Modern Wisdom - #447 - Ayelet Fishbach - The Psychology Of Human Motivation

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Ayelet Fishbach is a Professor of Behavioural Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago and an author. The ability to motivate ourselves to do the things we want to do and stop doing the things we don't would be a superpower. Sadly, motivation tends to be fleeting if it's not outright elusive and relying on YouTube motivational speeches can only help so much.  Expect to learn why your goal setting is probably all wrong, why plans to not do something are much less likely to succeed, how to overcome motivation dips, how to deal with negative feedback, why you shouldn't rely on willpower and self-control, the solution to juggling multiple goals at once and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get your news from a much better source at https://www.ground.news/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get $150 on everything from The Cold Plunge at https://thecoldplunge.com/ (use code MW150) (international shipping enquiries - [e-mail]) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Get It Done - https://amzn.to/3HWmoDh Check out Ayelet's website - https://www.ayeletfishbach.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ayelet Fishback, she's a professor of behavioral science and marketing, the University of Chicago and an author. The ability to motivate ourselves to do the things we want to do and stop doing the things we don't would be a superpower. Sadly, motivation tends to be fleeting if it's not outright elusive, and relying on YouTube motivational speeches can only help so much.

Today, expect to learn why your goal setting is probably all wrong, why plans to not do something much less likely to succeed, how to overcome motivation dips, how to deal with negative feedback, why you shouldn't rely on willpower and self-control, the solution to juggling multiple goals at once, and much more. This is one of the fundamental modern human problems as far as I can see it. We want ourselves to do a thing tomorrow and yet when we wake up, we find ourselves not doing it, despite the fact that we know that we want to. So having somebody that understands the psychology, the actual mechanisms that are going on that underpin how we're motivated

is incredibly useful. So if you listen and take the notes from this, hopefully you will be able to stick to your new years resolutions and continue to do whatever it is that you're trying to do. I yell at insights are a little bit counter to some of the things I'd probably predicted in advance, but also very, very robustly research. so yeah, apply these things and hopefully life will get a bit better tomorrow. But now, please welcome a Yellett fishback, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me excited to be here today. Given the fact that we are midway through March now, how many people do you think have failed

at their new year's resolutions by this point? Well, we have the data from last year. I would say about a quarter, maybe a little bit more. So it's not true that everybody ditched their resolutions. That's just not the case, but many did. And by November, we expect both people to drop the resolution. So by then we expect only like 25% to still do it till now. I'm surprised that 75% of people are still holding on in March. I would have thought there would have been more of a drop off by then. Well, I don't know about this year, I know, but but the previous data that we looked at. And let's say they didn't lose hope, they are still doing it, they are still trying. They are probably not doing as much as they planned, but who doesn't?

What determines whether someone sticks to a resolution or not? In twins' motivations, that is how much it feels good at the moment. It feels right. They enjoy doing it. They're excited doing it. And it's a bit surprising because the reason we set a resolution is not because we enjoy doing it. We set a resolution not because it's fun to do. We don't set to eat more ice cream and watch more TV in 2022. We set a resolution that is something that's important for us. And for most people in America, that would be health-related goals, so that's about 60% of their resolutions. Then the second one is anything related to finance, like getting a job, sticking to my job,

saving more money, and then we have a few. And these are not necessarily the things that people are excited to do because it's fun. And nevertheless, what predicts is how much it feels good at the moment that you pursue that resolution. Wouldn't that mean that it's basically impossible to complete a resolution which wasn't fun in the moment? Yes, that is unfortunately the case. Now, some people said really short-term goals.

Like, I need to do some medical checkup. Yeah, you can do that even if it's not fun. You just go there and you do it and it's over. But this is not the typical resolution. The typical resolution is to eat eat your food or to exercise more. And if it's not fun, that's not going to work. What if you looked at between a focus on process versus a focus on outcomes or goals? Because when James Clea brought atomic habits out whatever, three years ago or four years ago, I think everybody thought, right, this is it, I'm just going to focus on the process.

I can have growth without goals. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. How true has that been bor born out in the psychological literature? You need a goal, okay? If you don't have a goal, then you don't set a resolution in the first play. If you don't know that you want to eat healthier food, your exercise more, then you'll never get there. And by the way, we recently found that the extent to which people are extrinsically motivated, the extent to which they are motivated by the goal and by setting a goal that is more long-term, that also predicts whether they will set another goal next year. So these are the people that are gold-driven, that

have these long-term destinations. And it's important, however, I would not drop that. It's just that it's not enough and often the process matters more than we think, but definitely start with a goal. How do you define the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? Good question. Intuitionic motivation is doing something as its own end, that it feels right at the moment.

