Offline with Jon Favreau - The Science of Achieving (and Enjoying) Your New Year’s Resolution

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

Katy Milkman, Wharton professor and author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, joins Offline to discuss the limits of willpower. Katy and Max dig into the science behind habit formation, the psychology of temptation bundling, and all the strategies for sticking to New Year’s resolutions that are more effective—and more fun—than sheer will. But first! Crooked staffers Gabby, David and Ben join Max for a quick and snappy panel on their own resolutions for 2024, and what they’ve learned about changing their behavior in years past. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Everybody should give themselves a little bit, I think, more slack to not necessarily run the marathon, but do the hike if that's the thing you'll enjoy and you'll persist at it. If you instead had set the goal of I'm going to become a marathon runner, you would have quit by Quitters Day, which P.S. I think we are literally talking on Quitters Day. That is my understanding. What? Today is Quitters Day? Second Friday in January, I was told, is Quitters Day. What makes it Quitters Day? A lot of people quit their New Year's resolutions early and somebody named it Quitters Day. Maybe they were working at Hallmark. I'm not sure. But I got a lot of emails from reporters in the last couple of days who said,

it's Quitters Day this Friday. What are your thoughts? Are you supposed to give gifts on Quitters Day? I didn't get you anything. I'm sorry. I don't know. But I mean, I'm sure that there's some retailer who's working on that. I do not make New Year's resolutions. It's not for lack of things that I'd like to change. I wish I exercised more.

I wish I spent less time on my phone. No, the reason I don't make New Year's resolutions is I don't like failing. And I know that I probably would because changing who you are is really, really hard. I'm Max Fisher, filling in for Jon Favreau. This week, we're talking about the science of resolutions, why we make them, why they mostly fail, how to make them work. About one in three Americans say they're setting resolutions this year, including half of people under 30. Tellingly, only a third of the people setting resolutions say they think it's very likely they'll keep them. And even that might

be optimistic. One study found that only 9% of people who make resolutions end up completing them, with one in four quitting within the first week. Resolutions are fascinating to me, because they are the gap between who we are and who we want to be. And they remind us that we are in less than total control of our own behavior, including when it comes to some really important stuff like our health and our relationships. But it turns out that when you understand the psychological barriers that make it so difficult to change,

overcoming those barriers can get a lot easier. In a bit, we'll hear from Katie Melkman, who studies these very questions as a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of a book titled How to Change, The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. But first, I'm joined by some colleagues to discuss what happened when they tried New Year's resolutions. Hey, pals. Hello. Thanks for joining me. So if you could, please introduce yourselves. by some colleagues to discuss what happened when they tried new year's resolutions hey pals hello thanks for joining me so if you could please introduce yourselves howdy um i'm david toledo

i'm one of the producers on pod save america i'm ben talisman i'm the office manager here at crooked i'm gabriella leverett and i work in marketing so did you all set resolutions this year? Yes. Many. Many? Okay, what are they? Well, let me look at my book because I do have them. We're getting our paper. Okay, this is going to say a lot about me, but there are like eight dimensions of life. These are charts. Sure, I didn't know that.

Yes. So it's like social, societal, physical, XYZ. So I have goals for each of the dimensions and like habits and routines that ladder up to them. I'm like one of those. I'm one of those. That's amazing. You have eight resolutions. Minimum.

That's very type A. Ben? I also have multiple. They are on a note on my phone. Okay. And they are not societal. They are very basic. But yeah, my strategy is smaller, multiple resolutions. Okay. What are you guys

setting as your resolutions? Alright, David, while they're pulling out their paper, do you want to tell us if you're... I'm actually anti New Year's resolutions. Sorry to be the odd one on the table. I don't know.

I like, who cares? Like I break promises to myself all the time. And I'm also not into the whole like new year, new me mentality because just a calendar year ended. So I'm supposed to totally transform myself. I don't think so, honey. It takes me some time to like change. But it's nice. It's a mechanism for self-change, for self-improvement.

I will say I'm into setting goals. I don't think they necessarily need to be done on January 1st. I like the idea of a fresh start, but they can be done on any of the temporal landmarks. Not necessarily a new year, but a new month, a new week, a birthday, a new academic year if you're in school. So you do set resolutions for yourself. You're just the contrarian about the day. Not new year resolutions. Yes.

Okay. What's one of the resolutions you're setting for yourself this year? Oh, this year. Okay. Last year, my resolution, one of my resolutions, which I had a lot of fun doing was at some point during early 2023, I was listening to like an NPR podcast called Life Kit. And the host was talking about how to be a better movie watcher. And the movie critic was talking about how he watches 300 movies a year for work, obviously. That's his job to talk about movies. I think I hit 100 last year. Yeah, I was like,

if he can do 300, I'm going to do a modest one of 200. And I ended up watching 209. So you hit it. Yeah, I had a really good time. The receipts are on Letterboxd, follow me. Okay.

It was a really good year for cinema. I was like, Barbenheimer, of course, but I also watched a lot of oldies but goodies. It sounds like a fun goal. Yeah. And shout out to AMC subs, which made it really easy to watch a lot of movies on a budget.

