The Science of Motivation: Insights on Goal Setting and Will Power with Ayelet Fishbach

Episode Transcript:

00:02:59 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Ayelet, welcome to the show.

00:03:01 – Ayelet Fishbach
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here today.

00:03:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’m excited to talk with you about your book called Get It 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 her grand. 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 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.

00:03:41 – Ayelet Fishbach
It is such a great description of the work that they 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. Well, let me explain how. The idea in social psychology is that we are all the result of our circumstances, respond to our environment, the profession that we pursue, the people that are 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 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 power will 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. 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. 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.

00:05:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, we have gone back and forth on genders, you know, grandparent, grandchild, grandfather, grandchild, grandmother. We just kind of mix it up.

00:05:45 – Ayelet Fishbach
I see.

00:05:46 – Eric Zimmer
You’re welcome to have it be a grandmother and her granddaughter.

00:05:49 – Ayelet Fishbach
Okay.

00:05:49 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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.

00:06:50 – Ayelet Fishbach
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. Okay. 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.

00:07:51 – Eric Zimmer
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 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.

00:08:50 – Ayelet Fishbach
Thank you. Thank you. 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, no, 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 code. We see this also in employment. And I’ve been teaching business students for a long time. And when you ask them about their future jobs, they plan their future job for someone who’s basically a robot. 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 at when you pursue that goal.

00:10:30 – Eric Zimmer
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 going to be a middle ground between those two. And the closer we are to intrinsic motiv, 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?

00:11:22 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 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, 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. It feels right and 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’re 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 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 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 motiv than friends of motivation.

00:13:43 – Eric Zimmer
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 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 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?

00:15:10 – Ayelet Fishbach
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. The one example that I have was learning to do stand up comedy. And we actually walked. We walked 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, like they freeze. Oh, I’m supposed to move my body in a funny way and I be spontaneous and I Can think of that and what we call them. How about you set your goal for the first class as not feeling good, as challenging yourself, as struggling. So your goal is actually to 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. Today I’m going to feel not so great about what I’m doing. People were able to overcome like first initiation. 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.

00:17:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:17:07 – Ayelet Fishbach
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. 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 playing. This is the same thing that we do when we bring music to exercising or TV to exercising. We do some. 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 another example. Another strategy is to focus on what is immediately pleasant. Focus 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, that could help. But really learning 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?

00:19:25 – Eric Zimmer
It’s pretty. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:27 – Ayelet Fishbach
But we offered more money for the alarm clock.

00:19:31 – Eric Zimmer
How much more money you think?

00:19:32 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 the Nissan. Yes.

00:20:34 – Eric Zimmer
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, $20,000. I just want the money. 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 10% more. So I could sort of fix that in my brain in some way.

00:21:22 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 drinks, some something that pays. 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 like 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. 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.

00:22:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It 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.

00:23:07 – Ayelet Fishbach
Yes.

00:23:08 – Eric Zimmer
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?

00:23:41 – Ayelet Fishbach
Yes, a few things. Okay. First, we want to define the goal such that it is connected to an activity but is sufficiently abstract, is 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 am 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. 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 your 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 here going 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 or fused together. It means that, like, you do this and you feel that it’s right, that you feel like you’re achieving the goal.

00:26:23 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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, 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 10 minutes. Ten minutes later, I know there’s going to be a good feeling.

00:27:19 – Ayelet Fishbach
With your example, you basically highlighted that by the fact that I set the goal that already means that it’s not 100% intrinsically motivating. 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.

00:28:06 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:28:59 – Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah. So two things here. First, you’re right that avoidance calls 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. Okay. So. Right.

00:29:16 – Eric Zimmer
I guess.

00:29:17 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 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. 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.

00:30:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I was just thinking as you were talking about TV and how nobody, you know, 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.

00:31:55 – Ayelet Fishbach
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.

00:32:25 – Eric Zimmer
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 this starts to get in the way, so I stop 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. 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.

00:33:48 – Ayelet Fishbach
You know, a very good friend that usually gives the best advice once gave me 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 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 early earlier, then 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.

00:34:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:34:21 – Ayelet Fishbach
Right. So you have to start with that. There is so much 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? Okay, so 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 of this hour in bed in the morning with social media or book or what’s not? If we decide to prioritize, then it’s a matter of self control. 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 to strike the right balance, it’s really about planning. It’s really about thinking. Well, on some days I’m going to be reading 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.

