Why You Feel Stuck and How to Actually Change | Dr. Katy Milkman

0:00Everywhere I go, airports, events walking down the street, people stop me and say, Lewis, this show got me through one of the hardest seasons of my life. And it's one of the coolest things when people come up to me. So if you see me, please come up and say hi. And let me know how this show, The School of Greatness, has impacted you. It lights me up because our mission at Greatness Media is to impact 100 million lives every single week. So if today's conversation hits home for you, do me a favor and push the follow button right now. It means that the next conversation will be delivered to you and will find you exactly when you need it. Again, thank you so much for being here and listening to The School of Greatness. Make sure to follow right now to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. There's a stat that I saw, a recent survey by one poll that said 80% of people feel stuck in their lives. I'm curious, why do you think it's so hard for people to want to change and create the lives that they truly want, the desires they have, the dreams.

1:02Why is it so hard when there's that many people feel stuck to actually make those changes? It's a great question. And I think there's sort of two categories of barriers that are important. One of them is structural and social and sort of outside of your own control. Okay. Right? We've got inequality. We have, you know, just the world is tough and it throws a lot at us. That's, there's not as much we can do about that in this conversation. So when I'm focused on the second category because that's what I study and that's the internal barriers that can prevent us from reaching our goals and that can make us feel stuck. And internal barriers, one of the biggest actually is status quo bias. This is something that behavioral scientists have been studying for many decades. It's a tendency to want to stick to whatever path you're on to feel like any deviation from it will be a loss. It's frightening. It's overwhelming. And so it leads a lot of us to keep doing things that aren't productive to stay in ruts. And, you know, the book I wrote in the science I do is really focused on, okay, say you

2:06want to change. Instead of this quo bias is working against you. What are the tools and techniques that you can then use to figure out how do you get like escape velocity from that status quo bias? So give me an example of, or I'll give you an example of, there seems to be like a lot of people who are in relationships that aren't fulfilling them. Or maybe they talk about their partner, their spouse, to their friends and family often about what's not working and what they don't like about this person or them thinking about getting out of it and they're doing this for months or years. But maybe they're so used to the pain or they're just comfortable with the frustrations that it's, they stain it because it's less painful than the unknown of something else or being alone or what, would that fit into the status quo bias? Yeah, no, it absolutely would and it would also fit into escalation of commitment which is another bias that has been extensively documented, the tendency we have when we're on a path to stick to it in part because we tend not to ignore sunk costs.

3:10So a sunk cost is like something that you can't recover. It's like three years of my life over this person, all this time invested, I can't get that back. That's right. I'm a birthday present that you purchased and obsessed over. Got a house we bought together, the trips we've taken on, the family integrations. All of those things that they're, they're irrecoverable, they're historical, they're behind you, you can't get them back. So maybe the house you bought actually is recoverable. We're not going to go about a sunk cost. But yeah, the time, we tend to wait that and we shouldn't. What you need to do is think about what are my options going forward. What are the cost and benefits of either path staying with this person or, you know, moving on? What are those cost-benefit paths? But we focus on the sunk cost and think, oh, I can't give that up. But you're not going to get it back no matter what whether you stay in it or not. It's in the past. And this is a really pernicious bias. And I think it's part of the reason that we would stay in a relationship or in a job that isn't working out. Escalation commitment is really common and the sunk cost bias is a big part of that. Escalation of commitment status quo bias.

4:11So what's the biggest interior internal barrier that holds us back, would you say? Oh my goodness. Well, I mean, this is the barrier in the sense to deciding you want to change, right? So right now we're sort of like before I even write my book, which is about how to change once you've decided to. There's a lot of people who haven't decided they want to change. So I would say status quo bias and escalation commitment are like sister-brother bias. You know what I'm saying? They're really closely related. They're both keeping us stuck in the mud. And then where most of my research comes in is, okay, you actually have already raised your hand and said, like, I know I need to change. It's time. How do I do it? And so that's a whole different set of barriers actually to become challenges because even once we decide we want to change, even once we've ignored the sunk costs and gotten over this status quo bias, now we have a whole bunch of things holding us back from actually getting to where we want to be. What are those things? Yeah, okay. What are those things? Let's go. Okay. So there's a whole bunch of them. The first one is actually literally they're getting started.

5:12Yes. You know you want to change, but like when are you really going to do it? You know, when are you going to jump into the defense? So that's a first barrier. Okay. And I open the book with that because obviously, you know, where you open a book about changes with getting started. Then I go to probably the next most important and that is impulsivity. Okay. The fact that we tend to overweight the instant gratification. We'll get from our decisions like it's going to taste so good to eat this or it's going to feel so great to scream at this person or you know, it's going to be really exciting to buy this instead of setting aside money for retirement. All of those kinds of we focus on the present at the expense of our long-term benefits. That's another major barrier figuring out how do you get through that hump? Procrastination is related to impulsivity. We put things off because they don't feel great in the moment. So I think of that it's a closely related but it's another barrier that we've got forgetting. Which I actually think most people underestimate the importance of but we forget a lot of

6:15important things and we don't get to things because it's just not at the top of the priority list and we don't put it there and we mean to put it there and we don't. So forgetting, I think- What's me about forgetting? What's an example of that? So another way it's often talked about is like flake out. Like, you know, I'm going to start focusing on retirement saving. I'm going to set up the auto deduction eventually. I'm not going to call an Oscar. I know I need to get one of those but I haven't gotten to it and I just keep flaking out on it. It doesn't come to top of mind when I could do something about it. We put it off. We put it off and suddenly we're at retirement without accumulating any savings. And suddenly, you know, we're having an exam and we find out if only we had early detection, we would have had a better outcome. Right? So those, that's what I mean when I say sort of forgetting or flake out. So that's another category of barrier that can forget. Change it's like sort of on the priority list, not high enough that you ever make it at the top and you keep putting off and forgetting. So that's another- Why is it so hard for us to get started once we know? Okay, now it's time to make the change but it's still hard to actually get started

7:15in doing that. What holds us back from that starting step? Yeah. Well, our motivation to make change is actually just like our motivation to do anything. By the way, it tends to be sort of, you know, it ebbs and flows. There are times when we are in a more reflective action oriented, change oriented mode and times when we're more pessimistic or just sort of going with the flow because we're, you know, in the middle of things. And so actually I've done some research on something I call the fresh start effect. This is with Hank Chen Dai who's down the street at UCLA, my former student and Jason Reese, senior fellow at Wharton. And what we have shown in our work is that there are certain moments that feel like a new beginning in life. Like what? So one that you know about already, I don't know- New years or- Yes. And you mean to come here and tell you about any fancy science? You're like, yeah, I know about new years. Birthday, new years, yeah. Yeah, there are moments that feel like, like, okay, I'm turning a page. And in a grocery, a graduation- Move to a new community, a new job, a new city, yeah.

8:18You got it. Those are all fresh start moments. Actually, there's trivial ones too, but they can matter. Like the start of any week can feel like a fresh start. That's true. You sort of sit down, you go into work maybe for the first time in a couple days, you feel fresh at your desk ready to sit and think about what are my priorities and whether you wouldn't in the middle of a week. Start of any month following celebration of certain holidays, particularly the kind that we associate with fresh starts. So those are all moments when we feel like we've opened a new chapter. And we- We have a couple things that go on at those moments. One is that we feel like, okay, this is a moment when I want to step back and think big picture about things because you recognize that there's that break point you think actually about your life, like your character in a book, that the way we organize our memories and structure them, it's not linear completely. Instead, it's like, you know, the college years, you know, the years playing sports, the years living in Boston, whatever they are, that's how you structure your memories and that means there's actually implications for the way you live your life.

9:18Because when you get to one of those chapter breaks, that's when you do this big picture thinking. Interesting. And you also tend to feel like your identity is shifting, right? Yes. And I think that's what I think is going to happen to a new role as you, you know, I'm turning 40 in the year ahead and that feels like a big break to me. Like I will be in a different age category. When I became a professor, I vividly remember. Like that was a huge shift in my identity. I felt like a different, okay, I have a different set of expectations and roles in ways I should sort of dress and talk. And that identity shift that can come, even if it's something as small as, you know, you're can look back and say, well, you know, last year, my old job, I was a graduate student, I didn't manage to eat right. But that was the old me and this is the new me. And so you feel the sense of optimism and disconnect from those past failures. Right. I've had this belief, maybe correct me if I'm wrong or maybe you have some science that could back this or dismantle this. I had to believe that living a good life is not enough for you to want to change.

10:23There's got to be some type, like if you're 80% of my life is good. Like I've got a good relationship, I've got a good job, I've got things here 80% there. It's like, I feel like there needs to be some type of breakdown, massive breakdown for us to realize, okay, there's a near death experience that I had, a near death or a death in the family or a friend. There's a loss of a relationship, there's a loss of a job, there's a loss of an expectation that you really had a dream for. These kind of bigger breakdowns, I feel like make us reflect stronger towards wanting to make a change. I totally agree. So first of all, I will say I do not personally have fantastic data on this, but there are survey studies suggesting that those kinds of experiences lead to identity shifts, which can lead, of course, as I've described in this other line of work to the sense of a fresh start and the belief that you want to turn the page. So it's the same principle at play, absolutely. And I think the mechanism to use a nerd term is really the same, right?

11:25So it's that something shocking happens. It's sort of a wake up call, leaves you a step back and do that big picture thinking. And it creates this disruption in your narrative. Because I feel like it's easy to procrastinate or kind of feel lazy, which is part of your process as well. It's easy to feel that when things are okay. And when things are good, but they're not like, it's not a big enough pain to be like, I need the, now I have motivation to make a change. Yeah, yeah. Do we need a bigger pain or is it possible to create exponential change or transformation when things are okay or really good in your thought? It's so interesting. I do think that even when things are good, we can have these kinds of fresh start experiences that shape us in positive ways. I'll give you an example. I was at a phone call. It was driving here from Santa Barbara this morning. I had a phone call with a friend who just got tenure. And he is thinking big. His life is great.