Gabby, Ben, can you give us one of your resolutions that you're excited about for this year? Okay. My exciting one is that I want to write a producible short film and then produce it. Wow. That's a big resolution. Okay. That's exciting. Yeah.

I write a lot and I tend to make like not. I just wrote a mockumentary about salmon and that's just not something that I have the resources to make. So I decided I actually want to make something and then have a product at the end of it. I love that. What is it about? I think it's going to be about a woman who goes to a medium to contact her dead therapist to have like one last session. You guys have to cut that though. Now someone's going to take it. Rachel.

Mine is to have a home that reflects my authentic self and fulfills my mental and physical needs. Okay. Great resolutions. So today is January 12th. Have any of you already given up at any of your resolutions?

I've augmented. Okay. That sounds suspiciously like giving up. No, that's the opposite of giving up. That's resiliency if you think about it. Did you augment the goal to make them less ambitious? To make them more attainable. Okay.

It's all about goals are all about framing. And I work in marketing. So it's all about marketing to yourself. That's what resolutions reallyable. Okay. It's all about goals are all about frame and I work in marketing. So it's all about marketing to yourself. That's what resolutions really are. Okay. I, for example, wanted to be moving my body at least 30 minutes a day in any way. But then I got a gift card to core power for the holidays from one of the coordinators here. And so now I'm going to on one hour class per week for that. So it's just like moving the time around. But the specifics aren't exactly. So like the specifics aren't the point to me. The point is like I am doing something good for my body and I'm making it an intentional weekly activity. So augmenting is how I'd prefer the audience to hear that change.

Well, let's talk about last year. David, we know you hit your admirable goal of watching movies, an excellent goal. Ben, Gabby, how'd you do last year? So I had two resolutions. One was to do Japanese Duolingo every day, and I hit that goal. Okay, nice. And then because my reward is if I did it, I get to go. I get to go to Japan. Oh, wow.

And that was very motivating. And then my other goal was to read one book. And I did not do that. Yeah. Tell us about your, because you've set this goal a couple of years, right? Tell us about your journey to New Year's resolution yourself into reading a single book? Yes. So it started in 2021. I hadn't read a book since college. And I was like, this is terrible. So I made a resolution that I would read one book because if I didn't achieve it, it would be pathetic. And don't worry about this year. But so I did. I read J.P. Brammer's memoir, and it was really, really great. And then I was like, great, what amazing momentum. I'll read two books in 2022.

And then I read one book again. And so it was plateau. Like, it was still getting me to read. So you half succeeded. Exactly. And then half succeeded. And then last year I was like, let's not kid ourselves. Let's read one book and

then i read and then you didn't even what's fascinating to me about that is that the the motivation for reading books that you were trying to use to get yourself over the hump was to avoid the shame of having to tell people that you hadn't read a book and it turned out that was really effective for one year yeah but as soon as you read it it suddenly wasn't that effective anymore and now i'm talking about the shame on a podcast. But going to Japan was something that was effective. Yes, yes, definitely. Way harder goal of using Duolingo a bunch.

It was definitely more challenging because, but the thing with Duolingo is that the daily feedback where it gives you, this is how many days you've been doing this. And it's like, not something you have to like like I've used apps that are like habit trackers where you like x out days that you do things and for me it didn't work because I was like well I know I did it already yeah um but it was yeah it was really great and there were definitely days that um I didn't want to do it but I was like I to break my streak. So like the gamified aspect of it,

really worked. Yeah. Gabby, how'd you do? Yeah. For me, a lot of it was not to get too sentimental. A lot of it was about like mental health and lowering my anxiety, which I definitely have and setting better work life, having better work life balance. And so I successfully did that. You know, I did weekly therapy for the full year, completed that out. I'm still doing it now. I turn off my laptop at 5 p.m. Wow. Yeah. So I am doing much better. Actually, the one thing that I would recommend people do at the beginning of the year, oh, and I'm totally telling on myself, but I, at the beginning of

the year, canceled all of my one-on-one meetings with everybody on my calendar and was like, if you don't notice, then I don't have to do them again. So that's how I start the beginning of the year. I just kind of like clear out my calendar, like dedicated times on my calendar for work and then see who notices and then I'll add them back based on there. I mean, that's a reward to yourself, which you earned absolutely. Were there any resolutions that you particularly struggled with or I'm sorry, augmented last year? I mean, they're all ups and downs because mine are not so much like duolingo streak type of things. They're more like general things that like every month there's going to be different habits and routines I'm going to have to implement. But I, you know, one of the things for my mental health, I wanted to have a better morning routine. I wanted to wake up earlier. I was waking up at 8, 8.30 and like it was getting kind of later in the day. And so I have been able to shift that back to like 7 a.m. I wanted it to be 6.30. Didn't get there, but I still count that as a win. So I guess, I guess maybe I'm just

very positive and I'm actually failing miserably and just like not really believing it. Well, it does seem like an important insight that you you got part of the way there and frame that for yourself as a success rather than as a failure. And I want to ask you, like, what do you all think is so hard about achieving resolutions like these? Like, why do they so often fail, which for most people they do pretty quickly? I know. I know the answer. Okay, what's the answer? Because I watch lots of videos on YouTube about these types of things. I think that people choose resolutions based on how they sound. And I don't think they choose them for who they are.

