Katy Milkman Quotes

making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important

We all struggle to line up what we do with what we want.

You’ll learn that making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important

Research has proven time and again that rather than relying on willpower to resist temptation, we’re better off figuring out how to make good behaviors more gratifying in the short-term. Big payoffs far down the road just aren’t enough to keep us motivated.

We think “future me” will be able to make good choices, but too often “present me” succumbs to temptation.

Agassi could see the wisdom in this assessment. He’d always been a perfectionist, but until Gilbert’s remarks, he’d viewed that trait as a strength rather than a weakness.

Plans don't change minds - they only help us remember to do the things we already want to do

insight: if you want to change your behavior or someone else’s, you’re at a huge advantage if you begin with a blank slate—a fresh start—and no old habits working against you.

Behavior change is similar. You can use an all-purpose strategy that works well on average. Set tough goals and break them down into component steps. Visualize success. Work to create habits—tiny ones, atomic ones, keystone ones—following the advice laid out in self-help bestsellers. But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness

many of us choose not to adopt commitment devices because we undervalue them or are naïve about how much we need them, not because we don’t need them or are unwilling to risk the penalty.

According to one recent study, the average adult forgets three things each day, ranging from pin numbers to chores to wedding anniversaries. We’re so forgetful, in part, because it’s difficult for information to stick in our brains, especially if we’ve only thought about it once or twice.

I like to remind cynics that if you flip the discouraging statistics about New Year’s resolutions on their head, you’ll see that 20 percent of the goals set each January succeed. That’s a lot of people who’ve changed their lives for the better simply because they resolved to try in the first place.

She learned that rather than perceiving time as a continuum, we tend to think about our lives in “episodes,” creating story arcs from the notable incidents, or chapters, in our lives. One chapter might start the day you move into your college dorm (“the college years”), another with your first job (“the consulting

When policy makers, organizations, or scientists applied a one-size-fits-all strategy to change behavior, the results were mixed. But when they began by asking what stood in the way of progress—say, why their employees weren’t saving enough money or getting flu shots—and then developed targeted strategies to change behavior, the results were far better.

The moral of this research to me is that temptation bundling certainly works best if you can actually restrict an indulgence to whenever you’re doing a task that requires an extra boost of motivation (such as making it possible to listen to audiobooks only at the gym, and not in your car or on the bus). But merely suggesting that people try temptation bundling is enough to produce benefits that last.

An engineer can’t design a successful structure without first carefully accounting for the forces of opposition (say, wind resistance or gravity). So engineers always attempt to solve problems by first identifying the obstacles to success. Now, studying behavior change, I began to understand the power and promise of applying this same strategy. It’s the very strategy that turned Andre Agassi’s tennis career around by helping him refocus on his opponents’ weaknesses.

The chart broke down why most Americans die earlier than they should. It turns out that the leading cause of premature death isn’t poor health care, difficult social circumstances, bad genes, or environmental toxins. Instead, an estimated 40 percent of premature deaths are the result of personal behaviors we can change. I’m talking about daily, seemingly small decisions about eating, drinking, exercise, smoking, sex, and vehicle safety. These decisions add up, producing hundreds of thousands of fatal cancers, heart attacks, and accidents each year.

Temptation bundling entails allowing yourself to engage in a guilty pleasure (such as binge-watching TV) only when pursuing a virtuous or valuable activity that you tend to dread (such as exercise). Temptation bundling solves two problems at once. It can help reduce overindulgence in temptations and increase time spent on activities that serve your long-term goals. Gamification is another way to make goal pursuit instantly gratifying. It involves making something that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards. Gamification works when players “buy in” to the game. It can backfire if players feel the game is being imposed on them.

Every book is like a conversation with its author. So you have to be picky about the books you read. With your limited time, you want a conversation partner who can teach you something you didn’t know.

Hermann estimated that forgetting follows a roughly exponential decay function. We forget nearly half of the information we’ve learned within twenty minutes. After twenty-four hours, about 70 percent of it is gone, and a month later, we’re looking at losses of approximately 80 percent

I love Nick’s story because it so nicely illustrates the power and simplicity of cash commitment devices. It also highlights a somewhat contradictory feature of cash commitment devices. On the one hand, when we use them, we’re flouting the standard laws of economics, which say more freedom is better than less. But on the other hand, we’re also leaning heavily on standard economics, which recommends that you hike up the price of unwanted behavior or impose restrictions to discourage it. These are the very solutions economics prescribes, such as taxing cigarettes and alcohol or banning marijuana to reduce consumption.

