So congratulations on the tiny habit book. It's everywhere right now. Right? You're the New York Times best Beller, the number one top Amazon pick for the whole year of 2020, and it's so well deserved because you've been doing this for 25 years, right? You've been running the behavior design lab at Stanford, and you've been thinking about this deeply for a long time. And so I'm so pleased that when you consolidated it all, it's resonating with Pete, and it's getting to people and helping people.
So today, I was hoping that we could talk about you know, tiny habits for startup founders and for startups and for early stage endeavors. Yeah. For sure. You know, it's been about the last, I'd say, 12 years where I was focused on habits specifically. Before that, it was other things that my lab would work on and other. But, yeah, the last 12 years, it's really been about How do we help people be happier and healthier?
And it turns out there's a new way of thinking about behavior and habits, and there's new and the old stuff does not work very well. And I think that's why my lab shifted away from persuasive technology, and we got did in about 2008, 2009, and just human behavior in general. It's like, oh my gosh. Even though this is, you know, human behaviors all around us, they're 1000 and thousands of studies on human behavior.
We still haven't cracked the nut, you know, it's academics and with the behavior model and other work We laid a new foundation, and I think that was so compelling for us that we left persuasive technology behind. And I feel like we did what we needed to do there. And we look just at how do we understand human behavior in a new practical, accurate way, and how do we help people change their behavior reliably to be happier and healthier. It seems also that you're bringing with this.
I mean, earlier you were studying, like, how does technologies to persuade Pete, maybe to do some good things in their lives. But now you're looking at, you know, how do people persuade themselves to do good things in their life, and you're really bringing to this a sense of stewardship of people where you wanna be a force for good in the lives of others and that helping them create better systems is gonna help them bring the good end of the world. Yes. Exactly.
And that's, you know, if you ask me, why is that important to you? I'm just wired that way. Probably from my early upbringing and probably so many people listening to us are the same. You know, yes, there's excitement in starting a company, and it's great to have a vision and make it a reality and all that, but I would say most of the entrepreneurs I know are driven by a genuine desire to help people.
And I think that's probably why you and I have gravitated toward that and are interested in connecting with founders and start ups. Yeah. Definitely. And it's not a soft trying to help others. It's not like a sort of overly empathetic. It's more of a dynamic attempt to impact the world and make the world move forward. It's not about a softness. It's about a strength in helping others. I mean, I know you grew up in a family with a strong moral code.
And as did I, and I think that that really helped to when we're in the fervor of building our, you know, behavioral labs and companies and whatnot, you can still keep your eye on the ball, which is ultimately about the impact we have on others. So this is a great place to start. Can you talk about the Stanford lab and what it's like to go through that course there. Yeah. I'm your student. What am I doing? Well, let me distinguish between the classes I teach at Stanford and then my research lab.
And those are 2 different entities and they're actually 2 different appointments, but they work together. So we'll start with the class. So every year I teach a class at Stanford, and I always teach a new class. Like, in 2020, it was gonna be about saving the planet But because of coronavirus, we shifted to behavior designed for coronavirus challenges. The year before that, it was about helping people screen time. The year before that, it was about helping people connect with nature.
So every year, I try to find, like, what's the hardest most important problem that we can tackle that relates to behavior change, and I create a course around it. And that course is very much like a startup. Because I picked something I've never done Morgan. And I know I have some confidence I can manage the process, but I do not know where we're going in the course. And then students apply, and they have to do a project as they apply for the class.
And so I look at their application, which includes the project, you know, an audition project of sorts. And I picked the students that I think are gonna benefit most from the class and the students that will also bring the most to the class and have to send away at least half the students who applied. And then first of all, even in the application, James, I say, hey. Nobody's ever taught this class before. I'm gonna make mistakes. There's gonna be twist and turns. It's like a startup.
If you don't like this, then go take a traditional class. This is not the class for you. And what's great about that is I'm setting the expectations that we're gonna go week by week in the class. I'll outline the syllabus, but I know that's gonna change. I mean, that should sound familiar to everybody listening. There's a plan, but we know it's gonna change.
And then the students who are afraid of that, they go take a traditional go get a traditional job, but it really inspires, I think, the right kind of students Pete even more excited about them. They join it. So then the class becomes They don't know this, but it's an audition to be in my lab. So the students that I feel are the strongest and that fill an important spot in my lab. I invite to join my research lab. So I've run the research lab since 1999, I guess.
Maybe 1998. And the lab is 8 to 10 students, and we meet once a week year round. So the lab keeps going. We have weekly meetings Zoom, and we've done that for years. And we work on 3 different research projects at a time up to 3. And it's very driven by what interests the students because they don't get paid for it.
And I've learned over the years that pick projects, the students, are interested in, but also relate to the bigger themes in my work, which has to do with health and behavior change and peace and wellness and so on. And so those 2 things work together. And then Morgan, I turn to my lab, and I pick somebody to be a TA for the next class IT. So even though those are, in my case, separate appointments at Stanford, they work together really well, and it's a wonderful fun thing to do.
And you've had some big names in your lab. Right? I mean, often lower key from color with Eli Gil or Mike Krueger. From Instagram. Yeah. And some VCs have spun out of my classes in my lab, and they're doing really well. Maybe proud is not quite the right word I should be using, but I'll say it. When I see one of my students, either doing a startup or making great investments in important companies, I do feel And I feel like, okay.
I've had at least perhaps a little bit of influence on helping them move forward and create innovations in the world. Yeah. And it sounds just in this few short minutes here with you, BJ, you're reminding me that you do such a great job of creating context for people. Meaning by introducing the idea by saying, look, this class is like a startup or by creating a series of classes and then bringing research lab and then creating a lab in which those people can do Beller.
