of motivation and your sense of self or your self-talk, your identity, and maybe emotions?

A Yes, and it's probably, it's complicated, um, and I'm not sure anybody has totally figured it out, because those are big categories, but certainly there's a relationship. Let me start here. In different contexts, we have different things that motivate us. In some ways, You can think of that as wearing different hats or having different identities in different contexts. So in some contexts, I'm an uncle, like at a family reunion. In some contexts, I'm a teacher, like at Stanford. In other contexts, ah, I'm a, you know, ok surfer. Not a good one, not a terrible one. And so in each of those contexts, I'm a different person, and what motivates me is different in each one, and I'm behaving differently in each one Based on that role that I'm playing. That said, I do think there is a general, though some people would argue with me, a general, and I'll call it self-efficacy. Even though Albert Bandura, who pioneered the concept and so may argue with me, I do think that people have a generalizable sense of, yeah, I can do this. Uh, you know, whatever the context is, whether I'm at a family reunion or at Stanford or out in the waves, Bam, here's a huge wave, I'm gonna do this, or here's a huge teaching challenge, I'm gonna do this, or wow, my family reunion's really going south, I gotta step and do something big, I'm gonna do this. So I do think that sense of being able to take action an…

AI assessment note: “Yes, and it's probably, it's complicated... but certainly there's a relationship.”

Q When you were saying that I was thinking, well, what is the role of my friends then in my behavior or my destination or my journey? Like people that I hang out with the most, my coworkers, my friends, what role do they play?

A Massive. Massive good or bad. So, yes, a lot. I mean, most people don't like to admit this, but our behavior is so influenced by our environment more than we think, and part of that environment is the people around us. Your friends, if you want to eat in a certain way, and they eat in a totally different way, that's hard. If you're hanging out with them during an eating context. If your friends are really into, let's say, studying and doing homework, Bam, you're gonna probably study and do more homework. But we do have identities, different identities and different friend groups, and knowing how to move among them to optimize ourselves or achieve our aspirations is a skill. For some people, and this is hard, you may need to turn the volume down on some friendships or even end them if those friendships are not taking you in the direction you want to go. That's just the reality. In other cases, let's just talk about households as friends, let's say. You can hopefully have a household where you say, hey, everybody, I'm not drinking coffee for the next little while, and I need your support on this, and your friends will support you rather than sabotage you. Now, hopefully, people in your household will support you when you want to make a good change and not sabotage you, but there is, unfortunately, situations where you do get sabotaged by friends or members of your household, even…

AI assessment note: “Massive. Massive good or bad. So, yes, a lot.”

Q I think that's a good way to sum it up. We've talked a lot about individual level behavior change. How do we change the behaviors of groups or tribes?

A Yeah, that's a great question. There was a year at Stanford where the whole year of research, we called it Change Together. And what we wanted to look at, what are, how do we change groups? Uh, and we mapped out different patterns, of course, another framework, another model for this, and it's harder to explain this because it's like a two by three thing, and anyway, but just, I'll get to some of the conclusions from the research, is that there are different patterns that work for changing groups or changing together. One distinction that we drew out of the research is we called one type of group Like if you want to change your behavior, you can join a destination group or a journey group. A destination group is a community that is already doing what you aspire to do. So let's say you aspire to work out. Oh, let's pick something easier. You, you aspire to study a lot. You're in college. So guess what? Move into the honor storm where people are already studying, and then it makes it easier for you to change and study because you've joined this group. That is, they're already doing that. So that's one way. Another way is called the journey group, where you join up with other novices who also want to make this change, and together you make this journey, and you all study more, or whatever you're choosing. So you've got these two patterns going on. Then, on top of that, you have th…

AI assessment note: “there are different patterns that work for changing groups or changing together.”

Q I think that's a really good way to put it. I want to dive into behavior change a little bit. We, we tend to think that if we give people the right information, it'll cause a behavior change, but I don't, I don't think that's true. Can you walk me through?

