Author
BJ Fogg
The Stanford behavior scientist who argues that tiny, celebrated behaviors beat big resolutions.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
BJ Fogg founded the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, where he has studied for more than two decades how behavior changes in practice rather than how people wish it would. Some of the founders who built the habit-forming apps of the 2010s, among them Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, took his classes.
Tiny Habits, published in 2019, turned that research into a method for individuals. Its core is the Fogg Behavior Model: a behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt converge, and since motivation is unreliable, the reliable lever is making the behavior tiny and prompting it well.
The signature
Fogg's signature is the insistence that emotion, not repetition, wires a habit. He teaches people to shrink a behavior until it is almost trivial, anchor it after something they already do, and celebrate immediately so the brain tags it as worth repeating. The method is deliberately gentle; he argues that feeling bad about yourself is a poor engine for change.