The biggest challenge with cash commitment devices isn’t their effectiveness; it’s getting more people comfortable with the idea of using them. And it’s reasonable to have some hesitation. As great as these results sound, maybe you’re just not ready to impose costly restrictions or fines on yourself in case you don’t hit all of your goals.

as soon as you sign a commitment and post it on your wall, you’ve created a mental cost for writing an unnecessary prescription. If you’re tempted to write that script, you’ll now be hyperaware that doing so means breaking your word. After all, you signed your name to a framed letter promising not to do this very thing. In short, the “price” of prescribing an unnecessary antibiotic has gone up.

But what impresses me most is that so many doctors were influenced by their pledge even though breaking it had no monetary penalty. A pledge like this stands in stark contrast to cash commitments, locked bank accounts, and deadline penalties, which I call “hard commitments” because they involve a more concrete cost. The clinician pledge is a prime example of what I call a “soft commitment”—a commitment that comes with only a psychological price tag for failure.

Signing a pledge is a particularly soft form of commitment because the penalty is simply the guilt and discomfort you’ll feel if you break your word, to others or yourself. Being at odds with yourself, which psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” is a surprisingly powerful force first studied by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. People often go to great lengths to avoid reckoning with their internal contradictions. Cognitive dissonance can help explain why cults are so hard to leave (after you’ve joined and invested so much of yourself, it’s difficult to admit that you’re unhappy) and why smokers often underestimate the health effects of their habit (if you believe you’re intelligent and also have a nasty habit, cognitive dissonance pushes you to discount or ignore evidence that your habit is, indeed, nasty). Cognitive dissonance is also a handy tool we can harness to change behavior for good. By electing to make pledges and asking others to do the same, we can turn cognitive dissonance into a soft penalty that helps us and them achieve more.

Consistent with our prior findings, we saw that having any new exercise-boosting technique to copy worked better than just making a plan, regardless of where the technique came from. But interestingly, it was more helpful if people found strategies to copy and paste themselves than if the strategies came from someone else.

we discovered that seeking out exercise hacks to copy and paste led people to find tips that best fit their own lifestyles. What’s more, taking a more active approach to information gathering increased the time participants spent with their role models, increasing their exposure to good habits.

restrictions designed to prevent impulsive choices are all around us: speed limits, laws against drug use, laws against texting while driving, and even standard, spaced-out homework deadlines. But normally these kinds of restrictions are imposed on us by a presumably benevolent third party, such as a government or a teacher. What makes commitment devices weird is that they’re self-imposed—we’re handcuffing ourselves!

Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device.

Study after study (mine included) has shown that achieving transformative behavior change is more like treating a chronic disease than curing a rash. You can’t just slap a little ointment on it and expect it to clear up forever. The internal obstacles that stand in the way of change, which I’ve described in this book—obstacles such as temptation, forgetfulness, underconfidence, and laziness—are like the symptoms of a chronic disease. They won’t just go away once you’ve started “treating” them. They’re human nature and require constant vigilance.

The theory is that there are two types of people in the world. Everyone has self-control problems, so that isn’t the distinguishing characteristic. Rather, some of us have come to terms with our impulsivity and are willing to take steps to rein it in. Behavioral economists call these people “sophisticates.” But not everyone in the world is a sophisticate, as evidenced by the debate that rages whenever I teach Wharton MBA students about Green Bank’s unusual savings product. Lots of people are instead overly optimistic about their ability to overcome their self-control problems through sheer willpower. These types of people are “naïfs.

The prevalence of naïfs suggests (not surprisingly) that one important function of a good manager is to set up systems that impose costs and restrictions on employees whenever temptation could stand in the way of wise long-term decisions.

In one study, we described March 20 as “the first day of spring” for some students and “the third Thursday in March” for others. In another study, we described May 14 as “the first day of Penn’s summer break” for some students and “Penn’s administrative day” (a meaningless designation we invented) for others. Confirming our suspicion about the usefulness of fresh start dates, in both of these studies (and others), when we suggested that a date was associated with a new beginning (such as “the first day of spring”), students viewed it as a more attractive time to kick-start goal pursuit than when we presented it as an unremarkable day (such as “the third Thursday in March”).

(1) «¿A qué hora prevé ir a las urnas?»; (2) «¿Desde dónde prevé hacerlo?»; y (3) «¿Qué prevé estar haciendo antes de salir hacia allí?». Con estas tres preguntas se pretendía que los votantes establecieran las señales (momento, lugar y actividad) que les recordarían ir a votar.

