Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
Hello, everybody. There are all sorts of ways to struggle with getting things done. Maybe you're a procrastinator. Maybe you're somebody whose energy flags in the middle of a project. Maybe you're too stubborn and don't know when to quit. Or maybe, like me, you're somebody who sets too many goals and gets burned out and makes everybody around you miserable. Whatever your situation, we all, I think, struggle with motivation.
The good news is that there's a whole crew of scientists who study best practices for getting things done. My guest is one of the most eminent players in the field. Her name is Islet Fishbach PhD. She is the Jeffrey Breckenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
She's also the author of Get It Done, Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. I heard her name uttered so many times by our previous guests that I thought, let's go book her. And I'm glad we did because we had a great conversation in which we talked about the crucial first step
of setting goals, how to pick the right goals for you, whether it's more effective to have goals that are positive, in other words, where you're aiming to achieve something specific or negative, where you're aiming to stop doing something, whether to do lists work, whether incentives work, best practices for monitoring your progress, the importance of celebrating milestones, the importance of negative feedback, why the 10,000 steps per day goal makes motivational sense
She calls that strategy, put a number on it, even though the whole 10,000 steps thing has been proven to be scientifically arbitrary. And we talk about how to know when to let go of a goal. We'll get started with Islet Fishbach after this.
Before we get started, I want to remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over at DanHarris.com these days. You probably heard me announce that we've started a new community through sub-stack, which includes all kinds of perks for subscribers, such as the ability to chat with me and sometimes our guests.
about each of the new podcast episodes. Video, ask me anything sessions, even live meditation sessions with me. Plus, you'll get a cheat sheet, which includes full transcript and key takeaways from every episode. Recently, we had my friend, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren in the chat, and we've got plenty of other podcast guests who are gonna be hopping into the chat in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join us. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year.
or free for anybody who can't afford it. No questions asked. Just head over to DanHarris.com. We'll see you there. Meanwhile, I want to give you an update on what's happening over on the Happier app. As you know, I used to be involved with that app. I'm not anymore, but I'm going to continue to update you on their doings. They are very excited to announce something very cool. They have teamed up with two of the world's most renowned meditation centers.
The Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock for an exclusive retreat giveaway. Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat, a $600 travel credit, and a complimentary four-year membership to the Happier app. The giveaway is from October 1st to October 14th. Enter now at happierapp.com slash retreat giveaway. That's happierapp.com forward slash retreat giveaway.
Wondering new podcasts, even the royals pulls back the curtain on the darker side of royal families past and present from all over the world, where status comes at the expense of your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. New episodes come out every week. Listen to even the royals early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Hi, Lett Fishbach. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
Let me start with some background on you. What made you interested in the subject of motivation? Were you just like a huge procrastinator? And is this research or is there some other route?
Yeah, maybe we kind of tell a story about what made us do the thing that we do. And then every few years you ask us, is that the real story? Or maybe I just now adjusted it and fixed it and made it over the years. I was arising as social psychologist in Israel. I was
interested in motivation, which was back then not a topic in social psychology. So people studied motivation mainly in education, in clinical psychology, less so in social psychology. But I was just so fascinated and I wanted to know how you get yourself to do things. And I think that every
Every student and in particular, every graduate student, every person that ever tried to pursue a PhD needed a ton of motivation and self-control because there is no clear schedule. There are very ill-defined goals. You're kind of trying to come up with a good idea. It's really hard to say I will come up with a good idea between 10 to 11 a.m. today's kind of need to organize your schedule.
And really, I couldn't think of anything that fascinated me more than understanding how people do that. So yeah, I guess a bit of a research. I agree with you about how fascinating it is. And it's, I think, universal in its importance. So let's talk about
What you recommend after all of your years of research slash research in your book, you say the first step is to choose your goals, which may sound obvious, but actually choosing goals is not uncomplicated.
It's not. So the first step is really to mark a destination and not where you are going. And it's not trivial because we sometimes set the wrong goals for ourselves. Sometimes we set goals that are not intrinsically motivated and they can
Talk about what that means. We said calls that are chores, not calls that are not exciting. We find that setting approach calls do goals are so much better, are so much likely to be achieved than avoidance goals than do not goals. So we need
to think about our goals in terms of a destination, in terms of something that is exciting, it's getting a job, it's not applying for a job, it's owning a house, it's not saving for down payment. And then of course the goals need to fit our life and everything else that is going on at the same time. And so together is a lot in setting the right goal. So you said a lot there that's worth following up on intrinsic motivation. Can you define that?
