In the Downloadable Mini Habits PDF Summary, you will learn:

• How to “minify” your habits so that you can build powerful habits that will serve you for a lifetime
• How mini habits serve you
• Why motivation is not enough and what strategies are better
• How you can trick your brain to get you moving
• 3 steps you can start taking to make your mini habits work for you

Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results |
Book Summary & PDF

The basic premise of Mini Habits is that small steps are powerful and that habits are the best way to leverage this power.

As entrepreneurs, it’s very important to create powerful productive habits rather than depend on fleeting motivation to get stuff done. People tend to set large, impressive-sounding goals and then generally fall short of them. They repeat the goal-setting process again and then just cycle through it: they get motivated, fail, and then try again.

Mini Habits provides a different approach: aim for something that you can definitely do. This can be something as simple as one push-up a day, which was Stephen Guise’s first mini habit.

When you aim for consistency over quantity every day, good things will happen.

Listen to my full Mini Habits Interview with author Stephen Guise below ⇓

A mini habit is a very small positive behavior that you force yourself to do every day; it is “too small to fail.” Nature makes it weightless, deceptively powerful, and a superior habit-building strategy. You will have no choice but to believe in yourself when you’re always moving forward.

The barrier to the first step is so low that even depressed or “stuck” people can find early success and begin to reverse their lives right away. And if you think 1 push-up a day is too small to matter, I’ve got one heck of a story for you!

1. Willpower and discipline beat motivation

Motivation is the most popular action strategy in personal development, which is evident in just the number of podcasts and books about it available. In fact, it is the No. 4 best-selling Amazon category in non-fiction. Meanwhile, there is no category for willpower or discipline, which Stephen believes is the better way to go.

However, willpower is more controllable. With it you can even get yourself to do something that you don’t feel like doing,

Why motivation is not a winning strategy for taking action:

• When you start, there is no certainty with the outcome.
• The outcome is dependent on your motivation.
• Motivation is fickle
• Motivation is fluctuating every day.
• It cannot be sustained for the long-term.

“It’s tricky because you can sometimes generate motivation. I’m not going to say that it never works. The problem is that it works sometimes but other times you won’t even be motivated to motivate yourself, because in order to get motivated you have to desire to get motivated. And so there are times when you will lose the battle before it’s begun because you don’t even care to get motivated.”

When motivation can’t be used as a main strategy, one is going to have to rely on his own willpower.

Studies have shown, however, that willpower is a limited resource, which then presents another problem in our way. This is where the Mini Habits strategy comes in:

The Mini Habits strategy is based on minimizing the willpower cost of action.

Example: it costs a lot less willpower to make oneself do 1 push-up than to do 100 push-ups.

2. Small steps are the best way to utilize one’s willpower

With willpower more effective than motivation, small steps are the best return on the investment.

Go for ‘Stupid Small Actions’

“Stupid small action” is the idea that if an action sounds stupid to a person, then it’s probably a good size because he can definitely do it.

“So when I tell people about the mini habits concept of 1 push-up a day, where they question the point of doing it, that makes it a good mini habit because it’s so small that you can’t resist it. It’s too small to fail.”

1 Push-Up is Better than 0

The “1 push-up” example came about as Stephen was going through the whole process, starting with wanting to exercise one day but he wasn’t motivated. He couldn’t get himself motivated to do it.

Sometimes this is the effect of motivation — at times it just won’t work.

This left him with the willpower option, but at that time he didn’t have enough willpower either. So he hit a wall and started brainstorming. He read a book called Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.

One of the creative problem-solving Thinkertoys talked about is called “false faces.” This is a technique where one considers the opposite of what he is currently thinking.

At that time Stephen was trying to do a 30-minute workout, and in his mind it was like a Mount Everest, an intimidating goal right in front of him. So he thought about the opposite of that in terms of how difficult it was for him to do it.

Thus, the 1 push-up came to mind. At first Stephen thought it was ridiculous just to think of it.

After not being able to do anything, he decided that 1 push-up is better than 0. He went down and did his push-up, and since he was already in a push-up position, he did a few more and then did the same thing with pull-ups. He ended up doing one of those 10-minute ab ripper workouts on YouTube.

Stephen realized that he had gotten his 30-minute workout by aiming for 1 push-up because of momentum (the next key takeaway from the book).

He did it for 6 months, and then after that he started going to the gym, and years later he goes to the gym 5-6 days a week.

