The One You Feed - The Science of Motivation: Insights on Goal Setting and Willpower with Ayelet Fishbach

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Feeling overwhelmed by holiday stress or the pressure to make everything perfect? Or maybe it’s the loneliness this season can bring. Either way, you’re not alone—and this year can be different. Join us for a free online webinar on Sunday, December 10, at 12 PM Eastern to learn a simple habit that can help you let go of stress and find peace, steadiness, and genuine connection. Give yourself this gift of support and clarity for the season. Sign up here. In this episode, Ayelet Fishbach dives into the science of motivation and shares valuable insights on goal-setting and willpower. As a social psychologist and motivation scientist, her work involves understanding the intricacies of human behavior and environmental influence. Dr. Fishbach also shares a fresh perspective on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and explains the importance of learning to nurture empathy toward our future selves. Key Takeaways: Master effective behavior change strategies to reach your full potential Bust motivational myths and unlock your true drive Craft powerful personal goals that propel you forward Embrace the importance of intrinsic motivation for lasting success Skillfully handle goal competition to stay on your path to achievement For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are you feeling stressed about the holidays? The pressure to make everything perfect? The tricky family gatherings? Trying to keep everybody happy? And for some of you, it's the opposite. It's the feeling of being alone. Either way, it's a lot. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, know that many others feel the same way. But this year can be different. Join me and the One You Feed community for a free online event on December 10th at 12 p.m. Eastern. You'll learn a simple wise habit that can help you let go of holiday stress and find more peace, steadiness, and real connection. Picture yourself getting through

this season feeling grounded, present, and clear without all the pressure to be perfect. Give yourself this free gift of support, learning, and genuine connection with others who get it. Sign up now at oneufeed.net slash holiday. If you're unable to attend live, we'll be sending the video to people who have registered. So go to oneufeed.net slash holiday and change the way you experience the holidays. Set your goals, whether it's what you eat or the job that you are going to have when you are in a similar situation to the situation that you will be in when you pursue that goal. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ayelet Fishback, the professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She's also the past president of the Society for the Study of Motivation.

past president of the Society for the Study of Motivation. Ayelet has been published in many psychology and business journals and served as associate editor of several journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science. Her research is regularly featured in the media, including Wall Street Journal, CNN, Chicago Tribune, NPR, and many others. Today, Ayelet and Eric discuss her book, Get It Done, Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. Hi, Ayelet. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here today.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you about your book called Get It Done, Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It is such a great description of the

work that I do as someone who is both a social psychologist and a motivation scientist, which, you know, it's kind of surprising to me that it fits so well let me explain how the idea in social psychology is that we are all the result of our circumstances we respond to our environment their profession that we pursue that people that our friends how we choose to like spend our life our hobbies everything is the result of the situation. And then what motivation science adds to this is that, yes, but we can change our situation. And, you know, the simple example is that we set an alarm clock. So yes, we sleep when we are tired and there is a quiet, dark room. But if we set an alarm clock, then we are tired and there is a quiet dark room but if we set an alarm clock then we are going to

get up because it's hard to sleep in a noisy room if we set a goal that changes how we see our performance okay that increases our motivation if we create an environment in which there are certain foods then this is what we are going to eat. And I think that this problem basically take it to a very general level that if we set our life such that it is easier and more natural to act on the good, if this is what we feed, then this is what we are going to do. And in a way, it kind of resolves this tension between the question of whether we respond to our situation or control our situation. We do both, okay? We respond to what is out there. We can also manipulate what is out there so that we control our response. I would, however, change it to a grandmother and her granddaughter if I could. Yes, we have gone back and forth on genders, you know, grandparent, grandchild, grandfather, grandchild, grandmother, we just kind of mix it up. I see. You're welcome to have it be a

grandmother and her granddaughter. Okay. Early on in the book, you said, how do you motivate yourself? The short answer is by changing your circumstances. You modify your own behavior by modifying the situation in which it occurs. And I think that for people who don't know much about motivational or behavioral science, that's the step that we miss the most often. We think it's just an internal thing. I just decide that I'm going to do something differently. And then I do it. And if I don't do it, it's a failure of my will. It's a failure of my willpower. It's a personal failing. Whereas what we know is there's a whole lot of things we can

learn about how to make changes in our lives a lot more effectively so that we have a better chance to succeed and we don't need as much willpower or self-control, even though we do need some of those things, right? To the extent that we don't rely on them exclusively really says a lot about how likely we are to be successful. Absolutely. I think about the myths that people believe in, in motivation science. That is the first one. I just, either I didn't try hard enough or I didn't care enough. So I didn't do something

because it wasn't important for me or because I couldn't. Well, there is a third possibility that is probably the most likely explanation. You just did not set the situation right. You did not set yourself up for success. You know, I'll stick to the example of food. When we are hungry, we eat what is in front of us. So telling yourself when you are full, I'm just going to try very hard not to eat that food that's bad for me. Well, when you are hungry, you're going to eat what is in front of you. So if you want to control what you eat, you want to make sure that what is in front of you are the foods that you would like to eat. You want to manipulate your situation.