12:25And you don't know what is that mean for those stuff? Fair enough. Not everyone is part of my weird work. Academic work. Yes. Okay. So in academia, if you're a professor, this is like the be all and end all of your career. You're working really hard. You get your PhD. You get your assistant professor job. You work really hard. You write a bunch of papers. You teach a bunch of classes. And if your university says, you know, you're doing great. If you're good enough, they bestow upon you tenure, which means permanent job. Job security, basically can't be fired unless you do something illegal. And they're saying like, you have now total academic freedom. We're no longer in it be evaluating you. We trust you. We trust you. And it's like this bizarre institution is created to help people take risks. But it is a big moment in the life of an academic when they get to that milestone. It's like, there's nowhere else to go. You've climbed to the top of the mountain. And so it's really exciting. It often happens to people around their 40s, sort of like midlife when you might already be having some introspection going on about like, why am I here? What's my purpose? So a lot of academic step back at that moment and think, why do I want to do now?

13:27What do I want to do next? I've been climbing and climbing to this point. And I was having this conversation with a friend on the drive here who had reached that point and was having that exact, okay, what's next? And wanted to talk about writing a book since I'd written a book. And like, what is that? Like he thinks that might be the next big adventure for him. But nothing is wrong. Everything is right. It's just that he reached a moment. He reached an achievement. He got to the top of a mountain and looked around and realized, okay, I've climbed to my goal and it's time to figure out what the next one is. And I think that can be a fresh start to do that. It's positive. Identity is something that is interesting to me. How important is the way we shape our own identity or view our identity in terms of where we are to where we will be? Like if we stay stuck in old identities, how do we shed identities? How do we create a new identity even though we've never actually lived it? Well that help us get there. Can you share more just about identity in general on how it hurts us or helps us? It's a fantastic question.

14:28I'm going to give you a somewhat, first I'm going to give you a somewhat frustrating answer is frustrates me. I don't feel like academic research has wrapped its arms around the identity the way it would like it to because I think it is unquestionably so important. Write the labels we put on ourselves obviously matter but I feel like we don't know nearly as much as we should. It's one of the things I'm most interested to study. It's a nice book. Moving from maybe. Maybe. We know a little. What are the things I think is most relevant to the way I think about identity is mindset which is it's different than identity but a mindset can come with or can be triggered by an identity. And one of the barriers we haven't talked about yet to change that I think is really important is whether you believe you can change. And identity and mindset are a big part of that. So we know a lot about mindset from work for instance by Carol Dweck, Stan Ferd, who's done this incredible. Both mindset versus fixed mindset. Exactly. And that's sort of an identity right? You identify with being someone who can grow or you identify as someone who is X right?

15:33Like you know I'm only this smart. I'm only this capable. So in a sense there's an identity that comes with believing you can grow or an identity that comes with believing you can't. There's also wonderful research on the placebo effect and how that extends beyond just medicine. We know about it in medicine that like if you believe a sugarpele is going to make you healthier you actually experience physiological benefits. But there's some really interesting research showing it's beyond you know we think of it in this medical contact and that's where it was first studied actually I learned from a children's book like Ben Franklin studied this and I don't know if you know mesmerizing interesting. That term comes from Dr. Mesmer who is the original sort of charlatan in France who was giving people fake medicine and make care. Anyway and Ben Franklin figured it all out. Sounds like a freaking hour show. It does. It was like and it's also a wonderful children's book. Yeah. I wish I'd known that before I wrote my book it would have been in there. Anyway there's a lot more though than just the medical components to placebo effects. Right when we believe that we will achieve something that also can improve our achievement

16:38right when we believe we're going to get an outcome. One of my favorite studies that I describe in the book that I think is sort of related to mindset and identity is work by Ali Krum who's a psychologist at Stanford. She did this really interesting work with Ellen Langer of Harvard where they randomly assigned housekeepers to one of two groups and those housekeepers were either told every day when you go and do your job in a hotel you are getting exercise at the level that's recommended by the CDC. So you're getting a great workout when you do your job. Reburning a thousand calories or you get whatever like your... Great. I don't know if a thousand calories is the definition. You get a great workout. Yeah. Oh good workout. Yeah. It was more like 300. Okay. Yeah. Just not to get too overboard. And then another group just wasn't told that information. And the question actually was are there differences in the outcomes those two groups experience a month later in terms of health. So just a group that believes they're doing a job that comes with health benefits actually end up losing more weight and a more controlled blood pressure and the answer was yes.

17:42Really? Which is it... On the one hand you're like is that magic? Like what's going on? On the other hand you can start to see how it actually would play out and how this would be applicable in other settings. So they believed their job could give them a workout. And all of a sudden maybe they're choosing to take the stairs from Florida Florida to get those extra calories or like lean a little bit more when they're using the vacuum. Right. I live in a townhouse in Philadelphia and someone pointed out to me like it's so great that you live in a townhouse all that passive exercise when you run up and down the stairs. And now I am the one volunteering to like you know go grab the ketchup that we forgot if we're going to have dinner on a roof deck. That's exciting. I can get extra exercise. So there's like different choices that you make once you start to have a different set of beliefs about what you're achieving. So anyway I think of this as related to identity because if you're... Now you're starting to have the identities I am someone doing a career that's physically active and now you lean into that and then you experience the benefits. So I think the work on mindset is the best work I have seen that's really rigorous

18:46and that relates to identity. So if belief supports you getting those results you want or making the transformation of the change you want how would you suggest that we learn to believe in ourselves more from a scientific point of view like what's the data suggest on okay if you say these affirmations if you look in the mirror and do this exercise if you just smile at people and you create more reflection of joy like what is the thing that you've seen in data that helps increase belief in oneself. Yeah I think the most powerful thing is who you surround yourself with. Really? So I think the social context you create the people around you have so much to do with whether or not you believe in yourself and by the way I also want to add like a really quick footnote because the academic and me can't stand not to which is to say you can... You can have excessive confidence and that can be harmful. So this is a little bit of a dangerous like sea saw we're on here right. You want to be confident enough and believe in yourself enough that you're going to lean

19:47into the opportunities and work towards the goals that because you believe you could achieve them but if you're like I've got this I'm perfect you're not going to practice you're not going to work hard so there is anyway it's a little bit of a delicate balance but back to how do you get to that right level of belief everything I know from research points to the structure of the people you surround yourself with whether it's the people you work with the people you train with if you're an athlete the people you socialize with they give you a lot of those beliefs in yourself and you you can choose them but they they will with the messages they send you about what's acceptable behavior what's normal what they're achieving and how you measure up it shapes so much about our confidence. Really? There seems to be I think this is true and I also love the examples of some of the great

20:50athletes who have accomplished so much that were doubted over and over growing up and kind of have this chip on their shoulder like no one believed in them and they said I'm going to go prove them wrong type of mentality which I think can get you extremely far in terms of success and results but never feel this for failure to inside. You never choose that. You never choose that. I think what you're pointing to is it's not a necessary condition. Right. It's not the best environment. It's not the only. Yeah, there are people who can thrive without it but if you get to choose and if you want to create an environment where you're going to believe in yourself. So you think surrounding yourself with the right people, the right environment of people, the right community what should those people be like? What should their attitude, their energy, their communication style be like with you? If people were reflecting on their five to ten people in their inner circle, what should they reflect on? They should have these qualities, they should say these things or here's some red flags. If your best friend tells you you shouldn't do this or your best friend says, I don't think

21:53you look good doing whatever it is. What are those flags and one of those I guess positive signs? Yeah. Okay. Here let me pivot a little bit to another. We're doing a lot of academic stuff obviously. I love academic. I'm actually going to tell you a story about a person in academia who is a person who is the most important person in my career as my dissertation advisor, who his name is Max Bezerman, he's a Harvard Business School professor, great human being, but in a great academic what he's truly exceptional at is mentoring. His PhD students have gone on to be tenured professors, now everyone knows what tenured is, at every elite institution in the world. So he's good at instilling belief in other people? Unbelief. Confidence, belief. Unbelievably good. And he does all the other things that you need to do to help someone succeed, right? Like, you know, good coaches. Of course. You know, he, you know, the training, like the actual teaching of skills, all those things are part of it. But I think he creates an environment for people to thrive and it actually took me a while after I had graduated as one of his advisees and I was trying to advise my own students

22:55and figure out what was the secret sauce that made him so wildly more successful as a coach and mentor than anyone else in our field had really, I mean, strataspherically more successful. And what I realized is he had all the obvious stuff, all those obvious ingredients like, you know, responsive and new his stuff and gives you, gives you a few, but, but there was a unshaking belief. Like he treated you like family, he was there for you, he believed that you could do it. He always was giving that positive reinforcement. Another thing that he did that I think is so interesting and related to research is he sort of created, I'll call it like mentoring circles within the students he was coaching so that we were not always just being coached or mentored and advised by him, right? But he would put us in the position to advise more junior students. So there's this wonderful research that I write about in the book by Lauren Eskis-Winkler who's a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern.