I would love to define that because intrinsic motivation is such a confusing concept in studying motivation. Intwinsic motivation is pursuing something in an end in itself. When you are 100% intrinsically motivated,
It doesn't make sense to ask, why are you doing it? Because the reason to do it is to be able to do this. The means and the end collide. So you can think of pure intrinsically motivated activities as a stroll in the park on a nice spring day with a person that you like.
And really, most of the times, and at least for course, that we are trying to set for ourselves, it's unrealistic to think about this purely intrinsically motivating. There is some extrinsic motivation. There are some long-term rewards. There is a destination that is not achieved while I'm pursuing the goal, but will arrive later in time.
And then we ask, well, how intrinsically motivated your goal is right now when you're exercising or meditating? How much doing it is also the goal of doing it as opposed to being a bit removed goal?
And now for example, a person that loves their job and wished they had a few more minutes by the end of the day is more intrinsically motivated than the person who just can't wait to close the door and go home and forget about their job.
Neither is purely intrinsically motivated. Both people are partially working because they are trying to make money because they may be seeking a promotion. They have some long-term goals. There are things that are not achieved immediately.
If you get some value from doing not just for achieving something in the long run, then you are at least somewhat intrinsically motivated. And at the risk of giving you an answer that is way too long than what you were hoping to get.
I would also say that in twins equalization, predicts what people do better than extrinsic motivation. That is, how much you value what you do, how much it feels like an animal itself is the best predictor of engagement. People who eat healthy food are people who like the taste of healthy food, people who exercise other people who enjoy exercising.
That's really interesting. So if you don't like the taste of healthy food and you hate getting sweaty, what can you do?
find the healthy food that you like and start swimming. And basically find the way that feels intrinsically motivating. Now, we all tried to force ourselves to do something that we absolutely hate doing, right? We all tried to exercise in ways that didn't feel right for our body or for our soul. We were just bored and disengaged and you can do it for a little bit, but
Eventually it doesn't feel right and you leave it and hopefully you found that otherwise that it actually feel good. So that kind of brings me to the other follow up question i was going to ask which is you said that we shouldn't pick goals that feel like chores so how can we make our goals more exciting.
Yes, there are a few techniques to do that. We find that when people think about their goal in terms of, ah, I have to do this. I must do it. There was less excitement and there was less persistence. And so one way to make the goal more inspiring, more motivating is to ask, why? Why are you doing it?
You can actually ask why several times. So you tell me that you have to finish this work and ask you why. And you say, because there was a deadline and my boss expecting to see that by the end of the week. And why? Because this is like part of something that we are trying to create as a team and why this is
something that serves some more important goal, like this will advance me, this will advance my team, this will create a positive change in the world and basically get to the essence to the meaning of why you're doing the things that you're doing now. At one point, the why becomes so abstract that it's no longer a goal. Like if you do this, many times eventually I ask you why, I mean, just I don't know because I want to be happy.
And I don't think that the goal to be happy is a great goal. It's so abstract that it's no longer connected to action. And then I say, OK, let's go a bit lower. Let's ask a few how questions. So ask a few why questions. But stop at a place where you can clearly see the actions that will lead you to this more general, more abstract goal. Let me step back a second as it pertains to goals.
Do you recommend that we should have like an Excel spreadsheet with a list of goals on it? And we're tracking our progress story. I mean, I have goals, but I don't have them written down anywhere, should I?
It depends. Some people like to do this. A fun fact is that as I was exchanging potential covers for my book with my editor, one of the suggestions was to do this. And I was telling her, well, that would be a terrible thing to put on the cover of my book, even that I never recommended people will have a to-do list. I do recommend that people understand their goal system. And your goal system is
Basically, some diagram of the main goals that you have in your life and how they are related to each other and how they are related to the activities that you are pursuing. And ideally, the goals don't conflict with each other. And ideally, there are some actions that you can take that will achieve both. So maybe by
exercising, you will achieve your health goals and maybe you will also achieve some other spiritual goals, maybe you do it with friends or there was also social connection and so on. So not really a list of goals, more like an understanding of what are the things that are currently important for me in my life.
Asking for a friend here, there are people who have too many goals that we have trouble prioritizing or achieving any balance. What does the research say about how to manage this?
