Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Ayelet Fishbach on Get It Done: Find the Fun Path to a Goal EP 176

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. One reason it's hard to choose our objective is that we are often planned for our future self and we have this policy where we think that our future self is going to be much more for superhuman than our present self, which means that when we plan for the future we envision the person that doesn't get tired or hungry or frustrated or bored. And that person of course will get up at 6 a.m. welcome to midnight. Well, not really. And so it's often hard to add plan because our plans are so full from that what we refer to as the empathy gap, is lack of empathy for our future self.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on

Starting point is 00:01:17 Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 176 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by FeedSpot as one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts in the world. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you would like to introduce

Starting point is 00:01:54 this to a friend or family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We now have episode starter packs both on Spotify and the PassionStruck website, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com, slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed my episodes from last week, they included Dr. Valerie Young, who is the co-founder of the Imposter Syndrome Institute and the foremost expert in the world on the subject. And we go through everything

Starting point is 00:02:28 in foster syndrome in our conversation. Plus, we touch on employee disengagement, the great resignation, perfectionalism, and so many other topics. I also had on Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, and she is an expert and biological agent, and how you can reverse your own. And we discuss her new book, Younger You.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And we lay out the program that you could implement today to reverse your own biological age. And if you like today's episode or any of the others that I mentioned, please consider giving us a five star rating and review. They go such a long way in helping us to improve the popularity of the show and make sure it's touching more people who need to hear its message. Now, let's talk about today's guest.

Starting point is 00:03:08 Dr. Islet Fishback is the Jeffrey Breckenridge Keller, professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, and the author of the new book Get It Done. Surprising lessons from the Science of Motivation. She is the past president for the Society of the Science of Motivation and the International Social Cognition Network. She is an expert on Motivation and Decision-making and Dr. Fishback's

Starting point is 00:03:35 groundbreaking research on human motivation has won the Society of Experimental Social Psychologies Best Dissertation Award and Career Tireirejectory Award, as well as the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award. And in today's episode, we discuss how examining behavior and the science of motivation became her lifelong pursuit. She provides her advice on how to combat chronic loneliness that so many people are experiencing today. We then do a deep dive into the science motivation covering topics such as intrinsic motivation, due versus do not goals, the

Starting point is 00:04:11 loss of version principle, the importance of microchanges and how they impact behavioral change, the pesky midpoint and how to juggle and prioritize goals as well as so much more. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. So, is static to welcome I let fish back to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome, I let. I am very excited to be here, John.

Starting point is 00:04:43 Well, I am astatic to have you on. And your book is just fabulous. For those who are watching, there's a copy behind her shoulder, but I'll raise a copy here too, so you can all see it. It's called Get It Done. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. But you just recently got a recognition that it was rated as one of the top books by the big idea club.

Starting point is 00:05:04 And if people aren't familiar with that, that's got some pretty prominent people on it, including Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, who I've had on the show as well at Adam Grant. So congratulations, what an honor. Thank you very much. She also meant that I go to talk with all of them. I only knew Adam Grand personally before that. So I was excited. That was nice. Yes, well, Susan Cain is absolutely a pleasure. So I'm glad you got to meet her. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Well, I understand we both started our careers in a similar place being the military, but prior to that that you lived in an Israeli caboose. Can you tell me about how both experienced shaped who you are maybe go into a little of detail in case a listener doesn't know what a caboose is and how this led you down the path to study psychology? Well, they definitely made me an unusual person in the department here at the University of Chicago. Just to give some background,

Starting point is 00:06:12 I grew up in Kibbutz in Israel. Back then, Kibbutz was a completely socialist society. That meant it was basically a place where a few hundreds of families lived together. Where everybody got the same pain no matter what they did. And where all the children grew up together. I was part of a cohort of 20 children that were born in the same year. And always they were together and we slept together and like the same. Children, at place, it is very unusual for the American context to think

Starting point is 00:06:55 about growing up in Kibus. I then at 18 did what Israel was required to do, which is a self-my country. I did one year as basically a counselor and then joined the Army for a couple of years before starting my career as a student of psychology. How that influenced me well in so many ways in my work, in them. So I often refer to that as my job experience because big and academic is such an open and work. You ask for the keyboard check, wow, I think the one big lesson that I learned is that big lesson that I learned is that the situation matters that you will be a different person, depending where you are. And I had a chance to grow up in a place that was so different than where I pursued my career as a motivation scientist. I could see that I yelled at it was in the small socialist community, such a different person than the