Through language, it's almost as if that's a huge part of setting ourselves on the road to wellness and being better is setting the context mentally for ourselves. Is that how you approach it? I think you're right, but I don't probably think of it in those exact terms. I think my view is wow. I don't know how deep to go on this. Life is short. We only have so many days on this planet, and only a subset of those days are going to be good days where we can do stuff.
And only a subset of those days we gonna be working on the best projects? So when you're having, you know, a good day, you're healthy, you're happy, you're with a great team and you're working on the right project, you just gotta do the best you can to move forward. And I think that gives me a lot of Currier. Even my lab at Stanford, was a startup. Nobody came to me and said, BJ start a lab. Here's the funding. Here's your space. It was me saying, oh, students. You wanna do research with me?
Let's meet in Tresiter, which is the student union. And we did that for a while. And then a faculty member gave us a quarter. He heard what was going on, and he gave us a corner in his office. And then they gave me, you know, a whole room, and then they offered more space. So think just saying, hey. At one point, you're not gonna be on this planet. And so, bam, be brave, be Beller. Take big steps.
And the other piece for me is work with good people and train them and help them so they can have a massive impact. So my strategy of my life at Stanford and outside of Stanford and personal life isn't to be like the Tony Robbins or this celebrity personality. It's to teach other people how behavior works so they can have positive impact in the world. And, again, I think that's driven by I'm not always gonna be around. But if I teach people effectively, then my influence can continue. Right.
And so it's like you're encouraging them and giving them tools to push on this new levels of responsibility Yeah. For themselves and the people around them. You know, I've gotta say BJ today is, you know, January 2021. I mean, We are surrounded more and more with a culture doesn't think about that tone that doesn't think about that responsibility or that stewardship.
Beller it's our politicians or whether it's our business leaders, do you feel that distance between what you're saying and what we see in the news every day? A lot. And even more so, because I've gathered people around me or people are attracted to what I'm doing, who are different than that. They're mission driven. They're willing to make sacrifices. It's not about greed or becoming wealthy. It's about impact. And everybody listening.
You really should bring those people into your life and into your ventures. It's I'm sure you've heard elsewhere and on this show, the importance of the teammates you're working with. So when you're surrounded by those kind of people and then you read the news or you watch something going on on TV, you're just like, How could this possibly be happening?
And you have to remember, you've created kind of your own social bubble, your own social reality, and not everybody has had that kind of opportunity. Yeah. It does feel like people are trapped in their war of all against all Beller, and we are trapped where we try to trap ourselves in a creation event, a context setting, and a tone creating, and a sharing, and a paying it forward, and there's a whole different mindset. Very interesting.
Yeah. Let me share one thing I say to my students and then industry people I trained as well, which I think is gonna be relevant here. This is more like concluding statement. For some reason, James, it just felt like this is a good moment to do this. So, yes, I train industry people outside of Stanford who are creating product and services. And yesterday, it was a health company, and they were trying to change health care in a big way.
And they were identified young Flint, so sort of felt like my students and my students at Stanford. And the point I made yesterday was, hey. Don't feel like these problems have been figured out or that people older than you know the answers, and you should feel empowered, maybe even responsible, that these are problems for you to solve a And if it's not you that's solving this problem, then who? Who do you think is gonna do it if it's not you?
And I hope that helps my students and then people I train under in that they can't wait around to be invited to have a research lab or invited to do X Y Z take the initiative. If it's not us, making the difference. Who do we think is gonna make the difference? Well, that's us. It's us. And so let's do it and let's be brave in doing it and let's cooperate and let's help each other. And, James, that's something I've always admired about you.
Every time I've reached out to you over the years, and I knew how busy you were and stuff, you were always so generous your time and your help. Thank you. Well, you're welcome, BJ. And you inspire that and me and and many others. So I'd love to start to dig in on some of this stuff for the start founders. You know, they are rushing to ship something quickly.
If you talk about a world in which it's non zero sum, meaning we've got this sort of endless plane of opportunities to create something new. If it's not you, who's gonna do it? You know, we're not struggling over some sort of 0 sum game where there's one slot that we have to fight over it. We're actually trying to expand our knowledge. And these start founders are doing that. They're rushing to build things.
They're by nature builders, but we're also seeing sometimes that the impulse to build first is sometimes flawed. You have to come up with what people are going to want and use regularly and actually maybe pay for it, of course, before you actually build some do you have a framework for what a product has to be able to do before it deserves a bunch of funding and development? Do you help people think that through? I do.
I have various, and I'll start at the highest level, and I won't get to all of them. But this is exactly what I teach Not so much in my Stanford class. There was a time when I did that, but outside of Stanford, what I call my behavior design boot camp with industry innovators. You know, the highest level, there's 2 principles that I've found over the years that matter more than anything Beller, and I call them maxims. Maxim number 1 is help people do what they already want to do.
And, James, I have to confess. It took me 10 years to come to grips with it. That was the reality. You know, I started studying persuasive technology. Well, I James the whole domain of computers that influence us. Attitudes and behaviors and hopefully for the better call that persuasive technology. So, you know, I'm just thinking, well, how do you persuade or influence people?
And then later, this is part of the shift in my lab, 2008, 2009, it was like, no. The only thing that really works in the long term. And so this means if you want your venture to last or if you want your product to engage Pete. If you want your platform to change behavior and I'm using those more or less as synonyms, you've gotta help people do what they already want to do. And that pattern, everything that's gone big and persisted does that.
Notice it's not persuading people to do what they don't wanna do. No. It's Beller Pete do what they already wanna do. So when people call me for help, I counted 42,000 phone calls over the years. Just free 15 minute phone calls and people pitch an idea or they say we're doing X Y Z. What I'm listening for is, are you helping people do what they already want to do? And then I'll share the next MAC a second.