Well, many of us have too many goals, right? We want to do too many things at the same time. And when we draw our goal system, we realized that there are just like five places we wanted to be right now. And one way to think about this is in terms of the relationships between these goals and how much you want to find the right balance versus prioritized. And if you're prioritizing, that is a self-control conflict. Some goals
need to let go. I should not look to buy a new car because I prioritize saving for retirement, whatever. As time goes, you are seeking to balance between them. So you might want to both invest in your career and your family and
You don't want to prioritize. You want to do both. Then we often see people looking for means or activities that help them achieve more than one goal. We refer to them in a research literature as multifinal means, right? Or in language is feeding two birds with one scone.
Which is, you know, I care for birds, so that's my way of expressing the idea that you want to achieve a lot for one activity. We do it often spontaneously, like I try to bring lunch from home because it's healthier, it saves me time, it is less food there at waste, it's better for the environment, so there's a bunch of courses that I achieve via one activity.
Often we can be more mindful that maybe if it's really important for us to spend more time with our extended family and also to go on vacations, then we need to find a way to combine these two. There we cannot afford pursuing them at different times of the year. Either way, it's particularly important when you have limited resources and it could be limited financial resources. It could be just a time that you're
particular busiest work, it could also be something that we see with aging more. With aging population, there were just less resources, just physiological resources, and we see that people need to be more mindful about this multifinal activities. How do I combine my exercising with a social activity? Maybe I can include my trip to the grocery stores as part of it. And so I get more for the same activity.
Final follow-up based on your very first answer. When you talk about approach goals versus anti goals, I think you use slightly different terminology, but you're saying approach goals like I want to affirmatively achieve this. Those are more powerful than I want to, I don't know, stop doing a thing.
Yes, they are certainly more intrinsically motivating. One advantage of do not goals, the anti goals or the avoidance goals as we sometimes call them is that they seem urgent if you think that you should.
Stop doing something. Stop each red meat. Stop smoking. You think that you should do it right now. On the downside, do not cause a harder to pursue because first, how do you know if you're successful? Well, you think about the things that you should not do. Am I still thinking about this food that I should not be eating? By checking your progress, you're going to mind the thing that you're trying to avoid.
The other reason that it's better to go with doing things and not with not doing things is that when you tell someone not to do something, it's exactly the thing that they want to do. It's called psychological reactants. We see that with teenagers all the time, right? One way to get a teenager to do something is by telling them to do just the opposite. They are rebels.
We never completely outgrow that, and so we see that when we decide not to do something, we often really tempted to do that. A lot of research suggesting that the way not to elicit psychological reactors is never to set that, do not to goals in the first place. That all tracks, that all makes sense.
So when we're setting goals, one of the things you recommend in your book is to put a number on it. What do you mean by putting a number on it?
Putting a number on means how much, how soon? I like to use the goal of 10,000 steps in a day. Now, I actually don't think that it's a very reasonable goal for most of us, and clearly there were no specific health reasons why this number was ever put on exercising. It was more for some marketing purposes, but it's such a great
Number right it's so motivating i don't know anyone that hasn't tried that it's such a catch it yet one day it's 10,000 steps and the reason that it works or where is that it is easy to monitor. And once you said that number anything below that number feels like a loss.
And so if I step short of this goal, I'm going to walk these 10 steps from 100 steps short of this goal. I'm probably going to walk around my bedroom, right? Just get to the goal. You don't really care about doing more than what you're required, but you care about that. There is a great study that looked at the distribution of marathon running times in the US and
You see that many more people finish the marathon just under four hours and just above four hours, which is such a great illustration, right, of the power of four hours. No one wants to go home and say, I finished the marathon in four hours and five minutes. And so they push themselves to finish in three hours and 55 minutes, so 59 minutes just to meet the goal. And numbers are powerful, but, you know,
We need to be careful. There was also a study that showed that when diatos fail on their calorie monitoring goal by just a little bit, they give up and just eat junk. And here's an example of time when you put the number, but.
Really, you are counting calories, which is not exactly healthy eating. There are better ways to evaluate the healthiness of the food than barely counting calories. And then you get discouraged by not meeting your goal, which really should have been to eat healthy food and not to eat that 2,000 calorie mark per day.
I'm thinking about when I do Peloton the bike for a long time, I was looking at the numbers and I would have a goal for what I wanted. Either I wanted to set a PR or personal record or I wanted to just make sure that I was hitting certain numbers. And for a while, I noticed I was like hurting myself because I was trying too hard. So then I stopped.