Starting point is 00:08:28 researcher in the university that prides itself for inventing capitalism basically. The opposite of where I grew up, and then let me say one more thing that you learn from this is that you can thrive in many places. They influence you, but they also bring different good things about you and they make your life richer. Well, that love to interview professors and scientists because of the background that you have and the practical experience of doing all these experiments that support the work that she put out. And it's interesting, earlier this week,

Starting point is 00:09:17 I released a podcast with a professor from Columbia Business School, who is an expert on secrets. I mean, it was an interesting story to hear how he got into secrets, but how did you develop this passion for motivation? Well, there was no big secret there. I have some theories. I think that I was curious about how do you motivate yourself

Starting point is 00:09:42 because I was kind of thrown into a situation of being a PhD as student without really knowing what it means, no one in my family had a PhD or a college degree at that point. And so I was kind of curious and I will do this idea, get up in the morning and do something that is so much a function of your motivation. And I was very back then interested in the work that came from your keen universities, a lot by German psychologists, so I thought that Lohin was like the first one going back to the beginning of the 20th century and I was interested in more wisdom to work by motivation scientists, but it was not a thing in social psychology. So that was in the 90s, it was early on in the life of behavioral economics that is very much about motivation, I wasn't really aware of the work in behavioral economics at starting to move in that direction. So there was

Starting point is 00:11:06 a little bit, they were like, you know, Tori Hinges at Columbia and Aria Kuglanski at the University of Maryland, I ended up going to be a postdoc with him. And so I was interested in something that didn't exist as a field in social psychology or econ. I was lucky to be interested in it just at the time when it started to exist because I don't think that anybody can create a field on their own. By the time I completed my graduate degree and came to the US as a postdoc, it was already not something to let you needed to explain when you said that you're doing work in motivation. Okay, well, I can't wait to get more into this topic of motivation in your book, but before we do, I happened to read a fairly recent article that you wrote about something that I believe millions today are dealing with, and that is chronic illness. And it's something that keeps coming up again and again on this podcast.

Starting point is 00:12:11 It came up in my discussion with Susan Cain, Katie Milkman, Kathy Heller, Dr. Sarah Faye, Cretchen Rubin. I know it's something that a lot of people are dealing with. So I thought before we went any further, we could get some of your advice on how to deal with loneliness. I actually did two papers on loneliness. The first one came out around the beginning of the pandemic and it was a paper on which we found the people

Starting point is 00:12:44 that have food restrictions more likely to report being lonely. And we found it in a high power, a co-alational studies basically, and seeing that people that report food restrictions also were reporting a lonely on loneliness, as skills, and then we have an experiment in which we are, and serve one food to us some people and then a different food to one person. Okay, for example, we both students

Starting point is 00:13:11 to our lab and said, well, because you're not 21, you cannot drink the wine with the rest of the group, you'll get your own beverage. And we are in these these experiments people that were unable to share the food, whether it was the wine or some other candy snack with others felt non-neil. And it was interesting because it was just at the point in history when we stopped having meals with other people. And we are still not fully back to having meals with other people. And we are still not fully back to having meals with others, but we are very much on the way there. We found that we connect through doing things together

Starting point is 00:13:55 and in particular, we are connected through eating together, through feeding other people in our life and having them feed us. And I'm not talking about a parent feeding a baby. I'm talking about, you're aunt preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for you. You invite your cousin to go out to a restaurant. You go with a friend after work and how meaningful this is to elevate loneliness. So that we are somewhat back to eating together, or mostly back to eating together.

Starting point is 00:14:31 This is one way to be less lonely, connect to people, and connect to people, not just by talking to them, but by doing things with them in particular, sharing and meal with them. And most recently, we found that, this is people that is still in progress. So the first paper with K-dling Wally at Cornell, the second paper that I mentioned now,

Starting point is 00:14:54 was with that faith in Hong Kong. We found that when people feel lonely, they're more interested in used products. Which really was an insight into the strenuosity of loneliness where you, if you cannot connect to people, you need to find another way. If I cannot talk to you, if I cannot do something with you, then I want to maybe have a symbolic connection by no buying a used book from someone, buying some furniture that belonged to someone. We looked at people that were entering either a to be by themselves, where in the new books store people were often as a couple, as a family, they were with other people.

Starting point is 00:15:51 It was really interesting that when you're by yourself, you are looking to make this symbolic connection to other people partially by getting their products, getting the book that has someone wrote a note and a dedicated gate to it, another person that's weathered before you. Well, thank you for that explanation. And I don't think anyone wants any of my use books, because I highlight, I take notes, I do all kinds of things in them. So it would probably ruin the experience for most people. Yeah, by the way, I also want people to buy my books. So I'm not saying that people should get your used books.