And I think that that leads to a lot of incongruency. Can you give us an example? Yeah. Like I, for example, had the res, okay. One that I failed at now that I remember back in therapy. I remember just getting up in the mornings when I was at more like eight 30 and seeing that people were like already out running. And I felt so much shame that I wasn't out running in the mornings. And I was talking to my therapist and I was like, everybody gets up in the morning and everybody runs. And she's like, Gabby, you don't actually want to run. You just don't want to be the only one not running.

And that's not a real goal for you. Like that doesn't ladder up to anything that I'm trying to bring into my life. So instead, I do dance parties in my own house. So like I put Spotify up on my television. I put the lyrics up and I will dance and sing and like, that's more true to who I am, but still ladders up to that same movement goal. And so I think that people maybe aren't doing that part of it, which is like making it true to themselves and who they are in the moment. That's really smart. I also think it is the new year aspect of it that people make these resolutions,

I feel like during the holidays when there isn't a lot going on and then there's this new year ahead of them and they're like, well, this is an opportunity to be a different person. And then when in the first couple weeks, especially of January, where nothing is really different

except for the date that they're writing down. And there's like that kind of malaise that follows the holidays. I think people start to fall off because they're like, oh, nothing is really different. So I think some people lack that kind of internal motivation that you need to make goals like this succeed. For me, my birthday is, it was yesterday, it was the 11th. Happy birthday. Thank you.

And for me, I think a reason that resolutions in general work for me is because it's framed as, oh, it's a new year of my life. Like, oh, it's the jump from 27 to 28 or whatever. Yeah, I think that's a really important insight that we think we're magically going to become different people who operate on different motives and incentives and that's going to make this all so easy. Totally. May I add, though, that I believe that goals are part of an equation.

I think that other parts of the equation are routines, are habits, are quarterly check-ins, reflections, planning. And if you just set a goal without any of those things involved, it's probably not going to be very fruitful. I also think that if you're really devoted to a goal, making sure that you're seeing it somewhere daily, if it's buried in your notes app, no offense, but you have Duolingo, the app on your phone. And so like, if you're not finding ways to make it visible to you on a regular basis, it's going to become a back burner. And so making sure, for example, my planner, which I'm not going to plug the exact one, but it has some day, one day, half year, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily. Wow.

And so you can see. Oh, my God. Look at that detail. Yeah. That's awesome. Yes. Beautiful handwriting. Thank you.

So I wrote it many times before I put it in here in pen. But yeah, you can just kind of see like goals kind of laddering back to daily actions that I can know that I'm doing. And then they kind of like make sure that I get there one day. I feel like we are learning that maybe you naturally have some tendencies or things that come to you. Well, or you're very fastidious, you're very detail-oriented that work well with setting and achieving goals for yourselves. And one of the things we're going to talk about in the second half of the episode is what do the rest of us do

who maybe don't write things out quite like that? It doesn't come to us as naturally, but I think there are ways to it. Well, pals, thank you so much for joining me. This was great. Thank you. Before we get to the break, well, the Iowa caucus is tomorrow and we all deserve a little treat for getting through it. So how about a New Hampshire primary? ABC News will hold the New Hampshire presidential debate on Thursday, January 18th at 9 p.m. Eastern, which means it's time for our Thank you. 11,000 members, head to crooked.com slash friends to learn more and sign up. What happens when one of China's most famous human rights activists escapes house arrest in China, lands in America

as a symbol of freedom and democracy, then somehow re-emerges a few years later as an avid Trump supporter? This is the story of Chen Guangcheng. In Crooked's newest podcast, Dissident at the Doorstep, hosts Alison Klayman, Colin Jones, and Yang Yongcheng tell the story of how a person can become a symbol for American values and what happens to them next. The first and second episode dropped yesterday. Listen to it now with new episodes of Dissident at the Doorstep at every Saturday in the Pod Save the World feed wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm joined now by Katie Melkman. She's a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of How to Change the Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Katie, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I want to start with this idea of willpower, which forever and ever I feel like has been at

the center of how we think about resolutions. This idea that the way that you get yourself to the gym or to eat better is by gritting your teeth and just willing yourself to change. But it turns out that our obsession with self-control might actually be part of why resolutions so often fail. Can you explain the case against relying just on willpower? Absolutely. Willpower is something that we want to fall back on, not at all, if possible, because it's really hard to use. The people who make the most progress actually turn out to be people who have already developed a habit of engaging in healthy behavior. So this is based on research by one of

my collaborators, Angela Duckworth, who you might know for her work on grit. But actually, she has a really lovely paper showing that the people who appear to exert the most self-control are actually people who formed habits and aren't even thinking deliberately about pursuing a goal. They're just short-circuiting that and jumping straight to the behavior that has become habitual. They're not thinking, do I have a muffin or an apple for breakfast? The apple is what they always have. And they're not thinking, do I go to the gym or skip the gym? They always go to the gym. So they skip willpower. It's been short-circuited. But if you're actually trying to build a habit, it's also a disaster if you try to rely on willpower.