23:56She had this amazing insight when she was doing research for her dissertation. She noticed that she was interviewing all these people who were struggling to achieve their goals. And as she asked them what they thought might help them achieve more because that's what she was interested in, how do we increase achievement? They all have these really deep insights, you know, struggling sales people and see students when she got them to introspect, they actually knew a lot. They maybe just hadn't gotten there and no one had asked them. They also really liked being asked like what's your advice? How would you coach someone who was in your shoes? And she always most of the time when someone is struggling or when we're coaching someone are instinct, even if it's unsolicited is to just whip out some advice. Like here are the seven things that I think will help you get further. And it can be really demotivating because it conveys like I think you're kind of, you haven't gotten your stuff together. You don't have the answers on the answers. Yeah. I'm going to give you the answers. You know parents will get toudi CAN and their baby toiji is out there and now they don't

25:00know what country it is. C� it. You can see kids, it is off. Yeah. So I think that they have their처 ligago for their kids to get their historyaze beauty, that they don't get that back. So giving suicidal inspectors and those evidence of quierenine or lo48. to give this kind of advice, I must, I must, you know, be kind of cut out for this. Maybe I'm better at this than I thought. And then you're gonna start introspecting in a way you might not if it was just your problem because you gotta help someone else and you don't wanna let them down. And then when you do that, you actually figure out, well, I've got some good ideas. And like maybe I do know something. And then once you've told someone else to do it, you're gonna feel like a hypocrite if you don't do it yourself. Right. So this is another sort of social trick, Max would put us in these sort of advice giving circles where the senior students are working with Junior, and he rarely gave advice actually. He more facilitated the experience for you to learn and create the answer within yourself, I guess, by helping others. By helping others. And he would, you know, he's nudging along the way. And like good job, like maybe a little redirection.

26:02But and if you go to him and you're like, I need to know how to do X, he tells you. But there wasn't a lot of, steer like, back seat driving. Sure. If that makes sense. And I think that also helped build confidence it, like it made us believe in ourselves in those roles. And I now actually have an advice club of people who are former Max students, maybe no accident. We sort of try to keep this going even beyond that point in our lives where he was coaching us. And each of us were at similar career stages, all professors, similar goals. And we reach out to each other for solicited advice. Whenever we're facing a challenge, a career challenge doesn't make us not sure what to do. And it's just been totally amazing. So it's this peer group of people who support each other, care about each other, there's friendship. That's all built in. We see others achieving and it helps us see, oh, that's cool. If they can do it, I can do it. But then also we get to give advice and we grow from that as well.

27:03What would you say are the top three or five things that a coach can do to instill belief in someone else that you witness from him or that you've also seen with your peer group? I think a lot of positive feedback is super important that that's like the predominant sense is that this person thinks I'm doing great, even if they're also telling me ways I can improve because you don't want to only obviously to really important to also get, well, a little more like this. You need that nudging, but it needs to be with a positive. Sometimes people call it a feedback sandwich, right? You like start with positive anyway. So I do think that positivity and like conveying they believe in you, I think creating social structure for you, which is one of the things Max, there was sort of a whole ecosystem of other students and supporters who were all striving towards similar goals and instead of feeling that we were in competition with one another, it was very clear that we were all part of a team. Almost every email starts with high team.

28:05Right, these are academics all vying for jobs and to achieve and you could see it being very cut, fruit and competitive. We weren't on a team, right? We weren't playing for a team, but we were a team. And that was how we saw ourselves. And then the structuring, you know, some everybody structured to help others who are below, you know, below them, it's sort of part of your role is working with them. So those are a few of the key things. I'm not trying to hit your number. Positive feedback, social structure, supporting the team. Yeah, putting people on the role of advice givers or supporters and mentors. I think you, yeah, he said, you said he believed in you, we treated you like family, mentoring circles. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we have hit your number you asked for. That's great. I love that. I think those were the keys. I love that. How does someone build confidence within themselves if they feel like they're not confident? Maybe they don't have this mentor, this social structure to instill that. They don't have the people around them. Are there ways we can build inner confidence

29:07without other people believing in us? Yeah, I think, well, so first of all, I do think you can go out and find these people, even if you don't have them, and that we should proactively be creating those structures, right? So say you want to make up a goal. Say you want to run a marathon, right? A lot of people decide at some point in the world. I just, did you run a marathon? No, yes. Today, as you guys started training for my first marathon, which is in three months, which is a small window of training time, but it's very sore today. Yeah. So, I'm going to surround myself with a coach, with a team of support people who've done it before, who are encouraging. Like, I'm not just saying, I'm going to do this on my own. I never got to do that. I'm not downloading an app and saying, it'll just be the app. Because I know it's going to be challenging. I know it's something I've never done. It's something that has scared me my entire life. I know it's not supposed to be this easy, like walking the park. It's a marathon. And so I've set up the structure and the accountability and the schedule to follow through on the action steps needed in order to set myself up for the best possible position

30:09for staying healthy and finishing it and all these different things that I want to do with my goals. Perfect. You already know all of this. I'm a full marathon. So I'm not using it. Yeah, I'm not letting zone. That's funny. I do, obviously, I knew you were a full marathonly, but I do think we underappreciate, at least when we're young, how much those skills translate. Oh, man. It's amazing. I think the lessons about how do you structure practice? What are the, in my book, I was a tennis player. So I talk a lot about insights that actually came from that sport and then eventually influenced my research and understanding of, OK, if you want to build a habit, the best way to do it is not like standing in the same place, doing it exactly the same way every single time. Sure. That's never how you would practice in sports. And that would never work out when you're out on the field, or out on the court. You've got to be in variable conditions and preparing for anything. Worst case in areas, yeah. Right. And yet, often, I think scientists and anyone

31:11who's trying to create structures and success make mistakes that if you looked at it like an athlete, and you said, well, how would an athlete tackle a parallel problem, we would know that's not going to work. It's too rigid. It's too much expectation of things being perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Right. You talked about habits and behavior. What is the difference between a habit and a behavior, and which one should we be focusing on more in order to get to where we want to be? Changing our behaviors or changing our habits? A habit is a subset of behavior. It's a pretty narrow subset, actually, if you look at the true scientific definition. So Wendy Wood of University of Southern California is, I think, the world's expert on habit. And she would define it pretty rigidly as something you basically do automatically without almost consciously realizing you're doing it. Like you make the coffee in the morning with the coffee maker, hit the button, and you're doing it on your own. But you're just like, shower. You shampoo your hair, and you're like, did I do the shampoo? I was thinking about something else. You don't have to work, and you don't have to go out there.

32:12You're like, what? You're on autopilot. So that's those are the really wrote activities. You hand sanitize if you're working in a hospital, and you even notice you did, did I do that already? I study behavior, which is a super category. It's even above routines or habits where it's just all behavior change requires different behaviors to happen. Some of them are going to be on autopilot. Some of them are going to be routine and some of them are one-time decisions that have big implications for your life. So I actually think having all of those categories in mind when we think about change is really important as opposed to narrowly focusing on one or the other. So what is the definition of a behavior? Oh, that's an interesting one. Like what is a behavior? A behavior is an action you take. Like really, everything is behavior. If it's inside your head, it's not a behavior then it's like a judgment. But any actual action you take is a behavior. Any action you take. So what are the most common behaviors that we have

33:14that I guess hold us back? And then what are the behaviors that all trip performers? I was like breathing. No, the most common behavior is that hold us back. And then the most common behaviors of the ultra high performers successful in business and sports, what are those behaviors that they tend to lean into? Versus the ones where people are stuck. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Trying to ask you questions you've never been asked here. That's not my goal. They're great, they're really great questions. Okay, let me start with some of the most common behaviors. They keep us stuck. They keep us stuck. Yes. Yeah, I think common behaviors where we get stuck are, and this is like, what are the most common new years resolutions? They're to change those behaviors that we get stuck up. So the most common things we get stuck on are things related to our health, right? We aren't making good decisions about what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, whether we're physically active. Those are really common points where we get stuck.

34:19Our finances, right? Making good financial decisions on a daily basis about how we spend our money, how we save, who we give our money to. Those are places people often get stuck. When you get stuck in bad social loops, we sort of started by talking about relationships. So I think that's another place we get stuck, whether it's not, we feel like we're too shy, we're not meeting enough people, we're meeting the wrong people, in the wrong relationships that's another area where we get stuck. I think education and career, sort of, I put them, because one follows the other, and that's another category. If you're a student, you're trying to achieve, but we often get stuck on not really studying rigorously and putting the time in, the focus in, and then that converts to work where we're not being as productive as we could be, we're not setting ourselves up for success. So I think those are some of the common categories that get us stuck, yeah. What are the behaviors of the ultra performers, or the elite who are accomplishing all their goals and pursuing their dreams? What are those behaviors that they do really well?

35:20So I have never gone and interviewed the ultra performers and said, like list for me, all your behaviors. So instead of answering your question perfectly, what I'm gonna do is tell you some of the behaviors that research shows lead to great outcomes, and then certainly, I have seen lots of top performers where I go, oh, they're totally doing that. It's great. So I think one of the most important things is leaning on structure as opposed to expecting to just follow the Nike, just do it mantra. And by the way, when you talked about how you're training for your marathon, I noticed you immediately went to all the structures. Schedule structure accountability coaching, investing money into it all. So there's more investment in it. So it's like, you've got to chill up. Yes. And then, you know, I think that's the most important thing for me. It's so ingrained in me that if you want to accomplish your goals, you've got to schedule these things you've got to do on a daily basis and make it like,

36:21break it down. What's the daily goal? When are you gonna do it? What's gonna cure you to do it? Who's gonna watch you do it? Everything. What's that stake for you? What's the state for other people? What's the higher purpose that if you don't do this, who are you gonna be hurting? And who is literally holding you accountable? Right? You've got your coach involved. So those are the kinds of things that- I think one of the leading academic, the research that shows which will help you get more results. Yes. And there's so many pieces of that. And like each one of them, we get unpacked and talked about studies from, you know, okay, a big one is, too often people say, I just have this big goal. You know, it's big. I think if I said a big audacious goal, and that by the way, that's good. It's good to set stretch goals, but then you've got to break it down. Like into the, you know, what's, what are you gonna do this week? What are you gonna do today? What are those component parts? And people get a lot further. Research by Albin Jura, the late Albin Jura of Stanford, great thinker sort of, did some of the pioneering work on this. We just did a field experiment where we tested with thousands of people who wanted to be volunteering 200 hours a year.