Starting point is 00:16:30 For sure, joking, of course. I'm sure that John's old books are very treat, because you see his notes. Yeah, you could see inside my mind by looking at my highlights. Well, inside your book get it done, you lay out a framework, how you master motivation. And the first part talks about how you set a goal. The second is about how do you keep the momentum going. The third is all about juggling and prioritizing goals.

Starting point is 00:16:58 And the fourth part teaches you kind of how do you interact with people to get the support that you need. And I'm going to dive into each section of the book throughout the interview without giving too much of it away. But I wanted to start out with, why is it so hard to choose our objective? And what is the difference between do versus do not goals? So two questions there. One reason it's hard to choose our objective is that we often plan for our future self and we have this policy where we think that our future self is going to be much more for a superhuman than our present self. Which means that when we plan for the future, we envision the person that doesn't get tired or hungry

Starting point is 00:17:46 or frustrated or bored. And that person, of course, will get up at 6 a.m. and walk until midnight. Well, not really. And so it's often hard to add plan because our plans suffer from what we refer to as the empathy gap, is lack of empathy for our future self. Your second question about do versus do not goals, well, it's better to set do goals because they are more likely to be exciting.

Starting point is 00:18:20 Do goals are more likely to be intrinsically motivating. They are not a chore. Do not go, don't eat that, don't smoke that, don't talk to that person, don't engage in that activity. These are goals that seem less exciting, more like a chore. One problem with these goals is they tend to bring to mind exactly the thing that you are not allowed to do. So you think I should not talk to my ex and how do you know that you are not talking to your ex or you ask yourself, am I, and by that you bring to mind, the thought that you were trying to get out of your mind, you ask yourself

Starting point is 00:19:03 and have I eaten or whatever, read meat and you bring to mind the fact that you are tempted by that food. And another reason is that do not go, tend to elicit psychological reactants. And maybe we'll throw another concept in psychology here. But psychological reactants is when you become the rattle that you wear when you wear a kid.

Starting point is 00:19:26 You want to do something exactly because your parents or teacher told you not to. You want to eat the thing that you told yourself that you should not eat exactly because you told yourself that you should not eat that. And that's not good for the goal and for your success. One advantage of FOIDES goals is that they tend to seem urgent if you think that you should not do something. You probably think that you should not do it right now. But the stamina is less, so when it's not a good predictor, what you're going to do in the long run. We'll be right back to my interview with Ilet Fishback.

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Starting point is 00:21:00 Claim your $75 credit now at indeed.com slash passion struck indeed.com slash passion struck terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need indeed. Now back to my interview with Ilet Fishback. Well, I love that you took my first question and jumped all the way to chapter 10 in your book. Did I? Sorry. Yes. that's where you covered the future itself, but I'm going to just go there right now, since we're there. I recently interviewed Katie Melcomann, and if the listener is not familiar with her, she's a professor at U Pen Wharton School of Business. And we talked a lot about how your

Starting point is 00:21:39 expectations shape your reality. And can you discuss that phenomenon through the psychology around the future self. What happens when we feel distant with our future self? Yeah, well, Katie Milhmann is also a good friend, so I'm glad to hear that you talked to her. We published the paper together, and we are working on more. Your question about the future self, we as humans, we are working on more. The question about the future itself, we as humans we plan for the future, right? We have a future itself.

Starting point is 00:22:13 I don't think that my dog has a future self. She very much lives in the present. We partially live in the future. We plan for what we are going to do next. We try to exercise patients. We think about our future. We plan for what we are going to do next. We try to exercise our patience. We think about our future, whether we plan accurately, well, that depends on how much we remember that our future self will become our present self once we get there. And what we search find is that we consistently tend to be too optimistic with our planning

Starting point is 00:22:46 and thinking that our future self would be too diligent. More than what is possible, how it's working, more than it's even possible and care less about fun. To give you an example, this is actually a study that doesn't go very much to the future. This is people deciding go very much to the future. This is people deciding whether they want to listen to the song Hey, Jude by the Beatles or a loud alarm clock. And this is a study of Kayling Wollion, I went here at the University of Chicago and it sounds like a no-boy now who would choose to listen to allow the alarm clock. But we paid more for the alarm. And so the majority of the people in this experiment chose to listen to the loud alarm clock. Now, they are not planning for the very far future.

Starting point is 00:23:32 They will have to do it very soon. Still, by the time they make their choice, they are thinking, well, when I do the study, this is what I want to do. I want to do that. Unpleasant test that pays more. Then they come to the study. I want to do that unpleasant task that pays more. Then they come to the study, they have to do the task and guess what, the people that choose the alarm clock are much more likely to regret their choice

Starting point is 00:23:54 than the people that chose the song. In other studies we found that when people plan their future job, they say that they will care much more about pay than doing something that is interesting and with people that they like. When they reflect about their present job, they say, well, doing something that is interesting with people that I like is absolutely critical to get myself up in the morning. And so what we learn is that it's important to plan for the future. We are future oriented. It's self control is about the future. Patience is about the future.