The purpose is not necessarily to which destination, but to enjoy what I'm doing right now. Exturbing motivation is the prize by the end, is what I get from completing the goal, from being done with that, something. Now, the truth is that for the goals that we care about, we are never 100% intrinsically motivating, right? So, you know, what, like, walking the park

on a nice day is only intrinsically motivating, okay? Like dinner with a loved one is only intrinsically motivating. Like dinner with a loved one is only intrinsically motivating but no one sets these schools. We would do this even if we didn't plan. What people said to do, which is the career, hobbies that require work, like exercising, hobbies that require work, like exercising, saving money, and so on. These are goals that are somewhat intrinsically motivating, and the little that they are really matters a lot to give you an example. We found that when we made doing math for kids more intrinsically motivating that is they were doing math while they were listening to music and reporting pencils with all kind of colors and it was kind of fun to do. And this is research with K-Link, Wolliet Cornell by the way. What we found is that they were

sticking with this longer. Now did we make math class intrinsically motivating? For many kids not really, only slightly more intrinsically motivating that it would have been otherwise. Do you only just need a little edge then a lot of the time? Yeah. Yeah. And you need to update that, right? So we know the people stick to their workout if they find something that they like, but what I liked yesterday might be boring today, okay?

Or maybe the weather has changed and what was fun to do outside yesterday is not fun to do today. And so we constantly need to adjust with a focus on how do I pursue my long-term goals, such that they are right for me that they feel good at the moment. It seems to me that there's a tension or a trade-off at least a little bit between somebody in a planning mode where they're looking at what do I want to do longer-term, what's the direction that I want to go in perhaps even what are the steps that I would

need to go through to get there and then an executing mode where you're just kind of following the plan and working for the boss that was you a couple of days ago or a couple of weeks ago, is that something that you've noticed as well? Yes, and it's interesting there is a working psychology on these two phases. Some of the work, this is by Peter Gowitz here, and when you talk about being in a deliberative mindset, where you deliberate your options, where you're kind of objective, you see what's possible for you versus the Implemental mindset. The Implemental mindset is like, now you are the contractor that you're hired to do the work, that the liberator decided to do. And now you are much more like focus on doing the thing

that you are not really evaluating the alternatives very carefully. There is work on assessors versus locomotars. Some people are just more assessors in their personality and this is something that Eric Blansky at University of Maryland studied. They like to assess, they like to consider should they do this, should they do that, what are the pros, what are their cons, they are giving you like these complicated tables, they are their crimes, they are giving you like these complicated tables, they don't necessarily make a decision, they think about it and then other people are locomotives, they just move ahead and to the extent that they are extreme on locomotion, then often they don't assess enough, they just go through the motion without really thinking is this the best thing for me?

And so you kind of need the right balance between assessing and moving and local mooring. Have you got any idea about the optimal phase length for going from assessing to local moating or from planning to executing? three months, six months, one week. It really depends on the goal, right? If it's your morning exercise, then probably five minutes is plenty of time to decide what you're going to do. And then it really doesn't matter, just like do something. If it's your career choice and you're going to do and it really doesn't matter, just do something. If it's your career choice and you are going to make this decision in five minutes, I would say don't and sleep on it and be a bit open to not having closure or not having a decision until you really thought through your options.

So sometimes we encourage people to think more before they do something which is say, you know, do it. It doesn't really matter how, just do it. Overall, you've done a lot of work to do with motivation both psychologically and then in Experiments plus all of the other work that you've been looking at What have you found that people get most wrong when they're thinking about motivation? People get a few things wrong Let me mention a couple one is that people think that they should change themselves, but it's actually better to

change the situation. It's actually harder to change who we are and change our personalities compared with changing the environment in which we operate. It is really easy to eat healthy or food when there is only healthy food around you and it's really hard to do it otherwise. It's really easy to work when you're surrounded with colleagues that are supportive and willing to help, but it's almost impossible when you are in the wrong place with the wrong people

that are not helping you. And so people often have the naive perception that if I just want something strongly enough, then it will happen and then they encourage themselves to just like, only enough, then it will happen and then they encourage themselves to just say, you know, do what you need to do and then like really try harder and enough and it's about removing the barriers, designing the environment that works best for your goals. The second mistake that I will mention is that people believe that their future self is going to be a much better person than their present self in a way. The future self is going to wake up early in the

morning and do everything that they should during the day. And the future self is not going to be tempted by, you know, that social media or certain foods and so on. And not showing empathy to your future self is a mistake. It's like planning to drive many hours when you get up in the morning and you're fully awake and not having sufficient empathy to the person that you are going to be after three hours of driving, which just can't do that anymore. Does it term in Japanese called revenge bedtimerastination. Have you come across this? I am curious. It's a word similar to like Shardon Freud or whatever in German. It's just

something that we don't have a concept for in English. And it's called Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which is kind of the reverse of not having enough empathy for your future self. It's having too much disdain for the person that you were earlier in the day. So you haven't achieved what you meant to earlier in the day. So you punish yourself by staying up at night in an attempt to try and get stuff done. But then all that you end up doing is making tomorrow morning hell for yourself. And then you kind of continue this cycle. I've certainly noticed with myself as well that you do have this sort of superhuman prediction about the person that you're going to be in future, especially when you're setting goals.