I love that idea. Do we react to our circumstances or do we control our circumstances? And the answer is both, right? We have varying degrees of each in certain circumstances where we do each. You just said something there that was one of the things that struck me the most from your book. I've read a lot of these books and yours is excellent, but something really stood out and it's what you just said. And basically what you said in the book is try and set goals when you're in a state similar to the state you'll be in when executing them.

And you just alluded to that with food. Like don't set the goal of what you're going to eat when you're stuffed, right? Because you're going to feel differently. It's the reverse of that adage. Don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry. But so many of us set goals based on our very best version of ourselves. The me that got enough sleep, you know, the kids were away for the weekend, so I had lots of extra hours. We set our goals in these idealized states and then real life rolls around and we can't

achieve them. And I was just really struck by how wise that is. Thank you. Thank you. It's something that we know for a long time that people don't have much sympathy to their future self or empathy, actually, we call it the lack of empathy to your future self. You see that when you are traveling to somewhere where it's very cold, but right now it's summer for you. And so you don't really pack a coat we see this also in employment and i've been teaching business students for a long time and when you ask about their future jobs they plan their future job for someone who's basically a robot okay someone who really cares about how much money they will make but cares less about doing something that is interesting with the people that they like, about being challenged, about being curious. Now, it's not that they don't

care at all, but in a way they say this future self, the mean few months from now, that person would really prioritize their future earnings above everything else. And guess what? That's just lack of empathy to your future self, because then you will have to get up in the morning and go and do that job. And we know that what predicts being able to do your job, being able to stick with employment is the immediate gratification that you get from interacting with people that you like over solving problems that are interesting for you. And so, yes, set your goals, whether it's what you eat or the job that

you are going to have when you are in a similar situation to the situation that you will be in when you pursue that goal. Yeah. And I think that leads us nicely into talking about intrinsic motivation, because you just sort of mentioned it there, right? It's one thing to say, I'm going to go to work and I'm going to work in this situation. I don't care if I like it. I don't care how good it is because I want to get this money. That's the extreme of extrinsic motivation. I'm doing this thing only because I'm going to get this other thing out of it. Whereas intrinsic motivation at the far other extreme would be, I'm doing this thing only because I love doing it. It seems to me that most of us with most things, there's going to be a middle ground between those two. And the closer we are to intrinsic motivation, the more likely we are to continue to stick with it.

But would you agree that for a lot of things we do, we end up sort of between pure intrinsic and pure extrinsic motivation? Absolutely. Intrinsic motivation is doing something as its own end. It's a stroll in the park. It's a nice meal with a friend. And many of the things that we need to do in life are not purely intrinsically motivated they are not something that we do only because it feels good while we are doing it extrinsic motivation is not bad extrinsic motivation is what gets us to do our annual medical checkup okay is what gets us to save for retirement. It's basically doing something that doesn't feel good right now, but will benefit in the long run.

Intrinsic motivation is doing something because it feels right at the moment, because doing it is like achieving the goal. And when people are intrinsically motivated, they're going to really engage in the activity. They're going to experience what sometimes people refer to as the flow, that it feels right, that it feels right at the moment. Now, let's take employment. Ideally, it's not one or the other. Well, it's not just intrinsically motivating. You're not only working for some future benefit.

You're actually enjoying what you're doing. You actually get some immediate benefits from it. But you also want to work thinking about your future self and thinking about supporting that person in the future. So it's somewhere between. We often need to stick with relationship in bad times because we know that in good times, we are intrinsically motivated to be in the relationship because there is nothing that feels better than being with this person that I love. But right now

we are in an argument. And so most calls are somewhere in between, and that's fine. If you can increase the intrinsic motivation, eventually that predicts persistence better than extrinsic motivation. That is, the immediate feeling that that feels right, that predicts how much people exercise, how much they eat healthy food, how much they stick to their employment. Basically, everything that we measured in our studies was better predicted by that immediate intrinsic motivation than extrinsic motivation. So as you're saying that intrinsic motivation is the best predictor of engagement in just about everything. What I think is interesting is not only might a goal have a little bit of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as you sort of alluded to, even the same thing can slide along that scale. I think about playing

guitar for me. I used to play guitar because I loved it and I was hoping something was going to come out of it. Like I was going to be a guitar player. I was going to make a living doing it. Well, that became obvious it wasn't going to happen. And I had to work really hard to reclaim playing the guitar just because I like to do it. Because every time I started to play, I'd think, oh, well, maybe I could record that. So I got back to, I do it because I like it. But I also know that in order to like it, I like to get better at it. So I try and practice each day, even if on that day, I don't feel extrinsically motivated to do it. I know that the thing overall is extrinsically motivated. Or take this podcast as an example.