Starting point is 00:24:33 But there are certain biases in planning for the future. And they often evoke from the idea that this person is very different than the person I am now. Well, I want to get to patients later on in the interview because it's definitely a topic that's near and dear to my heart because when I was younger, I wish I would have had more patients. I think it would have allowed me to take on some of the early learnings that I ended up skipping. But we'll get to that. In chapter two, you introduce this concept of the loss of version principle, and then you go into it again in chapter eight, where you're talking about learning from negative

Starting point is 00:25:10 feedback. And I wanted you maybe to use the bag tags that you talk about in chapter eight to describe what is this principle and how can it be applied. The loss of a regime is the idea that we care more about avoiding losses than missing out on gas. We have, for example, learned back a few years ago, when the city of Chicago and many other places in America issued a bag tax, that people would bring their bags from home to the grocery store because they don't want to pay the tax. They don't want to pay 10 cents for a bag, which is how much the grocery store was required to charge you back when the law was introduced.

Starting point is 00:26:01 Now, that was interesting because at that time, when she got going to do that law, it was already the practice in many grocery stores that if you brought your bag, they would give you a 10 cent discount per bag. Okay, so the deal was very similar, okay, except that one day instead of getting 10 cents, now you have to pay 10 cents if you did not bring your bag. So we moved from, you could get again to, you will incur a loss. Guess what? People's behavior basically changed overnight.

Starting point is 00:26:36 We are personally like my family. We used to forget our bags in our car all the time. But once we needed to pay 10 cents, well, we made sure to bring those bags to the store. And so it's an interesting principle. We're trying to motivate people, often losses are a greater motivator than the absence of gain. Well, I think it's a very interesting principle.

Starting point is 00:27:03 I thought since we're talking about giving people amounts of money, you bring up such an interesting story in chapter three of something that happened in the early 1900s in Vietnam. And I thought that it was one of the most fascinating stories in the book. And I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before. But I was hoping you could talk about that and then why you wrote about it for the book. I love that story. This is the story of the Kobo effect

Starting point is 00:27:32 that we are getting to Kobo as very soon. It started in Hanoi when French colonists were trying to get rid of the rats that were running around the streets and they had that. There were problems with that, too many rats, probably due to the newer sewage system that they installed. And so they came up with a clever bounty system. They would pay one cent per rat keel, specifically they were paying one cent per a tail of what was supposed to be a dead rat.

Starting point is 00:28:06 They thought that the program was successful because initially they were getting a ton of like dead rat tails. Don't try to envision it, it's kind of disgusting. But anyways, what they realized very soon is they are actually more not fewer rats running the streets. And what they then realized is that they were paying people for rats.

Starting point is 00:28:31 They were paying for tales. How do you get a tale of a rat? Well, you need to have a rat. And so the people of Anoi were breeding rats, where I'm creating more rats, so they can get the money. And it's such a nice example of how incentives can backfire. How incentives can get you exactly the opposite effect of what you are hoping to get. I mentioned it's called the corporate effect because some years later,

Starting point is 00:28:55 authorities were trying to get rid of corporate in India by introducing a similar bounty program. Guess what? If you are getting paid to bring in a dead cobra, you should have a live cobra first. So you're incentivizing people to win that cobra. Let me also add that this does not mean that incentives don't work. Incentives work very well. Incentives can get people to breathe rats, which is not something that anybody would ever do unless they're incentivized to do. This means that you should be very careful with presenting incentives because you don't always know what kind of behavior you're incentivizing. Well, I think that's a good backdrop to ask you to discuss what the over-justification effect

Starting point is 00:29:47 is and how that impacts behaviors. The over-justification effect is really interesting for me because in a way to engage in any behavior you need some justification. So you need justification but but not over justification. And the over justification effect that goes all the way back to the 70s, when we realized that kids will stop joining if you pay them, if you reward them for doing it. And every social name that leopard did the original study at Stanford University, he gave children an award for drawing pictures and as a result they were, after they got their award and it was no longer part of the deal, they did not want to draw any more pictures.

Starting point is 00:30:45 It was interesting because if you think about it, when we pay artists to create art, they create more, not less art, okay? And so for professional artists, when you pay them, you strengthen their motivation to create art. You provide the right justification. I can make it into a profession.

