How to Stay Motivated with Ayelet Fishbach

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. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is i l At Fishbach, 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 i LT. It 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, Ilet and Eric discuss her book, Get It Done Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. Hi, yell, Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here today. 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 grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents 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 the walk that they do is is someone who is both a social psychologist and motivation scientists, which you know, it is 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 on to our environment, their profession, that we pursue, the people that our friends, how we choose to spend our life, our hobeys, 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 that we set on the larm clock. So yes, we sleep when we are tired and there is a quiet dark room. But if we certain a larm clock, then we are going to get up because it's hard to sleep in the 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 fools, 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 lives such that it is easier and more that well to act on the good. Okay, 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 we respond to what is out there. We can also manipulate what is out there so that we control

our response. I wouldn't, however, change it to ask a grandmother and her granddaughter if I could. Yes, we have gone back and forth on genders, you know, grandparents, grandchild, grandfather, grandchild, grandmother. We just kind of mix it up. 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 answers 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, you know, 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 that myths

that people believe in in motivation science. That is the first one. I just that either I didn't try hard enough, or I I didn't care enough, O case, 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 are 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. You know, do we react to our circumstances or do

we control our circumstances? And the answer is both, right, we have varying degrees of each and 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 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. Something that we know for a long time, the people don't have much sympathy to their future self or empathy. Actually we called it now, the lack of empathy to your future self. You see, when you know you are traveling to somewhere where it's very cold, but right now it's somewhere for you, and so you

don't really tet a code. We see this also an employment And I've been teaching business students for a long time, and when you asked about the future jobs they plan the future job for someone who's basically a robot. Here is someone who are really cares about how much money they will make, but cares less about doing something. It's interesting with the people that they like about being challenged about being here. It's not that they don't care it all.

But in a way they say this future self, the mean a few months from now, that person would really prioritize the mutual earnings about everything else. And guess what, that's just lack of empathy to your future yourself, because then you will have to get up in the morning and go and do that job. And we know that's what they being able to do your job, being able to stick with employment. Is that the immediate gratification that you get from interacting with people that you like over

solving problems that I'm interesting for you. And so yes, set your goals, whether it's what you eat or the job thaty are going to have when you are in a similar situation to the situation that you will be it 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, you know, there's gonna 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. Explosive motivation is not bent. The extrinsic motivation is what it gets us to do our annual medical check up, 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 are 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. Okay, well, it's not just extrinsically motivating.

You're not only working for some future benefit. You actually enjoying what you're doing. You actually get some immediate benefits from it. But you also want to walk 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 that I love. But right now we are in an argument, and and so most schools 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 that 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, well, 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 gonna be a guitar player. I was gonna make a living doing it. Well, that became obvious it wasn't gonna 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, and 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 am very intrinsically motivated, but there are some days that I simply don't feel like doing it, because as a 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 had 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 of newer question for us. You're absolutely right that many activities that will be twansically motivating or are sometimes in twynsically motivatings, might not be in twynsically motivating right now. The one example that I have was learning to do

stand up comedy, and we actually worked. We worked with the Second City here, which is an improved 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 act with the people around them. So they're not really trying to be a stand up comedians. They just want to feel a little bit more comfortable. And they get to these import classes and they feel horrible.

They like they uizing, Oh, I'm supposed to like move my body a funny way and like be spontaneous. That I can think of that and what we call them. How about you set your goal for the first class as not feeling good. It's just challenging yourself as a struggling So your your goal is actually too feel a little bit bad. Try to make it difficult, and you know, with that goal in mind, today I'm going to embarrass myself here. Today I'm going to feel not so great

about what I'm doing. People are able to overcome the first initiation, So today that's going to feel bad, and in the future I will learn to enjoy it. Okay, I will learn to get the intrinsic motivation in the sense of enjoyment, but how to increase in teris of motivation, so you know, one thing is there and waste 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 and 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 there. You can try to make something more intrinsically motivated by the way you do it. Some people like to work 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 they were more motivated. Overall, the whole thing became more pleasant for them because music was was playing. This is the same thing that we do when that 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 beautiful? Is you know? Another example. Another strategy is to focus on what is immediately pleasant. They focused on the experience or try to be in the experience. Think about how you feel about it right now.

