the tiny small habits that change everything

If you start with a big behavior that’s hard to do, the design is unstable it’s like a large plant with shallow roots. When a powerful wind kicks up, the big plant might topple over because it’s not held firmly in place.

Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things. Here are my Favourite Take-aways from reading, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg:

He is the founder and director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, later renamed as Behavior Design Lab, “That’s if we continue on our current trajectory.Brian Jeffrey Foggis an American social scientist who is currently a research associate at Stanford University and an author. “In some regions of the world it will become not possible to grow food, or to raise animals,” said Rachel Bezner Kerr, a Cornell University professor who has worked with Malawian farmers for over 20 years. There’s only so much small farmers in a small country can do, if the world’s biggest climate polluters, led by the United States and China, fail to reduce their emissions. That is to say, they bear little to no responsibility for the problem of climate change. Sub-Saharan Africans account for barely 3 percent of the planet-heating gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere. Already, half its people live below the poverty line.Įighty percent of them have no access to electricity. As in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, climate change has dampened agricultural productivity, with a recent World Bank study warning that climate shocks could shrink the region’s already frail economy by 3 percent to 9 percent by 2030. Malawi has seen recurrent droughts in some places, extreme rains in others, rising temperatures and four cyclones in three years. Their scrappy, throw-everything-at-the-wall array of innovations is multiplied by small subsistence farmers elsewhere in the world. Harry and her neighbors in Malawi, a largely agrarian nation of 19 million on the front lines of climate hazards. Harry, who has abandoned her parents’ tradition of growing just maize and tobacco and added peanuts, sunflowers, and soy to her fields. They are resurrecting old crops, like finger millet and forgotten yams, and planting trees that naturally fertilize the soil. A few are turning away from one legacy of European colonialism, the practice of planting rows and rows of maize, or corn, and saturating the fields with chemical fertilizers. They are planting vetiver grass to keep floodwaters at bay. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, they are sowing pigeon peas to shade their soils from a hotter, more scorching sun. When it comes to growing food, some of the smallest farmers in the world are becoming some of the most creative farmers in the world.

The tiny small habits that change everything