Starting point is 00:31:09 I can connect to people throughout. For a child that's creating art, if you pay them, you create an over-adjustification. They were not trying to impress you without painting. They were not trying to make a living, okay, they were just trying to be creative and have fun. And by creating this exo-adjustification, the incentive ended up again like in the Cobra effect have the opposite effect, which is undermining the motivation to draw. Well, I think it's very interesting. I found this whole chapter to be very interesting, and it reminded me a lot about training my dog

Starting point is 00:31:48 Bentley and about how you don't want to over-reward whether it's an animal or a human for the actions that they're taking. So reading what you wrote, I realized that I was training him in the right way because a lot of times I withhold purposely the treats so that there's always this expectation. The ideas over time, you need to wean them off of them anyhow so that they just start doing it because they've been trained. But I thought that that was a really good research learning that I received from what you wrote.

Starting point is 00:32:20 Yes, we know that this is the intermittent reinforcement schedule that behavior is introduced. If you don't reward a behavior all the time, you know, we won't have a stronger impact. Yes, sometimes less is more. One of my other favorite chapters was chapter four, and you introduce intrinsic motivation. And I found it fascinating. I thought maybe for the audience you could describe not only what it is, but why it is the best predictor of engagement in just about everything. Yeah, so I say two things about intramurism motivation. One is that it's the hardest concept in motivation science to understand and the second is at the best predictor of behavior. So let me explain what it is. Intonation motivation is the motivation that comes from doing the thing. It's the motivation that you experience when you enjoy what you do when it feels right, when you feel you are growing as a person or you are

Starting point is 00:33:26 having a lot of fun or whatever is the source of positive experience, it's the motivation to do that can be separated from the motivation to achieve, from the motivation to get the long-term rewards. We can think of intrinsic motivation at work, for example, as the motivation to no stain your office for a few more minutes after you should go home because you're really engaging what you're doing and you want to make progress, you want to walk on it. We often compare it to extrinsic motivation, which is the delayed benefit, You'll do something and you'll get it later. It's the best predictor of engagement because despite the fact that we've just discussed it

Starting point is 00:34:15 as humans, we can think about the future, we still have our animal nature. It means that we care a lot about the present. We engage in something because it feels good when we do that. And so we set a goal to exercise because we know that our future health depends on us being physically active, but how much we engage in the exercise when we are there, or how much we go to the GM after we purchase the membership depends on whether we enjoy whether it feels good to do. Students come to college because they want to college degree

Starting point is 00:34:53 because they understand the beneficial for them in the long one for their professional development. But how much they actually study when they are in college depends on whether they find the materials interesting and gauging whether they get some immediate benefit from doing the activity. So intrinsic motivation is a better predictor of engagement than extrinsic motivation study that once I did that we looked at it, we had people list on new is resolutions in January and then three times during the year, we asked them whether they are still sticking to these solutions. And now what we found is that people that stated the resolution that they enjoy're still pursuing the resolutions, where is those that were lower in tracing motivation gave up by March. And so, tracing motivation is important. I also mentioned that it's confusing concept. And I think it is a confusing concept, because now, first, we need to realize that in

Starting point is 00:36:00 tracing motivation is often critical for activities that are not only intrinsically motivating. We set an exercising goal or a new year resolution, not because we are intrinsically motivated. We do it because it's important in the long run. But how much we can actually process that function of the immediate benefits. I also think that the intrinsic motivation can be confusing because we think that it's only about being creative, it's only about being curious, it's only about like some art or some hobby.

Starting point is 00:36:41 We need to bring a intrinsic motivation to doing our everyday work, to exercise, to eat healthier food, to basically doing everything in life. What's interesting you bring that up because another person that we both know, Michelle Seager from the University of Michigan was on the podcast and we talked about her new book,

Starting point is 00:37:02 The Joy Choice and a lot of what she was talking about seems to coincide with what you just brought up. And we've spent a lot of time talking about microchoises that we make every single day that most people are oblivious about, but really determine the course of your life. And in it, she talks about how in society, we're taught to start and stop, but not really sustain. Do you agree with her thoughts? Yeah, I think so. We often think about meeting the goal and then we will be done.

