Reading Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg made an old saying feel practical again: difficult things begin with what is easy, and great things begin with what is small.
Fogg uses many examples that are familiar to ordinary people: losing weight, building small routines, starting with actions so tiny that they almost feel too easy to count. That is exactly why the idea works as a starting point. It does not ask you to become a different person overnight. It asks you to lower the threshold until the action can actually happen.
One example that immediately came to mind was flossing.
I started using dental floss after getting a dental implant in 2010. I have written separately about teeth, but the short version is this: my teeth are tightly spaced, and flossing never became a smooth habit. In the beginning I used the round spool-style Oral-B floss, and I still remember how frustrating it was. Floss is supposed to be thin and slippery, but using it felt like pulling noodles by hand while trying to clean between teeth. It was awkward, uncomfortable, and hard to persist with. I only used that roll a few times. I did not even have the heart to throw it away.
Exercise is another example.
Push-ups are meant to train the arms and chest, but unless someone practices boxing, shoots a high-poundage bow, plays with powerful slingshots, or trains at a semi-professional or professional level, most people do not specifically train those muscles with much seriousness.
I once bought a dumbbell, a stainless-steel one weighing 20 jin. I probably used it fewer than ten times. The only foresight I had was buying stainless steel: it did not rust, did not need maintenance, and could sit there for years without causing trouble. Later I felt that dumbbells were not something I could carry around anytime and anywhere, so I read Convict Conditioning, which focuses on bodyweight training and starts with wall push-ups. I kept at it for a while.
Then my wife commented on it several times. She even got down on the floor and demonstrated ten regular push-ups right in front of me. That destroyed what little dignity I had left. So I stopped doing wall push-ups.
Today, after reading Fogg’s idea of tiny actions, I suddenly realized what Convict Conditioning did not spell out clearly enough: the hard things in the world begin with the easy ones. A habit should be so small that even if you have a cold or a fever, you can still do it. So from today on, no excuses—I am going back to wall push-ups, steadily and gradually.
The same logic appears in product design.
Tiny Habits also mentions Instagram. Its simple photo-sharing logic defeated the more complicated ways of sharing pictures on Picasa and Facebook. Google bought it for a billion dollars, and when many people still thought the deal was a loss, Instagram’s valuation had already reached the tens of billions.
Apple also admires simplicity, though personally I still think it is not simple enough, at least on the desktop side. Using a Mac still requires a fair amount of learning. For specifics, one can look at Chi Jianqiang’s Mac learning notes.
Twitter did something similar by lowering the difficulty of expression with its original 140-character limit. Later the limit was removed. Maybe people had more to say. Or maybe plain text is still more efficient than long images.
The model also applies in reverse: reduce the motivation and convenience behind bad habits.
If someone has diabetes, they should not buy sweets or too many carbohydrates in the first place. If someone likes playing games too much, they should not configure an overly powerful computer. I used to recommend Apple’s Macs for this reason, though now even Apple’s integrated graphics are very strong. As for me, I probably will not consider a computer with a dedicated graphics card again unless I need it for AI projects. For now, I do not.