It requires some practice, It requires some awareness. If you meditate it could help, but really learning to do 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

intoans and 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 it another example for that, this is a study where we offer people choice between two tasks. One was to listen to the song aged with by the dealers and the other one was to listen to a loud alarm box. You do you know what you would choose right? It's pretty yeah, yeah,

But we offered more money for the alarm clock. How much money you think, like thousands of dollars ten over the base pay really not much. We got about seventy of the people in this experiment to choose the loud alarm because it 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

hand the Nissan less. 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 gonna give me more. Okay. It's a lot harder to quantify all the intangibles that go

around it. It's a lot harder to know, well, as the company culture better, Well, I like the people, and so we go, okay, 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. Scientists, I can tell you that if you want to influence people's decisions, give them some numbers.

People like to use the numbers right. And so we know that when people's seek employment, when they go to walk, they are looking for during something that pays in 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 the liking of the people that wanting to walk with these people on whatever it is that we do. It's very easy to say that next job is going to be

a ten percent increase what I'm making now. It's easy to put too much emphasis on money. It's not the 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 yeah, guess what they also care about It not just me. Yeah, it makes me think of something that you say in

a different section, and maybe we'll get to it. 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 a hundred thousand dollars a year and I worked twenty hours a week and everybody I met seems lovely, and this other place will pay me fifty dollars a year. I've got to work forty 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 easy year to make a decision. We're drawing

the 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 is 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. Okay. First, we want to define the goals such that is connected to an activity, but it's sufficiently upsetly, sufficiently general so that it doesn't feel like a mean skate. The goal is not something that I will do so that I

can do something else. It's the thing itself is. 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. Okay, The goal is not to lose weight so that I can be attractive over summer. The goal is to feel comfortable to feel attractive. And now I ask myself what do I need to do in order to feel that I'm an attractive person. When I learn in the middle that I like myself powerful goals, I'll also usually approach

goals and not avoidance goals. So it's 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. If you set your goal is exercising, there's doing something is eating certain foods that's easier, that is less likely to bring to mind the thing that you're trying to avoid. One reason why it's so hard to overcome addiction is because

that goal is usually an avoidance. School, you tell yourself that you should not be drinking, and now you ask yourself, how good I am sticking to this goal? Well, have I been drinking? Well, you know, now you're 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're trying to push off of mind, and so avoid this.

Goales are problematic. Putting a number is often useful. We talked about the power of numbers. We like numbers. If you set your goal target is, let's say, exercising five times a week, you're going to be disappointed if you're 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 we said in your goal is that it

still be intrinsically motivating. That is, it's a goal that doing it would feel a little bit or a lot like achieving it and pursuing the goal and achieving the goal are fused together. It means that like, you do this and you feel it's right, you feel like you're chieving 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 it's saving for retirements 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 twenty years. It's different when I reframed exercise for myself and when 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, ten minutes, ten minutes later, I know there's going to be a good feeling with you. Example. He basically highlighted it by the fact that I set the goal that are with

the means that it's not one hundred percent intrinsically motivating. Yes, I like watching TVs intrinsically motivating. It's fun. It feels as good as you do that. No one sets the goal to watch mo tiv or it's more ice cream. Hekay. We set the goal to exercise because exercising requires that at least when you've started, 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 work hard or immediately after, then you have a much better chance. And if you're counting on phel lingloding ten years from now, what twenty 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, then I want to avoid this negative thing.

Obviously in some circumstances, I'm a recovering alcoholic and hero attic, 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 schools work better than approach goals, that there's a personality element to this. Yes, so two things. You're first, you're right that void in schools 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

its starting now. So all right, I guess yeah, yeah, Like if you say I should not smoke, you don't mean that I should not smoke in a month from now. I mean I should not smoke starting today, Versus if you say, should eat more green vegetables or there were ring more water. Well, this sounds like something that maybe I can start tomorrow next week, and that's fine. So avoiding schools have the element of urgency. And then there are individual differences. So some people we spawn more to

avoid in schools. Some people are more in the mindset of avoiding danger or avoiding sickness. Basically they respond to warning more than than others that are more attracted to a culture goals. And there was also something I wanted to say as you were talking so openly about overcoming addiction, which is about framing. Okay, Often we have a choice about whether we want to think about our goal in

terms of avoidance or approach. Okay, am I trying to end a bad relationship or start a healthy relationship and I trying to avoid certain substance or you know, approach others that are healthy for me. How do we think about my leisure time? As are the activities that they should not engage in or other activities that they should engage And we do have a choice in how we think about our balls. 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 on another nice example of over estivating willpower, you know, making the mistake of thinking that they's just a better 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 walk. 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 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. Now I'm assuming the reason you 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 won't 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, 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, it usually gives the best advice. Once gave me a really dumb advice, and the advice was, if you if you want to do something and you don't have the time,