The key is to make the habit really small but also large enough that it starts the process of whatever that is.

“I have an example of a broken-down goal which is not satisfying that. A reader’s e-mail said, ‘mini habits aren’t working for me. I’ve been writing one word per day. Now, we have seven words after a week.’”

The reason this doesn’t work is because writing one word doesn’t really take any thought. One can write “the” but it doesn’t mean anything and it doesn’t start the process of writing. This is why Stephen aims for 50 words per day, which is about a paragraph. It gets his thoughts moving in that direction.

3. A little bit of motion is enough to give you momentum

This idea follows Newton’s First Law, which states: an object at rest continues to stay at rest and an object in motion continues to stay in motion until an external force is applied.

Stephen noticed the power of this concept, which in his experience is — just to start off with 1 push-up and then get a 30-minute workout from it suggests that there’s definitely a Newton’s law in effect.

What Stephen did was that he actually tricked his brain. He likes to think of it as a Trojan horse technique.

The basal ganglia, or the area of the brain that’s largely responsible for movement and motor control, is like your subconscious. It has its ways of wanting to do things or not. Your conscious mind, on the other hand, is how you typically identify yourself from.

Whenever you want to do something that you don’t really feel like doing, you inquire with your subconscious. At times, it might refuse, especially if the activity is too much.

But here’s the trick:

If only small actions are needed, such as 1 push-up, it gets you into the control room.

• The activity can lead to a much bigger action.
• It bypasses defenses.

Therefore, the subconscious mind does not really defend against the small steps.

Simply put, when one is starting, it is quite difficult to take action. But once the necessary small steps are taken, the mind does not really interfere with these steps.

2 Ways to Benefit from Momentum:

• Doing repetitions – Stephen calls this “bonus reps,” which is important in any session that you begin. If you’re aiming for 1 push-up a day, or 50 words a day, you can always do 10 or 20 push-ups or write half of a book in a single day if you want.  There is no ceiling for mini habits. One only needs to meet that minimum.  
• Actual formation of the mini habits – Now you are literally forming a minified habit because you are repeating it every day. Habits are the best foundation for more behavior in any area. Just break down your resistance every single day in order to create the habit for the long term.

Get that Winning Feeling from Doing Small Actions

There is a “winning feeling” that comes with doing small actions. The success is not really about how much you are doing.

What this Feeling of Success is All About:

• It’s about reframing your whole mindset, the way you look at life.
• That you set a goal and you met that goal is enough to give you a feeling of victory, because you intently aimed for it and you achieved it. It may not be the same feeling that one gets from climbing Mount Everest, but it is something significant, especially when one is doing it every day. Stephen calls it success cycling, where you are just not failing to reach your goals anymore.
• It also relates to self-efficacy, a belief that one can influence outcomes. A lot of people today have very low self-efficacy because they set goals and yet they fail to reach them. So they would set another goal and then fail to reach it that it just cycles their self-efficacy lower and lower because they are trying to do things but are not able to meet their goal.

But this is a self-efficacy generating machine in that you’re frequently setting these targets and you’re constantly hitting those, and this really boosts confidence and helps you achieve more in whatever area the mini habit is in.

1. 1. Identify the habit you want to form.

   This can be a full-sized habit or it can even be a general goal. Example: getting in shape.

   2.  Break it down into the smallest “stupid actions” that you can take.

   Since getting in shape is a full-sized habit, it can be minified into smaller ones such as showing up in the gym x times per week, or like Stephen’s 1 push-up a day. This decreases your general resistance to exercising.

   Make it really small but also large enough that it gets you started in the process.

   3.   Use a tracking system.

   Tracking is important because it gives you that winning feeling from completing a goal. It gives you some sort of feedback that you’re on track.

   Tracking can be as simple as writing a check mark or ticking a box if you’re using an app. Stephen did it with one of those big desk calendars where he would just write a giant check for each day that he completed all of his mini habits.

   This concept is similar to the Seinfeld calendar where the goal is to not break the streak. So when you see on your calendar the x’s or checks or whatever you decide to write there, and you see that streak, you wouldn’t want a blank box there.

Visit Stephen Guise’s main blog. Mini Habits and his latest book, How To Be An Imperfectionist, are both on Amazon.

Related Readings:

1. The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin
2. The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
3. Deep Work by Cal Newport