I'm fortunate enough now that this is what I do for a living. And I'm very intrinsically motivated. But there are some days that I simply don't feel like doing it. Because as humans, we just have days where we don't feel like doing anything. And so I think it's just kind of interesting to look at that. What are some ways of making things more intrinsically motivating? So if we've got a job that's, you know, okay, I've got some intrinsic motivation, but it's also the way I have to make a living, you know, I feel like I need to be here. What are some ways to make it more intrinsically motivating? Well, a lot in your question. First, you're absolutely right that many activities that will be intrinsically motivating or are sometimes intrinsically motivating might not be intrinsically motivating right now.

And we actually worked with the second city here, which is an improv club. And it was interesting because we got into classes of people that just want to learn improvisation for the sake of feeling more confident as they interact with the people around them. So they're not really trying to be a stand-up comedian. They just want to feel a little bit more comfortable. And they get to these improv classes and they feel horrible they like they freeze oh i'm supposed to like move my body in a funny way and i be spontaneous and i i can think of that and what we told them how about you set your goal for the first class as not feeling good as challenging yourself as struggling okay so your goal is actually to feel a little bit bad try to make it difficult and you know with that goal in mind okay today I'm going to embarrass myself

okay today I'm going to feel not so great about what I'm doing, people were able to overcome, like, first initiation, okay, so today that's going to feel bad, and in the future I will learn to enjoy, okay, I will learn to get the intrinsic motivation in the sense of enjoyment, but how to increase intrinsic motivation? So, you know, one thing is to embrace the fact that intrinsic motivation might not happen the first time you do something. If you haven't been running for a while and you go on a run. Exactly right. You can already complete my sentence. So, you know, give yourself a chance.

It might take a while. Other ways, well, you could bring some immediate benefits. You can try to make something more intrinsically motivated by the way you do it. Some people like to walk while listening to music. I personally cannot do that. But when I went to study with high school students, it turned out that when you played music during math class, they were actually more engaged in the math. They were more motivated overall.

The whole thing became more pleasant for them because music was played. This is the same thing that we do when we bring music to exercising or TV to exercising. We bring music to exercising or TV to exercising. We do something that is difficult that might not be immediately pleasant with some other things that make it more immediately pleasant. You know, healthy food that is tasty, that is colorful, that is It's another example. Another strategy is to focus on what is immediately pleasant. Focus on the experience. So try to be in the experience. Think about how you feel about it right now. It requires some practice.

It requires some awareness. requires some practice it requires some awareness if you meditate that could help but really learning to to observe how you are feeling right now and to focus on the positives and then a third strategy that i would offer is just when you choose what to do whether it's your profession or your exercise routine or the food that you are going to eat or the people that you are going to interact with, well, take into account intrinsic motivation. Ask yourself how much I will enjoy that, how much it would feel right while I'm doing it, not after I'm doing it.

I would give another example for that. This is a study where we offer people choice between two tasks. One was to listen to the song Hey Jude by the Beatles, and the other one was to listen to a loud alarm clock. You know what you would choose, right? It's pretty, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but we offered more money for the alarm clock. How much more money?

You think like thousands of dollars, 10% over the base pay, really not much. We got about 70% of the people in this experiment to choose the loud alarm because it paid 10% more and they wanted the money and they regretted their choice. The majority of them said that they wish they made a little bit less money and had a nice son. Yes. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? So that's interesting. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So that's interesting because we hear all the time in the workplace that money is not what motivates people, right? And yet, I think that that may ultimately be true in the long term. In the short term, I think people are often lured by money because it's easier to quantify. It's easier to go, oh, this new job is going to give me $20,000 more. Okay. It's a lot harder to quantify all the intangibles that go around it. it's a lot harder to know well is the company culture better well i like the people and so we go okay twenty thousand dollars i just want the money similar to the alarm clock it's like well i don't know how unpleasant listening to the alarm clock is but i know i'm going to get ten percent more so i could sort of fix that in my brain in some way yes as a decision scientist i can tell you that if you want to influence people's decision give them some numbers okay people like to use the numbers right and so we know that when people seek employment when they go to work they

are looking for doing something that pays their money is important but they're also looking to do something that is interesting with people that they like and as you said it's hard to measure interest it's hard to measure that. It's hard to measure the liking of the people and wanting to work with these people on whatever it is that we do. It's very easy to say that next job is going to be like a 10% increase at what I'm making now. It's easy to put too much emphasis on money. It's not that money is not important. It's really important. We also know that money is important for other people. And we not that money is not important. It's really important. We also know that money is important for other people. And we think that other people care much less than us about doing

something that is interesting with people that they like. And guess what? They also care about it. Not just me. Yeah. That makes me think of something that you say in a different section, and maybe we'll get to it. But you're talking about self-control and you say, a problem isn't about self-control if it isn't clear that one choice is a temptation. When both choices have potential, it's simply a difficult decision. And I think that speaks to what we were just talking about, that deciding between two workplaces is a difficult decision. You know, it's easy if it's like, well, this place will pay me $100,000 a year and I work 20 hours a week and everybody I met seems lovely. And this other place will pay me $50,000 a year.