Starting point is 00:37:41 In some areas more than others, so we do have an understanding most of us that even though we set a retirement saving goal for this year, we will still need to save for retirement next year. But for many goals like health eating, we think that we should just lose these few extra pounds, and then we are done, which by the way, is a terrible goal for many people, because as soon as you lose these extra pounds, you start gaining them. And so what was the point instead of, forget about losing weight and think about promoting health,

Starting point is 00:38:20 we are obsessed with meeting a goal and then dropping. Dropping is a real problem in that context. So meeting some exercise in goal and then dropping it. In my writing, I give the example of thinking about that you daily exercise goal is something that happens only while you exercise. And so people, mean, clued gluten, who go to the gym, will make sure to park very close to the door so that you don't have to walk the extra steps

Starting point is 00:38:53 on your way to the gym, right? It's kind of ridiculous, because if you want to exercise, well, do a bit more walking, like walk to the gym, don't drive all the way to the entrance. We tend to do this. Let's just meet the goal and drop it instead of, let's be consistent. Yeah, it reminds me of story I recently talked about

Starting point is 00:39:18 in a recent podcast episode on micro decisions. And I used the example of a gentleman named Stephen Dunier who learned how to use micro decisions. And I used the example of a gentleman named Stephen Dunier who learned how to use micro decisions to change the course of his life. And he gave an example. Similar to what you were just talking about, that he came back from working a stint in London and was 25 pounds overweight. He was also not in the exercise that he needed to be. But he knew himself well enough that if he just set an ambiguous goal, then I'm going to lose 25 pounds, it would never happen. So instead, he decided to take on a task that he wanted to walk these 22 arduous trails

Starting point is 00:39:57 around Santa Monica where he lives. And he accomplished them over a year and ended up losing 30 pounds and drastically improved his health. But what he learned from it was just the fact of putting step in front of the next step. And then before you know it, you've walked 100 meters and then you've walked 400 meters. And before you know it, you've walked five miles. And I thank so much of the daily actions we take tend to be the same thing if we want to make continuous progress. His goal was also more intrinsically motivating. Working is better than not eating. It was also an approach goal and not an avoidance goal. So he did that right. Speaking of goals, one of my favorite professors in college was Wendy Lawrence.

Starting point is 00:40:48 She was my physics instructor and she was probably one of the tougher instructors I had because she really held us accountable and really talked to us about why goals mattered so much. And Wendy ended up becoming an astronaut. And I recently had her on the podcast, and her message is all about the need to dream, the dream. And she feels so many people start their dreams and then they run into an obstacle

Starting point is 00:41:15 or they receive negative feedback or something you discuss in the book. And she realized that by taking constant action, something that you cover in chapter five, that it was extremely important for her on her path to achieving her goal. So I was hoping you might be able to use that as a backdrop for discussing the goal gradient effect,

Starting point is 00:41:37 what it is and why is it important to our progress. So the Colchredian effect, we feel as to our tendency to be more motivated, the more progress we make. And you can see this for example with a college dropout. About half of the people that start college in the US will drop college, which is a huge waste of time and money for these people. And they usually drop college at the beginning, like the first or maybe the second year. If you think about four-year college,

Starting point is 00:42:12 very few people will drop it when they are one semester away from getting a college degree. We see the same effects with loyalty programs, gay people start a program, can you make it cautious and forget that they are part of the program. When they're one, purchase away from the reward, they are highly motivated to get it done. You mentioned you have a dog, I bet you know your dog is very happy to see you and so start running toward you and as the dog gets closer to you, they want more quickly.

Starting point is 00:42:48 There are more injuries, greater motivation. What we see here is a basic effect where your first few actions have less impact on the goal than your last action. If we go back to my college degree example, your first year gets you a quarter or four year college degree, your last year gets you a full year for your college degree. and that's motivating. It also means that we can trick ourselves into big more motivated by thinking about so we're already like a year into the process. We feel that we are already like closer in relative terms to the end and you get this boost in motivation. By the way, every marketing program that is giving you free stamps or free progress, this is what they're trying to do.

Starting point is 00:44:05 and STEM, so free progress, this is what they're trying to do. They are now trying to motivate you to stick to the loyalty program by giving you this illusory progress already on the goal gradient, okay, you're already making progress, but we can use it to motivate ourselves. Well, we've talked a lot about goal setting and how you make progress, but I really enjoyed the interview that you did with Daniel Pink recently.

Starting point is 00:44:29 It might have been a few months ago, but Daniel Pink is known well for discussing the pesky midpoint. And Robin Sharma, who's another one of my favorite authors, also talks about it when he says, change his heart at first, messy in the middle, and glorious at the end. And you cover this midpoint in chapter 7. Why is the middle problem such a huge issue? And I thought, because my partner is Jewish using the Hanukkah candle example, it's probably a good way to explain it.