I set a rule where I wouldn't look at the number until the last five minutes. And then I noticed that if I turn the numbers back on, I stopped hiding them on the screen. And I was really far from what my goal was. The rest of the ride, I just wouldn't try anymore. I just get super discouraged. So I can see how they're both motivating and the opposite of motivating.
Well, clearly a very driven person, because without any progress feedback, it is very hard to stay motivated. And sometimes we look at what we achieved, sometimes we should look at what we managed to do. But we need to feel that we are growing, we are getting somewhere.
Not only helps achieve our goals, it's also a source of just feeling good about who we are, the positive feeling, the happiness, satisfaction, the pride of progress. I often look at the study of emotions, how that
is related to the study of goals and really meeting goals and making progress on goals is a source of positive feelings, which suggests that if you hide all the progress signals, it's hard to know when to feel good about yourself.
Yeah, I see the numbers at the end. I'm not sure that makes me feel good about it. But this idea of monitoring your progress is a huge one in your book. So I just want to highlight that. Monitoring progress is a really important way to keep us motivated toward achieving our goals. So can you say a little bit about best practices in this regard?
First out by monitoring your progress, because wind progress motivation increases. And now one great example comes from Pacific academic degrees. We see that about half of the students in the US that start college will not
Finish it, they will not earn a college degree and they tend to drop out at the beginning in the first year, not when they are one year away from completing their degree. So with progress, there is more motivation. Actually, every loyalty program that you ever participated in.
You know that it was easier to stick with a program when you were just one purchase away from getting the reward as opposed to what you just start right so that there is more that you feel that you are getting for your effort. The more progress you have made.
Even if there is no clear end state, you know, exercising that you always want to exercise. But monitoring progress, this is how many times I exercise this way, how many minutes I've already into my exercise increases motivation.
The trick is to know whether to monitor your progress in terms of the amount of work that you have already done versus the amount of work that is still missing. And let's stay with that. Like the one-hour exercise, you can look at the number of minutes that you have exercised or the number of minutes that are still missing to the end of this training session.
And what we consistently find is that for novices, for uncommitted people, usually up to the midpoint, it's better to look back. Look at what I refer to as the glass half full. Beyond that point, it's better to look ahead at what is still missing. What I haven't done yet.
Let me add here that we also found that people that spontaneously look at what they have achieved are often more satisfied with their current level of performance. We were in a study in a company where we asked half of the employees to reflect what they achieved and half to reflect on what is still missing. And we found that those reflected on what is still missing, what they still need to do. We're expressing a higher level of aspiration.
We took these data and tested what people spontaneously do and found that those that tell us what's still missing are those that are thinking about their next job, their next task, what they are going to do after they finish this one. What's wrong with that?
Oh, there's nothing wrong with that. It's great. You can influence your motivation by guiding yourself to look either back or forward. You should just know that if you look back, if you reflect it what you've achieved, you're going to feel better about where you are. So it's a bit of a trade-off. How much you want to be happy where you are versus get yourself going so you climb the next mountain.
I am definitely in the latter category, maniacally in the latter category. I could use some of the former category. What would you advise for me? So for example, the biggest project I have right now is this book that I've been working on forever and that I've grown on about too much on this show. So apologies. Well, just using as an example, how would you recommend I dip into the happiness
slash satisfaction bucket a little bit more regularly instead of obsessing about what's yet to be done. Yeah, you know, let me first reflect on the question because it's not a simple question. We often think about how to motivate ourselves and everybody around us for the long term goals. How to get people to climb the next mountain, seek a promotion, save for later in life.
This is kind of our cultural limit that we always need to be forward-looking. We always need to think about the next thing. And there was nothing wrong about it.
accept that if you're always future oriented then you know life goes by and you're never quite in the present. If you stop for a while to evaluate what you have achieved, okay, so you're writing a book which is a very familiar task for me, just published mine a few months ago.
As you're writing, there are some things that you've already discovered. There are some insights that are already there. And the question is, how much do you allow yourself to indulge in that, to be proud of that, to enjoy
what you have achieved so that there is a sense of achievement that is not always just a step on the way to move to something else. I think that we can all benefit from forward-looking and long-term goals. We should also be aware of that. Almost a philosophical question, which is, if I always walk for the future, then, you know, life happens.