For example, a woman from Singapore called me and she says, oh, we're creating this book reading club when we're gonna get non readers to read. And I was like, well, do they want to read? She's like, no, but we're gonna swayed them to. And I was like, nope. Not gonna work. She's like, well, but we're gonna persuade them. We're gonna use gamification. And I said, nope.
I'm just not seeing you're not gonna have a successful venture on getting people who don't want to read to read no matter how much you think you can use technology or gamification or whatever. I'm listening for that. And then I try not to crush her hopes and other people hopes. I try to, like, turn it and say, well, here's the direction you've got. Number 2, and this one is Also important. You gotta do both. You gotta help people feel successful.
So as they use your product or service, they need to feel successful doing it. Now Instagram is a really clear example on this. So when Mike Krueger was in my class, he was an amazing student. He was on a team following a design brief, I gave them about mobile, and they came up with this concept for sharing photos. They called it send to sunshine and so on. And I consider that really the seed that then became Instagram years later. And the vision, the project was a good one.
Actually, I went back and looked at my grading. They got 18 out of 20, and I wrote, you know, some very interesting. I didn't say billions of people are gonna use this. It did impress me. Now when they launched Instagram, how did they help people feel successful? Yes. You could share photos and you could get likes and followers, but I don't think that was the key. I think the filters.
You could take a picture apply a filter and then your photo transform from just a photo anybody could take to something with a point of view. Something with a perspective, something that might even be like a work of art. And so those filters as people put them on allow them to go, oh my gosh. That looks great. That looks terrible. Oh, that looks wonderful. Let me post that one. And that's max and number 3, simplicity changes behavior.
I don't talk about that very much, but it's number 1, help people do what they already want to do to Instagram didn't go out and try to get people to share photos who didn't want to. Facebook didn't go out and try to get people that didn't wanna be connected to connect. Number 2, help people feel successful. That's what wires in the habit. It's not repetition that wires in habits. When people say that they are either, well, probably inadvertently misleading you, but not that.
It's emotions and then simplicity. Those are the keys. Well, it's interesting too because how you describe what a product does matters a lot then. Because if you say people want to apply filters to photos and send them out over the internet. People might say, how do you know that? Whereas what you might say is people want others to admire them and tell them that they like them. You're like, oh, yeah. People already do want that.
I mean, like, you could describe the Instagram product in various ways in which it sounds like you're covering something people wanna do, but you're not clear that they wanna do, like Airbnb. Like, people really wanna sleep on an air Beller and someone's spare room, it turns out they don't, but they do wanna rent out an empty apartment like you would rent out an empty room. And so do you ever find that when talking with people about their startup ideas? Absolutely.
Because often, especially if they're technical founders, they're describing what they're doing in technical terms. Not in terms of helping people do what they already want to do. If I'm remembering right, when Instagram first launched, their website said a fun and quirky way to share photos. Instagram was tiny, but I looked at it and I was like, oh, man. There's tons of competition, but I think they're gonna win.
And so I made that part of the keynotes and stuff I did, and I pointed out I used the reason I remember because it was part of my slide deck back then, and I gave that example. And so they didn't say, but, you know, fun and quirky way. Now did they test that? Maybe, maybe not. But At the time, that was the angle now. Instagram has been quite a different thing.
But to your point, James, yeah, whether you're pitching a VC or putting it on a website for everyday people to look at, they don't care that you've solved the technical problem because they didn't wake up in the morning saying, oh my god. I wish I had a secure way of doing X Way. I wish I could get an API working for something. So Instagram set a fun and quirky way to share photos. They didn't say over 48 top filters with a 98% AI accuracy. That's a technical thing.
And yesterday, I saw 3 Beller care ideas. And 2 of the projects kind of missed the Pete. Their project name and subtitle stuff just really didn't position it of, like, what's the benefit to the patient? What's the benefit to the doctor. What problem are we solving for those people? So it is a common mistake because we get excited about, wow, it's a technical innovation. We couldn't do this before. Wow. You know, but that's not what the market's looking for.
And then in terms of helping people feel successful, I mean, you might say that Instagram gave people these filters, which made them feel like they were doing something they hadn't been able to do before, except they're using hystomatic, which had come a few months before Instagram. But they didn't give them so many filters that they then felt incompetent on the other side. Yes. And so you hit 2 really, really important points that are about feeling successful.
I'll go to the first one, the filters, I'll help people to and you need to help them feel successful in ways that matter. And I'm gonna make a guess. What was Instagram tapping Flint? Pete want to feel like they are admired by their friends. Not people want to be admired by their friends because if they don't feel like their art doesn't matter, they wanna feel like they're admired by their friends. So the filter's like, oh, that's cool.
You know, so instantly, you get the feeling of, my friends are gonna think I'm so cool. Okay. And that sounds a little crass. But I'm just trying to boil it down. So that and that helps you will feel successful, but also simplicity if you have too much going on. Everyone listening knows this that so many new ventures over complicate things. And then, you know, new customers try to use it, and they're overwhelmed. They're like, nope. Not for me. I feel unsuccessful. I feel stupid.
I feel overwhelmed. I don't wanna do it. Yeah. So that simplicity also helps some feel successful. So number 3, Axiom Maxim helps with number 2 as well. And it's technically it's simplicity changes behavior. Now that's not in my book, but it is appropriate right now to share. Yeah. No. It's interesting. We've had some people say that some VCs say that all pitch decks need to include the problem that you're solving.
Mhmm. And I'm not sure that that's quite accurate because we've seen some great companies that it would be hard to say what problem are you solving? Like, what does Twitter solve? What does Instagram solve? What it does is it creates a new thing that I already wanna to do. It might be that instead of saying what problem it is, people should have in their deck. Like, what am I helping people do that they already want to do? That might be a better way of thinking about Yes.