A I know we've all thought that we've all hoped that for a long time and it is important. And in tiny habits, I point this out and I've pointed it out for a while. That information alone does not reliably lead to sustained behavior change. Now information can be part of the puzzle, but that alone doesn't seem to do the trick for most people. So seeing statistics, seeing data won't necessarily change somebody's behavior in the long term. And back in the day when the quantified self movement was more visible and buzzier and more exciting, That was one of the things, I mean, I really, really like the people involved, and I really like to see technology Be created to help people be healthier and more productive and happier and so on, but I couldn't get super enthusiastic about the overall idea of quantified self because I knew that just giving somebody data about their sleep or about how many calories or about whatever wasn't going to add up to be a thing that would create lasting change in most people's lives. Now, I imagine there are a few unusual people that All they need is data, and everything else clicks together. Yeah, now, there is one qualification chain for this that, where it does help. Information. And let me drill down on where it doesn't work. If it's information about why you should do something in a domain, we already understand pretty well, like nutrition or sleep or…

AI assessment note: “information alone does not reliably lead to sustained behavior change.”

Q What does it mean to be happy and healthy?

A Of course it's different for different people, but for me, Nature is a big piece of that for me, and I didn't realize this, I didn't realize the pattern, how important connecting to nature is for me to be healthy and happy, and it's different for different people, but yes, I taught a class, two classes. The only class I ever repeated at Stanford, I always teach a new class, was on behavior design to help people connect to nature, but I didn't recognize how important that pattern was in my life I'd moved out of Silicon Valley in about 2001 because I just felt like it was dehumanizing me. And so, even though I still had teaching and research at Stanford, we kind of escaped about two hours north where I, where we moved to live next to a river, and the whole reason we moved out was to be by the river and get out of what I felt like in Silicon Valley was just greed and exploitation and just not real relationships. If you couldn't help somebody financially, it just seemed like they weren't interested in. So, that And then one day I was sitting in our home, and it's in Hildesburg, California, and I looked around the living room, and every single piece of every painting, every, anything in the room had to do with nature. I had plants. I had rocks. I had feathers. The carpet was leaves, and I looked around and said, okay, BJ, this is clear. You're kind of obsessed with nature. So for me…

AI assessment note: “connecting to nature is for me to be healthy and happy”

Q What are the other parts of the environment that we probably don't think about that have a massive influence on our behavior?

A Wow. I wish I had the framework. I wish I had the model of environment. Cause then I could just go here with the five things, uh, off the top of my head. I'm going to think, so we've talked a little bit about the perception of what's around us, and so I'm not going to go there, and certainly our social environment, bam, not going to go there. I'm going to go with our built environment, and I'm going to go with some details. I think lighting matters so much. If you look around the places where I live, I have like hacked the lighting, like right now, I have a huge window open in front of me, and I have full sun coming in right into my face, and then in the evening, the light changes, you know, I have, like, they turn to be, like, amber, and then at night, I only have, like, these red night lights all over the house, so I really think lighting plays a big role, and there's research on this. I'm not an expert on the studies, but the lighting is a huge deal. I think sound is a huge issue. And managing our sound environment is harder than the lighting environment. I think that's a big deal. Creating an environment, and this is different than light and sound, but it's a big part of my life, and it has been for a long time, is how do I rearrange my environment to make the good behaviors really easy to do? And I'm constantly designing and redesigning and optimizing, and it can be as sim…

AI assessment note: “I'm going to go with our built environment... I think lighting matters so much.”

Q Is that an information? Like will information alone change the.

A It may be. See, this is, this is why it's a hard question. Maybe. Yes. You know, this is a model, you know, as I was trying to map it out. So I've mapped out what is ability, what is motivation, what is behavior, all of those things. And when it gets to context, it's such a hard thing to feel like you, like I solved the puzzle elegantly for it. So that is, you know, a kind of project that's in the back of my mind. And if there is a solve, you know, maybe I'll stumble across it someday or some, maybe somebody's already solved it and that would be awesome. There could be a map that's given to me of the hiking trails near where I live in South Maui. And then just looking at that map, we'll make it.