I've got to work 40 hours a week and the people seem awful. Like, okay, that's easy, right? It's when it gets harder. And I love that fact or that idea that, you know, numbers make it easier to make a decision. We're drawn to numbers because we can quantify it. Yes. So let's go back to nearly the beginning of the book. I've been hopping all over the place. There's been no chronology to this.

But one of the things that you say about choosing a goal is you call it choosing a powerful goal. And you describe a powerful goal as something that feels exciting and not like a chore. So, you know, assuming we're picking a goal like health, right? Like, I want to be in better health. How do we frame that goal? How do we choose that goal in a way that makes it a powerful goal, feel like something that's not a chore? Yes, a few things. First, we want to define the goal such that it is connected to an activity, want to define the goal such that it is connected to an activity, but it's sufficiently abstract, it's sufficiently general so that it doesn't feel like a means. The goal is not something that I will do so that I can do something else. It's the thing itself. So the goal is not maybe to lose

weight, which by the way, I don't like that goal at all. So I can always use it as a bad goal. The goal is not to lose weight so that I can be attractive over summer. The goal is to feel comfortable, to feel attractive. Now I ask myself, what do I need to do in order to feel that I'm an attractive person when I look in the mirror, that I like myself. Powerful goals are also usually approach goals and not avoidance goals. So usually it's something that you want to do and not something that you want to avoid. Again, losing weight is problematic because it's usually about not doing, it's about not eating. is problematic because it's usually about not doing.

It's about not eating. If you set your goal as exercising, as doing something, as eating certain foods, that's easier. That is less likely to bring to mind the thing that you are trying to avoid. One reason why it's so hard to overcome addiction is because that goal is usually an avoidance goal. You tell yourself that you should not be drinking. And now you ask yourself, how good I am at sticking to this goal? Well, have I been drinking? Well, you know, now you are thinking about drinking. It's like trying to

end a bad relationship. And you ask yourself, do I still think about this person? And by checking, you bring to mind that person that you are trying to push off of mind. And so avoidance goals are problematic. Putting a number is often useful. We talked about the power of numbers. We like numbers. If you set your goal target as, let's say, exercising five times a week week you're going to be disappointed if you only exercised four times a week so you kind of created the motivation to do this last thing because it will complete the goal in your mind and then the last thing with setting a goal is that it has to be intrinsically motivating that is it's a goal that doing it would feel a little bit or a lot like achieving

it. Pursuing the goal and achieving the goal are fused together. It means that like you do this and you feel that it's right and you feel like you're achieving the goal. Yeah. As we were talking about intrinsic motivation, you know, another strategy that you write in the book that's been really helpful for me is to shrink the distance as much as possible between the activity and the reward, right? It's why saving for retirement is so notoriously difficult, right? It's so far away. It's the same way. Like, if I'm exercising so that I don't get a heart attack in 20 years, it's different.

When I reframed exercise for myself and went, I may enjoy it while I'm doing it, but even if I don't enjoy it while I'm doing it, very shortly thereafter, I'm going to feel much better in my body. I'm going to feel better about myself. And so all of a sudden, the distance between the activity and the goal was shrunk. Maybe I can't get all the way to, I'm exercising because it feels good, because sometimes it doesn't. But I've been able in my own mind to shrink that distance down to, you know, 10 minutes, 10 minutes later, I know there's going to be a good feeling. With your example, he basically highlighted that by the fact that I set the goal, that already means that it's not 100% intrinsically motivated. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

All right, like watching TV is intrinsically motivating. It's fun. It feels good as you do that. No one sets their goal to watch more TV or eat more ice cream. We set the goal to exercise because exercising requires that at least when you start it, you're going to feel a little bit uncomfortable. It will take a while to kick in. But if you feel good toward the end of your workout or immediately after, then you have a much better chance than if you are counting on feeling good in 10 years from now or 20.

Yeah, or even if you're working out to look good, like that's a goal that's coming over time. It comes, but it's not as immediate. So you just mentioned that approach goals are broadly speaking better than avoidance goals. It's better to say, I want this positive thing than I want to avoid this negative thing. Obviously in some circumstances, I'm a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. So I needed an avoidance goal at a certain point, right? There was no getting around that. Although there is certainly a way of even with that, focusing on what good things come into my life as a result of that, you know, so that's not only not doing, you know, often talking with people who are early in recovery

about, yeah, it's what you're giving up, but we also have to be looking at what you're going to get. But you also say in the book, for some people, avoidance goals work better than approach goals, that there's a personality element to this. Yeah. So two things here. First, you're right that avoidance goals are common, and they also have some sense of urgency. If you think that you should not do something, it sounds like you should not do it starting now. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you say I should not smoke, you don't mean I should not smoke in a month from now. You mean I should not smoke starting today versus if you say I should eat more green vegetables or drink more water. Well, this sounds like something that maybe I can start tomorrow or next week and that's fine.