Yes, I know. I think that I think this is a really important balance. And what I'm copying to, and I suspect I'm not alone in this, is that I think I feel a little out of whack out of balance. And so just to come back to it, I'm curious, do you have recommended tactics for savoring progress thus far so that we can be happy now without endangering our motivation to climb the next mountain?
Rewarding, okay, so self-rewards, celebrating your milestones, reflecting on what you have achieved and where you have gotten so far, reminding yourself that these achievements are there, that they exist, telling the people around you that you're proud of what they have achieved, just
have healthier relationship with your goals. What I mean by healthier relationship is that we need to understand that while our goals are probably important for us, we also set them for the sake of doing something, of getting somewhere.
And sometimes the whole purpose of setting a goal is just to get going. And now I'm coming back to something that we discussed at the beginning of our conversation. But when you said an exercising goal that you said to do a workout, really you set the goal just to get yourself moving. That ultimately what matters is that you are moving your body.
It doesn't really matter whether you actually met the 30 minutes mark or like the hour mark of your workout. And once we are the center, our goals are there just to motivate ourselves then it often matters less.
whether you quite beat your target, how much, as long as you've been doing that and now you're writing a book, surely the ultimate goal is to have the book out and for people to read it. But there's also the goal of just discovering ideas and just writing a book so that you can get to review 20 years of research and motivation, which is what I did.
That was very much something that I achieved during the year that I was writing, and I very much felt that this was a source of satisfaction by itself, that it's not necessarily about achieving it. It's about pursuing it, about celebrating the pursuit. So you can hold in your mind two things at the same time. One is, my goal is to reach my goal and...
You might have a parallel goal of enjoying the process and enjoying your life, which doesn't stop while you're pursuing the goal. And part of that might be to think about the pleasures that occur along the way.
Yes. And that also allows you to do what goes that do not provide such pleasure along the way. And we sometimes see what we call action crisis, which is when people need to give up on a goal, okay? Maybe it doesn't fit your health situation, okay? Maybe you have aged, okay? Maybe it doesn't fit.
where you are in your life currently, your job, your family situation, people constantly through their life need to drop goals.
When you need to do alcohol, when you experience this action crisis, it's a good idea to think whether I get pleasure for pursuing the goal and not just from achieving it. Whether there is something in doing it, there is intrinsic motivation that I can separate, that I can see that it's not just about telling myself and the world that I achieved something.
How do you draw the line between a wise recalibration of goals and quitting, surrender, giving up? Well, in psychology, you often talk about framing. And framing is when you choose to put the title.
on something. Someone maybe was pursuing a Korean law. They were dreaming to become a lawyer and then one day they decided that they are not doing that anymore. Whether you call them or whether they call themselves squidgers or readjusters, whether they refer to it as I gave up versus I found my calling and it's not the practice of law. It's totally framing.
And the nice thing about framing is that to a large extent, we control it. OK, we tell the story. We can decide that something was giving up or something was changed because I discovered that there are other ways, OK, that this is not the priority that it has in my life. So stopping doing something that you've been doing for a long time is always hard. But you can
Make it easier when you choose the right framework and when you realize that there are many turning points in life, it's not a straight life, it's navigating many goals and it's constantly.
adjusting to what I want to achieve. And let me say something more about it. The interesting thing about studying people's goal systems and motivation is that we are not machines that are designed to pursue goals that we are giving to us. We need to decide on the goals. So when I study motivation, it's not like how people do something. It's how they choose what to do.
and how they change that. So you have to choose where you live. What do you eat? What is your profession? And understanding your motivation is not just how you get there, is how you chose where you're going. Let me just go back to framing for a second, because it strikes me that maybe there's a thin line between a cognitive reframing
and self-deception or justification. So let me just stop talking. Will you buy onto something there or am I being a puritanical, nose to the grindstone ogre?
Yeah, you're up to something. Sometimes it's justification in the sense that I might try to convince myself that something is good, but I'm really just justifying that something that's even better did not work out. And I'm being reminded of the story of the fifth Beatles, so the Beatles initially were five people. And the fifth person that I can't actually remember his name,
Pete Best, the drummer? Yeah. Famously said that he did not regret not being part of the Beatles. He did not regret that this did not work hard because his life was great anyways and whatever.
And you hear that story in kind of laughing because if someone could be part of the Beatles, that sounds a bit like justification and making excuses than really choosing not to be part of that, the most famous rock band ever.