You just have this presumption that all of the inefficiencies that you have in your system are going to be pushed out of the way by the sheer volume of goals that you create. If I make enough crushing goals, then I'm going to have to squeeze all of the inefficiencies and my 20 minutes on YouTube here and my extra long walk over there and I'll make sure that I get to work on time and stuff. And it's just not the way that it works. I have a friend Chris Sparks who's a productivity expert and he has a term where he says, in order to pick something up, you have to put something down.

What he means by that is that it's safer to presume that your current level of output is the level of output that you're going to be at when you try and achieve this goal as well as opposed to presuming that you're going to be this superhuman incredibly resilient, much more effective version of you that might happen, but probably not. not. I love that. The worst advice that I think I ever got was that if you have a lot to do, just wake up one hour early. Okay, it's the worst advice because as you know, if you wake up one hour early, also go to sleep one hour early. You really don't make more time in the day by doing that. You're just more tired. Why is it so hard to choose a goal? Like, when people actually have to try and come up with something that's good, why is it so difficult for them to do that? I don't know that it's hard. It's hard to set goals right and to set the right goal for you.

It needs to be a goal not a sure. It needs to be something that you like to do, that you enjoy thinking about the destination and not necessarily that you think about all the hard work that is involved. To give you an example, do or approach goals work better than do not goals because do not goals feel like a short and it's really hard to do this thing that I set up not to do. I mean not to do the thing that I set up not to do. What's an example of that? So, you know, not to a smoke, not to contact my ex, not to have certain thoughts.

The classic study by Dan Wagner was to ask people not to think about white bears and guess what, once you ask people not to think about white bears, there is nothing more that they want to do, thinking about white bears. It's really not thinking about your ex or trying to push a tune out of your head. The more you try to do it, the more the thing comes back to your mind. Because how do you know that you are successful? You check yourself, you check yourself by bringing it back. So all these feel like, sure, there is also reactants, when I tell myself that I should not eat something, I really want to eat that just because it's now being there. Identifies the thing that I should not be eating.

So these goals tend to be like chores. Even like concrete goals that you need to be sufficiently abstract to motivate yourself if you think about your goal as saving for a house, this is less motivating than buying a house or applying for a job is less motivating than getting a job. And so people often set their goals such that it's not that motivating. Adding targets is helpful and often people have very vague goals. If I tell myself that I want to exercise three times this week,

or I want to finish a certain project by the end of the month, this is better than I want to be successful at work. I want to work out more and people don't always get this. Incentives can be wrong for your goal. OK, setting a goal that doesn't fit with your incentives that doesn't work very well. And then in terms of motivation, we actually started. There are setting a goal that is important,

but horrible to pursue. That is not going to work. The difference between approach and avoidance goals, I want to do something and I shouldn't do something. There are things that we don't want to do anymore and we do want to make a goal out if not doing them anymore. So what's a better way to reframe, let's say that somebody wants to stop smoking or spend less time on their phone, how should they frame the goal of spending less time on the phone or of stopping smoking?

Ideally, in terms of what you want to do instead, okay? And for the fun that is actually easier than for quitting smoking, for the fun is that you know, when do you use your phone too much? For many people that would be before bed or when I wake up, what can you do instead? Okay, so have your goal to read a book before you fall asleep and not look at my phone before I fall asleep. That is much more likely to happen. For quitting smoking, this is harder for people because it's really hard to find what is the thing that is the opposite of not smoking. What else can I put in my mouth? That people often, when they try to stop drinking soda, they replace it with water. They just put something else in

front of them so they can consume that thing instead. And then one thing that people can do is think about these situations in which they they smoke. And what can you do instead in that situation that is fun, that is rewarding, that's going to make it a pleasant time without smoking. It seems to me that boredom must play a little bit of an important role when it comes to what we're talking about here, because if you need to replace doing something you don't want to do with another thing

that you do want to do, the fix is always doing something you don't want to do with another thing that you do want to do. The fix is always doing something. It's never that you're allowing yourself to have space within the day. I suppose that you could say, I'm going to sit on the couch and not look at my phone, but there's going to be a fair bit of friction and temptation in doing that. So yeah, it feels like very much an active process of trying to do a thing instead of doing the thing you don't want to do anymore. Yes, and I like this example, like imagine, like sitting in front of your phone trying not to use it. That doesn't work for anybody, right? So either you put something else in your hand that you do want to do or you go outside,

you do something else, you just don't sit there on the sofa, so you don't have this opportunity to want to spend too much time on your phone. Or your phone is not there. And then again, you change the situation. Okay, if you want your child not to be on the computer, you take away the computer. If you want yourself not to be on your phone, you take away the phone. Are the biological predispositions

toward differing levels of motivation? Probably so, but it's unclear that they are that important. And I say probably so because we see that some people just have more grit, they're just more motivated, they're just more able to pull through. But we also see that often there is a lot of variability between domains. So you might be an amazing at work, but not so good when it gets to controlling your consumption of junk food. And I might be a very health conscious, but terrible at saving. And so we see these differences which suggest to us that to the extent that there is this

