Before you set this book down, we want to make sure that you quickly and effectively get started with your own personal change effort—and maybe a bigger effort as well. To do so, we offer the following pieces of advice.
We’ve given you a careful way of thinking about the science of personal change. We’ve told you about crucial moments, vital behaviors, six powerful sources of influence, and the need to learn and adjust. Following this advice can seem so overwhelming that you might be tempted to put off getting started for another day—or decade.
Don’t. Following the advice may not be nearly as difficult as it appears. For example, while change will happen when you align all six sources in support of your new habits, you might already have more of the sources working in your favor than you think. Many people succeed by simply adding one more source of influence.
For example, simply start using smaller plates and utensils, and you may start shedding pounds like you’ve always hoped.
Turn one accomplice into a friend, and you may get over the hump in your goal of quitting smoking.
Transform your career goal into a game by breaking it into small wins and creating a way to keep score, and you may get traction in no time.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting your attempt to move forward by simply adding an idea or two from this book to whatever you’ve been doing before. View the Change Anything model as a way of improving your plan incrementally over time.
Just get started. Learn from both your successes and your failures, and then adjust. Eventually you’ll discover the right combination of tactics to help you change for good.
Second, don’t forget the important research we shared in the chapter “Be the Scientist and the Subject.” One of your most potent change tools is a recording device—pens, pencils, laptops. Simply recording a plan increases your chance of success by almost a third!
The material contained in this book can also be used to influence others—friends, co-workers, communities, companies, anything that is populated with human beings. We chose to write about personal change in this book, but in its predecessor (Influencer: The Power to Change Anything) we applied the same model to changing others. We showed how the science you now understand has been used to bring about changes most of the world thought were impossible.
For example, we showed how one man with very little formal authority was able to change the behavior of sixty million of his countrymen in order to reduce AIDS infections by close to 90 percent. And he did it in just a couple of years. We introduced the world to a woman who has helped more than fifteen thousand hardened criminals become productive, law-abiding citizens. We revealed the influence principles behind the remarkable work of an ordinary citizen who influenced U.S. health care workers to save one hundred thousand lives from medical mistakes.
We share this because we want you to know that, like the people just described, you can apply the change tools you’ve just studied to problems of all kinds, to people of all kinds. The six sources of influence affect all human behavior—including that of the individuals around you. Imagine if you applied the six sources to solving crime, increasing the quality of education, eradicating diseases… there are no limits to what can be done.
Think about it. What would this world be like if there were a million more people who knew how to apply good science to human change? Lots of important problems would be solved. That’s because when you aim at vital behaviors and get all six sources of influence working in your favor, you change. When you motivate and enable others to enact their vital behaviors, they change.
We began this book by suggesting that our intent was not simply to write a good book, but to help you create change. We hope first and foremost that reading this book has increased your ability to succeed at changing something meaningful to you. More importantly, we hope you’ll get started.
We give you our final assurance that while there is yet much to learn about human change, you now have a basic grasp of how to make it happen far more effectively than ever before. You have a systematic way of changing anything. Our hope is that you will now go out and change something.