And be the simplest way that can people can solve a problem they have. Amazon did that. Right? Twitter did that. People want to interact. People wanna share it. So one angle. It's not the only angle, but one is we are the simplest easiest most satisfying way to do x, and those are slightly different things. But, yeah, the easiest way to do x, one is just the overriding principle of human term is that people are lazy.
Now there's more sophisticated ways to say it, but we generally choose the easiest path to do something. Well, the nature does. Right? I mean, the law of least effort. It's why all the capillaries in our bodies conform to the same ratios that the capillaries of a tree, and it's like the law of least effort means that we all go to this lazy state, and we see that everywhere. That's just nature. It's nothing immoral.
Yeah. Beller, and I like calling it lazy just because it alarms some Pete, and them up, but there's kind of an exception. And maybe I'll give an example. I won't stereotype her. So I was having a colleague of mine code something for me, and this was 15 years ago, creating something. He's like, oh, BJ. Yeah. I did this. And then I added some features to it as well. That's like, Jonathan, I didn't want those features. He said, don't worry. I'm not gonna charge you. I just did it for free.
I was like, no, Jonathan. I'm sorry. You have to remove those features. In his mind, Morgan was better. And the fact that he could do it meant that he should do it and that's not the case. And I know a lot of my students think that. It's like, we can do this and this and this and this is like, no. No. No. No. No. Simplicity wins. Not, you know, a feature full, complicated thing.
Now some people, a very, very small part of the market, I would guess, makes their decision based on here's this new product and it's offering all features, and I'm willing to endure the complexity of it. But normal people don't think in that way. It's like, what's the simplest way that I can get this thing done that I want to get done? Right. More is not better. Generally not. Can you take us through the b equals map equation that you've worked on?
Yes. Okay. This everybody was the breakthrough. And I didn't know I was headed toward a breakthrough, but it's a model. It's written like an equation. It's not like a math equation, but it's all human behavior is this. A behavior happens when 3 things come together at the same moment. There's motivation to do the behavior. There's ability to the behavior. There's a simplicity thing, and there's a prompt and the prompt is the cue, the reminder of the call to action.
I used to call it trigger, but then I decided to change the same concept. I decided to change it to the word prompt, because it was less ambiguous and all behavior. Any culture of people at any age, those are the components. And then it's that simple. Motivation ability prompt any one of those things is missing, then the behavior will not happen. Got it. And when you say this is the breakthrough, when did this occur to you? You know, I looked back, James.
I really tried to because in my book, tiny habits, I really wanted to give Pete love Genesis stories. Like, how did this come together? So I dug back and you know, there's some stuff I couldn't find because it was on computers from, like, 2003 that I are in my garage somewhere. But what I did find a slide deck that I was doing some for eBay. That's helping them with customer support, which at the time they called site user assistance. And on that project, I said, hey.
Look. You know, you've got this dimension of motivation, and you have this dimension of ability. And to me, that was pretty obvious. You know? And there's other research out there that talks about motivation and ability. Nobody's put it together model before me quite like mine. There's been some imitators after me, but that was pretty straightforward. And I use that to map out what I now call the diamond of emotions. Or I called it back then.
I don't talk about it much, but I go back and I think that diamond of user emotion Pete those two pieces together. And then I knew there was another component because you know, you could be motivated and able. Like, I'm motivated and able to do lots of things right now, but I don't do them unless I'm prompted unless there's something is do this behavior now. And so there was some moment when that came together for me. And I was like, oh my gosh. Then I ran kind of my thought It's like, okay.
Does it apply to this? This this, I could not find any exception. And I had to live with it for a while. It's like, no. It can't be this simple. This age old puzzle, age old of what causes human behavior. Does it really come down to only these three things and then fast forward? The answer is yes. It's 3 components that characterize every behavior. How do you know when somebody's motivated? Let's say that you're a start a founder and you're trying to create a product around something.
How do you know when people are motivated? That is the $64,000,000,000 question, James. There's no perfect answer, but there's practical answers. If you have a Twitter account that's devoted to helping faith first time moms who are also working, manage the complexity, and they follow you. Guess what? That person's motivated. If you have a website on that top and they go to your website, they're motivated for what you're offering. And, you know, they found you on Google.
I mean, in some ways, Google search is an engine that figures out what are people motivated to do? What do people want? And then the AdWords and, you know, they Beller an empire. Based on figuring out what people want and then selling ad spots to offer it to those people. So that a little more the answer is if people are willing to do work, like input effort, the more effort they put into something, the more motivated they are to do it.
So the more time they spend, maybe filling out an application to join my class, the application for my class is not an in it. I wanna filter out all those people who are not motivated to do a 3 hour project. So the more time they put into something, That is a direct measure of motivation. The more money they pay for something, that's not a perfect measure because people have different resources, but the more they stretch their finances to do something. Let's we Pete it there.
The more motivated they are, the more physical effort they put in, the more mental effort And the more they violate their routine, like, my partner needed to get vaccinated 2 days ago. So it's like, I guess I can't go surfing, which is my routine. I surf every Morgan.
And instead, I went with him to give emotional support and get him through the vaccination process because I was so motivated you really have those 5 components, and those 5 components are a different model that I call the ability chain. But the point is the harder the behavior somebody does, the more motivated they and the components of ability or time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine, violating, changing your routine up. Very interesting.
You know, this goes toward coming up with startup ideas because if you're looking around at where people are violating their patterns or doing something.
Or if you're going through the stacks of data around the Google search and just playing around in the data, you might find something anomalous that will tip you off to some we, you know, brought this essay called the hidden patterns of great startup ideas and what we said and what I believe very much is that the biggest waste in the world or in our startup VC ecosystem in particular is just great people working on mediocre ideas.