general factor of the more motivated person, it doesn't explain everything. It is the case that the self-control for example is getting better with age. Is that right? You get more self-control as you grow up? Yeah, until it goes down again. What age is that? When you get better or when you get there. So, beyond like, into your 20s you're still getting better. So the teams and the people in the 20s are still there. Improvement and part of it is just controlling

impulse. And all the people are just generally less tempted, they have better control. And then I can remember the age for the older people's studies, but if I remember quite clearly, it was something around 70, but I mean, I say this and you hear my voice goes down because I'm not I like if someone says no like you got the age one night like this so I would say that it's also unclear when self-control goes down whether people are less able to

inhibit or they just don't care. That was what I was thinking that older people just don't give a shit anymore. That might be my fear. Yes, I tend to agree. I think that that's a large part of it. Whatever, I can say whatever I want, I spend enough years here. Yeah. So that's a cute motivation and setting goals and stuff. How can people ensure that their drive doesn't slow down after this first honeymoon period?

Yes, it depends on the on the goal again. For some goals actually there is an increase Okay, in particular when you think about it all or nothing all the more you do the more motivated you are So if they take four-year college About half of the people that start college will drop out, and they usually drop out in the first or the second year. So it's hard at the beginning. And it makes sense that your last year in college is getting your college degree. Your first year is only getting a quarter of a college degree. And so you see that people walk harder or stick to their goldmower toward the end.

Same for also loyalty for ones by the way, consumers drop them at the beginning. When they are just one purchase away from their reward, they are not going to drop the program. So for some goals, you see that there is an increase in motivation, even animals run faster as they get closer to their reward, whether it's food or for your dog seeing you, they will run faster as they get closer to you. For other goals, you see that there was a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning and then it slows down. And if there is end, you'll see again an increase in motivation, but you'll have the middle problem. And this is when you are no longer excited about the bikini, you're no longer excited by the end, it's just the long stretch of the middle.

We looked at it in one study, this is with the Rima Tua Tila, in Israel where people were lighting the candles on the menorah and they had to do it over the holiday of Hanukkah for eight consecutive nights. Many people were lighting the menorah on the first night, eight days later, eight nights later, many people were lighting the window again on the last night, in the middle, not so much. So people cut corners in the middle, people do less of good work. What to do, keep middle short, weekly exercise goal is better than monthly exercise goal. Monthly saving goals is better than an annual saving goals.

Short goals have short middles. So you're looking at creating progress markers along the way that allow you to hit those bit by bit by bit even if you're then going to repeat it again for the following week or month or whatever. Exactly. And you nicely identify that when I say, like a short goal, well, you know, it's not, if you ever weekly excise goal is not, it's not, you don't just do it for one week. Yeah. You want to exercise again next week, but that's another goal. That's the goal

that I'll have next week. Yeah. So you wouldn't say I want to exercise 150 times this year. You would say I want to exercise three times every week. Yeah. Okay. Yes, because if you think about the number of times that you need to exercise this year, huh? Well, I've seen studies around the finishing times for people in marathons and how they all bunch together

around these totally, essentially totally arbitrary numbers, you have loads of people that finish between three hours, 58 and four hours or two, but no one finishes, very few people finish it like four hours, 10 or something, they'll push for the next particular milestone. Yes, I love this study. This is a study that shows how effective targets are. Once you look at the distribution of marathons, you see that there are so many that are doing it in under four hours, compared to just about four hours. And you wonder, is it easier to run a marathon

in three hours and 59 minutes than four hours and one minute? No. It's really like the idea that if I can get it under my set goal, which for many marathon hours, it's four hours, or three and a half hours, or four and a half hours, then I achieved my goal. In a way, anything that is below that specific time is a win, and if I have like one minute after four hours, that is seen as a loss, and we don't like losses. But I would say that there is a problem with that. If we are too attached to these numbers,

if we put too motivated ourselves, we might end up cutting corners. We might end up maybe pursuing the goal not in the right way. And let me give you a couple of examples. First is I caught my son who's 10 year old waving his hand in the evening trying to get his feet pitch to get to the number of steps that he was hoping to have years ago had what they called the great initiative, and that was a program designed to sell every customer eight financial products. So, the great was GR8. As you can imagine, or as you might remember from seeing it on the media media that did not go well. The only way to get customers to have eight financial incentives by selling them, sorry, eight financial tools. Is selling them tools that they didn't need or often were even unaware of.

So it's a customer, you were just paying for financial tools that you didn't know you owned. Good heart's law in that way is so vicious. I see it in myself as well, right, that you posit yourself an outcome that then becomes a measure. And then all that you start trying to do is hacking the version of the measure that you wanted to do, like purposefully not drinking much water the night before you'll weekly check in on the scales because you know that that's going to make me up. Well, no, no, I know that I said I wanted to lose weight every week, but I didn't mean I just wanted to have less water in my body. What I actually meant was that I wanted to lose body weight as opposed to just fluids.

So yeah, you were so sneaky and tricky in that way. And another thing is that when we have dashboards and analytics which are increasingly being given to us, right, in the modern world, you can very quickly create an outcome that becomes a measure. And you can start to optimize for the thing that you think is what you actually want. The example I always use is with mailing lists. So somebody could say, I'm giving $100 to everybody that signs up for my mailing list and they get a million people sign up for the mailing list, but then they don't give away the million dollars.