But for most of us, what matters is not really whether it was a justification or not like that. There is no real truth there. There is the story that we tell ourselves that matters that will influence our motivation. And let me give you another example, which is a Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset. And so a lot of the resources that I do is on
Learning for setbacks and failure and how people get up on their feet and do something. And we know that it is better to frame a negative experience, to frame failure in terms of growth, to focus on what you have learned. And we know that when people don't think about this in terms of growth, but think about it in terms of failure, in terms of like a proof that they cannot do something, this really kills their motivation.
Now, there is no real truth. I tried to do something. I did not work out. Obviously, I don't quite have the knowledge or talent yet. But I can still learn how to do this. I can improve. And now it's a framework. Now it's the story that I'm telling myself.
And that will influence whether I'm going to try again, whether I'm going to get up and do the thing that seemed impossible. They did not work out. And so you have the flexibility. You can decide how to think about your progress, how to think about your setbacks. And these decisions will really influence your motivation. Much more of my conversation with Islet Fishbach after this.
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What's up, guys? It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's so good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay? Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And all I mean just friends, I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on The Wondery App, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So let me go back to something from earlier, because you said something about rewards. That raises the question about how we use rewards and incentives as we're pursuing our goals. Do incentives work? And if not, why not?
Well, incentives work. They don't always work the way we expected incentives to work and sometimes they create the opposite of what we were hoping to get. And to give you an example, we ran a study a few years ago where we told little children between the age three to five,
that eating certain foods will make them smart. So we told like three-year-old that if they eat carrots, they can learn how to count to 100. We didn't directly say that. We told them a story about a girl that ate baby carrots and then could count to 100. And we told all their kids that they will be stronger, they will be smarter, and they ate fewer carrots.
Right? They did not want to eat the food that we added the incentives to, assuming that it's not very tasty, that if we told them that this is good for them, that means that they will not enjoy the taste. So the incentive worked, okay? Just not the way you would hope.
The classic demonstration that I also write about it in my book is from the Hanoi Rat massacre. That was when French colonists were trying to get rid of the rats running the streets of Hanoi and what they did was creating a bounty system where they would pay one cent pair of dead rats.
The result was that the residents of Hanoi were waiting west so that they can kill them and get the money. And so the incentive changed people's behavior except that there were more rats going not fewer. All this to say that you should just be careful with the incentives. Now we are mainly interested here in
how you're incentive by yourself, in self motivation and that the incentives that you give yourself or sticking with your goals. And we often think about these incentives as mini goals, as an additional reason to do something. So I know I should work out because it's healthy for me. And that ultimately is the goal. But if I promise myself a nice cup of tea in some
fancy coffee shop, that could be an extra incentive to do that, exercise to go to the class. And this could work, okay? And it could work in particular if the incentives are a bit unpredictable, so we don't always give ourselves the prize. We stay excited about the incentive. If the incentive is not too big to distract us from achieving the goal case, we are basically pursuing the incentive.
and not the goal, meaning we are looking for shortcuts, incentives to work, just need to be clever with them. You may have already covered this, but in the book you talk about uncertain rewards being better.
Yes, uncertain rewards are better. That is uncertain rewards are more motivating. And there are a few reasons for that. Uncertain rewards are exciting. I don't know if I'm going to get there rewards. It's not guaranteed. It could be a challenge. Let's see if I can get it. It could be one way to make it into a game. It's a lottery. We are
I ran a study some years ago where we asked people to offer the willingness to pay for either a bag that we said included four truffles, four chocolate truffles in it, or a bag that included either two or four truffles and the people that were placing the beads did not know how many truffles are in the bag. And what we found is that people were bidding more money
on their mystery bag. The bag that had either two or four chocolate truffles for sure bag.
Why is that? People were curious about the game. They were curious to see if they can win. They were excited to play our game and see how many travels they are going to get. When we think about incentivizing others, uncertain incentives also often mean that
when there is no incentive, people are still going to perform the activity because they don't quite know that the incentives are not there anymore. And so, no, any mail research finds that once you put an email on an incentive structure when they're being rewarded on
Some occasions, but not others, they would still perform the behavior. Frankly, if you have a pet, you probably know that, that you used to give your dog a treat every time they went to the bathroom where they were supposed to. After a while, you stop this habit.
But they kept theirs. So they still expect the incentive to appear sometime. They learn to perform the behavior. And certain incentives are just better. And they are easier to implement. Got it. I don't know if what I'm about to ask you about is the opposite of incentives.