And you've said that you've listened to 10,000 ideas or more do you have a sense about where truly great start up ideas come from at this point? You're so deeply into human psychology. I was wondering if there were some things that you would know. You know, look for things that humans are fundamentally wired to do. For sure. You remember this James back in the day, you sign up for LinkedIn and you Flint to people And there was nothing else you could do.
I remember people saying, now that I'm all LinkedIn, Nawa, there really was nothing to do. But what it showed is it showed you had this little wheel or circle thing, and inside that showed your number of connections. And what was so smart in doing. It was tapping into what we're deeply wired to do, and that's to look like to avoid looking like we are losers. Okay. So if I start in LinkedIn and I have 3 connections, that means loser.
And but if I have 200 or 400, I remember, I think Alan Levy had 500, which was the max. At least the way I saw it, there was this, like, boom, that went through all of Silicon Valley. Like, Beller has 500 connections. We don't know what we're doing with these But, oh my gosh, she's on this pedestal. And so what that tapped into was our deep seated social motivators. We want to look like we're valued and we have status, and we certainly don't wanna look like losers.
So one really safe guide is to always look at it in kind of primitive fundamental ways. Like, you know, we want to look good to others. We want to be financially secure. We want to feel love, things like that that are just very deep wired into us as human beings and animals, frankly. Yeah. Years ago, I said that behind every great consumer internet company, is a insight about human psychology. Mhmm. Well Pete. Looking at that level. Yeah. I think you're right.
I think that's where a lot of these really interesting ideas come from, and and clearly something like Instagram came out of your lab through that type of thinking. So it can certainly be done. So this behavioral design for founders, No. You talked to so many founders. You work BJ with startups. Do you actually work with them on a regular basis or not? Well, the short answer is no. So years ago, I changed my policy 10 or 15 years ago. No more consulting. No more work for hire.
And I don't serve on advisory boards. And those were policies I made, and that's hard, but it's good that I've done that and stuck to it. But what people can do is call me for these 15 minute phone calls. It's gonna be gfog.com, and there's a way to schedule with me. And if they schedule me for like, oh, I'm having a hard time, x sercising. Those aren't the people I work with. It's people that are creating products and services. And I've done this, James, for so long. It's just twice a week.
I take phone calls I help people 15 minutes. Bim, I go to the next call. There's no upsell. There's no cross sell. I don't do homework before. I don't do follow-up after it's just in 15 minutes. Help people and gotten pretty fast at that because I know exactly what I'm listening for. So that's how at least in my mind, I've been able to help a whole bunch of founders and hopefully help startups understand if they're on the right path or if they need to course correct.
And sometimes I have to give really bad news and I tried to do it in the nicest of ways, but I'm impartial here. I I'm not investing in you. I'm not your brother or sister or dad. And why not tell the people the absolute truth as I see it? And sometimes nobody's told them the truth. And it's like, the problem. Here's not how it's not gonna work. And like I said earlier, then I always try to suggest a path where they can make it work.
Mhmm. Are there things that you're noticing in these conversations that lead you to see what founders can do to level up in their day to day idea creation product generation or leadership or running of the company, being a force for good? Not really in those short phone calls. That's like 15 minutes. I just try to get them right. Well, I say, how can I help you? You know? And so it's just in 15 minutes. So it's been pretty much about helping them get the right psychology for their product.
And there's not really time for me to understand them as people and individuals, but I certainly have experience like, personally and with my friends and networks and stuff in the space. And I'll just go where I think your question is leading. Take care of yourself. Take care of your most important relationships. Them. I don't know which one I'd prioritize over the other. Most people say take care of yourself first, but I don't know. I mean, they kinda go hand in hand.
So Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you don't take care of yourself and you get run down or sick or depressed or discouraged, not good. If, you know, your most important relationship, that gets damaged. What's the point of having a super successful company if you lose that thing so valuable. So I'm definitely here to say prioritize those things for sure. Yeah. So are there some tiny habits? How could tiny habits help these startup founders level up. So much.
Well, in the book, tiny habits, it's really about behavior design, the broader, the name from my work, And then one of the methods is the tiny habits method. So behavior design is a set of models, including the model we just talked about. I called the fog behavior model, but there's other models well, the choice model, the engagement model, other things. And and method. So models are ways of thinking. Methods are ways of doing and all of these are new.
And together, I call those behavior design, and that's what my lab is about for the last 10 years. And so tiny habits is a method now there is a broader set of methods for behavior design. And this is what I teach in the boot camp, and it's just system. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. And these steps come before MVP. So Pete people probably know a lot about lean startup and MVP, this comes before. At the end of my steps, then you look at MVP or the last step in mind, there's 7 steps.
It's called Pete testing. And with snap testing, you then test your concept in a very, very fast way. And ideally, it's 4 hours or faster. So you invest 4 hours testing it, and you're not testing whether you can build it. In fact, I advocate not building anything. Don't code anything. Just test if you've got the right psychology. If you do offer X Y Z, will people do it and be happy and feel successful and so on? And then what you're looking for is a signal in the test.
And you might just test with ten people. Maybe it's twenty people. So it's really fast just to get some sense of, like, if you have ten people, do this new thing and nobody likes it, that's a pretty clear signal that's not gonna work back up. If you get 5 or 7 out of 10 people say, I love it. Can I use this more? Can I share it with friends? That's a great signal, a great indicator that you should move forward.
And now in my view, you do other Pete tests to further refine it, and then some Flint, you move out of what I would consider the behavior, at least my steps in behavior design, and you would move on to MVP lean startup, things like that. That are Morgan familiar. So within the book, tiny habits, those steps are there except for they're geared toward everyday people to figure out how to change their own life's systematically, but there is a chapter in fact I couldn't put in the book.