Como es natural, pensar en el dónde y el cuándo para cualquier cosa que quiera hacer es una estrategia a la que recurro de forma constante en mi vida personal y profesional.

Famously, he developed a careful strategy for cultivating a set of virtues that he thought would lead to a productive and fulfilling life. With the goal of turning righteous behavior into a habit, Franklin created a system of charts to track his daily success or failure in exhibiting thirteen different virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.

Google, he explained, offered its employees a wide range of benefits and programs designed to make their lives and jobs better and to solve such problems as undersaving for retirement, overuse of social media, physical inactivity, unhealthy eating, and smoking.

Being at odds with yourself, which psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” is a surprisingly powerful force first studied by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. People often go to great lengths to avoid reckoning with their internal contradictions. Cognitive dissonance can help explain why cults are so hard to leave (after you’ve joined and invested so much of yourself, it’s difficult to admit that you’re unhappy) and why smokers often underestimate the health effects

when it comes to changing your behavior, your opponent isn’t facing you across the net. Your opponent is inside your head. Maybe it’s forgetfulness, or a lack of confidence, or laziness, or the tendency to succumb to temptation. Whatever the challenge, the best tacticians size up their opponent and play accordingly.

what Katy has learned is that the secret to a better life is not to eradicate the impulses that make us human but instead to understand them, outsmart them, and whenever possible, to make them work for us rather than against us.

Economists call this tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards “present bias,” though its common name is “impulsivity,” and it’s unfortunately universal.

Happily, when temptation bundling works, tough goals are dreaded no longer and wasted time can be recovered in the bargain. And I’ve learned bundling can be used to solve all kinds of problems ranging from making more home-cooked meals (no wine unless you’re at the stove) to finishing projects (by, say, reserving podcast listening for scrapbooking time).

Unfortunately, not all activities can be bundled with one another. For instance, responding to all the new emails in my inbox requires my full attention, so combining that task with an audiobook, podcast, or TV show is not an option. In general, a cognitively demanding task can’t easily be paired with another cognitively demanding task.

The results of Jana’s project were stunning: The volunteers who received recognition for their efforts were 20 percent more likely to volunteer for Wikipedia again in the following month than those of equal caliber who earned no praise for their work. And, amazingly, this gap in engagement had remarkable staying power—the volunteers who earned symbolic awards were 13 percent more likely than others to be active on Wikipedia a year later. Jana’s experiment with Wikipedia is an example of something called “gamification,” or the act of making an activity that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards.

Ethan and Nancy believe that their study highlights a common mistake companies make with gamification. Gamification is unhelpful and can even be harmful if people feel that their employer is forcing them to participate in “mandatory fun.” And if a game is a dud (and it’s a bit of an art to create a game that isn’t), it doesn’t do anyone any good. It would be like temptation bundling your workout with a boring lecture.

While Ethan and Nancy’s experiment was a disappointment, gamification isn’t always a wash. At its best, gamification helps people achieve goals they want to reach anyway by making the process more exciting. The important thing is that everyone playing the game elects to be there. When people do buy in, the results can be impressive.

How can managers take advantage of gamification, if they can’t assume that employees will want to buy in? One low-risk way to make work more appealing is to simply make the workplace itself more enticing and fun—it’s rare for employees to object to that. Consider Google’s pioneering and widely imitated office design,

innovative companies all around us are busy using the Mary Poppins approach to make their employees’ experiences at work more fun.

Olvidamos casi la mitad de la nueva información al cabo de veinte minutos. A las veinticuatro horas, se ha borrado cerca del 70 % y, un mes después, la pérdida alcanza el 80

we hoped to effectively promote behavior change, of course we would need to understand when to begin. Although

This book will offer many answers to that question (the most important being “It depends”), but one is particularly relevant to Prasad’s problem. It starts with a remarkable medical success story.

. I was particularly taken with the idea of “nudging” people toward better choices, which was gaining popularity around the time I started my PhD.

percent

posts are quickly tweaked by other Wikipedians, but a post that endures unchanged is presumed to be high-quality. Durability means no one else has taken issue

Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.

Katy Milkman, award-winning behavioral scientist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, describes the essence of greatness as being clear on your purpose or mission so that it serves as your North Star. She told me that when someone has that clear North Star and has built their life to support and “lean toward it” in all aspects, she feels like she is in the presence of greatness.

things seem fun is a much better strategy