In order to design successful habits and change your behaviors, you should do three things.

• Stop judging yourself.

• Take your aspirations and break them down into tiny behaviors.

• Embrace mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward.

Behavior Design recognizes this reality: A key to lasting change is matching yourself with behaviors that you want to do. In your quest to exercise daily, for example, you’ll find plenty of options. If streaming Beyoncé and dancing for five minutes while you make breakfast is the exercise you want to do, then make dancing a daily habit. And forget about the treadmill at the gym.

And that’s how habit formation works. 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 storm comes into your life, your big habit is at risk. However, a habit that is easy to do can weather a storm like flexible sprouts, and it can then grow deeper and stronger roots.

Success leads to success. But here’s something that may surprise you. The size of the success doesn’t seem to matter very much. When you feel successful at something, even if it’s tiny, your confidence grows quickly, and your motivation increases to do that habit again and perform related behaviors. I call this success momentum. Surprisingly enough, this gets created by the frequency of your successes, not by the size. So with Tiny Habits you are shooting for a bunch of tiny successes done quickly. Not a big one that takes a long time.

By layering your habit with environment redesign, you will reduce friction and set your habit free to go above the Action Line. All hail the mighty prewashed, presliced cucumber.