There's really excellent research by Ayelet Fischbach at the University of Chicago and Caitlin Woolley at Cornell showing that we think if we just find the most efficient path to success, we'll be able to grid it out. We'll be able to just do it as Nike tells us, and succeed with willpower. And that's what most of us choose when we're mapping out how we will achieve our goals. But it's a mistake. A small fraction of people try to pursue change in a way that's more enjoyable. They look for the fun path. And it turns out if you can pick, if you can nudge people, you say, you know, try pursuing your goals in a way that's fun versus try pursuing your goals in a way that's efficient. You do a random assignment study, which they've done. You actually get better results when you're pursuing goals in a way that's fun. And the reason is you don't have to work against your impulses. You don't have to push through and

use willpower. You enjoy the pursuit of the goal and you persist. And there's study after study now that are showing this in different ways. Well, I think that's a really important point about changing the way we think about pursuing goals and resolutions. Because I feel like so often when we think about how to meet our goals for ourselves, like you say, we often pick the straightest path, which is also the hardest path. We get up at dawn to jog. We replace all of our favorite foods with the healthiest ones. But this research that you cited, which I would actually like to hear you talk a little bit more about because it really unlocked something for me,

actually says that what we should do is compromise on those goals to try to have fun along the way. Can you kind of explain that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the key reasons we fail at our goals is something called present bias. So present bias is the tendency to care more about instant gratification, the rewards I get right now, than the long-term payoffs. It's a problem for us in many contexts, right? It makes it really hard to save because normally when you get the paycheck, you want to spend it on something fun immediately as opposed to thinking, yeah, in 40 years when I retire or 30 or 20, whatever it is, it's a long time horizon for most people unless you're a couple days away. That's when you're

going to get the benefit, right? So saving is a classic present bias problem. Exercising, quitting smoking, studying for your exam instead of going out with your friends, focusing on the project you have for work instead of, you know, spending time on social media or checking out the latest YouTube videos. All of these things are going to be challenging because present bias is working against us. So what do you do when you're facing this challenge? Well, the classic mistake is you say, I'm just going to use willpower to push through. But actually what turns out to be evidence-based and more successful is just changing the equation. If you are wired to care more about instant gratification, then you need to make it

instantly gratifying to pursue your goals as opposed to just assuming you can push through the pain. So there's a number of different research studies that have shown the power of making it more fun. I've done some work on a strategy I call temptation bundling. That is a very explicit way of doing this where- I love this idea. Thank you. It has changed my life for the better. So I'm preaching what I practice. If you have something you find it to be a chore, say exercise, but maybe for you, it's cooking fresh meals or spending time with a difficult employee and mentoring them, whatever it might be. Think of something you'd find tempting and you'd really want to do and

only let yourself do it when you're experiencing the chore. So let's do exercise, which is for me, the chore. I know I should exercise in the elliptical. I feel good afterwards. But PS, I'm present biased. So in the moment, I want to sit on my couch and binge watch TV. Well, my solution is I only get to binge watch my favorite lowbrow shows when I'm working out on the elliptical. And now I don't have to use willpower to drag myself to the elliptical at the end of the day. I'm actually looking forward to it because I want to know what happens to my favorite characters. And time flies while I'm doing it. I've changed the experience.

So that's one example. We've done research showing that temptation bundling significantly increases exercise. Another example from Ayelet Fischbach and Caitlin Woolley's research is to show that students who are in a math class actually perform better. They persist longer on difficult math problems when their teachers basically temptation bundle in the environment. They bring in markers and snacks and play music. And P.S., teachers are super worried that this is not going to go well because it sounds distracting. But students actually persist longer when they're pursuing their goals in this more fun environment. So these are a bunch of different examples. One of the things that I really love about this idea of temptation bundling, of taking the things

like going to the gym that we want to do but have a hard time making ourselves doing, and then adding something fun to do while we're there to make it more appealing. One of the things I love about this is it really flips the way that we think about that present bias. Because I feel like everything in our culture tells us that present bias, which is, you know, like you were saying, is our tendency to want to indulge whatever feels good in the moment over what is good for us in the long term. Everything in our culture tells us that's bad and that our responsibility is to overcome that present bias, is to eradicate it from our day-to-day lives. Like the famous, or depending on who you talk to, notorious marshmallow experiment that says that the kids who do

best in life are the ones who can resist the temptation to have a marshmallow, which it turns out now maybe actually that experiment was just controlling for wealth and kids who grew up wealthier, or that's what it was conveying. We can talk about that if you want. But actually, my interpretation is the experiment is quite good. It's just that people misinterpreted its purpose. And it's just a funky way of measuring how well people do later in life that seems to be fairly robust. And it's strongly correlated with it basically picks up on a bunch of other things that are also going to predict how well you do in life.