So they may have achieved their goal of getting a million people onto their mailing list, but that wasn't actually the goal. The goal was I want a million people to want to sign up to my mailing list who feel like they're connected to me, who genuinely want to receive my messages with Goodwill and don't hate me and aren't sending me loads and loads of complaints. Like, that's the actual outcome that they wanted, but because we synthesize things down and

we're able to look at dashboards, we see things in a lower resolution way and that causes us to try and shortcut our own rules. Absolutely. And these are all the ways in which our targets can backfire, can lead us to pursue the wrong goal. If there was a shortcut, we should suspect that we are going to take the shortcut case. So instead of eating less food, you might drink less water to get to their desired weight on the scale. And so we really need to be thoughtful in setting these targets and realize that the only purpose to set it in the first place is to get people all ourselves to pursue the goal.

Another problem that you didn't mention with target is that we tend to feel so bad when we miss out. So if you know, many people have color with target. And if they just miss it by a little bit, then you have what the hell effect, which is like, well, today is won, or the week is won. Now, this is completely taken in your mind, that the food that you are going to eat now has the same impact on you. Then the food that you ate before you missed your target. But you kind of gave up on yourself

because you didn't quite meet your very optimistic target. Is there a way that people can reframe that catastrophic mindset? There should never be a what the hell effect. It's never a reason to lose it just because you lost it by a little bit. There should never be a reason to just yell at your friend or partner because you were already yelling. Give up on yourself in any other way. In my research, I talk about what your action signal to yourself is it signal about your commitment or is it a signal about your progress? And in this, what the health situation, people take their their failure in this case, the fact that

they could do something as a signal that they that they are uncommitted, that they are just they can't do it, it's like whatever, I'm just like not doing it. If instead you take it as a signal of low progress or lack of progress, then what you need to do is just try harder and make more progress. What role does feedback have in this? Feedback is critical for pursuing our goals. We need to know where we stand. We need to be able to look at ourselves or measure it somehow or have our friends and mentors and bosses and colleagues tell us how we are doing. So feedback is critical. The thing is that it is much easier to

learn from positive feedback than from negative feedback. And we miss out on a lot of great information that is often in negative feedback. How can we become better at taking negative feedback then? We need to realize why it's hard. It's hard emotionally. That's actually pretty intuitive. It's also hard cognitively. It is easy to ignore negative feedback because often what negative feedback tells us

is what not to do. And now we need to do the mental switch. It creates an avoidance goal for us, which we then need to flip into an approach goal. Exactly, why? So instead of you saying, one of your bosses comes up to you about a meeting that you've been in and says, when you get nervous in a meeting,

you look down at your hands and it doesn't look very good to the group of people that you're trying to present to, you then need to do the work of, when I get nervous, I need to look up at the board or I need to fix my eyes onto somebody as opposed to just taking it in that this is the thing that I do and then obsessing over the fact

that you look down at your hands when you get nervous. I love this example. I'll tell you why, because I got the feedback before that I don't look into the camera in a zoom or Skype calls. And the first thing when you hear this feedback is like, why do you say that? Do you know how it is to look at the camera? I'm looking at the person, the person is below the camera. And really what you need to do is like the mental switch where you know instead of looking at the person, look at the camera, okay? And so instead of looking at your hands, think about what you need to do, look at something else. And this is not easy for people. By the way, animals cannot do this at all,

okay? When you are a yell at your dog, the dog has no idea what is the correct behavior, just that what they did was not something that you appreciated. So, people are really different. That's interesting, so the dogs don't really have very good inference. They can do avoidant or they can do approach, but they probably can't turn and avoidant into an approach. Exactly. Exactly.

When you're illiterate dog, they should not do whatever they did on your carpet. They don't realize that the correct behavior is to go outside and do it on the grass. You'll have to give positive reinforcement for that behavior because the punishment didn't do anything. That's really interesting. So is there a case to be made around parents raising children or also training animals that you need to see if you want to try and have motivation to do things

that you want them to do? You need to almost look at your feedback in two different pathways, one focusing on approach and one focusing on avoidant. Yes, and it is much easier to learn from positive feedback. Now the right way by the fact that we took the wrong way. And so not learning from that would be absolutely a mistake. You know, even more than that, sometimes there are many right ways and only one wrong way. Like maybe all the dishes in this restaurant are amazing except for one that is bad and so really like knowing that this is bad is much more useful than knowing that everything else is good

and so you need to be able to learn from negative video but I agree with what you said and I know I write about it that if you are trying to teach someone, they're using positive feedback. So much easier for them to learn. What was the study that you did with the improv class? Oh, thank you. So, you know, I said before going back to the beginning of our conversation, that we are going to stick to go that feel good, that if you feel good when you're doing it, if you feel right, then you're going to stick with it.

