OP Mini Challenge – Habit Building
Two premium members of Octalysis Prime share their best answers to the Monday's Mini Challenge on Habit Building in our Slack community.
We host a Slack Community where the premium members of Octalysis Prime come together to support and learn from each other.
The best way to learn is by putting your knowledge into practice.
That is why we created the ‘Monday’s Mini Challenge’: One topic, three questions and many excellent answers from our Premium Primers!
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- Habit building fails alone and succeeds in company. Every habit-formation study with meaningful effect sizes has a social layer. Solo apps get 30-day curiosity; peer cohorts get year-long compounding. A mini challenge is peer accountability in a bottle.
- A short, high-stakes challenge beats a long, low-stakes one. The mistake most habit programs make is stretching the timeline. Long timelines dilute the commitment density. A 21-day sprint with real accountability produces more change than a 365-day tracker with no witnesses. Density > duration.
- CD5 (Social Influence) is the load-bearing drive in every successful habit program. Willpower plus a group beats willpower alone every time. The group is not optional. A habit program without a group is a habit wish.
- The winning move is making the first week too easy to skip. Most habit stacks fail in days 1-7 because the friction is too high. A well-designed mini challenge engineers day 1 to be almost embarrassingly simple — so simple the user has no excuse. Momentum from an absurdly easy week 1 carries the user into the harder weeks.
- The deepest insight: habit building is identity change wearing behavioral clothing. The behavior is the surface; the identity shift is the product. A mini challenge succeeds when the user says “I am the kind of person who does this now” by the end of it. Any program that achieves the behavior without the identity shift will lose the behavior the moment the program ends.
About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
The Question
“People often get a boost of motivation to start exercising when summer is around the corner.
However, this is often short-lived and insufficient to maintain the new behavior.
After doing a daily action has become a habit, which usually takes around 60 days, it is a lot easier to sustain the behavior. How can you explain this using the Octalysis Framework?”
Habit Building – Reply from Alexandre Lim
Alexandre Lim is a software engineer from France and passionate about Gamification. He tackles the question using the Eight Core Drives of the Octalysis Framework:
“People often focus on what they want to achieve; outcomes in a limited time frame.
This is mostly based on Black Hat and Extrinsic Core Drives (CD). Namely CD8: Loss & Avoidance, CD6: Scarcity & Impatience, and CD2: Development & Accomplishment.
As a result they either burn out, or they stop due to a lack of urgency as soon as the time frame is finished.
It’s useful to use CD8, CD6, and CD2 at first to create the urgency to start building the habit.
But to enrich the experience and sustain the behavior, we should add the intrinsic Core Drives CD3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, CD7: Unpredictability & Curiosity and CD5: Social Influence & Relatedness.
A CD5 example would be having an accountability partner.
But I think the key Core Drive at play is actually CD4: Ownership & Possession.
By repeating an action every day, unconsciously, we create a new identity (CD4). We don’t want to lose this identity (CD8), so the habit persists.
As part of our identity, it’s becoming easier to sustain the behavior.
For example, my identity is centered around being a badminton player. If I had to stop playing after 20 years of practice, I’d likely go through an identity crisis.”
Habit Building – Reply from Bo Ullersted
Bo is a teacher from Denmark and a long-time Octalysis Prime member with a steady record of great quality replies.
Here he connects B.J. Fogg’s Behavioral Model and Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking to the question:
“It’s part of the B=MAP theory: when it becomes a habit, you automatically have a Prompt — you remember that this is the time you usually do this activity.
It also increases your Ability to do the action. For this reason, less Motivation is needed to do the action.
Yu-kai even states that when something is a strong habit, motivation is needed to not do the action.
But why does our Ability increase when we build a habit?
It has to do with System 1 and 2, from ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. When we do stuff that are not habits, we need to spend mental energy on activating the ‘logical brain’, System 2.
But habits can be run by our efficient, “intuitive brain”, System 1, which is our default mode.”
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Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges & Leaderboards
- What is Gamification? Definition, Examples & Framework
- Master the Art of Streak Design
- Boosters: Supercharge Your Gamified System
- 90+ Gamification Examples & Cases with ROI Stats