So avoidance goals have the element of urgency. And then there are individual differences. So some people respond more to avoidance goals. Some people are more in the mindset of avoiding danger, of avoiding sickness. Basically, they respond to warning more than others that are more attracted to approach goals. There was also something that I wanted to say as you were talking so openly about overcoming addiction, which is about framing. Often we have a choice about whether we want to think about our goal in terms of avoidance or approach. Am I trying to end

a bad relationship or start a healthy relationship? Am I trying to avoid certain substance or, you know, approach others that are healthier for me? And how do I think about my leisure time? Are there activities that I should not engage in or are there activities that I should engage in? We do have a choice in how we think about our goals. Yeah, I was just thinking as you were talking about TV and how nobody needs to set a goal to watch TV, but people will often want to set a goal to watch less TV. And what's interesting though in doing that is why, right? Why do you want to watch less TV? Generally, it's because there's something else that you want to be doing. There's something else that you think is more valuable. But if I've not gotten clear on that, then it's very difficult to do because not only will I be uncertain of why this goal is important, it will be entirely in avoidance and it won't be an

approach goal. Whereas if I go, okay, well, what I want to do is practice guitar two more hours each week. What's getting in the way? Oh, it's TV. Okay. Well now I know why I'm giving up two hours of TV. It's for this positive. It's for this good thing. It's not just something I'm denying myself, you know? And so with anything, with eating differently, the more I'm able to frame that choice as not a self-denial, but a self-gift almost, you know, I'm eating healthy because I'm not denying myself bad food. I'm giving myself healthy food. I'm giving myself the chance to feel better. Like you're saying, it's a total framing question.

I absolutely agree. I would say that this is also another nice example of overestimating willpower and making the mistake of thinking that it's just a matter of wanting this strongly enough. If I just be determined not to watch TV, then I will not watch TV, but that's not going to work. If I schedule time to play my guitar, either in my mind or with a friend or, you know, with a teacher, well, then I'm not watching TV because I'm playing my guitar then. I want to come back to something you just said there, which was with a friend or with a teacher, both of which things are social support and how important social support is in all this. And I want to get back there. But I want to hit what you just said, because you said, well, I don't play guitar.

or another instrument is not because you're intrinsically lazy. It's because you have the same problem we all have, which is that we only have so much time. So we have to choose what we do. And so this really gets into the idea of competing goals. We have these competing goals, and if we're not clear about them, we will often end up kind of going in circles, you know, just I'm doing this, but then, then this starts to get in the way. So I stopped doing that. And then I do this for me, the more I've been able to acknowledge competing goals, like, okay, these two things, I want to do them both. I can't do them both. I mean, a great example for me was when I started this podcast, I also wanted to be in a band again, and I kept feeling bad that I wasn't in a band. And I finally went

and I looked at it and I went, my job makes me travel and I'm trying to do this podcast. And if I want to do this podcast really well, then I can't do both. And so I chose the podcast. I made a decision, which you would call prioritizing versus compromising. So talk to us about goal competition and prioritizing versus compromising. You know, a very good friend that usually gives the best advice once gave me a really dumb advice. And the advice was, if you want to do something and you don't have the time, just wake up an hour early. And, you know, I always thought that this is a really dumb advice because, you know, if you wake up one hour earlier, then you go to sleep one hour earlier because you go to sleep one hour earlier

because you still need your full night and so that really doesn't work there is really only 24 hours in a day and some of them you will spend sleeping yep right so you have to start with that there is so much that that you can do and accept it and be willing to work with this is the first step and then you know we all want to do many things and the first thing to decide is whether we are trying to create balance we want to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that or are we trying to prioritize are we trying to put something ahead of other things, so now do I want to create a balance between staying late in bed and reading a book in the morning and exercising in the morning or do I want to put exercising ahead of this hour in bed in the morning with social media, our book or what's not.

If we decide to prioritize, then it's a matter of self-control, okay? So now we have something that we want to do more than another thing. And we can talk about the strategies of self-control, which is not about willpower, okay? It's not about saying, I really need to do it. It's about changing the situation so you have a better chance.