But often, what is going to feel good doesn't feel good when you just start it. And improvisation is one of those things. When you just start improv, you are mainly going to feel embarrassed. And when we partner here with the second CD improvisation club in Chicago, we studied just regular people, okay, not professionals that are going to take an improv class and we approached them in the very like first few classes. So they're just beginners. And at this point, we tell them, you know, your goal for this exercise is to

feel bad. It's to feel uncomfortable, we framed it. And when people had the goal to feel uncomfortable, they were more motivated. They wanted to come back. They actually spent more time on the exercise. They were taking more risk. So they exercised exercise required them to move in an interesting way and they were more willing to move their body and make kind of voices and so on, because they were more comfortable, to feel uncomfortable, that was their goal. And so embracing the discomfort is often the way to initiate some habit. Later on, it will be easier. That's like preparing yourself for kind of realistically what's going to happen. Difficult medical procedure and examination that you know that's going to be hard or whatever,

I guess, kind of warning yourself about that in Vance helps you to be prepared. or whatever, I guess, kind of warning yourself about that in Vance helps you to be prepared. It's, you know, it's warning and I think warning helps with self-control. It's even more than warning here because if your goal was to feel uncomfortable, now that you feel uncomfortable, you know that this is working, okay?

It's like having your goal to sweat while you exercise. Like, most people don't like to sweat. I don't like to sweat, but no, it's a sign that this is working, that I'm doing it right. And so you don't want to pain free exercise. So, you know, it's more than the preparation, it's the signal in feeling uncomfortable changes.

That's really good. I really like that. So talk to me about people don't just have one goal, right? It might be easier if life was just a singular track and all that we were focused on was eating the right food or starting the business or the good relationship or whatever. How do people juggle multiple goals? Yeah, right. It would be really nice to want one thing, but unfortunately, unfortunately, we need to pick

our battles and decide between several goals. And the first thing is to decide whether you are prioritizing or seeking some compromise or balance. If you are prioritizing, then you want to put one goal above others. Maybe you want to put your health goal above eating whatever you want, whenever you want to. Often self-control kicks in. We can talk about that. When you are balanced, when you seek a compromise, now you think about, let's say, like, working and family. How do I fit them together? How do I find activities that pursue several goals simultaneously? We call this psychology multifinal means.

Okay, they're like the feeding at two birds with one stone. Maybe I can back to work so that I get my commute and exercise at the same time. Maybe I can find the food that is tasty, that's the most important goal for people when it gets to eating, but it's also healthy and not too expensive, and it doesn't take too much time, and so on, and organizing your lives as if you identify these activities that help you achieve multiple goals. It's often critical.

And then I can talk about self-control and like prioritizing. Yeah, well, will power and self-control, I think is what a lot of people blame downfalls in motivation on. I certainly know that I do right that it's especially I guess with avoidance rather than approach goals But with that too I didn't go to the gym today It must be because I don't have enough willpower or I ate the food that I said I wasn't going to eat It's because I don't have enough self control

Yeah, and then this is not the great contribution to have, saying that I don't have enough willpower, well, no one has enough willpower. Okay, so let's just not count on the willpower. The problem with self control is at first, we need to identify that there is a problem. We need to identify a conflict. We need to identify that this one morning in which I don't exercise matters. One donut matters. So the one time I yell at my partner matters. And then the second challenge is doing something about it once you realize that this is a

behavior that you want to change. For the identification part, it helps to use what we call a wide decision frame that is thinking about several decisions together. What should I do if I consider losing my partner? Not losing my partner, God forbid, losing my temper, every time I yell at my partner. What comes to my mind here is actually a study about financial decision-making with the Ebisu Smand Mycology University of Chicago. She asks people how much money they are willing to spend on all kinds of exceptional expenses, like going to a hotel room or buying champagne, buying a gift to a friend. buying champagne, buying a gift to a friend, and she either asked them about one time, or all the times that they would want to do it this year. And as you can imagine,

when people think about all the time that they would like to buy a gift to someone this year, then they are more financially responsible. Now, all the time that I was staying in a hotel room this year, maybe I should not spend so much money than if I think about it just once. Going back to my temporal example, all the time that I'm going to be tired and be tempted to just lose it. When it gets to resisting the temptation that has been identified, what we find is that it helps to think about it in advance, to anticipate it. And you get this mental preparation. It's like, you know, I use the metaphor of preparing to live a heavy box. If you know that it's going to be heavy, you mentally and physically, even like with your body,

you force it with more force, if you know that this is going to be a tense situation at work, or that you're going to be tempted to stay in bed in the morning and not work out, if you anticipate this in advance, we find that you're better able to do something about it when the time comes. What's happening when you watch a motivational YouTube video to do something about it when the time comes. What's happening when you watch a motivational YouTube video on the internet?

You know, you watch some compilation of some guys lifting heavy weights or being really healthy or living some cool life, or it's Tony Robbins shouting at you through the screen, what's going on with regards to motivation there? So these are two different examples. When you watch athletes, I don't think that anything is happening.