00:36:07 – Eric Zimmer
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, it’s probably going to be better. And if I spend more time on my career 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 sorry. 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?

00:37:50 – Ayelet Fishbach
So part of it is a healthy variety seeking.

00:37:53 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, okay.

00:37:54 – Ayelet Fishbach
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. On one week and yoga on the other and then running, swimming, whatever, that’s actually often good for your body, that 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 or, you know, you. You decide to eat certain foods on one day, but then completely undo it on the following day or on the next meal. And then we say, well, here balancing between your goals doesn’t make. Makes 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, 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, yeah, 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.

00:39:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:39:54 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 Pappys 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, okay. That this is something that courses your mind and you can engage with it. 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, completely inconsistent with the person that I want to be.

00:41:21 – Eric Zimmer
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 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.

00:42:05 – Ayelet Fishbach
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, an end, and a middle. And our motivation is very high. At the beginning, we are starting on something. We are excited. We perceive fast progress toward the end. Also, like, we are almost there, 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 saw in one study, that was a cute study. We went in Israel around the Hanukkah holiday. If you’re unfamiliar with the tradition, if you are observing Hanukkah, the only thing that you need to do is light the menorah on eight consecutive nights. So it’s really not very hard. Except that around 70, 80% of our participants, the people that we surveyed in the study, were lighting the manoir on the first day. The majority of them were lighting the manoa 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. So 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 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. 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 exercising we 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 mention 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.

00:44:34 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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?

00:45:15 – Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah. So, you know, the psychologist Wendy Wood talks about habits. And the idea with habits is that. But 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 girls, they are never completely a habit. They take exercising. Many of us, like adults. 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.

00:46:18 – Eric Zimmer
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?

00:46:41 – Ayelet Fishbach
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.

00:46:51 – Eric Zimmer
Like my dogs in the other room, they’re not moving unless there’s a good reason to.

00:46:55 – Ayelet Fishbach
Exactly, yeah. Unless the male person is there. Why move?

00:46:59 – Eric Zimmer
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 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 8 level of effort to get me moving. So it’s somewhere short of a habit. But get some of that habit momentum going.

00:47:43 – Ayelet Fishbach
Yes. You just pointed out another reason why many goals don’t become a habit. Because at one point life will interfere with it.

00:47:51 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:47:51 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 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 constantly need to motivate ourselves to adjust and do something different.

00:48:22 – Eric Zimmer
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 motivated, 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.

00:48:50 – Ayelet Fishbach
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. That and research in psychology, 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 ladder 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 rest that were running the street of Hanoi. And what they did was creating a bounty system where they paid residents of Hanoi $0.01 per dead rat. So you can imagine what happened, right? The incentive worked. People were giving ton of dead rats. They just had to bring the ton of dead rats tails to claim the reward. But there were more live rats running the street 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 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 or will help them learn how to read. And they didn’t want to eat these foods. In this case, what happened is that these kids, they were around ages 3 to 5, concluded that if the food is something that will make you learn how to count, then it’s more like medicine than food 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. It’s a bit of a game. Not every time I exercise, I will reward myself with a cup of latte, 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 perform the activity.

00:52:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You’ve got a couple 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.

00:53:21 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 and thought thousand steps a day. And you know, some people 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 like biking is good for you, it doesn’t give you the steps, but it definitely works on a different group of muscles that worth attending 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 incentivizing the people around us and parents often incentivize kids. It’s really hard to know without trying. We try way to predict and 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’m a scientist. So run 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? 30 minutes a day or an hour?

00:55:16 – Eric Zimmer
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 the stairs, it 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.

00:56:18 – Ayelet Fishbach
And a clean house.

00:56:19 – Eric Zimmer
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 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.

00:56:43 – Ayelet Fishbach
I agree. And, you know, the nice thing about your example is that it, again, illustrates the power of numbers.

00:56:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:56:50 – Ayelet Fishbach
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 a treadmill without any progress queue.

00:57:03 – Eric Zimmer
Okay?

00:57:04 – Ayelet Fishbach
So there’s nothing like you don’t know how many miles. You don’t know how much time. Like, yeah, you would feel lost after two minutes. Like, what am I doing? I’m not moving in space. I. 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. 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.

00:57:44 – Eric Zimmer
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 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 is good, failure is 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 to oneyoufeed.net 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.

00:58:26 – Ayelet Fishbach
Thank you so much for having me. Eric. That was a pleasure.