Starting point is 00:45:01 So let me start with that study. We met with Twertiltillery and now with North Western. We surveyed people in Israel that were observing that the Holy Day of Hanukkah about whether they were lighting the candles. And people are unfamiliar with the tradition. It's actually very easy to celebrate Hanukkah. You don't need all these gifts and nonsense. Only the only thing that you need to do is light the menorah on eight consecutive nights. Every night you add another candle. So we asked people whether they did that. Most of them did that on the first night, they're almost 80%. The majority of them on the last night, the eighth night of Hanukkah, in the middle, not so much. So when you get to day three and five, this is when people are

Starting point is 00:45:58 kind of forgetting to light the candles. Now, this was just kind of a funny illustration of something that we're all familiar with, that we start something with a lot of energy, we celebrate beginnings, we end it with a big party and we celebrate getting to the end of something. In the middle, we walk less hard hard and we also lower our performance standards. So we also cut corners. Yeah, we don't just not do it when we do something we don't do a good job. A couple of reasons for that, one is that middle actions seem to be a drop in the bucket. The first action, you first exercise in the week, it makes 100% of the progress that you have made so far. Your last action, your last class toward the degrees, 100% of the poverty is remaining, you are about to finish.

Starting point is 00:47:08 In the middle, well, it doesn't feel like your action has much impact, whether you look back or you look ahead, it feels negligible, so you don't bother. The other reason is that we also don't feel that we will remember what we do in the middle. And so we can kind of forgive ourselves for messing things up. I pay attention, I remember what I did when I started something, I paid attention to the end. In the middle, I thought really remember what I did, what I said, whether I was doing a good job or not so much. And so we tend to lower our standards. Well, I have had that happen many times in my own life as I think many people have.

Starting point is 00:47:54 And I guess that's why Robin Sharma says it's the message part of the whole journey. Yeah, unfortunately the middle is longer than the beginning and end, right? So we say make it shorter, make it as short as you can. Well, I wanted to jump into heart three of your book, which is you introduce competing goals through the lens of gold juggling and you bring up the principle of maximizing attainment.

Starting point is 00:48:20 And then in the next chapter, which we already covered, you discuss self-control through the lens of the future self. But I want to hit on the chapter on patience, because it's one of the lessons that I hear Gary Vee talk about the most is that entrepreneurs don't have enough patience. People don't have enough patience in their lives. And I know it's something, as we talked about earlier, that's impacted mine. And in chapter 11, you introduced something called the marshmallow test. What is that test about? And what can we learn from it about why weighting is so hard?

Starting point is 00:48:56 The marshmallow test was introduced by Walter Michel. And it was a pretty clever but simple test. You put a child, like let's say a five-year-old child there in front of a marshmallow and you tell them that they can have the marshmallow or they can wait. And if they waited, they don't really know how long they should wait. In reality, that was 15 minutes. But if they waited eventually eventually the experimenter was going to come to the room with let's say two marshmallows, okay, there are different variations

Starting point is 00:49:30 of the tests with different foods, but basically a larger and later reward, and initially Walter Michelle was interested to see what kids do, how do they exercise themselves from child, how do they motivate themselves. Later, many years later, you realize that performance on the Marish Milo tests predicts all kind of good things in life, the kids that were able to wait longer, that were able to get the two Marish Milos. Later, we are getting a higher grades in school and we're able to get the two marshmallows. And later we are getting a higher grades in school and we're doing well professionally. In recent years, some of these effects were replicated. And some didn't. And so it turned out that a single measure of patients

Starting point is 00:50:24 at age five is not going to be a dramatic predictor of the rest of your life, which I don't think is very surprising for most people, but in general, self control and patients, when you measure it using more comprehensive tools and interviewing teachers and parents and so on, that's the end of the predict academic and professional success and even the ability to maintain relationships with other people. And so patients being able to go for the larger later rewards in life is a big predictor of success, of course, on these areas. Yeah, I can agree with you more.

Starting point is 00:51:11 And I wish we had more time to deep dive on that. I think we could do a whole podcast just on that topic. Well, in the fourth section of the book, you go into social support and why it's so needed. And I want to understand from your perspective, what is the difference between role models and anti-role models? And why does that matter? We're kind of closing a circle here because we started with loneliness and we end up with that social support and social support is indeed the fourth ingredient in motivation.

Starting point is 00:51:45 Part of social support is identifying your world models in life and your anti-world model. The people that you don't want to be like, so there are people that we present how you want to conduct your life and there are people that we present how you don't want to conduct your life and there are people that we present how you don't want to conduct your life. It's often important to also know that you don't want to be like that person that does thing in the wrong way that doesn't have the right priorities at work or in life or with our family and so on. But I want to say about the positive world models, the people that you want to be inspired

Starting point is 00:52:36 by, that it's often better to have a role model that wants you to be successful than a role model that is successful by themselves. What I mean by that is that it really matters for us what the role models want us to do. Sometimes often we know them, so we actually know that my professor wants me to be successful, or that my father cares about how I raise my family. Sometimes we don't know them personally, but we still get the sense that they care about us. They might be leaders, or some inspiring athletes that tell people that they want people to care about being more athletes, to care about their health. And these are the people that have greater impact. Just observing this like superstar that doesn't really care about what you do less inspiring. Well, I don't think we can