In fact, James, most of the business and product development stuff, I had to take out of the book because it would have made the book too long, and my editors argued it would confuse people. And so when Amazon editors picked it, the number one business and leadership book of 2020, I was like, oh my gosh. I took out all the business and leadership stuff. At least I thought I did. But there is a very practical document. It's kind of hidden in the book. Here's this link. I'll tell you.
If you go to tinyhabus.com/business, you can then, you know, fill in a form and you get the business chapter that walks you through these 7 steps of behavior design. And then if you compare that with the steps in the book, you'll see them how they they match, but this is what I teach in my classes.
So what I teach in my boot camp, it's like at the early, early stages of when you're figuring out what you're doing, you don't have to guess there's a systematic way to figure out what the best path forward is. Wow. That's fantastic. Well, we will make sure to write that down on the outside of And the text is not only so that people can get that information, not only through listen to this, but by reading it. That's great. BJ, thanks for sharing that.
And so is there a founder mindset that you would ideally like to see people have it? Is this what the section lays out or no? No. It's really written for people creating products and services, they may be within a big company like P And G or USAA or Capital 1. They're creating something that's never been done before. And are those founders? Yes. Morgan. They're innovators, and they might be doing like a startup within Capital 1 or USA. It's very tactical.
This business chapter you give us one example as one of the tactics? Number 1, clarify your aspiration. That's step 1. What are we trying to do here? What are we even trying to do here? In the case of financial institutions, I won't name them by name. They might say, oh, we're trying to get our customers to save money. And it's like, no. Let's get it clear. Save what, at least with one group as I Beller them clarify.
It's like, oh, we're trying to help our twenty to thirty year old customers have an emergency fund of $500. Got it. That's very different than save money. Right? And it only takes a handful of minutes to get the team clear. On what are we trying to do here? And the next step, I call magic wanding, and this is a creative step. It's a brainstorming step.
I often call it brainstorming, but it's like if we could wave a magic wand and get anyone to do anything that would lead these young customers to saving $500 as an emergency fund, what would we wish for? Who would do what? And you come up with dozens of different wishes. Oh, her boss would give her a raise. He would have payroll deduction automatically. Boom. Boom. Boom. You come up with all these things. Then I'll fast forward to few steps later, then you prioritize those behaviors.
And you prioritize them in a systematic way, in a method I call focus mapping, and you do that as a team at the end of the focus mapping step, your team has surfaced the best ideas or behaviors and they've all agreed. That's one of the things about the group focus mapping process is you're prioritizing, but you're also aligning your team. Say, okay. For our product, for saving $500, it's gonna do these 3 things. And these other 33 things, We're not doing that.
We're just having them do these 3 things. And so that's what we're designing. And then from there, you figure out how do you make that a reality? How do you design for those behaviors? Got it. And so those are 2 or 3 of the steps that you walk us through here. These are great. And have you seen companies implement these? It's a great success. So there's examples. Yeah. It's a game changer for the product.
To some extent, the company, depending, you know, if it's PNG, I mean, I changed the game for PNG, the whole company. But if a small one. Yes. And for people's careers, I just got an email this morning from a woman who was in my boot camp that ran November December. And she got her dream job, and she got it after she ran this workshop for the company.
And she was so effective in helping them get clear on what they were doing under standing their options, focusing on the right ones, and then moving forward, she wrote me this morning just just delighted that it had taken her to a new level in her career. So these methods are not de school and design thinking, but it's similar. And here's why. Back in the day before there was design thinking this mid nineties.
Before there was the d school, there was a guy named David Beller, teaching a class at Stanford. And I took the class along with a guy named George Campbell. There's, like, eight of us. I don't even know what they called the class. I mean, just working with David. Well, a few years later, David pulled George, my classmate, and they started the d school. So David had a huge influence on the way that I look at problems and structure them and tackle them.
So it's almost like design thinking meets behavior chain. That's what you're getting on behavior design. Got it. And that's what's new. I mean, you said these breakthroughs, and this is new thinking. What was coming Morgan now what do you have now? Oh my gosh. The science the landscape about social science, about human behavior and habits is a total mess, and it has been for a very long time. Within business, you read a certain set of theories and models and approaches.
In the school of medicine, it's different. In the school of education, it's different. In the school of earth sciences, it's often different. It's a total mess. So what was before where all these, I think, limited models or theories that could apply in a situation, but nothing universal and often not practical. And then the kind of amazing thing about the behavior model, the b equals MAP is it's universal. So it applies to business and our sciences and education and all that.
And it's comprehensive. It accounts for everything, and there's variations of the behavior model. There's ways to look at how people make choices or create habits. So any behavior is a combination of different behavior models, and it's practical. So it was those 3 things that, you know, it's accurate and comprehensive and practical. It's like, oh my gosh. So that really changed the game. I mean, that's the cornerstone of a larger foundation of models.
That then led me to creating these methods and the models and methods work together. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We've been talking with Dan Arieli and grant and, obviously, everybody's reading Tim Ferris's stuff and whatnot. We've had Nirajal on here. Are you guys all friends? Did you guys all hang out and talk, or I wish. I think we're more like colleagues that might email each other on things from time to time, and we've either shared, like, near Pete what the media says.
He was not my student. He came to my boot camp. He came to my boot camp in, like, 2013. And then even people at, like, Yesterday, a guy in the medical school reached out to me at Stanford Medical School and said, oh my gosh. I'm surprised I hadn't heard you before. Well, I've heard of him because we shared a student. So even within Stanford, mean, it's been, like, probably 20 years since we shared this student. I'd heard of him, but he hadn't heard of me, and now he was reaching out.