37:25And they had committed to that goal. And we found that just sending them reminders, not to volunteer 200 hours a year, but to volunteer four hours a week, led to vastly better performance. Just that really simple change, even in the way you communicate about this. When you invite someone to start saving $5 a day, instead of $150 a month, you get vastly higher take-up. Interesting. Identical. So just little framing shifts, where you think about, let's break this down into the bite-sized component. Now it's hard to procrastinate on it. You can see how it's doable. It doesn't feel overwhelming. So you're saying, if my goal is to save $105, or invest $105 a month, or whatever this is, are you saying it's not the best approach to say, I'm gonna invest $105 a month, but I'm gonna do $5 a day. Yeah, so 100, I, I, I can't remember what this is. Yeah, it was 150, because it's like 30 days, roughly in a month, and you know. 150 dollars, and suppose it's saying, I'm gonna save or invest $150 a month, trick your brain into saying, I'm gonna invest $5 a day.

38:26Right. You're saying, by doing that, what should happen? We should have. Many more people raise their hands and say, I can do this. And suppose $150 is too big for some people, it sounds big. You start thinking, oh no, where am I gonna have to cut? Like, that's a big, like, I'm not gonna get to go out to dinner three times that I thought I was gonna get to go out to, I'm not gonna make my rent. So you're like focusing on that big category, $150. And this was an experiment that was done, led by Hal Hershfeldt at UCLA with a savings app, Acorns. And they just invited people, either some people get randomly assigned do you wanna save $5 a day, or $150 a month. It's literally the identical outcome. They will take $150 out of your account monthly. Yeah, but they frame it differently and you get vastly higher to take out something like five times more people are interested. It just feels doable. Yes. I mean, it's like, anyone can $5 and their couch or like, car like the change. It's like, I can do this every day, but $150 may be like a big stretch. Right, but it is the same thing. And so that broken down goal is really important.

39:28So it's like, if you're working out as opposed to saying, I'm gonna run, I don't know, 50 miles a week. It's like, that may seem like a lot, but I can run, what's that broken down to? Three miles, four miles a day. Four miles a day, five miles a day. It's more doable than thinking about the big number, right? Yeah. That's interesting. How could you apply that in another area of life, do you think, in terms of like fitness, in terms of finances, and what about like relationships, I don't know, is there? I think you can break down most big goals into its component parts. It might not be as simple as like, literally redoing the math, but it might be, I wanna have a better relationship and I wanna suspend more quality time together. Let's try to spend a lot more quality time together this year. Well, first you can get more concrete, right? That I have a lot of. And so, say you had a monthly goal. It might be like, okay, I wanna make sure that we go on five just us dates a month to have that alone time. You might say that means, every Friday plus one Saturday,

40:30we're gonna do it. And that means once a week plus one time, one week that has two times. And we're gonna, let's go map out when they are. And all becomes more bite size and achievable. And this is again, you said, you're like mapping out your schedules. These are the component parts that actually add up to achieving your goals. Yeah, and I'm really thinking of like, okay, what am I gonna do this week? What am I gonna schedule this week? Not like, I've got all this stuff to do for the next three months. Like, what can I do for the next few days? And what's coming tomorrow? And then, okay, I see the full week and how I'm gonna manage my time. And at the end of the week, wow, I can look at what I created and I can be proud of it and build for the next week. Yeah, so that's really important. Yeah, and time's gonna keep passing. And in three months, you're gonna look back and say, oh, look at all those steps I took to get to me what I'm at. Absolutely. Winning the LA marathon, I'm just kidding. Completing is a goal. Completing in five hours is my goal. Oh. Okay, so that's... So breaking down... Yeah, structure. Structure, let me add another super important strategy that I think a lot of hyperformers use

41:32that research supports. And this one I think is vastly underappreciated to. And it sort of relates to what I was poking at earlier, like the just do it, Nike, like, oh, that's not really right. I think this is really a misconception that's related to that. And this, the idea comes from research by ILLIT Fishbok of the University of Chicago and Caitlin Wolley of Cornell. And what they showed is that if you ask people when they have a big goal, what approach are they gonna take to try to get to it, most people say, like, I'm gonna look for the most efficient route. It's all about efficiency, what's the most effective path to that end goal? That's how I go for it. And like a small fraction of people say something different. They say, I try to find a way that I'll enjoy getting to that end destination. Have fun. Have fun. So you could think about someone who wants to... We've been on Marathon, say you're training for a marathon. You know, somebody who's like, I'm gonna just go to the gym and get on the train, grind it out. It's gonna hard every day. Yeah. And another person who's like, I'm gonna go on a run

42:33with a running group. We're gonna go through the most beautiful trails that I know, we're gonna do it together. Maybe I'm even gonna download some great reading material, listening material before I go, that I have something fun in my ears. Those are really different paths, right? Like, this one might be more efficient because you don't have to coordinate with other people. You'll do it every day. You're gonna like, no exactly your mileage. It's gonna be really controlled. Yes. But it turns out, if you don't enjoy it, you don't persist. Ah. And so they've done experiments where they showed that if you just actually encourage people to choose the most fun way to pursue an exercise goal or study, they did this with students in math class, giving them fun activities that were sort of going on in the background. Markers and play music and have snacks versus just grind it out. People achieve more because they persist longer when they find ways to make it fun to do. That's crazy. It's good for them. But we misunderstand this. We don't think we need that. We sort of think like, oh, that's kid stuff.

43:34Like, I'm just gonna push through and we're wrong. We won't ultimately. And that's because of impulsivity because we overvalue the present experience relative to the long-term gains. It's just how we're wired. We don't appreciate that. We don't appreciate that about ourselves. So we make these mistakes. We'll probably quit more frequently when it gets harder and harder if there's no like daily joy or fun. If you're just like, I got six months, 12 months, two years until maybe this goal happens. This is exhausting. It's draining. It's pulling me away from having fun in my friendships or these activities. So it sounds like if you can make the challenging steps, the fun activity in your day-to-day life, then you'll stick with it longer. So what I'm here you say. Absolutely. And I think it's so underappreciated. Yeah, that's true. What about what else around structure you said? There's a bunch of subcategories within structure and the importance of having structure for high performers. Yes, okay. So another really key thing is having if-then plans.

44:36I love that. So this is based on research by Peter Gullwitz, sort of NYU, who studied the way people, different people were making plans around goals they wanted to achieve. And he found that some people sort of said, I will eventually do it or I'll do it once a week. And other people laid out real detail in their plans. And they had sort of if-then statements like, if it is a Thursday at 4 p.m., then I will go train for my marathon in this location. As opposed to some time this week, I'll get around to it. The more structure, the more clear it was, what's the cue that's going to trigger the behavior, the more follow through he was seeing. And then he started running a series of experiments for who'd actually have people basically fill in the blanks. Like fill in the if X happens, then I will do Y sentence, instead of just saying, I plan to do Y. And looked at what are the outcomes and saw this really matters. It turns out we've done research showing that if people are prompted to just write down the date and time when they intend to get a flu shot, they're more likely to get a vaccine. If people are asked, when will you vote,

45:37where will you vote, how will you get there on a call, try and encourage them to go to a vote in an election? They're significantly more likely to show up. So these very simple tricks are being used widely in healthcare now and voter turnout because it's so powerful to create those if-then plans, instead of just sort of the flimsy ones, to get to an end goal. Gotcha. Oh, got, I like that if-then plans. If-then plans are super important. Okay. We haven't talked about tracking or accountability, although we've alluded to them. Let's do it. So those are other really important people. Tell me. So tracking does seem to be really useful in terms of achieving goals because if you're not, if you don't have visibility into whether you're, you know, getting anywhere, it's hard to reward yourself and rewarding yourself as part of sort of the loop that makes you keep feeling satisfied and doing something. For the actual behavioral change to be implemented, right? Exactly. So it's a really simple thing, but this tracking does seem to matter. One of my favorite studies of this shows it

46:38actually in water conservation, where people were taking showers that were long, and they were committed to conservation, but their showers were long, so that wasn't totally working out for them. And then they were randomly assigned to two groups, one group's getting something they know they're being monitored and someone else can see how much water they're using. The other group gets, you know, a visual. They can literally see in real time. How much water they use. Three minutes left. Two minutes like, whatever you have. Well, I wasn't counting. I was just showing total, you know, total gallons you, straight. Leaves are gallons, right? So it's like really visible. It's going up. They're wasting this much every moment, yeah. Right. And you can sort of think, like, oh, how much did I use total yesterday? Right. So you can imagine that kind of thing. It's a gamification. Yeah. And it's saving. It's a gamification, although there were no sort of stars and bells and whistles. It's more just, I know where I am. And I have, you know, I know how much I can. I'm a horrible human being for wasting this much water. Now I'm just kidding. Well, yeah, I mean, that might be the kind of fact. Right. Right. Hopefully, hopefully it wasn't that extreme.