Starting point is 00:53:49 come to the end of this interview without addressing this topic. How do you combat social lofing and free writing? Well, social lofing and free writing are the social diseases, okay, when they are more people doing the work they do less. I offer a few remedies for the sake of this interview. I will just mention one, which is identifying individuals' contribution. We see low-thing and free-widing when no one, often not even you, know how much you contributed. And if we go back to that, like Wing Your Months, Ferris Study on Social Law, that was people pulling the rope together. And when you pull a rope with a group, which we all had experienced doing, not even you know how much you help the group pull that rope. The solution is to attach your name to what you do. If you are generating creative ideas at work, then let's know how many ideas and which ideas John generated, which ideas are yellow generated.

Starting point is 00:55:07 If we are preparing a pot, let's put a note where we introduce the cook to the audience. Once we know how much each person contributed, we have less social open. Well, a book I recommend to you and to the audience is when I recently read by Jean Olwen who's the CEO and co-founder of Virgin Unite, which is the philanthropic arm of the Virgin Group. And it's all about partnerships. And she profiles 60 plus tight partnerships

Starting point is 00:55:49 that she has been exposed to and why those partnerships and the social support were so game-changing. And I thought I would just use that as a way to introduce my last question, which is, what can we learn about the partnership of Marie and Pierre Currie about connecting through goals? Thank you so much for introducing that couple. I love to talk about Maui and Pierre Currie. Maui and Pierre Currie were very highly influential physicists and chemists and discovered and developed the radioactivity theory, but also taught us about the relationship with

Starting point is 00:56:29 wingers and relationships. And basically they work together, the support each other, they connected while their mutual scientific interest. Here insist that Maui will be named on their first at a Nobel Prize, so he was instrumental in helping her at goals. The second one she won by herself, unfortunately, that was after he died, but they they they like to support each other. They also had two daughters which they also had two daughters which they supported and helped. They are all the studio at one and Nobel Prize with their husband. So we see that the families support their all over the place. They are at the other daughter and unfortunately not get the Nobel Prize but did marry someone who

Starting point is 00:57:24 got the Nobel Prize and so that marry someone who got the Nobel Prize. And so that created the family with, by far, the most Nobel prizes than any other family in the history. And also one of the best examples of how much relationships are critical to be successful at pursuing your goals, how much as seeking and providing support

Starting point is 00:57:47 is an inherent part of achieving things in life. Well, I love that story. And I just want to tell the audience. I so highly recommend this book. It's extremely well-written, well-researched and has tons of stories like this, and we've just shared a fraction of them across the different chapters, so please go out there and buy it. But if the audience would like to learn more about you, I let how can they find you. I would start with AyeletFishback.com,

Starting point is 00:58:22 or go to the University of Chicago website and search for my name. I hope that your audience will choose to read the book and I will be happy to connect with people also over social media. But everything is on my website, Jesus. Check it there. Well, it was such a joy and additionally an honor to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us and spreading your incredible wisdom. Thanks so much. Have a great day, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with I Let Fishback, and I wanted to thank Little

Starting point is 00:58:55 Brown Spark and Hatchet Book Group for the honor of interviewing I Let. Links to all things I Let will be in the show notes at hashinstruct.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any books from the guests here on the show. It helps support the show and make it free for listeners. Videos are on YouTube at John R. Miles. Advertiser, deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.

Starting point is 00:59:19 Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at John R. Miles, both on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I managed to book all these amazing guests, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. And most of these guests both subscribe to and provide their suggestions for both topics as well as other guests for the podcast. So please join us. You'll be an amazing company. You are about to hear a preview of my interview from the Passion Strike podcast with Ari Wallach, who is a futurist and the founder

Starting point is 00:59:50 and executive director of Long Path Labs. He's also an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. And we discuss his new book, which just launched this week, Long Path, becoming the greatest ancestors of our future needs. It's not just about avoiding the worst things, but it's about actually going to the things that we actually want, which is difficult because we have to be able to be creative and think about what it is that we want and have intentionality behind that.

Starting point is 01:00:17 So those two things came together to help me think about a different way of seeing tomorrow and kind of got me into this kind of, again, the term that I don't love, this kind of classic idea of future owner or being a futurist. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends and family members. When you find something useful or interesting,

Starting point is 01:00:36 if you know someone who's interested in learning more about the science of motivation, please share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.

Starting point is 01:00:52 And until next time, live life hash and struck. you

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Ayelet Fishbach on Get It Done: Find the Fun Path to a Goal EP 176

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