So it would be kind of nice I think, but probably not. I mean, we might cross pass at conferences or send an email or help each other out. Now our people, though, like Vic Strecker who studies purpose, that, you know, has come to Hillsburg and swung the river with me and we hang out. So sometimes yes, but I think everybody is so busy and passionate about their own work that they just do their own work, and we just do it the best we can.
And there's just kind of a lightweight sense of who's doing what. And then sometimes these things will come together. It's like, oh my gosh. Why didn't we start collaborating 3 years ago? Well, because was super focused on my stuff, and you were focused on your stuff. What's interesting, it's just there's not that many people thinking deeply about the psychology and the behavioral stuff.
That goes on, particularly around startups and rapid growth, transformation of society that's taking place as a result, you know, and we, for a long time, have said, with these startups, there is no corporate transformation without personal transformation. And, you know, there is a sense that behind all these companies, there are real human beings, and the number of you that are thinking about it right now. You know, you guys are selling a ton of books.
You're making a lot of impact, and it'll just be interesting if you're cabal and what you're saying is you're really not. You're doing your own work. You have prospect for each other, but everyone's following their own line and their own research. And, you know, it does feel as if over the last 10, 20 years, we've been making some real new progress, and it feels to me like you're right on the cutting edge of that.
Yeah. Now other people may give you other answers, and they may say, oh, BJ, he's an isolation this. He just does his own thing, and we're all hanging out together. And we're all on clubhouse together. We're all, you know, going to not Maui. We go to the big island. Together. That's just my sense is I think we're looking at an important challenge or problem or opportunity with behavior from different perspectives. And we don't all have the same view, and that's okay.
I believe as a scientist, especially as a social scientist that I am, you have to stay open to new possibilities. And it's easy to say, oh, my way is the only way. And but you've got to stay open to possibilities because somebody spent a lot of time smart person or a smart set of people from a different perspective.
And I think maybe that is the challenge on top of And we're not calling each other every weekend or having rooms on a clubhouse all the time, but it's how then do I get into the head and see it from the perspective of this person or this school of thought or so on, and I really don't think there's a great way to do that. Yeah. You know, practically speaking again, BJ, just, I've got 2 more questions week.
We talk about the day to day life for founders, Pete who are short on time, big on ideas, always in a Currier, you know, what habits are gonna stand them and the best at what behavioral design are the things that you think make the biggest impact for people like that? That is such a great coach. I'll give a general answer, and then I'll get down into specifics. The general answer is very practical. Super, super practical.
I just launched a tool about 2 weeks ago that helps people find the right habits for them and design tiny habit recipes. And you can find this at tinyhabits.com/recipes. It redirects to another thing that's longer to type in. And it's really best used on the mobile phone or tablet, but you can use it in any web browser. So at the top, there's categories. As admin, I can change the categories. I can change the order.
So they're probably not gonna be in the sort of, but it's like stress, brain health, productivity, relationships. So you pick a category. Then there's a card set below it that you swipe through the cards to say, oh my gosh. For activity, I wanna read more. Okay? You pick that. And then the card below that is the anchor. When are you going to do this in your routine?
So what you're doing is you're matching the new habit with where it fits in your routine, and then you push a button and you're done. What I'm trying to do with that is optimize that so it really queues up the most impactful habits, and it helps people design them into their lives. I do not have a category that says for founders. Though, I think founders can go through and say, oh, stress is an issue or productivity or relationships or nutrition, what have So that's a general answer.
So check that out, people. The specifics, though, I'll give some specifics category obviously, sleep. I am so glad in the last 10 years. There's been quite a revolution, I think, around how people are valuing sleep. It used to be very, very low, and it was bragging rights to say you only slept 3 hours. Now that is not bragging rights, at least among the people that I'm connected with. So sleep, of course, nutrition, of course, movement and relationships. All those are pretty obvious.
So I'm gonna give form habit within those. And, James, if you want me to get specific in the categories, I will, but let me finish up with 2 more categories. Sure. Nature. The only class I've taught twice at Stanford was behavior designed to connect people to nature. Get away from the screen the keyboard. Leave your phone behind and get into nature. However, you can. There's a reason I moved out of the Silicon Valley area up to sonoma County where I could live on the edge of a river.
There's a reason we bought a place here in Maui where the ocean's right there, and I can swim or surf all the time. Nature is just so important to our health and well-being in so many ways. It's quite difficult for me to start listing all the reasons, but the tip is have a daily habit routine, whatever you wanna call it, of connecting with nature, and ideally Morgan than once, So nature. And the next one maybe is a little quirkier, but I'll put it out there. Play a musical instrument.
Now, James, you sing. Right? Mhmm. Okay. So that might also count. But I think there's something about producing music that can be so restorative. Like, this morning, I played I call it a flute. It's really a recorder, a tenor recorder, And I played that for 30 minutes this morning. Some minutes, it's 5, some minutes, it's 30. That is like a meditation for me. And then times of the day, I'll just walk up a whole bunch of recorders.
I have a whole bunch of musical instruments, but that's the one I play the Morgan during the day, I'll just walk out and play it for 2 or 3 minutes, and it resets me. It's so rounding and refreshing and music. So music in nature are probably the categories that people aren't obvious to people.
And if you're not good at playing music, there's simple instruments like ukulele, or Calimba Omri even the recorder really simple instruments, and you'll progress very fast on those, and they'll start feeling successful quite quick very good. I gotta ask you this as well. You know, as a behavioral psychologist, we're watching a mass experiment of this pandemic sweep to Earth. Yeah. How are we doing? Like, where do you think we are mentally? Are we generally doing okay?
Are we looking down the barrel of long term crazy effects that will create significant behavioral change for 5, 10, 15 years. This has been your hardest question of all, but I'll take a stab at it. In June of 2020. I took a snapshot of how people were doing. Now it's not a perfect snapshot, but the surprise was Pete were doing pretty good. Like, oh my gosh. A lot of people are doing okay. Now I've not taken a snapshot recently, but my sense is people are doing a lot worse.