But if I want to strike the right balance, it's really about planning. It's really about thinking, well, on some days I'm going to be waiting in bed, on other days I'm going to get up early and exercise, and maybe it's a weekday versus a weekend. And it's really a matter of how I'm going to organize my life so that I can do all the things that I enjoy doing or the things that are important for me. And the strategies that involve monitoring multiple goals, which we all have all the time, start with asking this simple question, am I trying to find the compromise or prioritize one over the other? So an example of this would be,

if I want to prioritize my career, then I am probably going to spend more time on my career than I am, let's say I have a family with my family versus the compromise would be, you know what, I really want to strike a balance between those two, or going the other direction, I'm really going to prioritize the family, which means that I'm going to spend less time on career, and we'll get the results accordingly, right? I mean, again, we can't control external results. But generally speaking, if I spend more time with my family in an intentional way is probably going to be better. And if I spend more time on my career in an intentional way, it's probably going to go better. And I think that making that decision is so important. I don't know if you're familiar with the book. I think it's called 10,000 Weeks by a guy named Oliver Berkman. It's a book about time management. The book comes down to him

basically saying you have to face the existential fact that A, you're going to die. B, you only have so much time. And that when you continue to think you can do all these different things, you're just deceiving yourself. You have to choose. You have to really think about what's important. And then you have to choose, which is very much common sense, but not necessarily what a lot of us do. Why do you think that a lot of people are jumping from goal to goal to goal to goal? You know, like this week it's meditation practice, and then a month later it's working on my exercise, and then I think I need to take up journaling.

And then I'm not like building on these things. I'm sort of doing one for a little while, and I'm jumping ship, and I'm picking up the next thing. Why do you think that's happening? So part of it is a healthy variety seeking. Okay. When we talk about exercising, it's actually for many people a good strategy to jump around. Well, also quite literally, but also jumping between, you know,

Pilates on one week and yoga on the other, and then running, swimming, whatever. That's actually often good for your body, good for your spirit because you're more interested. So no problem with that. The problem with jumping between goals is, well, what if they undermine each other? So what if you decided that you are going to save money and then you also go on like a shopping spree on the next week? Because like it was a week before that you decided to save. Today you have something else in mind.

day you have something else in mind or you know you you decide to uh eat certain foods on one day but then completely undo it on the following day or on the next meal and and then we say well here balancing between your goals doesn't make sense we also found in studies that sometimes people balance in advance so because i think that i will be eating more healthily tomorrow, I feel that it's right to indulge now. And then it makes no sense because you basically use the future as an excuse, okay? Because I'm going to do what's good for me then. I can spend money or lose my temper or eat unhealthy food right now. So these patterns of juggling between was unhealthy and require more planning. Now, why people do that? Why people tell me on Monday that they are in a program of eating healthier food and on Tuesday that they are into baking cookies? Well, because we respond to the situation.

This is where we started. Circumstances affect what we do. And, you know, the people around us suggest some ideas and we want to try it out. And unless we are able to step out and kind of look at what we do from some distance. The psychologist Esther Pappis has these studies about teaching people to think about their temptations as ideas in their mind. You don't need to act on it. You can just acknowledge that you have this thought,

that this is something that courses your mind and you can engage with it and think about it. Ask yourself how interesting it is that you have these ideas and you don't necessarily have to act on them in a way to counteract the effect of situational crimes, okay, of these cues that lead us to do things that then we look at ourselves and say, oh, well, that was completely inconsistent with the person that I want Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like...

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signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The other reason we do some goal hopping is another point you make in your book. You call it the middle problem or the problem of the middle, which is that things are exciting in the beginning and they're exciting in the end. In between, they're often not. So I think a lot of times we get off to a start and we're like, all right, I'm exercising and it's good. I'm making these changes that feel good. And then it becomes kind of normal.

and it's good. I'm making these changes that feel good. And then it becomes kind of normal. And we're going along. And then somebody says, you know, boy, meditation really changed my life. And we're like, oh, well, that sounds good, because we're in the boring middle part. And so we jump out and meditation in the beginning feels very exciting. And then we get into the middle. And so that insight that the middle is problematic. Talk a little more about that. Yes, that's the problem with middles or that middle problem. And the middle problem happens every time we have a goal that takes more than two seconds. There is a beginning, an end and a middle. And our motivation is very high at the beginning.

We're starting on something. We are excited. We perceive fast progress. Toward the end starting on something we are excited we perceive fast progress toward the end also like we are almost there okay so we see fast progress and we want to get there in the middle is when it's hard to see progress your actions feel like you're up in the ocean and and so it's just hard to stay motivated we We saw in one study, that was a cute study, we ran it in Israel around the Hanukkah holiday. And if you aren't familiar with the tradition, if you are observing Hanukkah, the only thing that you need to do is light the menorah on eight consecutive nights. executive night. So it's really not very hard, except that around 70-80% of our participants, the people that we surveyed in this study, were lighting the menorah on the first day.

The majority of them were lighting the menorah on the last day, and in the middle, they were not really doing it. They kind of forgot about their goal. We see that some interventions are directed to tackle the middle problems. So Katie Milkman's The Fresh Start effect comes to mind as a way to think about Monday as the beginning of the week or the first day of the month or your birthday or a holiday as a reset, as a start, so that it helps you to go back to the energy that you had at the beginning. What I often suggest is to have goals that use time brackets and use these time brackets wisely. An exercise goal should be probably a weekly goal. So if you set yourself to exercise for 150 minutes this week, then there is a beginning, there is end, there is not a long middle. If you think about exercise, we're now at the end of your life, then everything is a middle.