just wake up. And now we're alms and you know, I always thought that this is a really dumb advice because you know, if you wake up one hour earlier than you go to sleep one hour earlier, because you still need you fornight, and so that really doesn't work. There is really only twenty four hours in a day, and some of them you will stand sleeping. So you have to start with that. There is so much that that you can do an exactly and be willing to

work with this at 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

prioritized We're trying to put something ahead of other things. Okay, So now do I want to create a balance, be to it 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 are in bed in the morning with 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'll have a better chance. But if I want to to strike the white 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 week day versus that we can 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 all 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 in my career in 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 Ten Thousand 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, be 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 these healthy variety seeking. Okay, when we talk about exercising, it's actually for many people a good strategy to jump around when also quite literally but also jumping between you know, Alison on one week and yoga on the other and then are running, swimming, whatever, that's actually often good for your body, that good for your split because you're more interested. So so no problem with that. The problem with jumping between goals is, well

what if they undermine each other? So what if you are decided that you're going to save money and then you also grow on like the shopping spray on the next week, because like it was a weekend before that you decided to save today you have something else in mind, or you know, you you decide to eat certain foods on one day but then completely under it on the following day. Or on the next meal. And then we say, well, here, balancing between your your goals doesn't make sense. We also

find instead is that sometimes people balancing the advance. So because I think that I will be eating more healthily tomorrow, I feel that it's right to indulge now. And you know, then it makes no sense because you basically use the future as an excuse 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 up. So these patterns of juggling between it was unhealthy and require more planning.

Now why people do that? White people tell me on Monday they are in a program of eating healthier of food and on Tuesday that they are into baking cookies. Well, because we respond to the situation. Yeah, this is where we started. Circumstances affect what we do. And you know, the people around us as suggests some ideas, and we want to try out and and unless we are able to step out, kay, and and kind of look at

what we do from some distance. That the psychologist as the papist has these studies about teaching people to think about the temptations as ideas in their minds that you don't need to act on it, and 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 as 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, 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 to be. 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 off and 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 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 and the beginning feels very exciting, and then we get into the middle, and so that insight that the middle is problem at it. Talk a little more about that. Yes, that's the problem with middles

or the middle problem. And the middle problem happens every time we have a goal that takes more than two seconds. There is a beginning and end in the middle, and our motivation is very high. At the beginning, we're starting on something, we are excited. We perceived fast progress towards the end also that we are almost there case, 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 drop in the ocean, and so

it's just hard to stay motivated. We are sawing in a one study that was a cut study. We went it in Israel around the Anuka holiday, and if you're unfamiliar with the tradition, if you're observing Hanuka, the only thing that you need to do is light them noah an eight consecutive nights. So it's really not very hard, except that around scent of our participants are the people that we serve it. In the study, we're lighting the

manure on the first day. More the majority of them were lighting the minaula on the last day, and in the middle they were not really doing it, kind of forgot about their goal. We see that some interventions are directed to tackle the middle problems. Katie Milkman's the fresh start effect comes to mind as a way to think about Monday is the beginning of the week, or the first day of the month, or your birthday or holidays.

As a we set as a start so that it helps you to go back to the energy that you headed the beginning. What I often suggest is to have goals that use time brackets. Use these time brackets wisely, and exercise goal should be probably a weekly goal. So if you set yourself to exercise for one hundred fifty minutes this week, then there was a beginning. There was end. There was not a long middle. If you think about exercise, we're now you know, the end of your life. Then

everything is a middle. Saving goals the same like it's really hard to save for retirement. We mentioned it because it's so far, but if we said it as a monthly saving also an annual saving goals, now there was the beginning. There is end the mill is not so long so that you forget that you even have this call on your plate. I think that's such wise strategy. Changing direction just a little bit. I want to think

about something like practicing guitar. These are things for me, meditating, exercising. There 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 twenty minutes of feeling happy. So these are things that go

on and on and on. Is it k 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. Yes. So, you know, the psychologists when they would talks about habits, and the idea with habits is that you don't really need to motivate yourself anymore. You just do it because this is who you are. You wash 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 stale and you have 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 out teeth. I still need to push myself to start every morning. Is that because the level of effort I've I've wondered about this question a lot, because I exercise very, very consistently. Every time I'm done in 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 and not put forth that amount of effort without a very good reason. I believe so we we are really wired to just sit there and do nothing if the environment doesn't make us move right like we we we are animals like my dogs in the other room. They're not moving unless there's a good reason to exactly, yeah, and 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 amountit will 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 interfered with it. Yes, right, because you will be traveling and uh, and you cannot feed your exercising with tint to the travel because you are a parent and you now have children on summer break, and that really does and work anymore because you moved 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 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 let's talk