But it is predictive. It's just that socioeconomic status is too. But it's a nice measure. So when an experimenter comes into the room, they offer these like five-year-olds two marshmallows, but they say, you're only going to get the second one if you can wait until I come back into the room to eat the first one. Basically, if kids can wait even five to seven seconds, that's most of the explanatory many of us took, because you're right, there are important things to learn from this experiment. The lesson many of us took is that you should never have the marshmallow. If you are the kind of person who have the marshmallow, you're screwed for life and you have to become one of the people who doesn't eat the marshmallow if you want to have any chance at success. And what I love about things like temptation bundling is they say, look, present bias is just how our brains work. And instead of trying to overcome it, which is impossible, and you're probably going to fail or at least have a hard time, use it to your advantage. And I also,

when I was learning about temptation bundling, I had this incredible aha moment where I remembered back to this time in my life years ago where there was like a year or two where I was going to the gym all the time and had a much easier time going, like way more than I had gone before and gone since. And I've never really understood or been able to reproduce that time in my life when I was going to the gym so much. And as I was reading about your research on temptation bundling, I suddenly realized that that period when I was going to the gym, I used to keep my copies of the New Yorker magazine, which I love reading, in my car. And I would only read them at the gym, not because I had planned it that way, but just because that was how it worked out. So what do you know, going to the gym became fun.

And I went all the time with like, no effort without even realizing I was doing it. So I just thought it was this incredible way to realize it's so powerful and so effective. Are there other examples for maybe ways you can use temptation bundling or examples of ways you've heard of it being used? Yeah, absolutely. First, I have to say on the side, which is just I love that you use the New Yorker to temptation bundle. And that is one of my, I'm a nerd too.

My very first foray into research life, which led to my whole career involved the New Yorker. So I temptation bundled to do my senior thesis, which was a requirement for graduating from the college I attended. And I didn't know how to make it fun to write a thesis. I had to write a thesis about operations research that also combined American studies. And I ended up doing a statistical analysis of a decade of New Yorker fiction, which allowed me to read hundreds of

New Yorker stories for my thesis. It was the most fun project I've ever done. And it was a temptation bundle. I figured out a way to pursue this daunting goal, but through something I love, just like you, I love, I love reading the New Yorker. So not everyone's going to resonate with that. So let me give you some other examples of temptation bundle, but, uh, but you're bringing me back. Uh, so think about temptation bundling byling by, imagine you want to cook fresh meals for your family every night or just for yourself, even if you live alone and it sort of feels like a chore or monotonous. You could only allow yourself to listen to your favorite podcast, maybe this one while you're cooking fresh meals, or only let yourself open your favorite bottle

of wine when you're spending time on meal prep. Similarly, you could save audiobooks you love or podcasts you love for when you're doing other household chores. You could think about only letting yourself go to a restaurant that has delicious but not such healthy options when spending time with maybe a difficult relative you should see more of or a mentee at work who you should be committing more time to mentoring. So there's a whole bunch of different ways you can do this. I often talk to my students about hitting the books at the library and how are they going to temptation bundle with that. Maybe there's a favorite treat they have at a favorite coffee shop. You only get to stop and pick up that

caffeinated beverage when you're on the way to hit the book. So lots of different ways to think about temptation bundling, which isn't to say that it will solve every problem. Sometimes you just want to change goal pursuit to make the experience more fun, not necessarily through a temptation bundle. But temptation bundling can work. And the final example I'll give, which is really from a different stream of research, is making things social is one way of temptation bundling. So if you do it with a friend, right, that's essentially temptation bundling, someone you enjoy spending time with. Now, I wouldn't say restrict your access to your friend, so it's only when you're doing this monotonous chore. But in this case, we did one experiment.

This was led by Rachel Gershon at UC Berkeley, where we tried two different ways of trying to get people to come to the gym more, who wanted to exercise more regularly. Everybody signed up for our experiment with a friend, a gym buddy, but then we randomly assigned them to either get paid a dollar every time they came to the gym under any circumstances, or they only got that dollar if they showed up at the same, during the same 30 minute interval as their friend, so that we know they're working out together essentially. And an economist would say, definitely just pay them directly for the thing you want, right? You're making them jump through more hoops to get the dollar if they have to show up with their friend. But we thought it's going to be more fun. You're going to be accountable. We're going to see actually better results when you pay indirectly and you incentivize this joint

tandem goal pursuit. And that is what we found. We found people exercised 35% more when their rewards were contingent on a friend showing up with them. And they told us at the end that they had enjoyed the experience more and they felt like they'd be a jerk, right? They felt accountable to someone else. So you get sort of a double benefit from this particular approach to goal pursuit, which is a type of temptation bundle. I love that. I mean, it's a good point about doing something that is hard or that you want to bring yourself to do with a friend, both as an incentive for doing it and a disincentive against skipping it. But I also love the idea of thinking about the act of doing that socially as kind of a treat for yourself, which I think we don't necessarily always think of doing that socially as kind of a treat for yourself, which I think we don't necessarily

always think of doing things socially as a reward for ourselves, but it absolutely is because it is something that enhances the experience so much for us. And it makes me think about something that we have done on this show where my co-host and I last year, we spent a couple of months trying to reduce our screen time, trying to like break up with our phones and cure our phone addictions. And we would go every week, we would try a new thing. We would have, you know, ridiculous phone cases to make it humiliating to carry the phone out or we would switch it to black studio and talk about what worked and what didn't, that actually the most effective thing by far was just that act of sitting together and discussing it and laughing about it and joking about it and doing it together and making it a social act. That was actually the thing that was such a powerful incentive for us. And when I was talking