But its valence is close to the opposite because you talk about something that's very different from incentives or rewards that can help us reach our goals. And that is negative feedback. Why should we be looking for and valuing negative feedback? How will that motivate us?
The opposite of incentives, I think, is punishment. But negative feedback is important to pay attention to, and it's important to pay attention to because it can help us produce success. And really when we study the psychology of failure, what we are trying to understand is how to help people be successful
And we think that there is valuable information in negative feedback that allow people to be successful. When we get negative feedback, we learn how not to do something. You can refer to this as learning by elimination or learning that if this way doesn't work, then I should take that. The other way, there is a lesson. If I parent my meal, I don't have dinner, but I have a lesson.
And so the question is whether people take this lesson, whether they are learning for me.
and not as much as they should. And we often don't learn from negative feedback because emotionally, it's just easier to disengage. It's like, don't pay attention, just move on, just keep going and ignore that. And we also ignore negative feedback because it's harder to learn from it because it requires this mental flip, understanding that if this doesn't work, then I should try something else.
How important is self-control in all of this?
Self-control is critical when you have several goals that you want to pursue, one of them conflicts with the others. So when you want to stay in bed, but also to get up and exercise financial goals, they're almost always involved, some sort of a self-control dilemma, because you may want to save money for later in life, but there are also so many things that you want to buy right now.
The ability to set priorities and adhere to the more important goals, predict academic achievement, professional achievement. People with better self-control tend to be better at sticking with their relationships, so their relationships are lasting longer. There is some data that they are more financially comfortable, and so it's
Pretty good to have high self-control. But this seems like a factory setting, right? Like we come into the world with a certain amount of self-control. Is this actually a skill we can hone or is it luck of the draw?
First, we come to the world with no self-control whatsoever. I think that there is probably some personality stable component, but it actually only like materialized later in life and self-control takes a really long time to develop. People are still developing the self-control way into their 20s. And so that takes time. But there are strategies that we can use to assist self-control. Basically, we need to
Understand the self-control requires that we first see the problem, we first identify a temptation, and then that we resist a temptation.
Identify temptation is not trivial because in our modern world most of the temptations are pretty harmless if you just do it once. Like not wearing your seatbelt once will really not influence your life expectancy, losing your temper once, will not destroy your relationship. Of course, one glass of alcohol or one cookie will not ruin your health goals. It's really only an accumulation.
And so to identify a temptation, you really need to be thinking about doing that many times, eating many cookies, losing your temper every time that you interact with that person, or at least several times this week, and so on. And only when we multiply that, actually in our mind, we can see that it is a problem.
And then once we realize that there is a problem, it helps to anticipate this in advance. It helps to know that this meeting at work is going to be very stressful, that I might lose my temper or that this party is going to be full with their temptations. What we found is that reminding people of an upcoming temptation
You would think that maybe that makes them more excited to give in, but it actually makes them more likely to give up on the temptation that is. So when you remind people of obstacles to doing well at work, to sticking with their health goals, they are better able to do that. In a way, they are prepared to do what they need to do when they get to the situation.
You also in the book talk about another attribute that can be very powerful when pursuing goals, which is patience. So I guess a two-part question for you. Why is patience so important? That's kind of an obvious question, but I want to hear your answer anyway. And is patience also a skill we can develop? So yes, patience is important. And yes, we can develop patience. And patience is important because
We watch that our delayed, they tend to be bigger. We are often in what we call the smaller sooner versus larger later dilemmas. One example is that you can ruin your appetite by having a snack that you don't particularly like one hour before a dinner.
and so you can have a little bit of food now that will ruin your nice experience when you're going to later have dinner with the people that you like and much better food. Another much bigger example is that you will not have money for retirement if you
Don't realize that you need to be patient, that you need to put some money aside now and have it later in life. And so between waiting an hour for dinner and waiting many years for using your retirement, there are all these everyday examples of needing to be patient, needing to choose something that is better but arrives later.
Now, how to become more patient? Well, there are a few things that you can do. I would say that often making the decision in advance is much easier. And so deciding what I'm going to do tomorrow is easier than deciding what I'm going to do today.
And one way to understand this is that if I offered you the $10 now or $15 next month, most people would say, give me the $10 now. I don't want to wait another month. If I offer you $10 in a year or $15 in 10 months, then most people would say, well, I'm willing to wait another month.
