#64 Book Review – Tiny Habits - MBC REI – Thoughts About Passive Investing

When building wealth while maintaining your professional career, your most valuable resource is not capital—it is your time, including the habits you fill your day with.

B.J. Fogg’s “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything” [1] offers a refreshingly practical approach to behavior change. As a Stanford researcher who has studied behavior for decades, Fogg distills his extensive research into an accessible methodology. While “Atomic Habits” [2] and “The Slight Edge” [3] explore similar territory, Fogg’s work stands apart with its emphasis on the psychology of behavior change and its uniquely systematic approach.

Quick Summary

The central thesis in all these books is simple: making small behavior changes makes them both easy to accomplish and sustainable over time.

Unlike the hustle mentality that many gurus promote, Fogg argues that sustainable success comes from implementing tiny, strategic changes that gradually transform into powerful routines. This approach aligns perfectly with the realities of busy professionals who cannot dedicate full-time attention to personal or financial improvements.

Further, the traditional approach of relying on motivation and willpower is fundamentally flawed because motivation naturally fluctuates. While motivation can be useful when making a significant, single time change, it will eventually dip. Thus, it is not sufficient to make behavioral changes that need to be sustained over time.

Instead, Fogg proposes his Behavior Model (B=MAP), which states that behavior (B) occurs when motivation (M), ability (A), and a prompt (P) converge at the same moment. In other words, the behavior will occur in response to the prompt when your motivation and ability exceed your inherent resistance to performing the task.

Similar to previous books, Fogg recommends:

Anchoring the habit: Identify an existing routine that you want to either change or use to prompt the new habit. For example, brushing your teeth, making coffee, or getting in the car to drive to work.
Focusing on behaviors, not outcomes: This allows you to be more concrete about what you are going to do. If you are unable to phrase the desired behavior as a specific action you will take, it is more likely an outcome. For example, “save money” is an outcome while “bring my lunch to work” is a behavior.
Clearly defining the desired habits: Create specific “recipes” that follow the format, “After I … I will…” to be very clear about what you are trying to achieve. For example, “after I turn on the coffee maker, I will make a sandwich for lunch”.
Shifting your identity helps: By thinking of yourself as someone for whom the desired habit is natural it becomes easier to perform the task. For example, if you identify as an athlete, it is easier to exercise than if you identify as a couch potato, because athletes exercise regularly.

He also argues that feeling good—not repetition alone—is what truly cements habits and thus emphasizes celebration after completing a task. His belied if that the emotional response we have after performing a behavior determines whether that behavior will become automatic.

Actionable Steps

Going beyond previous work, Fogg provides two useful tools to make building habits actionable.

First, he provides an approach for identifying potential behaviors to accomplish an outcome. He calls this “swarm behaviors”, but it is essentially brainstorming. Given an outcome that you are trying to achieve, spend 30-60 minutes (more if you want) thinking about all of the possible ways that you can accomplish that outcome. Don’t worry about whether or not they are realistic or not, just put down everything you can think of. Think of small tasks, not just huge ones. Consider this to be a “magic wand” exercise, where you get to wave a wand and the behavior just happens. You want to get at least 20, hopefully more, ideas. After you run out of ideas, go over each idea you came up with and make it more specific and as small as possible. Add in all the details you can think of – exactly what you would do, where it would happen, etc.

Second is the Focus Mapping (FM) technique. Focus mapping gives you a practical method for identifying which habits will be most effective for achieving your desired outcomes. FM creates a visual representation that clarifies the relationship between specific behaviors and your aspirational goals. You divide a page into quadrants based on impact (high/low) on the vertical axis and difficulty (hard/easy) on the horizontal axis.

You take each of the behaviors you identified in the first exercise (creating the behavior swarm) and place them on the page in the appropriate place. Start with the impact of each behavior, if you did it, how much would it help you meet your goal. Rank all of the behaviors in your list according to their impact, from highest to lowest. This is effectively associating your relative motivation (M) to the tasks, since you are more motivated to perform higher impact tasks. Once you have the relative impact, ask yourself the question “Can I get myself to do this”. Be honest here. Imagine your hardest day, and think about whether or not you would be truly able to do this task. This equates to your ability (A) to perform the task.

What makes Focus Mapping particularly powerful is its ability to cut through the overwhelming number of potential habits one could adopt. Rather than trying to change everything at once, the technique directs attention to the critical few behaviors that will yield the greatest returns for the least effort. This approach isn’t about avoiding difficult behaviors entirely, but rather about starting with the easiest, highest-impact changes to build momentum and confidence before tackling more challenging habits.

You are looking for “golden behaviors” – those high-impact actions that require minimal effort. These golden behaviors become the foundation of one’s tiny habits strategy. Once you have identified those behaviors, you then apply the B=MAP model to design the habit.

Fogg talks specifically about designing tasks since it will likely take multiple iterations to find the right behavior such that your Motivation and Ability are sufficient to regularly overcome your natural resistance to change. If you find that you aren’t able to establish the habit and are not making progress towards your desired outcome, review what is causing the resistance and work to address it – possibly by making the task smaller / easier, by selecting a different prompt (or being more specific about the prompt), or identifying steps you need to take in advance to reduce the resistance (new habits).

Building on Success

Once you have successfully established a tiny habit, it will naturally grow. Growth can happen either by doing more of the same action (e.g. if you start exercising for 30 seconds, it may naturally grow into 1 min, 5 min, 15min, 30 min, 60min) or by creating new habits (e.g. if you start by cleaning the counter every night, you may create a new habit to start cooking breakfast, preparing lunch, and grocery shopping on the weekends). The point is to not force the habits to grow faster than they do naturally. You should always be able to drop back to the habit you committed to do, even on your hard days, without feeling like a failure. As Fogg says “We change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad, so make sure your attempts at demotivating behavior don’t morph into guilt trips.”.

From here, you can select additional habits that you want to create and design them into your life. The trick is to always start with small golden behaviors and celebrate your successes to make them automatic.

For readers familiar with previous work, “Tiny Habits” offers complementary insights. Fogg’s focus on emotion, specific implementation strategies, and behavior design principles adds valuable dimensions to the habit conversation.

Ultimately, “Tiny Habits” delivers on its promise to provide a method that makes behavior change easier and more sustainable.

For additional reading:

This article is my opinion only, it is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Always do your own research and due diligence. Always consult your lawyer for legal advice, CPA for tax advice, and financial advisor for financial advice.