Saving goals, the same. It's really hard to save for retirement. We mentioned it because it's so far, but if we set it as a monthly saving goals or an annual saving goals, now there is a beginning, there is end. The middle is not so long so that you forget that you even have this goal on your plate. I think that's such a wise strategy. Changing direction just a little bit, I want to think about something like practicing guitar. These are things for me, meditating, exercising, that are things that I don't have an end point in mind. I'm not practicing guitar so that I can learn to play this one song,

then I'm done. I'm not meditating, you know, so that I can have 20 minutes of feeling happy. So these are things that go on and on and on. Is it okay to have things that go on and on and on? Or is it really helpful, even with something like that, to put some milestones in place to sort of keep it a little more interesting? habits is that you don't really need to motivate yourself anymore. You just do it because this is who you are. You brush your teeth in the morning because you've been doing it for many years. You don't need to motivate yourself. You don't need to help your future self do that. So, you know, to the extent that you can make something a habit, you get home, the guitar is there and you play a few songs. Great. Maybe you don't need to motivate yourself. The thing is that for many of our goals, they are never completely a habit. They take exercising. Many of us like adults, right? I've been exercising for our entire life. They have been on and off and some days more than others, but we are not new to exercising.

And nevertheless, it is never quite on the level of brushing our teeth. I still need to push myself to start every morning. Is that because the level of effort? I've wondered about this question a lot because I exercise very, very consistently. Every time I'm done, 100% of the time, I'm like, that was a good decision. It seems like I should just do it, but it's not that way. Is that just simply because it takes such an amount of effort and we're wired to not put forth that amount of effort without a very good reason?

I believe so. We are really wired to just sit there and do nothing if the environment doesn't make us move, right? Like we are animals. Like my dogs in the other room. They're not moving unless there's a good reason to. Exactly. Yeah. Unless the male person is there, why move? That certainly makes sense. So something like exercise ends up, I think, being somewhere short of a habit, but more than, I don't quite know what to call it, right? Because like, I always know that for me, there's some momentum to it. Like I'm exercising, it's, you know, yeah, I have to push myself a little bit, but not that hard compared to if I were to stop exercising

and three months, take it back up. the initial amount of effort to get that going would be way more than the amount of effort it takes me to do it. The amount it'll take me tomorrow might be like a one on the effort scale to push through. If I were to quit and be starting cold, it might take like an eight level of effort to get me moving. So it's somewhere short of a habit, but get some of that habit momentum going. Yes. You just pointed out another reason why many goals don't become a habit, because at one point, life will interfere with it. Yes. Right?

Because you will be traveling and you cannot fit your exercising routine to the travel because you are a parent and you now have children on summer break and that really doesn't work anymore. Yes. Because you move to a different state where you cannot quite do what you did before. Life interferes with our habits. We need to be agile. We need to be flexible. And so we, because of the need to motivate ourselves to adjust and do something different. Let's talk about incentives. So a little while ago, we talked about how ideally intrinsic motivation, the more intrinsically motivating something is,

the more likely you are to do it. If it's intrinsically motivating, you may not need incentives as much. Talk to me about the role of incentives. You lay this out in the book pretty clearly. There are good ways of incenting ourselves and there's ways that incentives sort of backfire on us. So let's talk about incentives a little bit. There is so much that we can say about incentives. There is a field of behavioral economics that is basically obsessed with incentives, with monetary incentives. And research in psychology is starting by studying food incentives and how they work with animals learning and so I would say that both psychology and economics have been obsessed

with incentives for a really long time and what we have learned is that incentives usually work. Incentives are usually the small things that we get on the way to reaching our goal. It's the prize on the way there. So the real reason why you exercise is because you want to be in good shape, you want to be healthy, but you can also incentivize yourself with a nice cup of latte by the end of a difficult exercise. So it's a small thing that you get for pursuing your goal. Incentives work, but sometimes they have really unexpected funny effects. And in my book, I tell the story of Hanoi in Vietnam, back at the beginning of the 19th century, when French colonials were trying to get rid of the rats

that were running the street of Hanoi. And what they did was creating a bounty system where they paid residents of Hanoi one cent per dead rat. So you can imagine what happened, right? I mean, the insanity worked. People were giving a ton of dead rats. They just had to bring the ton of dead rat tails to claim the reward. But there were more live rats running the streets of Hanoi

because it turned out that live rats is a source of income. So sometimes incentives have this funny effect where you would actually influence what people do, but in the wrong way. They will do what you did not plan them to do. Other times, incentives backfire. We pay kids to do something and they conclude that it's not fun to do. We did a study a few years ago when we told kids that eating certain foods will help them count to 100, okay, or will help them learn how to eat and they didn't want

to eat these foods. In this case, what happened is that these kids that were around ages three to five concluded that if the food is something that will make you learn how to count, then it's more like medicine than food, okay, that it's not something that you will enjoy eating and so incentives can lead to funny behaviors often the opposite of what you intended they can also sometimes not work at all and other times they do work how to set good incentives well try to make them such that they create a justification without an over-justification so that the incentive is a good reason to do the activity, but not such a good reason that it overrides the original reason to do the activity. It's not the only reason that you do something.