about incentives a little bit. There is so much that we can say about incentives. Okay, there is a field of behavior and economics that is basically obsessed with incentives. With monitory incentives, then we such in psychologists wing by studying food incentives and how they work with anymals learning and so I would think the 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 thing that we get on the way to reaching our goal. It's the price on the way they are so the will reason why you you exercise it because you want to be in good shape, you want to be healthy. But you can also incentivize yourself with now a nice set up of a flattering 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 an unexpected funny effects. And in my book, I tell the story of Annoy in Vietnam back at the beginning of the nineties century when French colonials were trying to get rid of the rest that we're running the street of Hannoy, and what they did was creating a bounty system where they paid residents of Hannoy one cent or dead rat. So you can imagine what happened, right, I mean, the incandi worked. People

were giving a ton of dead rights. They just had to bring the ton of dead right tails to claim that we would. But there were more live rights running the street of Hannoy because it turned out that life rights is a source of indra. 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 to study a few years ago when we are told kids that eating certain foods will help them counts to one hund right they or will help them learn how to wait, and they didn't want to eat these foods. In this case, what happened is that these kids they were round ages. So we yet to five concluded that if the food is something that will make you learn how to count, then it's more like medicine and food day that it's

not something that you will enjoy eating. And so incentives can lead to funny behaviors, often the opposite for what you're 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 the 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 to it than than certain incentives because they add an element of surprise. It's a bit of a game. Not if we tell my exercise, I will reward myself with a cup of flooded Okay, but sometimes I will so you know, I keep exercising thinking about this nice reward, which maybe like once a week I will give myself, And that

works better than having the incentive every time you profound activity. Yeah, you've got a couple of great questions to ask yourself when coming into 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 with 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 rout 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 that 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. 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 ten thousand steps a day and you know, supposed to believe in it. I am absolutely sure that it's important for us to walk and adding more steps is beneficial,

but the ten thousand number is really just a motivational act. Well, there was 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 like biking is good for you, doesn't give you the steps, but it definite neately works on a different group of muscles that worth intending to.

And so there are risk in thinking that you need to walk ten thousand steps a day, was that you cut out all other forms of exercising because ten thousand steps is too much time to allow for anything else. And so just think about how the incentives are going to influence your your behavior and when there are some

unintended consequences that you can't foresee. I would also say that it's often really hard to know in advance, particularly when incentivizing the people around us, and parents often incentivized kids. It's really hard to know without trying. We try to predict and now maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. So just stand try and incentivis sem 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. I

think I'm a scientist. So one of these experiments with yourself, learn what works for you, what kind of incentives work for you, and what's the best way to get yourself to exercise thirty minutes a day or an hour. Interestingly, the ten thousand steps thing. I've got this fitness track around my wrist. Here it's called a whoop. And the reason I like the whoop although it's not perfect, it's

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 strained 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 the stairs. It's just

incentivizes movement. And I like that idea generally, right, I like the idea generally that all those different things add up and they all matter and they all count, and that each day what I'm able to do is going to be very different. But if I prioritize moving my body whenever 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 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 gonna do boxing, I'm gonna do pilates, I'm gonna do rock climbing. You know, it just keeps things interesting. I agree. And you know, the nice thing about your example this is that it again illustrates the power of numbers. Yes, and the recent numbers are powerful is because they make it really easy

to monitor progress. And that is to feel like you're making progress. Okay, imagine running on a trade mail without any progress, kaith is that there's nothing like you don't know how many miles, you don't know how much time, Like you would feel lost after two minutes, like what am I doing? I'm not moving in space? I think the time is not moving right, Like there's nothing like. We need feedback. We need to feel that we are making progress, and we need to feel that we have

made progress until now. 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 this year, And we need to also be able to look ahead and said like, this is how much I still need to do. And numbers make it very tangible. You can monitor progress very easily. Yeah, 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 of minutes, and we're gonna talk about a really important thing, which is how do we learn from negative feedback. We talked so much in our culture about failures good, failures 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 one you feed dot Net slash joint, 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 me. That was a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You

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