Now, yes, there are people that are thriving and doing Beller. And a lot of those people aren't speaking up because it's kind of awkward and embarrassing and just doesn't feel right to say, oh my gosh. I'm really thriving right now when so many people are in trouble. So, yes, it's possible to thrive right now. Absolutely. And habits can help you with that relationships, nature, playing music, etcetera. But so many people are suffering. So the bigger snapshot to answer that James is hard.
So let me give it a stab, though. Like hard questions. I am hoping that on a broader level, what we're learning is resilience How do I get through something tough and how do I support others through something tough? Because we all have this challenge and guess what? We have no choice. We've been put in COVID boot camp, whether we liked it or not. So we gotta gear up.
And I'm hoping that people have developed practices of stress reduction and on the other side productivity that are working now and will make them stronger once this goes away. That's a hope. And I'm sure that's true for people, but I don't wanna say it's true everybody. I do think there are some people that are drinking more, watching more TV, more tension in the home, and that's going the wrong direction. Those are the Beller. That, yes, you can change that.
You can use this time to move in positive directions, but it takes a little care and feeding just like growing a garden. You can have weeds grow in it, you can invest a little bit of time and energy and design it, and that's how I see this period right now. The one thing that I would have never imagined happening. I have long been an advocate of working from home. Yeah. I live 2 hours from Stanford, and I have for I kept it a secret for a while, but, you know, 18 years. 2 hours away.
And so I learned how to work through Google Hangouts and then BlueJeans and zoom. Slack, all that. And I was a big advocate of working from home because why would I drive to Stanford and back? I lose 4 hours plus all the stress. I can just stay home and crank it out. And so I talked about that, but now it wasn't because I was so persuasive or created some solution because of COVID. So many people have learn to work from home, and I hope a lot of us continue to do so.
I do think it's much better for us all in all, I see that as a really healthy shift that's been forced upon us that I would have loved to have, you know, been more influential, like, in 2015 on that, but know, you can't get a billion people to work from home necessarily by just me sitting down and figuring it out. So I think that is one of the good trends mean, there's other small ones that everybody Beller.
Like, all the cooking at home and baking and reengaging with creating your own food, and it's like, that's a great one. So it's a mixed bag right now. Yeah. What's interesting to I love this metaphor you've got. If you've got a garden, you can let weeds grow in it, which will happen if you don't tend to it. But if you do tend to it, you can actually grow these beautiful Morgan, and that's your startup. That's your light. That's your home situation. It's true everywhere.
And I also really appreciate this idea that, you know, being at home more and commuting less, is going to provide us with more time to grow our gardens, to develop these habits rather than fall into the habits created by the building you worked in or the company that you work as our work becomes more half us, half our work versus almost all of our work, when we were going into the office, then there's an opportunity there to bring more healthy habits to how we do our work. It's great.
And I wanna say, James, that creating habits, and this is how my work I thought was gonna be super controversial, but I've been teaching tiny habits that method since 2011, you know, way back when. James Clare, who has a huge book on habits, He took my course in 2013 and then got interested in habits. And so I've been teaching it week after week after week to thousands of Pete, and I stopped counting at 40,000.
Because here was this way to create habits that was, like, really easy and really reliable. Meaning, if you follow directions, it will work. You know, this is very reliable and fast. And then I developed this analogy, the metaphor to the garden, and it does function.
Your habits function very much like you're designing a Morgan, or you have this opportunity to design a Morgan, you take the habit, you start it super tiny, So when you look at the recipe maker or my book or anything, it's not like read a chapter a day. It's read a paragraph. It's not 20 push ups. It's 2 push ups. You make it really, really tiny, and then you find a good spot for it just like you would in a Morgan. Where will this basil grow well?
Where will tomato grow And where will this habit fit into my life? And that's what that recipe maker tool that I referred to before where you swiped. That's what that's doing. So it's giving you the tiny version of the habit is helping you find where you're going to place it or plant it, and then you nurture it you wired in through emotions. So what I've found in my research is emotions, create habits. It's not repetition.
There's no scientific evidence I can find that says, repetition creates the habit. Correlates with habit does not cause it to form. So when you understand that, you know, Maxim number 2 Beller people feel successful in your own life, if you want habits to wire and help yourself feel successful, and there's techniques for that in tiny habits that I talk about.
And So you can look at habit formation, not as drudgery, not something you have to endure for 66 days, not something that you use willpower for. Those are all the wrong direction. It should be fun. You should pick habits that you like. You should be playful in your approach and revise as you go along. And so I think a start up mentality, like, James, if you've been coaching people or they understand they gotta revise and shift and shift and pivot, That's kinda what you do with habits as well.
You start out with something. You design it into your life. And if it doesn't work, you adjust it and you adjust it until you find How does this fit? So, like, if I plant a plant here and it grows a little bit and doesn't flourish, it's like, oh my gosh. Maybe I need to move it where it has more sun or the soil has different characteristics. So habit formation is not a motivation challenge. It's not a willpower challenge. It's a design challenge. It's a design process.
And if you're relying on gold power or if you're lacking motivation for the habit, you're headed in the wrong direction. And that's what makes tiny habits just really very, very, very different than traditional ways. And it should feel pretty familiar to founders and people and startups It's like, oh my gosh. Yeah. The way there's definitely parallels to a way that you figure out and make your venture work, the way you figure out habits and make those work. That's fantastic.
Well, that's probably a good place to end BJ. It's just been a delight to talk to you, and thank you so much for the time. Thank you, James. You've been listening to the NFX podcast. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to the NFX podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information on building iconic technology companies visit nfx.com.