You're just impressed by them. You don't want to exercise by yourself. When you watch really successful people doing the thing that they do really well is not doing much. When you watch someone who wants you to be successful, that's different. That is a world model and that can be motivating. Now you need to perceive that person as wanting you to be successful. And if it's a friend or family member someone that actually knows you and really want you to

be successful, that's easy. If it's a person on YouTube, then you need to make some influences here that this person actually cares about you. And you need to notice the what is person values. So it's not usually so much about their actions as much as the values that these actions convey if you will. So what do you mean? Yeah. Go ahead. To give you an example, like, no, the products that we buy online, let's say with YouTube, the videos that we watch on YouTube are videos that other people liked, not necessarily that other people watched.

We are much more attentive to the number of likes and the number of people, the number of time that the video has been viewed. Yeah, right. So we follow what other people value more than what other people do. That is very interesting. Are there any other examples of how that shows out? Shopping, we look at a number of stars and not bestseller. It's often not even easy to find information on how often people buy this product. We really care to see how much the people that buy the rating this product liked

it. It's what other people like to not what other people do. Yeah, and with products, I think that it's often a mistake. There is often more information in what people do than Yeah, because a lot of especially with products less so with entertainment, but with products people can buy things for utilitarian purpose. They don't necessarily I don't love my Dishwashing brush, right, but I bought it and I would happily buy another one But I'm probably not going to be bothered to go and give it five stars on something.

So you have a little bit of a selection effect here for what are the products that people are emotionally invested in. Exactly right and so you must find that they are the amazing reviews for this very special product it's not really. Like meeting what you need to do. meaning what you need to do. You've mentioned there that motivational videos, you kind of need to infer that the person that you're hearing from has some sort of connection with you or is speaking to you in some way. That suggests that there is a big social element to how people can use motivation. What's the social support structure pathway that helps us to be motivated? So we are social animals. We do things with other people and in the presence of other

people. For some goals, and I would argue our important goals, we do them with others. We have projects that work with others. We do things with our neighbors. We start a family with someone or some people that help us. And so we really want to see that we have the right company that we can do it together, that we know how to divide the works, such that we don't have a huge problem of social loathing. And other goals, we do in the presence of others. And so we care for what is in fashion and what other people say is

a worthy, what is appropriate, we just pay attention to others. And then on top of like these two ways in which we work with others, we also form relationships based on our goals. We are attracted to people that help us facilitate our goals and people are attracted to us because they see us as supportive of their goals. And so our goals and motivations very much are the basis of our relationships. What about actual relationships between people?

I had a guy called Adam Lane Smith on the show a few months ago, and he was saying, uh, vasopressin bonding between men and women is problem solving. So he talked about how women heavily bond through oxytocin, but men bond quite heavily through vasopressin. So, you have a problem. The man wants to feel useful. Honey, can you help me open this jar of beans or whatever and the guy comes over and he does a thing?

And that's bonding because on the average, men like to be involved in things and women like to be involved in people. So, that kind of made a little bit of sense to me. But presumably, goals and admiring your partner's ability to pursue and chase down their goals both individually and as a pair, that must contribute to a successful relationship. Yes. So successful relationship requires that you need each other. Okay. And that you are instrumental for each other's goals and relationships that do not survive when you are no longer instrumental for each other, you are no longer facilitating each other's

goals. And you know sometimes people are aware of it and they do take joint projects for the sake of being instrumental for each other. Other times people tend to be more aware of how much my partner needs to support my goal than how much I need to support their goals. We actually, we recently collected data from people asking how much you know your partner and how much your partner knows you and In general, this is already documented phenomenon people feel that they know everybody more than everybody knows them Okay, so there is that symmetry where I feel that I I know the people around me I am more of a mystery to them But what we recently found is that what predicts relationships,

satisfaction is how much you feel that you are known. You feel that the other person in your life knows and can support your goals. So the little that you give them, credit that they actually know, measure as a ton. Why do you think that is? Because this is what makes them useful for your motivation, what makes them instrumental for your goals. And this is really the basis of the social bond

that we will work together, that we will do something together. And there is a way to say that sounds a bit selfish, like we are just looking to use other people. And I don't want it to sound like that. We bond to other over looking for help with our goals and willing to offer help with their goals. We work on stuff together. And if we realize that, we can be just more thoughtful

in how we make sure that we invest in our relationship, that we have good relationships. Yeah, I think if someone had a problem with the idea of being helped or using their partner to assist them with their goals, that is under the presumption that the goal of being helped or using their partner to assist them with their goals. That is under the presumption that the goal of a life is to live the most comfortable, least-in-combered sort of existence that you can, which isn't the case, right? You know, you look back on over the last year. Look back on the things that really, really mattered to you.