47:39I'm teasing you. I'm not that negative. But it had a big impact on it. Tracking, tracking and measuring. So having a sense, because then you can say, like, I hit the goal. I did. You can make the goals more concrete that way. Like, I'm going to do 10,000 steps a day in my little bit, but Jigles, that makes me happy. That's gamification. That Jigle all gives me so much joy. But the tracking gives you visibility into how you're doing. And it's important. And then accountability, which you've mentioned a bunch of times does, you know, absolutely the research supports. When someone else you care about, when they're holding you accountable, it matters. Because it changes the cost-benefit calculus of achieving your goals. And that... Is there research around that that proves that, or is it? Yes, absolutely. When you're... My favorite work, so this isn't the category of what's called commitment devices. So it's a category that economists have been studying for decades because they find them really weird. So economists get really excited when they hear about commitment devices because they're like, these shouldn't exist. It breaks all our theories. A commitment device is when you create some sort of penalty

48:43or constraint on yourself. So we're used to the government doing that sort of thing, right? They put their speed limits. And they find you if you're tempted to speed. And we're like, yeah, that makes sense. But what if you find yourself or penalize yourself for not achieving your goals? That's crazy. Who would ever do that? And yet lots of us do. And it's effective. And someone who's holding you accountable is sort of like creating a penalty. Because if it's now visible to someone else, whether you've achieved more, you're going to feel shame. If you don't, that's the penalty. If it's invisible how you're doing. Yes. Now you could say also they're going to see the upside. So maybe it's not only a commitment device that there's also an opportunity for pride and so on. But we tend to lose this tend to larger than gains to us. Accountability tends to, I think, be most potent because of the sense that you don't want to let. You don't want to fall down when someone's watching. Right. And commitment devices are generally extremely effective. The most effective ones are actually

49:43when you put money on the line. Right. So you can put cash down that you will forfeit if you fail to achieve a goal. Right. And research shows that that helps. It works really well. So putting money down and saying, OK, I'm going to pay $1,000 to something I don't believe in. If I don't accomplish this goal, or if I don't do the steps at least to get there by a certain time. Exactly. And it's like, I incentivize you. You incentivize yourself, which is very counterintuitive. Why am I finding myself? But it works. My favorite study is on smoker who wanted to quit. Half of them are given your standard suite of stuff. Here's ways to quit. The other half are given all that stuff plus a commitment device. You can put money into this account for six months. And it'll disappear if you fail and nicotine or co-dening test in your urine at the end of six months. 30% higher quit rate. And I just had the ability to put that money in there. My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode. In the School of Greatness drops, new conversations every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

50:46around money, mindset, healing, manifestation, and relationships. And if you're not yet following the show, then you're missing all of them. Please tap the follow button right now. And you'll get notified the moment every new episode drops because the next one might be exactly what you need. Now, let's get back to the conversation. Someone once told me that you pay attention to what you pay for. And so in the coaching world, when you're investing in a book or you're investing in a coach, usually the more the investment in that book or program or coach, the more you want to pay attention to to getting the result. Would that be similar to the study that's like, okay, if I put $100 in this thing in six months if I start smoking, people are like, eh, $100 bucks doesn't matter. But if I put $100,000 in, I'm gonna pay attention because that's a lot more money that I don't wanna lose. You know what's really fascinating is it goes back to the very first thing we talked about, which is sunk costs. And the tendency we have not to ignore them.

51:47So, you know, if you buy a book, it's sunk cost, you can't go return it. And maybe you can. But in most cases, if you dog gear it a tiny bit or you're probably not gonna return it. So you should ignore it. It's irrecoverable. It doesn't matter, but we don't. That's not how we're wired. And as a result, as a result of wanting to sort of recover that sunk cost, we do work harder when we feel like, oh, I've invested so much. More money. Yeah, exactly. So it's a trick. It's sort of a mistake that we do it, but it works. And so let's hook into that and use it to motivate us to achieve more. So the more at stake you have of your own whatever money or time or energy, the more likely you'll achieve that goal or make that change. It's just, yeah, you can change the cost benefit calculus moving forward. You can also, if you've invested in the past, then the sunk cost that we did not to ignore will feel like they should change that. So there's sort of two ways, prospectively and retrospectively. You can put a bunch of money into something and then you're gonna feel guilty if you don't do it. Or you can use these commitment contracts where you literally put money on the line on, say, a website.

52:50One of these stake or B-minder that you'll have to forfeit if you don't achieve your goal in the future. Wow. They're both tactics that can work for different reasons. Why do you feel like so many people, actually, I was gonna ask you about this, with people putting penalties on themselves, even if they don't have accountability or it's not a public commitment or something like that. If we say we're gonna do something and then we break our word to ourselves, does that shift our identity? Or does that keep us in a lower level identity of less confidence, less belief in the selves? But actually when we keep our word, we increase the level of self-esteem and confidence whether people know about it or not. Like how does that affect our belief in ourselves or our confidence? It's a really interesting question. So, and specifically you're saying, when we fail and it's visible to others versus when we fail and it's invisible, how does that change our confidence? It's more like when we say we're gonna do something and we don't take those actions

53:50and we constantly, I say I'm gonna work out five days a week, but I'm gonna do one day and I keep saying I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this and I keep not doing it. How does that affect our belief in ourselves and our confidence when we continue to break our own word to ourselves? Got it. Yeah, as you, as you, you know, the premise of the question is, right, it's not good for our confidence to continually fail. We do have a really amazing, what Dan Gilbert of Harvard is called a psychological immune system where we sort of figure out ways to still end up satisfied and someone happier than maybe we would if we took everything at face value. So we can bounce back and I actually think fresh starts and the fact that the fresh start that affects this may be related to sort of the psychological immune system for all the failure that we, you know, we constantly fail at our goals. Goals are hard to achieve, most of them we fail at and we have built these ways to sort of stand up again

54:51and say, okay, but this time it's gonna be different and it's probably a good thing by and large but of course it's not perfect and the more we fail, the more difficult it is to for that psychological immune system to win. And what about the more we keep our word to ourselves, do we build more confidence in self-esteem and momentum towards achieving other goals as well? Is the other way? Sure, yes, absolutely. That especially if we're tracking and we can sort of give ourselves that pat on the back if it's visible to others, sort of the more things that reinforce what we're achieving, I think the better in terms of giving us that boost and confidence and it's interesting there's some new work that's starting to be done on the power of streaks and visible streaks and sort of seeing like momentum, like. Exactly, like if you, there's apps like Duolingo it's just trying to get people to learn a new language and they're really making it prominent to you. You know, look, you've done it five days and we'll keep the streak going

55:51and then they're really trying to play into that momentum and psychological momentum and streaks. They do build and they make us feel like, okay, you know, I don't want to lose what I've achieved and accomplished and that's very motivating. Mm, okay. Well, just say it's a number one thing we didn't know about changing our behavior for the better. That is a big question. I think the number one thing is like a high level thing as opposed to a tactic. Yes. And that high level thing is really what I built my book around and that is the importance of not just sort of taking any of these different tactics not the shelf willy-nilly that we've been talking about but trying to figure out what are the barriers for you and match the tools that you put together to build your strategy to what's holding you back. So if you're struggling with, I just dread doing this activity then find a way to make it fun. If you don't believe you can, then you need a new social structure and instead of supports. And like you're gonna, maybe everybody can benefit a bit

56:53from all of these things. If you're procrastinating, create a commitment device like find yourself if you put it off any longer so that you'll no longer consider doing that. So what is the barrier? And then make sure you double down on creating the structures that will be relevant to it because everything we've talked about is good. It's all useful on average. That's what you're gonna get the most out of. So how do we create an assessment for ourselves to see what we need the most of? Maybe we feel like we're, you're not procrastinating but actually we are procrastinating. Maybe we feel like we're a competent person but actually lack confidence or maybe feel like you're not lazy but actually you are. Like how do we, what's the assessment? What's the list of questions to ask ourselves or just things to be aware of so that we know, okay, I need to dive into like the confidence problem and start applying these things or I need the commitment devices. Yeah, you're like, and you've got that, my books chapters are organized and you've got them open in front of you. And I organize the book very intentionally around sort of these are the different barriers

57:53and here's what all the science says about how to overcome them. And so we've gone, we've been jumping around across chapters. You know, one of the things that I think is really wonderful about this particular topic is that, I don't think there's as much self deception here as there is in other domains. I think it's easier to diagnose just from a very simple understanding of what the barriers are. Almost like if you look at the table of contents in my book, you'll see yourself in it or read a couple, you know, a page and you'll understand like, what do I need by laziness? I mean, like you're taking the path of the last least resistance, you tend to fall back on habits. Okay, if that, if it's like bad habits that are really getting in your way, then here's the set of strategy. So I don't think there's as much self deception. I think it's fairly straightforward and people will see themselves quickly and there are challenges. What's the biggest thing you want to change in your life right now? Oh my God, I have to choose the biggest. There's so many. I do a lot of research by the way, like this whole career, a lot of it like came from realizing that I wasn't optimizing

58:56in my own life and that there were hacks and scientific strategies that could be applied to improve and I'm constantly, anyway, I think there's sort of like two categories of scientists who study this stuff, the super humans and they are out there who are like so self-controlled and amazing and they look around at like all the little ants around them and they're like, what's wrong with you? This is so peculiar, let me study it. And then there's the other group which I fall into, just the people are sort of like God and mess. Let me improve myself. What's the solution? Yeah, like let's find scientific, so I'm the messy kind of. Right now, I think the thing that I am struggling with most is work-life balance and it's been a really tough year on that for so many reasons. I have a five year old who is out of school for a long time and he was doing homeschool pre-K, which over Zoom goes about as well. It's every five minutes of time. Get back on there, yeah. Yes, it's about as tough as anyone would imagine, Zoom pre-K. So that was tough and then I have this book that I wrote

59:58and was really, you know, I put so much of myself into and that was a tug and then I do research primarily about health behavior change and in the last year and a half. And your health has struck, yeah. Well, yeah, we've needed some health behavior change in the world. This is a global pandemic struck. I've studied vaccines and encouraging people take vaccines and I felt like there was more need for my expertise than ever before and that I wanted to give as much as I could. And I have lost work-life balance to some degree, like, you know, many late nights at the computer when instead of stepping back, many missed, you know, outings with family. Sure. Because this is so important, I have to do this now. Their mission is important, you're sure. Yeah. But there has to be a balance. And so that, I think is the biggest thing I'm trying to change. What would you fall into then? Which category would you want to- For procrastination. For procrastination towards spending more time- It's that. ...tap the care of your health and being with family and downtime. So procrastinating being lazy. Not that way. Yeah, good. It's really all have our own.