to people afterwards, listeners or friends who were like, I want to try this too. I want to try it too. The people who were doing it socially with others were not just more successful, but were actually enjoying themselves and having fun. And that's what we're on this earth to do, right? To try to enjoy our day-to-day lives. And the people who were doing it by themselves were failing and were typically not feeling great about it. Yeah, that's a wonderful example. And it brings us to a couple other principles that research has shown can really help with goal pursuit. One is just when we surround ourselves with others who are pursuing similar goals, there's a couple magical things that can happen.

One is those people show us what's possible. And so if you're surrounded by, for instance, really studious people in college, you're going to end up getting better grades because they're the ones who are staying in on Saturday night and working instead of going out and partying. And you're going to think that's normal. I'll do the same. So there's lots of wonderful research showing we follow the herd. And there's one study I particularly love where it shows that your randomly assigned college roommate, if they were basically a more studious high school student, you end up doing better in college. So your friend group all having the shared goal, you're getting the benefit of sort of seeing what are the strategies they're using. You can use a strategy called copy and paste where you like very deliberately emulate what they're doing, which P.S. we've shown.

If you just nudge people, try to find a friend who's doing trying to pursue the same goal and has had some success and copy what they do. People end up getting better outcomes than if they're just given random advice. And then the final thing is actually the act of giving advice to someone else who's trying to pursue the same goal. You can see there's sort of like this amazing circle here. When you advise someone else, that improves your own likelihood of succeeding. So Lauren S. Chris Winkler at Northwestern University has done a bunch of great work on the power of advice giving to help the advisor. We ran one study that I got to be involved in where high school students gave advice to their younger peers on how to study more effectively and do better in classes. And it improved the advice givers' grades because they want to walk the talk, right? Once you've told someone else how to do it, you're going to feel hypocritical if you don't and boost your confidence to give advice to others. And it also forces you to introspect

about what will work. So your example actually has so much great science behind it. You're doing a million things at once by pursuing it socially. I love that insight about people who give good advice about how to do better at something like studying are likelier to follow it themselves, because I can totally see how that would lead you to internalize it and also just make it feel more rewarding to do the thing that you're talking about doing, because then it's not just a duty that you have to fulfill because you have to do it, but it's part of your identity that you get to feel good about. But there are also, I know that

you've talked about and written about even much kind of like smaller versions of making difficult tasks pleasurable or more pleasurable so that you're likelier to do them. Like an example that you cite from the Islet Fishback and Caitlin Woolley research is that when people were exercising or trying to get themselves to the gym more, I think, tell me if I have this right, they would tell them to do the fun exercises instead of the exercises that were healthier for them. And they became way likelier to stay and actually spend more time at the gym. Yeah, that's exactly right. So you can either try something like temptation bundling, or you can just change the way you pursue the same goal. So you can either try something like temptation bundling, or you can just change

the way you pursue the same goal. So in the exercise domain, I like to think of sort of, you can choose the maximally efficient, but punishing Stairmaster, say, or you can go to Zumba class with your friend. And they both are going to get you moving, and they're both going to burn calories. One is more efficient. And so you might think, oh, I should do the thing that's more efficient because I have this clear goal of getting fit. It's going to get me there faster. But in most cases, it seems that's actually a mistake because going to Zumba with your friend, you enjoy it and you keep coming back. You come the second time, you come the third time, you look forward to it. And let's be realistic. You probably don't do the Stairmaster more than once unless you have an amazing temptation bundle set up.

Well, there's also this famous example that was popularized by Charles Duhigg that the toothpaste companies popularized the idea of brushing your teeth twice a day by putting a little bit of mint in it just so it would give you a little pleasurable zip when you did it and that is crazy to me but is is so revealing because it it toothpaste doesn't actually taste that good but the fact that that alone is enough to at least help people obviously there are other reasons to brush your teeth but to help people to create they're all in the long run they're all downstream this is so present bias is working against you yeah no absolutely it's amazing. That's all it takes is just a little zip of mint. And it does. It makes me think about the things that I want to get myself to do, which is the little bit of mint that I can put into it. Or it makes me think about like, I hate running. I hate it. There's maybe nothing that I hate doing more. Sorry to the runners on this podcast. I respect you so much, but I just can't imagine a worse way to spend half an hour. But I love being outside. And I've tried so many

times to get myself to run, could never do it. And I started hiking a lot. And hiking is not probably not as good for you as running because you're not working as hard. But it's so easy to get myself to do it because I like being outside. Absolutely. And you've solved for the secret sauce that is getting yourself moving by making it fun. So everybody should give themselves a little bit, I think, more slack to not necessarily run the marathon, but do the hike if that's the thing you'll enjoy and you'll persist at it. If you instead had set the goal of, I'm going to become a marathon runner, you would have quit by Quitter's Day, which PS, I think we are literally talking on Quitter's Day. That is my understanding.