The things that probably mattered weren't super easy. It wasn't that day when you woke up and everything was fine and there was no challenges and you didn't overcome anything. No, like you take value from the times when there is difficulty that is hard and you lean into it even harder and you come out the other side and things go well. So the thing that was in my head there is you talking about couples and projects is how many of my friends have decided to renovate the house with their misses. And I hesitate, I'm not sure how good that's been for some of their relationships because based on the feedback that I've got from them, some of those projects have

nearly destroyed the relationship. But I understand that if you were able to manage the project a little bit better, it might work Yeah, well, innovations don't have great reputation but But you know, it's something that we do as a couple and And no, I love this example. I would just ask any couple What

What do you need to do together? Why do you need each other? What's your next goal? And maybe you are saving for your vacation, maybe you're planning your vacation, maybe you're doing house renovation, maybe you're adopting a pet. But if there is no longer a need that person in your life, it is very hard to

maintain the relationship. And so this is when we bring goals to support the relationship other than bring people to support our goals in both directions work. Yeah, that's a nice way to frame it. I'm also going to guess that having a child, you know, giving birth to a baby is the ultimate project, you know, and it's one that only you and your partner are usually involved in. It's 24 hours a day. There's a whole bunch of genetic components and motivations that are going on as well. So I imagine that aside from the fact that you love your child and all the rest of it, having a child is a useful

project to work together with your partner on. Yes, although having a child at least for the first period in the child's life is also an exhausting project, and that can strain the relationship. So we definitely see that, you know, when two people that already were struggling are now trying to maintain a relationship when they are both very, very of motivation. It's one of those instances of what doesn't kill you, make you stronger and a child to their relationship. Definitely makes their relationship stronger, but first as long as the experience doesn't kill the world. Unless it breaks at first, yeah, precisely. Yeah, so, you know, if the only purpose of that, the new goal is to get the relationship to be strong, you know, adopt a cat. Don't go for the kid straight away as the first one to try and fix the relationship,

okay? Yeah. Well, that's good advice. What was the study that you looked at to do with, was it a sign book inside of a tote bag that talked about a degrees of freedom away from something? Thanks for mentioning that. This is a study that was designed to test how much people are versed to invest in mains. We want to work toward goals. We want to work towards something that is important, that is useful. We don't like to invest in men, so we don't like to pay for parking

or shipping or gift wrapping. We don't like to study for prep with it classes. We want to work on the thing itself. What finally Shady and I did was inviting our MBA students to submit bids on a colleagues' book. And in one condition that is one group of people, they were submitting their bids on the book. They saw the book and they were telling us how much they are willing to pay. And another group of MBA students were bidding on a

tote bag that contained that same exact book. And they knew that, like they saw that the tote bag and the book and we told them that they are submitting beads on the tote bag, but whoever gets the bag is also getting that book. So the first group has an inferior deal, okay, they're just getting the book, the second they get a book and a bag. getting the book, the second they get a book and a bag. But the first group was on average willing to pay $11 more than the second book, then the second group. Basically, the first group was paying $23 on average

for the book, and the second group was willing to pay $12 for a tote bag that contained the book. In economic terms, that means that the value of the tote bag was negative. Okay, it was negative $11. That makes no sense. What's going on here makes ecological sense. People don't want to pay for a means. They don't want to pay for a means, they don't want to pay for a bag, but they are willing to pay for the book. And this is a nice illustration of how in life we are often willing to invest so much more if it's the thing itself than if it's a way to to get there. What's more direct example about how this would be applied to our motivation?

So, you know, I talked before about setting your goal as having a job, not as applying for a job, as getting the thing that you want, not as the way to get there, and not as a way to get there. Setting your goal as a destination as something that is exciting or something that you want to achieve and not anything that is on the way there. And some examples we specifically studied were studying for something that is really a means

to something else. People were not interested in the materials very much. People didn't want to buy products that they will use in order to get another product. So just define your goal in terms of the thing itself, not the way there. That runs counter a little bit, I think, to some of the ways that people have framed process goals over the last couple of years. Again, like the, whatever the aftershock of atomic habits has got a lot of people very focused on the process as opposed to the outcome. And yeah, we are fighting against this. This means versus actual goals thing.

I wonder how many of the goals I set this year are poorly framed in that way. Well, I know for a fact that I've done avoidance goals instead of approach goals. And replacing that with, I want to use my phone less versus I will read for 45 minutes on an evening time. That's, it achieves the same outcome, but it's framed in a much more active and proactive way. And also it makes you forget about the phone.

Yeah, and I agree. It's a nuanced point here. And I just love me try to see if I can explain it in a clear way. We definitely want to set a goal that is exciting to do, that is not just exciting to achieve, that is exciting to do. And so if I'm excited about a Robic exercise, and not so excited about running, then setting my exercise goal in terms of do more aerobic and not more running, that's the way of the means, then I don't have the vision, I don't have the aspiration, I don't know why I'm doing it.

If I tell my son, your goal is to take, do your homework. This is not motivating as your goal is to learn math, your goal is to have with books and understand them. And the way we are going to do this is through this homework assignment. But ultimately, if your goal in life is to do your homework. It's just not inspiring. That's just not, you know, this is like paying for a tote bag. It's not the thing. It's just the way they're. I yell at fish back, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go? They should get my book, get it done, and they should check my website, iLITFishback.com.

They will see all the ways in which they can connect with me, and I would be excited to connect with them. So, thank you so much for making the introduction. Yeah, I'm fed.