So just make these decisions in advance. It is so much easier. I would also like to say that when you wait for something, you actually enjoy it more. So it's not just that waiting often pays off just because the reward that is later is bigger. It is also the waiting.
increases enjoyment and everybody that designs a line whether it's in the grocery store or in an amusement park knows that and so they don't want you to wait there for an hour but they want you to wait for a few minutes because they know that you will enjoy.
Whatever it is that you are waiting for more after you invested that wait time. And so waiting a little bit actually is a win-win. You get something better and you enjoy it even more because you waited. Much more of my conversation with Islet Fishbach after this. You spend quite a bit of time in the book on
social support as being crucially important in terms of getting things done. In other words, enlisting help from other people. Why is this so important? Social support is important because we are social animals, because we work with others and because we work in the presence of others. Working with others is what we do when we
basically pursue any goal that is bigger than us. It could be starting a family, it could be a project at work, it could be something that we do as a neighborhood, as a large group, as a nation. We often have goals that require several people working together and then feeling that you are supporting and that you are being supported is critical.
Social support is also important for your personal goals because we look around us and we do what the people around us do and we tend to conform. We tend to eat what the people around us eat. We tend to wear what they're wearing and we are going to pursue a degree because they're doing that. We are going to be successful at work because they inspire us to do so.
And there's a lot of the work in motivation science is on how to leverage that information about other people to increase your motivation. And to give you an example of finding, we see that
When you are with someone who wants you to do something, this is a person that's going to have much more influence than a person who just does it by themselves. So watching an athlete on television is not going to get you to exercise, but someone who wants you to be in good shape
That person is going to make you more likely to go to the gym. We also find that relationships, whether it's romantic relationships or friends, or even just relationships in the family between their parents and their children and between their siblings are stronger
when we support each other's goals. And people drift apart when there is no longer goal support and in a way that their relationships are chosen so that they will support our goals. We are getting closer to people that are helping us achieve our goals. When they are no longer instrumental, we are moving away and their relationship is not as central for us. But that's a little depressing in some ways.
Yeah, it's also a recipe for connecting to someone. Think about how you can be useful for them. Think about how you can facilitate their goals and they will like you and they will be connected to you. So yeah, I can see why some people might feel that this is a bit more realistic view of relationships, but I don't think it's sad.
Well, I guess where I went with it was, oh, well, I'm not going to be friends with this person anymore because they can't help me with my goals. But maybe my goal is just to relax and enjoy my life with somebody who I find enjoyable to be around. And so if that's my goal, then this person doesn't have to be useful to my career, but they can be useful to my life goals.
Exactly. And I think the message is that you need to have goals that you are helping each other with. And just being aware of it means that it shows your next challenge so that very soon that lives with you is part of it, that they are helping.
Well, okay. So now we're talking about potential romantic relationships, marriage or a partnership. And I can see I hadn't thought about it before, how just I'll just take my own marriage, how we are really supporting each other in our goals. And if that were to dissipate, that could be a real wedge.
Yes, many relationships and when you don't feel that the other person understands you and therefore can support your goals. I'm thinking about one study that we run in which we ask people about how much they know someone versus how much they feel known.
Basically, we did this with romantic relationships also with other relationships, but let's stay with the romantic relationships. Like, how much do you know your partner? How much do you feel that your partner knows you? And most people say that they know the other person more than the other person knows them. And this is, of course, a bias. We are more aware of our knowledge than of another person's knowledge. So we feel like we are knowing more than we are known.
What was interesting is that what was a better predictor of relationship satisfaction was how much you felt known. And that is because if someone knows me, then they are helping me. Then they are there for me. If someone can tell me about my goals and can watch my progress, then
They are there for me helping me versus me knowing them that means that I can help them. That is less critical for me for my selfish point of view than filling out support it. And so filling now is really critical for relationships satisfaction. Before I let you go, can you please remind everybody of the name of your book and also
let us know about any other resources you're putting out into the world social media online courses anything like that
Absolutely. My book is get it done. And the full title is get it done. Surprising lessons from the science of motivation. You can also find a lot of information in ayeletfishback.com, which is my website. Hopefully you want to know more about the science of motivation. It's a very exciting field to be in at the moment. And there is so much that is going on. Such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Dan. Thanks again to ILET. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davey, and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Point, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for an episode from the TPH Vault.
If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.