What? Today's Quitter's Day? Friday in January, I was told, is Quitter's Day. Really? What makes it Quitter's Day? A lot of people quit their New Year's resolutions early and somebody named it Quitters Day. Maybe they were working at Hallmark. I'm not sure. But I got a lot of emails from reporters in the last couple of days who said, it's Quitters Day this Friday. What are your thoughts? Are you supposed to give gifts on Quitters Day? I didn't get you anything. I'm sorry. I don't know. But I mean, I'm sure that there's some retailer who's working on that.

So you write about this finding in regards to saving money, which is, of course, also a big resolution that a lot of people have, that people are likelier to save money if they are asked to put aside $5 a day as opposed to $35 at the end of every week or certainly $150 at the end of every month, even though it's the same amount. Can you explain what's going on there? Yeah, I love this work. It comes out of a group at UCLA led by Hal Hirschfeld, who recognized that sometimes when it's bite-sized and approachable to achieve your goal, you're going to be more motivated to say, yes, I can do that. And $150 a month, that feels like a really big purchase that you're foregoing potentially, right? That's

a meaningful amount of money. And you may say, no, I don't want to do that. But when you think about $5 a day, that's foregoing something kind of trivial. And so it's much more accessible and it doesn't feel as daunting and people are more willing, more than three times as likely to say, yes, I'll sign up for a savings program when it's framed as withdrawing $5 a day as opposed to $150 a month. Relatedly, in some work that I got to be involved in led by U Maryland's Anish Rai, we looked at a goal that requires effort, which was people who'd said they'd volunteer 200 hours a year for a nonprofit. And that nonprofit was messaging people and reminding them about the goal they'd committed to and saying, you know, do a little every week. And we said, you know, make it bite size,

make it clear what the little every week is. Let's talk about it as four hours a week. P.S. that's the same as 200 hours a year. And let's see if that improves follow through and simple messages that encourage people instead of saying do a little every week to get to your 200 hour yearly goal. They said do four hours every week to get to your 200 hour yearly goal, increased volunteering by 8%. So there's all these different ways that we can make something feel more approachable, but breaking it down into bite-sized concrete chunks is an important part of successful goal setting. Well, there's this research you write about students given the opportunity to set their own deadlines that shows, I think, that we, not only are we aware that we are likely to meet our goals if we break them down into little pieces,

but we are in fact so aware of that and we're so aware of how hard it is to achieve a long-term goal that we will limit our own options and we will put restrictions on ourselves and what we can do in order to break things down to those smaller goals. Can you talk about that research? Yeah, absolutely. So first, let me actually step back and just say, this is something that ends up being very counterintuitive to a lot of people. But also, I want to talk about the intuitive part, which is we're really used to other people putting constraints on us and breaking things down in order to help us achieve our goals, right?

You're used to your boss who says, you know, I'm going to break this big assignment you need to complete by the end of the month and I want to see like a draft by this date. And then, you know, I want to finish each of these component parts and giving you deadlines or a teacher, right? What teacher have you ever had walk into a class and say, like, hand it all in at the end of the semester, they break up their syllabus and they break down the work. That's kind of the job of a teacher is teaching a class is to have a series of deadlines and there's penalties if you don't hit them. Cause they know if you push everything off until the end, you're not going to learn as much. We're used to being penalized by, you know,

the, the state. If we speed, it might feel really tempting to speed to get somewhere, but that's not good for you in the long run. And it's risky. It's bad for society. And you're used to getting a ticket for that. So we're used to all these external things, right, that manage us and get us to do things on time and not give into temptation. But the minute I say to you, how do you feel about setting a penalty for yourself if you don't take three hikes that are at least six miles in the next three weeks? Say giving $100 to a political candidate you hate. You're like, what are you talking about? Are you crazy?

Right? That sounds nuts. Or if you have a class where a professor says you can set your own deadlines for the assignments or you can just hand them all in at the same time it may sound a little crazy to you to do that but um some people actually recognize the value in this and we call those people actually in the literature we call them sophisticated which i think is a nice word for it um very complimentary and you recognize actually you can use these kinds of incentives and tools to self-manage just the way your boss, your teacher, your parent, the state might use incentives, penalties, and deadlines to help you break up a big task, break down, say, a big goal like quitting smoking, and figure out, you know, what's the bite-sized chunk and how can you set yourself up for success by increasing the penalty associated with failure. So they're called commitment devices. Self-setting deadlines is an example of a commitment device. And there is research showing that people are willing to opt into these in many

settings, including in a class where there's grades on the line. Some people will choose to have to hand in work early in order to make sure it won't all pile up until the last day. With savings accounts, some people actually prefer a savings account that's illiquid. date or predetermined goal is reached because they recognize that that account, they won't be able to give in to temptation and dip in and take things out before they've reached their big savings goal. So there's all this sort of intriguing evidence of the value people place on these kinds of commitment devices. Well, I think there's a couple of interesting things going on here with this idea of a commitment