Also, uncertain incentives are often better than certain incentives because they add an element of surprise okay it's a bit of a game yeah not every time i exercise i will reward myself with a cup of flutter okay but sometimes i will so you know i keep exercising thinking about this nice reward which may be like once a week i will give myself, and that works better than having the incentive every time you perform the activity. Yeah, you've got a couple of great questions to ask yourself when coming to incentives. And one of them that I love is what would be the easiest route to achieve these incentives? What potential shortcuts exist? If the easiest route doesn't pull you towards making progress on your goals, you're using the wrong incentives. And I assume with the rats, the problem was people concluded

if they created more rats, they could kill more rats. So what's the easiest route to achieve the incentive? Well, the easiest route to achieve the incentive is breed your own rats versus going and chasing them down. So I love that question because I think it's a really good one. And whether we're thinking about our own incentives or even when we're creating incentives for our children or incentives in the workplace or anywhere that we're trying to incent behavior, it really is worth thinking through what ways could this go wrong? Because the number of different ways incentives can go wrong is genuinely usually pretty hilarious. hilarious. Here's a personal example from a few years back when there was a period of time in history where we all thought that we needed to walk 10,000 steps a day. And, you know, some still believe in it. I am absolutely sure that it's important for us to walk and adding more steps is beneficial, but the 10,000 number is really just a motivational tool. There is nothing specific about this number that is

healthier than another number. Anyways, I found myself not biking to walk, but walking because biking did not give me steps. Right now, this is ridiculous because biking is good for you. It doesn't give you the steps, but it definitely works on a different group of muscles that worth the intending to and so the risk in thinking that you need to walk 10 000 steps a day was that you cut out all other forms of exercising because 10 000 steps is too much time to allow for anything else and so just think about how the incentives are going to influence your behavior and where there are some unintended consequences that you can foresee. I would also say that it's often really hard to know in advance, in particular when we're incentivizing

the people around us and parents often incentivize kids it's really hard to know without trying yeah we try to predict and now maybe it works maybe it doesn't so just try an incentive system and if it doesn't work just put it in the trash move to something else you're just experimenting and i'm all for running experiments right i? I'm a scientist. So run these experiments with yourself. Learn what works for you. What kind of incentives work for you? What's the best way to get yourself to exercise 30 minutes a day or an hour?

Interestingly, that 10,000 steps thing, I've got this fitness tracker on my wrist here. It's called a Whoop. And the reason I like the Whoop, although it's not perfect, it's got a lot of work to do. The reason I like it is that it attempts to give you what it calls a strain score or an effort score. What it's trying to do is add up everything you do that day into sort of a total amount of effort you put out. So that means if you're swimming, if you're running, if you're biking, if you're cleaning the house, if you're going up and down I can, good things will come. So it's why I kind of like this thing. Now, the strange thing about this thing, it loves house cleaning.

So if I'm not careful, if I wanted to get a great whoop score every day, I would just clean my house all day long and I would have the best whoop scores ever. And a clean house. An overly clean house. Yeah. So again, incentives can go wrong, but I do like this because it gives me a broader score. And like you said earlier, I've always found with exercise for me that I do something for a while and then I'm like, I'm kind of bored of that. Let me try something else. You

know, so I've done a little of everything over the years, which turned out to be helpful in sticking with it. I'm like, I'm going to do boxing. I'm going to do Pilates. I'm going to do rock climbing. You know, it just keeps things interesting. I agree. And, you know, the nice thing about your example is that it, again, illustrates the power of numbers. Yes. And the reason numbers are powerful is because they make it really easy to monitor progress. And that is to feel like you are making progress. Okay. Imagine running on a treadmill without any progress cue.

Okay. So there is nothing like you don't know how many miles, you don't know how much time. You would feel lost after two minutes. Like, what am I doing? I'm not moving in space. The time is not moving, right? There's nothing.

We need feedback. We need to feel that we are making progress and we need to feel that we have made progress until now. Okay. So we need to be able to look back and say, well, this is how much I have done today, or this is how much I've done this week or this year. And we need to also be able to look ahead and say like, this is how much I still need to do.

And numbers make it very tangible. You can monitor progress very easily. Tracking and monitoring progress is so important. Well, we are at the end of our time. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation for a couple minutes, and we're going to talk about a really important thing, which is how do we learn from negative feedback? We talk so much in our culture about failure's good, failure's good, but not if we don't learn from it. So you and I are going to talk in the post-show conversation about how we actually can learn from our mistakes. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, a special episode I do each week called A Teaching

Song and a Poem, and the pleasure of supporting a show that you love, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been such a pleasure. I really enjoyed the book and I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for having on the show. It's been such a pleasure. I really enjoyed the book, and I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. That was a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

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