1:00:58Relaxing. I've talked about the idea of wants and shoulds. Yes. So wants being like the things that provide us with sort of more the instant hit of gratification and shoulds being the things that are good for us in the long run. But they're not always candy and salad. Right? Sometimes some of us get mixed up on those wants and shoulds. And for me, the want this year has always been like, oh, I feel like I have this mission. And it has overtaken some of the things that are really important and really should be at the center, you know, having a five-year-old, having a family and making sure that that's a priority. So having more balance is my biggest challenge right now. So the procrastination problem. Is that what it is? What would you, what in that chapter on the procrastination problem? What tool should you be looking at more? And how should you be applying that tool from the moment you leave this interview for the next couple of months? How could you integrate that tool into your life?

1:01:59I think accountability and commitment are some of the things that are probably the most powerful here. So one of the studies that I talk about in that chapter has to do with pledges and the power of doctors who were overprescribing unnecessary antibiotics to their patients. And it up, doing that less. So when they put a formal pledge up in their office saying, when you come in, you've got a stuff he knows and you're begging me for your antibiotic, I don't do that. It's not recommended by the best practice. And I follow best practices, not what I should be doing. That pledge reduced that dramatically. I think sort of pledges. My partner is someone who I can have holding the accountable, setting hours and sort of planning around what are those hours and what are they going to be allocated to? Am I really going to work on Friday and Saturday night until 11 p.m. instead of taking time for myself and my family?

1:02:59Those are the kinds of tools and sort of, I've already instituted this in part because of these issues. My phone goes away during dinner with my family when we're out doing activities, it needs to be away because otherwise I'll be tempted to check and see, oh, is there something coming up from work that I should be responding to? So it is a little bit backwards, but the tools apply whether or not the things that are tugging you in the wrong direction are pizza and junk food or work. Right. So what is, have you already been implementing all these things or is it something you need to have a conversation with them? I'm implementing some of them, but not as many. We're actually, I'm about to have a fresh start. So Friday tomorrow is a Friday and then I go on a vacation with my family for a week. Jim, really looking forward to you having had a vacation and I don't know how long. I just had one or two weeks ago and I don't know who's like, I can't remember last time, years or five years. I feel like years also pandemic stretches out. Time taffy. You know something I did that was an incredible, I don't know if you this is possible for you,

1:04:01but this is probably four or five years ago. I was like, I really feel like I need to get away on a vacation and I realized at the time for 15 years of my life, because I got a cell phone when I was 17 or 16 or something, for 15 years of my life, I had my cell phone on me every single day. Like there was never a day I didn't have my phone near me at some point. Like I checked it every day and I was like, that just doesn't feel right. Always at least one point in the day, I touched my cell phone for 15 years. And I said, what's the thing that scares me that I think it helped a reset? And my producer at the time, Christine, she was like, I was like, I'm going to go to Hawaii and what I'm going to do is just going to leave the phone in the hotel room when I go out. And she was like, what would it look like if you didn't take your phone or computer with you on the plane? And I was like, I don't even know if I could do that, but I actually ended up doing that for five or six days, left all the electronics at home. And it was the scariest thing the first day, but then it was like three days. It's amazing.

1:05:02It's incredible. That's how I take vacation, Stu. Really? You leave all this stuff at home. I don't bring a computer. I normally do bring my phone. But it's like, but I actually, I start away in the safe. Start away to safe and I take email off of it. So like, you know, social media and email or whatever. Right. All the things that would be a drag, they're gone. It's just a phone. It's just a phone. Call me and that's it. Yeah. I think that's absolutely critical. And that's a commitment device, right? You've put constraints on your own access to things that would tug you into a place that's not good. You'd be tempted to do this thing. It's not good for you. You've created a commitment device when you, right? And it is weird. Like, you are constraining access to tools that you normally value. That is a very weird thing if you sort of step back and think about it, but it helps. And there's a lot of ways we can create constraints that help us achieve more. What about non-negotiables? Creating a non-negotiable like every, like for dinner, non-negotiables, I put my phone away or Friday at six o'clock, I turn my phone off for the weekend. Totally. That's something that works in this or is that?

1:06:05Absolutely. It absolutely works in this. That's a kind of commitment device or the non, that is a commitment device. Those are boundaries, rules, constraints. Okay. And I've got it down for dinner. I mostly have it down during the day on weekends. My real remaining problem is late nights once my son isn't bad. After dinner, you're back from working until midnight, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, those are things I'm working on. I love the research behind the accountability and the commitment, the pledges. I think that's a really cool idea. How could we apply pledging in our life around a relationship, your finances, or your health? Well, I mean, actually, interestingly, society has already set up with a lot of pledges involved in relationships without us even getting involved, right? I'm engaged. I'm married. This is my blueprint. Right. I'm not singling anymore. Right, we're talking about, you know, sunk costs, wedding rings. Things are all related, right? It's interesting that these structures have bubbled up, even though the research that sort of proves how effective they are came decades, hundreds of years later, in any cases.

1:07:11But a lot of the things that exist that help us be true to each other, or even if you think about taking professional pledges when you become a doctor, they have a credit oath, a lot of these kinds of pledges that they're already there. But one thing the research points to is, can we build more of them? And how can we use them and how can we create ways that even when there isn't a structure, right? Maybe you're not going to get engaged to your coach in this, you know, marathon, because that's not the thing in marathons. But is there something from that idea that you can build? Can you commit or pledge to each other in some way that will make your commitment to each other more meaningful and more powerful? So anyway, it is interesting to see how society has already built some of this in and then think, can we take inspiration from it and from the research to build more of it in other places? Right. Can you talk to me about temptation bundling? What temptation bundling is and how we can utilize it for our lives?

1:08:12Yes, this is the very first bit of me search I did. Me search. This is my me search. So okay, this idea came and then it sort of, I get to this field later. I was a graduate student actually getting a PhD in computer science and business, which was, you know, the classwork was not that fun. I will admit, and I wasn't there were a lot of classes I had to take. There were tough, a lot of problems, that's, and I was exhausted when I would come home like focus so focused all day and like try and understand what everybody was saying and make sense of all these different, to me it was almost like a different language to think that way. So I come home, I was tired, I didn't want to pick up my problem sets and get the work done. All I wanted to do was what any sane person wanted to do like curl up on the couch and pitch watch. Exactly. Like any reasonable human. I was also a former athlete and like feeling physically healthy and active is important to me for, you know, identity, mental health, physical health, but I couldn't track myself

1:09:13to go to the gym, which I also knew I needed to be doing because I was just so drained. And I realized there was a way maybe I could solve those problems all at once. What I started doing and I'm certainly not the only person who would come up with this solution, but it might be the only person whose name did and studied it. As I, I decided I was only going to let myself enjoy indulgent entertainment while I was exercising at the gym. Right. So if I really want to watch the Kardashians, I needed me on a treadmill or doing it here where I can enjoy it while moving my body. You got it. So for me, I actually, turns out, I've already admitted I'm a nerd. So no one's going to be surprised to hear this. And also like I can only handle so much sensory input. So I did it with audio novels. Yeah. TV was like too much. I couldn't follow the characters. Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, James Patterson, Alex Cross style, actually Harry Potter, love Harry Potter and like full de morgue, what's going to happen next. So I would only let myself listen to those books at the gym and I would find myself then coming home from this long day of classes, craving a trip to the gym. Excited. Yeah.

1:10:13So excited. What's going to happen to Alex Cross next? Is he going to get, you know, is he going to escape? Is he going to get the bad guy? And then I get to the gym time and fly while I was there because the workout isn't painful. It's fun. I didn't even notice. Sometimes I worked out too long because I wanted to hear what happens next. And then I come back when I'm done. I'm refreshed. I'm rejuvenated. I've had my break. I'm going to dive into my classwork and I turned around, you know, my grades improved a lot. Thank goodness because I was having a tough time there for a little while in grad school. And it was just all better because I had figured out by linking a chore with a temptation, I could make it fun. And we already talked about the importance of making it fun for persistence. This is just a tactic for doing it. So I've since done research showing, I'm not, I'm not that weird. What am I research? Just like, Oh, look, I'm not weird. It works for other people too. So we ran large randomized controlled trials and showed that teaching people to temptation, bundle giving them, temptations to hook with a chore improves outcomes in terms of exercise. You can think about porting it to other places like only listen to this podcast. If it's somebody loves your podcast, while you're, you know, cooking your family a homemade

1:11:18meal or while you're catching up on household chores or while you're going for a run, what is the thing that you sometimes don't do put off because it's not instantly gratifying? Can you link something you love with it? The snack you only let yourself pick up when you're heading to hit the books. Social, make it social can be a way to make something fun, right? And that can be the temptation bundle. I only get to see my best friend when we're going for neighborhood walks and getting in our, that's cool. Our morning exercise, right? Like what, what, and we'll gossip only at that time. That's what will reserve the gossip for the exercise walk. So what are the ways that you can find something that you love? The guilty pleasures with a healthy habit. You got it. What is the best time to start a new habit? Yeah, this comes back, I think, to what we're talking about with fresh starts and these chapter breaks. And so psychologically, those break points are a great time for starting something new because we have that renewed enthusiasm, optimism, the ability to say, okay, I couldn't

1:12:18do it last time, but I can be optimistic now because I've turned the page on in chapter. But actually another thing that can help beyond just that psychological chapter break is a physical change, especially if a habit that's not such a good one has been associated with a place or location. So like you went through a breakup and you were living with a person for a year to your 10 years, it's actually moving into a new physical location and kind of creating a new environment and fresh started by physically moving. Is that what you mean? Totally. And that's going to sort of any of the things that had you in a rut that you want to rip away, it's going to be easier to pull them apart. I think the easiest example would be like, say you have a habit of picking up a dung and donuts on the way to work every morning, like three donuts and then you realize that's maybe not great for me or even one, maybe not great for you. Sorry if that's new to anyone. So you want to break that habit.