device, the idea of kind of binding your own hands or putting disincentives against your own behavior. I think one is just an acknowledgement that it's hard for us to resist temptation in the moment sometimes. And we put a lock on the cookie jar or whatever, just because we know we're going to have moments of weakness. And when we're able to think long-term, think strategically, be a little bit more high-minded, we say, okay, I'm going to put these restrictions on my future self against following these temptations. But I think in a way, there's also something that's happening here that's kind of the flip side of temptation

bundling, where temptation bundling is making the difficult tasks we want to complete more pleasurable, where we're also with things like commitment devices, we are taking the temptations, the bad habits that we want to avoid in the future, and we're actually trying to make them less pleasurable and make them less fun by changing how they work. So in a sense, this is just another kind of exploiting our own present bias, right? Absolutely. So it's basically saying there's going to be some future penalty associated with not getting my homework in and really learning from this class, or there's gonna be some future penalty in terms of not saving. And I may not be valuing that enough. So what can I do to bind my hands and bring the penalty forward? Maybe I'll fine myself if I don't go to the gym three times this week.

And that's another way of changing the equation around present bias. One way to change the equation so your overweighting of instant gratification is not detrimental to you is, well, let's just make it fun. Make it instantly gratifying. gratification is, is not detrimental to you is, well, let's just make it fun, make it instantly gratifying. The other way, though, is let's make it actually a bigger penalty with some of it paid up front. If you don't go to the gym, that's that's the commitment device version. So sort of, we can put our thumb on either side of the scale to try to engineer a situation

where we'll make the right choice, we can either increase the immediate reward or create some immediate or more immediate penalties so that the long-term rewards end up aligning with the short term. I feel like when I look at times when I've been successful at pursuing my goals or friends who have been successful, I actually start to see these everywhere, even though I wouldn't necessarily think of it as a commitment device. You know, there are like big examples that come to mind, like a friend of mine who set up an automatic donation in her own name to the national GOP, she's not a Republican, and it would automatically send send unless she removed it,

which she only gave herself permission to do if she achieved her goals for exercising that week. So the idea was that it made the temptation to skip exercise less appealing because it was more painful to skip the exercise because the donation would get made in her name to the Republican Party than it was to just go ahead and go through with it. But I also think about like this experiment that my co-host and I did with our phones. Like I mentioned, we got these looked ridiculous and it was kind of humiliating. And that was something that made the otherwise pleasurable and indulgent experience of being on my phone less enjoyable because I was being humiliated every time I took the phone out. So I feel like I see these little echoes of make the fun thing or the pleasurable thing that you want to stop doing less fun. Yeah, I love that. Those are great examples. Also, whenever you set up a friction to make

it a little harder to do something, you can think of that as being related. So, you talked about putting a lock on the cookie jar, but another thing you can do is just, if you want to eat healthier foods, empty your house of unhealthy foods. And now you can do is just, if you want to eat healthier foods, empty your house of unhealthy foods. And now you can still get them, right? You can get online and order something for delivery that's bad for you, or you can run out to the corner store or the nearest fast food joint, but it requires more effort. And if you have healthy snacks around them, the lazy thing to do is actually just eat the darn healthy snacks, right? So think about ways you can create frictions that support good habits and make it less likely that you'll engage with the bad ones. And that's another way

of changing this equation. But the research would also say, don't just replace the ice cream in your fridge with spinach, but replace it with healthy snacks that you really want to eat, even if it means you're being a little less puritanical with yourself. That's right. Because if you replace it with spinach, then you're still going to walk to the nearest McDonald's and order a McFreezy or whatever they sell these days that satisfies. I don't even, I made that up. Is that a product? McFreezy.

It sounds like it would be a McDonald's product. It's going to be. I'm going to sell the offline McFreezy. But we coined it. So remember, folks, when you see it's going to be you're gonna sell the offline but we we coined it so remember folks when you see the mcfreezy you heard it here first um yes the point is if you if you make the options that are low effort miserable you you will actually exert the effort to go uh get the thing that's bad for you no matter what, whether it's food and health or whether it's the exertion of effort in some other context, savings. So you have to think about

what's the replacement, what's the low friction option that's acceptable and ideally desirable. Right. So let me see if I can kind of sum all this up for myself. The people who we look at and we think they have incredible willpower because they eat well or they exercise regularly, often what's actually going on is not that they've brute forced themselves into doing the good thing because they're better people than the rest of us, but rather that they've developed strategies to avoid situations where willpower would be necessary at all to do what they want to do. Like they get up on time not by willing themselves out of bed because they're stronger, but by putting their alarm on the other side of the room so that when it goes off, staying in bed is just less appealing.

So in other words, instead of trying to overcome their brain's present bias, they're exploiting it. And the lesson of that is that then trying to force ourselves to do things we hate or give up things we enjoy is probably not going to work. And instead, what we should be thinking about is how to re-engineer our day-to-day environments to make our goals actually enjoyable in the moment to pursue, or at least the most enjoyable option in front of us. Is that right, do you think? It was an amazing summary. I loved it. Okay, thank you. Well, Katie Melkman,

thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. This was a really fun conversation, and I am looking forward to my next McFreezy. I can't wait. It's going to be great. All right. Thanks, Katie. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Thank you. Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.