AI assessment note: “It may be. See, this is, this is why it's a hard question. Maybe.”

Q little bit more. And normally when I hear examples of environmental change, it's, it's sort of very physical and visual in the sense of, um, I put a gym in my garage or I put my running shoes next to my door or what does it mean in the context of a knowledge worker? Like how, how do we set up an environment to make better decisions, to think better?

A You are asking me such a good, hard question. I love this. Um, I'm a person who creates models and frameworks and so on, and the one concept that I've not been able to nail is to do a theory or framework or model of environment, context, or environment. I'm using those as synonyms. It's hard. Um, but you're right. There's the physical aspects of it, but then there's like these digital environments, you know, what's on your screen and what's open and what's easily accessible. And then environment and context can also be how you perceive the exact same landscape around you. So say I'm here in Maui and I'm like, oh, I could walk some places. I don't know where I'm walking. And then I see a map of trails nearby. And I look at the trails, and I'm like, oh, just that insight that there are trails around me then changes. I believe changes my context or my environment because now I'm perceiving what's around me differently. So it's not that the actual landscape has changed, but my perception of the landscape has changed. And right now, if we want to talk about coronavirus issues, people are perceiving people around them differently. So it's not like your neighbors have changed. It's not like that doorknob or the elevator button has changed. But now we have a different perception about, oh my gosh, what does that door mean? What does that elevator button mean in terms of contagion? So I…

AI assessment note: “That's one way we can change the environment is change our perception of it.”

Q But in general, like, how do we go about stopping habit? I mean, habits are sort of neutral, right? They're neither good nor bad. How do we stop a habit that we feel is bad for us?

A Yeah. The, the, uh, valence of that word has shifted over the last 10 years. Uh, even 10 years ago when I was training the Weight Watchers innovators at their headquarters, they were unwilling to use the word habit in their program because they felt it was mostly a negative word. So that was a snapshot in time I remember about 10 years ago. Fast forward to today, it can go both ways today, but there was a time when it was considered mostly negative. And yes, you're right. Habits are habits. The way they form good habits, what we call good habits and bad habits, they all form in the same way. Our brain The way that brain gets rewired, it's not like here are the good habits and bad habits. It's just think behaviors become automatic, and then it's ourselves or the culture that labels them good or bad. Creating habits is pretty straightforward and easy, and that's what the tiny habits method is all about. It's for creating habits, stopping unwanted behaviors, or what people call breaking bad habits. It can be much, much harder, and it's not the same thing. They're as different as growing This little tree, let's say a palm tree with coconuts, to pulling it out of the earth. There are different processes. And unfortunately, there's a lot of information out there that tells people how to break habits that is not effective enough. It's limited. And in response to that, I've created a t…

AI assessment note: “I've created a three-phase, I call it master plan for behavior change”

Q How do we understand for ourselves or others where we are on this motivation wave?

A That is a hard, thank you for that hard question. That's hard. That's hard. That's like the, well, I'll tell you what, Alphabet, Google, came from that. They solved it in one way, and that is the whole backbone of Google was exactly figuring that out. And the way it works for Google, and the way they figured out early, Larry and Sergey is, wow, if somebody goes in and types in, how do I save more money into a search engine, Well, guess what? That's what they're motivated to do in that moment, and we're gonna queue up things for them. So we're gonna deliver to them what people already want to do. So that's one of the things I talk about a lot, and I call it a maxim. Maxim number one is help people do what they already want to do. Notice how Google did that with search, and then they sold ads on that search, ok? So they were able to say, hey, You got a solution to help people save money. We can find people who want to save money. We're going to match you up. We're going to charge you to get in front of those people. So in some ways, the ability to sense what that person wanted in the moment, not sense because they typed it into a search box, gave Google the ability to sell ads against that and then deliver. Whether it's sponsored products or more organic solutions that weren't paid for right to those people. Now, that's in the case of search. They came in, swept in, they kind of …

AI assessment note: “Alphabet, Google, came from that. They solved it in one way”