1:13:20If you're like moving to a new job, you are literally not going to walk by the same dung and donuts on the way to work. Right. Or take a different route. If you take a different route, you can give yourself a fresh start. But so you can create changes that make it easier to break habits if you move out of living with, right? So just think about how this is an insane example, but you're in a relationship with someone. It's not working out. You could imagine you don't move out. You just say like, well, we'll go have a tan and we'll like move into different rooms. That would be a terrible idea. Terrible. Terrible idea, right? And like that's part of though the thing that we do when we're trying to change other habits is basically like still living with the environment that was holding us back. So thinking about are there breaks in the environment that can help shape change is great. And there's this research by Wendy Wood showing that when people college transfer students, when they're transferring to a new college in a totally new community versus just like

1:14:20basically going down to a different, you know, they're still living in the same environment with the same habits and friends and just going to a different, you know, I used to go to this college down this street. Now go to that college. Right. The more disruption there was to your environment, the more that that habit disruption came along with it. And people were able to build better and different exercise routines and improvement in change would happen when you were easily when there's that shift in the drastic change. And drastic physical change in environment change. Yeah. Interesting. Huh. So moving like in a different state or a different climate or a different just like all around environment will help you shift or a different job on a different set of so, you know, place you hang out. Whatever it is, the physical change can actually sort of help in addition to that fresh start psychological change is what I think the research points to. This is Wendy Wood's research that you're talking about, right? Yes. Sounds like someone I should introduce. You should interview Wendy, which is amazing. She's down the street. She's down the street. Yes. Everybody I've talked about, one of the things that's really fun about behavioral sciences.

1:15:23We have this, I co-direct this initiative with Angela Duckworth called the Behavior Change for Good Inition. We have a 150 scientist in our network around the world who all study behavior change and have like, you know, they're different areas of expertise. Wendy is. Adam and Ethan are in there too. I think Wendy, exactly. Exactly. Ethan told me about this. Yeah. Wendy's down the street. Wendy, you were to great book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. I have to read that. Yeah. Okay. Cool. What else do we need to know about behavioral change to support us in accomplishing and achieving our goals? Trying to think about it. Besides everything in your book. We've covered a lot. We've covered a lot. Yes. We've covered a lot of ground. You know, we have, we talked about it at a high level, but I want to come back to something we talked about at a high level that I think is one of the most important insights in the book. And that is flexibility. I think we should talk a bit about flexibility. Maybe we should even talk also a little bit about recovering from failure. Oh, I like this. Yes. Let's talk about it.

1:16:24Okay. So, to talk about flexibility, I'm going to tell you about an experiment that surprised me. And maybe I'll, well, now I've told you it surprised me. So I won't set you up and ask you to guess because you'll know. Okay. So, I think I'll tell you about an experiment because I thought I knew enough about habits to help people form lasting habits with a tactic that ended up not working. So, as an experiment, I ran at Google. I ran it with John Bashiers of Harvard Business School on a few other collaborators. We wanted to get Googlers to build a lasting exercise habit. So we had 2,500 of them who signed up. They all said, I'm in. I want to build it. It's called the Fresh Start Challenge. The beginning of the new year. They're all ready to go to the corporate gym more regularly. And we readily assign them to different groups. We thought we had a formula for helping them build a lasting habit based on sort of a month program. We were going to get them to kickstart this habit during this month. Okay. So, one group is told, we want to focus you on consistency in your routine. You tell us the ideal time for you to work out, say they say 7am.

1:17:27We said great. You're going to go to the gym at 7am as consistently as possible. You'll only be rewarded when you hit the gym right at around 7am. You'll go for it. You're a 7am workout person for a month. And after a month of this sort of reinforcing that, you're going to have a habit. We're going to let go and we'll see that you keep doing it. Okay. The second group, we say, okay, what's your ideal workout time? Let's make your plan. Let's say this person says 7am too. We say great. 7am is a good time. Go 7am sometimes. But we want you to mix it up. Go whenever you want. Just do it a lot for the next month. And when the month is over, we think you'll have a lasting habit. Flexibility is key. We thought the people who we got going consistently. We actually, we thought that was probably that. Consistency is the best way. We do it consistently every time or every day. You're going to be able to stick this habit. We're going to be a robot. We're going to keep going. Yes. We're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. Yes. We're going to keep going. So we thought that was the thing to do. Both groups in our experiment ended up going to the gym at the same frequency during this

1:18:28month long kickoff period. But in different patterns, the group that we'd said, routine, routine, routine, 85% of their workouts are at the same time. The group that said flexibility, flexibility, only half of their workouts are at that same time. Then we let go of the month where we've been really holding their hands is over. And what we really care about is who's going afterwards, like who's built a habit the less. For the next month, six months, year, right? Yeah. We're looking at the data. And we're sure it's the routine people. We analyze the data. It's not. Flexibility. Flexibility. Flexibility is key. Not concessibility is key. Flexibility. Flexibility is key. And we're like, what's going on? So we dig in. We're analyzing this data. We're like, what's going on? The people who had gone more consistently at their regular time, they did keep going a little bit more often at their special time. So if you're a 7A and person, you're going a little bit more at 7AM if you were in that rigid group than if you're in the flexible group, but they're rigid. That's the key word. It's almost like if you missed that time, I'm not going at all. That's right. I missed the day. So I'm not going to go at noon or five or seven. They don't go if they missed their 7AM.

1:19:29That's it. They give up on themselves. They only under these circumstances kind of habit. The flexible people, they go tiny bit less at their regular time, but they're, if they missed that time, they have another time. They have a backup plan. They have a backup plan after that. So they're going to the gym more net net because they've built this flexible strategy like they have their first best, their second best, and their third best. They've built a no matter what habit, if you will. I'm going to do this a minute if I have to or 11AM. Just as long as I get it in, I'm done. They've learned how to roll with the fact that life is not consistent. Perfect. So they have a most regular time, but they also have an next best time and so on, instead of an only rigid routine. I thought this was so interesting to me, and I read about this in the book. It brought me back to tennis because, and we sort of talked about this a little bit earlier on the saying flexible, you never practice a sport only under perfect conditions. Right. I never trained and hit forehands always standing at the baseline perfectly. I'm shotting at 78 degrees. Yeah. That's all you do when you're training right from your, your, your hose because that's

1:20:32not what you're going to find in the real, when you're on, when you're on the court in a real match, you're going to have to be able to run backwards and forwards and you have the sudden, your eyes to a different angle. And so it, I think that's what we learned from that. It's so important if we're trying to build good habits. If we're trying to build routines that will last to understand that we need to, okay, have a first best, but have a second best on third best and, and practice being flexible as we're trying to build up that performance. So you're actually talking about your, I think it's, it's different if you're meeting with your Spanish coach at 8am every day. There's nothing wrong with that, but probably practicing Spanish and saying I'm always going to do it at 5pm and otherwise no matter what, sometimes there's no one holding you accountable. You're not meeting, you know, with your tutor. Sure. So you're going to want to say like, I'll try for 5pm. But I'm going to practice at some point. Yeah. Even if 5pm falls apart, then I've got my 9pm backup plan. Right, right. Or if life happens and I want to do a dinner at 5 with someone friend and then I can

1:21:32do it afterwards or before. So it's related to failure. Yeah. Which was the other thing I said we have talked about. Because flexibility is about like, you can like fail because you can shift it. Exactly. Whereas if I have to do it at 7am and I don't make it and I'm done for the day, I failed. That's interesting. So tell me more about failure. That was the next thing you were to say, right? I think some of the tech, first of all, I think the thing I want to study most next and sort of that I think is the most important understudied topic in my field is recovery from failure. And that, you know, of course, we've got Carol Dweck thinking about like failure as growth is it. And I'm saying Angela Duck, we're thinking about grit. It's not like it isn't studied. I just think there's so much that we need to know because almost inevitably we fail when we're trying to achieve anything ambitious. Okay. So a lot of people don't get back up again and figure that out. Why do we not get back up? Because it's so defeating or it's deflating or we told people we were going to do this and then we let them down and we let ourselves down or all of the above, you know, all of

1:22:35the above or we don't have a growth mindset or, you know, we think maybe something else will be easier. Perfectionist. And so then we procrastinate if it's not perfect or. There's a million reasons. That's one of the challenges and that's what makes it so hard to solve. So we know a little bit and flexibility seems to be one of the key things, you know, having a growth mindset so you can say that failure isn't diagnostic of me, but it's an opportunity to grow and learn and I can get better and do better the next time. So these are some of the things, but I think we need a lot more. One study I really like and we're saying I'm talking a lot about exercise studies, even though it's just, you know, a part of this world, but there's a lot. It's like the fruit fly of habits like the one of the gym. Marissa Sharif, who is a professor at Wharton with me, has this really cool research on what she calls emergency reserves. I call them Mulligans. She wanted to go to the, she wanted to work out every day. So she was doing some research and she realized, okay, I want to set a tough goal like every day.

1:23:35That's good for me, but sometimes I'm going to fail and she knew about something else called the What the Hell Effect. Well aptly named when you have a small goal failure, people often throw up their hands and give up and then abandon completely. Small goal failure. Yeah, so like I'm only going to eat 1500 calories to get my goal and then I see donuts in the coffee room I eat and then I'm like, what the hell? And then I have pizza. I go crazy. That's the What the Hell Effect. It was originally studied related to dieting, not saying it's healthy to have those guys goals, but anyway, that's where I was studied. So we do this What the Hell Effect thing all the time. So she was like, how do I balance these two problems if I want to have a tough goal? But if I have a tough goal, I'm going to have some goal failures and I'm going to get What the hell and I'm going to quit. So she came up with this strategy for herself, which she then studied both with productivity and also with exercise goals and all different settings for her dissertation work. And the idea was she's going to set that tough goal, but give herself some emergency reserves. Some sort of like if you play monopoly like the get out of jail free card, then you save for the real emergency, but you've got it in your back pocket and then you can declare

1:24:38like everything's okay. I'm going to use this now. So three times a month, I can call a golly emergency card like, um, exhausted. I didn't sleep well last night. I'm got too much of my plate today. So these are one of three days that I can say, it's okay. And I'm not a failure. And it's got to be limited. Right. So it doesn't become like, well, every day, I never work out. Yeah. And she thinks calling it an emergency is important, even though I like to call it a mulligan because you don't want to be tempted to use it. She says she actually almost never takes it. But she, what she does is she sets like seven days a week goal, but she gets two emergency reserves. She almost never takes them each week. Two weeks, two week. Yeah. And then she's done this research showing like if you do that kind of structure rate, the seven day a week tough goal, she compares that to what about just a five day a week goal, which is structurally the same as seven days with you get out of jail free cards. Yes. Or you get the seven, which one's, which one's seven days with the emergency reserves, crushes the other two, just much better performance because you're striving for that tough goal, but you don't give up on yourself if you have a miss. And so that makes up for, you know, that makes it better than everything else.

