The Power Law of Good Behavior

behavior change itself will be inherently imperfect. You can lose the battle—a person, a specific moment, a single unit of behavior—and still win the war. This is true because populations are, in the aggregate, largely predictable. Even if any given person might not do what we expect all the time, the overall behavior of large numbers of people acr

Power-law — “A functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another.” (related: Pareto distribution; Pareto principle — “for many events, roughly 80% of th

Nature and society are replete with such imbalanced phenomena, some of which are said to work according to the Pareto principle, named after the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto’s insight is sometimes called the 80/20 principle—80 percent of outcomes of interest are caused by 20 percent of inputs—though the numbers don’t have to be that strict.

Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying? If you have ever wondered, “Why don’t I do what I say I’m going to do? Why don’t I lose the weight or stop smoking or save for retirement or start that side business?

In 2007 researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published a study that revealed that our attitudes and behaviors have more impact on the people around us than we’d ever previously thought.