1:25:43And so I think this is something we can do is like, can we give ourselves a tiny bit of wiggle room, not so much the world wiggle all the time. You know, even it looks like, okay, I have one cheat meal a week or something or one day or whatever I want, but I know I could have pizza two nights a week if I wanted to. But then you're like, well, I know I know I could eat it this night, but as an emergency, but I know it's coming in three days. So I'll just wait something like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she's done it looking at productivity too. Like you need to, you need to do a certain task every day on your goal to make your big, you know, the most income is if you do it every time. But you know, if we each set different goals and give you different emergency reserves, you can get more productivity from the same workforce from the same individuals because they feel like, you know, it's not overwhelming. They see the wiggle room and they're able to keep pushing themselves. So they're having the Mulligan method or approach to your recovery from failure strategy is a good strategy as we're here to say. Yes, yes. I think that understanding and appreciating the value of things like cheat meals, emergency

1:26:46reserves, it lets you forgive yourself. And that's the fundamental thing. Like failure's happen. Understand how to forgive yourself. It can be through flexibility, which we talked about sort of having the backup plan, the backup plan to the backup plan instead of the if only plan. And it can be with these kinds of sort of thinking about how will I give myself an emergency reserve around Mulligan so that being prepared for life to throw you curve balls in different ways, I think seems really important to success. How else do we learn how to recover from failure? That is the great. So don't beat ourselves up. Yeah. Like I'm a horrible, I'm a loser, I suck, I'm no good. I can never do this because I keep failing over and over again. Yeah. I think a lot of us are in beat-up mode. I think you're right. I think, I think besides these structures that we've talked about, I actually think I'm going to go back to social because I think that's another thing that helps with recovering from failures. If you have, if you've built your team and your support structures and recovering from failure also has to do a lot of confidence to know that you can get back up and that

1:27:46there is another chance and that it's okay. I think that social support can be an important part of recovery as well. It's so interesting to say that. And I wanted to bring this up earlier when you were talking about your mentor, was it in Max? Yeah. Well, I take a lot of notes, so I totally remember that way otherwise I wouldn't, but where you mentioned that he does something really integral where he essentially has you coach someone else or kind of coach yourself in the question as opposed to him giving the advice. Simon Sinek, I'm not sure if you're going to be familiar with him. Sure. I was asking him about, because I believe self-doubt is one of the killer of dreams. When we doubt ourselves, it's hard to go after the goals and take the risks and be consistent in all these things without the belief at least. And I was asking him, what do you think is a great way to instill belief in someone who doubts himself? And he was like, whatever good example, I have this friend of mine who's kind of endow in her luck for many years. She's very talented and smart before whatever reason she wasn't believing herself.

1:28:48And I would try to tell her, I believe in her and give her the confidence and say these things, but it's just nothing was working. Even one day I said, you know what? I asked her if she could coach me on something. And she was like, I'm actually really struggling with this area of my life and I think you're really smart and talented this can you coach me. And him switching it around from giving her advice to saying, will you coach me on helping me improve this? He saw her confidence go through the roof. And so I think it's pretty cool that your mentor does the same with you and your team of colleagues where it's like, okay, you guys coach each other on how you would solve this problem. And it builds that confidence with each other. So I think it's cool in terms of building confidence is we should always be coaching others. Even if you feel like you don't believe in yourself. Absolutely. And of course, it's just like slightly tricky tight roadblock in that if you're always coaching others and they don't want it. You're right, right. Just ring their confidence. That's one of the things I like about this idea of like advice club circles of friends who all want the coaching from each other.

1:29:49They come and solicit it. And they also, so they build each other's confidence in multiple ways by saying, hey, I want your advice. I'm soliciting it. I believe in you. And then you get the chance to coach. But also when you're struggling, you can go to them and solicit advice. So it's this beautiful circle. And I think it's really related to what Simon Sinek was saying. I love this. I'm excited about all these strategies and the research here. I want people to get your book, How to Change, a science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Make sure you guys get a copy of this book and get a few copies. Lots of good strategies for change and transformation. I've got a couple of final questions for you. This is called the Three Truths question. It's a hypothetical scenario. So I'd like you to imagine you get to live as long as you want to live, but for whatever reason it's your last day on Earth. And you've created and accomplished everything you want to create and accomplish in your life. Many years away from now. So whatever reason you've got to take all of your work with you or it's got to go somewhere else.

1:30:50All you're written work, the audio, the videos, the research papers got to go with you somewhere else. But you get to leave behind on a piece of paper. You get to write down three things you know to be true. From all your lessons in life, whether it be from research and academics or just life lessons, the three things you know to be true that you would want to share with the world. And this is all we would have to remember you by are these three truths or three lessons. What would you say would be those for you? Well, okay. I mean, I think we've talked, obviously, about a lot of the biggest truths already. I have to pick three. I think number one would be if you want to achieve your potential, if you want to achieve your goals, find a way to make the path to achievement fun. It cannot be painful in the moment. It has to be enjoyable to get there or else you're not going to persist in it cheap as much.

1:31:53To me, I think that's number one. Number two is probably about fresh starts. I think I would want to leave people with the realization that life is full of these moments that give us renewed confidence in ourselves, renewed motivation, a sense of a new beginning and a clean slate and that by looking for them, by looking for opportunities to create chapter breaks when things aren't going right, we can get further. I believe, you know, I'd like to do even more research on this to prove this in a million different ways. But what we know already is it's clear these moments arise. They help us pursue our goals. We can call them out and help people achieve more. Fresh starts are there, they're real, they're coming and they can give us the opportunities we need to grow and not give us that psychological immune system boost that we need.

1:32:54Okay, so make it fun, fresh starts. I think my third comes back to what we just talked about about the importance of flexibility. That you have to create flexible approaches to achievement that you cannot be too rigid. That rigidity is the enemy of habit and success because life throws you curveballs constantly. And of course, rutinization, we all understand that there is sort of a habit loop and when we want to build, but we have to build it with a recognition of the real world and the real constraints will face. So I think those are my three. Those are cool. I like those. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Katie, before I ask you the final question for your commitment to obsessing over this research and figuring out how can I help as many people as possible with the data, with the science, the research studies, and leaving something

1:33:57you love behind, which is sports to go all in in school and then continue to be in this pursuit for however many years you've been doing this now and making this your life's mission because it's making a lasting impact on a lot of people. One tool that someone can get from this book or this interview could really support someone in overcoming a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of dissatisfaction, of being stuck in something, could prevent them from dying sooner than they need to, from changing a habit or a routine, psychologically or physically. So I really acknowledge you for being committed to your mission and doing it in a fun way. I appreciate and acknowledge your efforts here. And again, I want people to get your book, How to Change, the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be, my Katie Milkman. I think you'll be very inspired. So make sure you check this out. You are also on social media, which platform would you say you are on the most that you're go to? Twitter. You're on the most.

1:34:57Katie, underscore Milkman, right? On Twitter. And you're also Katie Milkman on Instagram and Facebook and you find you there as well. But Twitter is your go to where you'll be most active. Merking, most reactive and active. Yes, exactly. So if you want to connect with Katie. Retweeting. Yeah. If you want to connect with Katie, you'll see a lot of people's comments there. Share this podcast or the YouTube video over on there and tag her and let her know what you enjoyed most about this. We've got a podcast as well called, Choisology with Katie Milkman, right? I do. And so people can check that out. You can go to Katie Milkman.com for all more information about the book and all the different things you're up to as well. Anything else that we should be aware of or supportive for you? For anyone who's really into the academic stuff, I run this initiative with Angela Duckworth called the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. And we put out a lot of research papers and so that might be another place. People who want to get into the nerdy stuff.

1:35:59The nerdy data. See the data. Where is that? I think it's Katie Milkman.com was a there. They'll find it or bcfg.upend.edu. Okay. We've got a Duckworth on here as well. We've got to get her and I've had a few people try to make the connection for that. But I think she's not traveling right now. She's just getting back on her. Okay, perfect. I'm sure you can find her at a time when she's in LA. Perfect. Okay. Katie, final question. What's your definition of greatness? Oh my goodness. It's such a good question. I should have prepared for this. I think my definition of greatness is people who are there's a North Star. Something, a purpose and meaning and mission that's driving them forward creates greatness to me. And that's when I see someone who has that clear North Star that purpose and they've built their life, created the structures to support it and are sort of leaning towards it in all

1:37:05aspects of themselves to me. That's greatness. And it can be seasonal. So the North Star can change seasonally. But seeing someone is really lined up everything because they have that North Star and Purpose. That's when I feel like I'm in the presence of greatness. Love it. Okay. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. This was really fun. My friend, I hope you're enjoying this episode right now because we are on a mission to impact a hundred million lives every single week. And every follow here on this podcast helps us reach more people. Make sure to hit the follow at the top of this show's page right now. It's the single biggest thing that you can do to support the show and the impact of us reaching you every single time we have new episodes. I appreciate you and I can't wait to see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free

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