Ayelet Fishbach | How to Use The Science of Motivation to Accomplish Your Goals for the Year

Srini Rao: .

Ayelet, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Ayelet Fishbach: Thank you

Srini Rao: . It is my pleasure to have you here. As I had mentioned to you, I wanted you to be one of our first episodes of 2023 because I thought it was such a fitting message. You have a book out called Get It Done, Surprising Science of Motivation, which I absolutely loved because it was so practical and realistic.

Instead of just a bunch of inspirational nonsense. But before we get into that, I wanted to start by asking you where in the world were you born and raised and how did that end up impacting the choices that you've made throughout your life, in your career?

Ayelet Fishbach: Oh. I was born and raised in Israel and I in as one Latin community, as one socialist community called kibbutz.

It is very different from where I am now. So I left my basically farming, heavily farming community. When I was 18, I did my military service in Israel. Then went to college in Loise. Discovered the big city and loved it from there and had gone to the U. S. And then basically had my career here, which is at the university of Chicago and I cannot even start to describe how different is that in the university of Chicago.

Srini Rao: We'll absolutely get into that. It's funny because I, the thing I know about a kibbutz is obviously just because of the WeWork show, Adam Neumann talks about this. Not that's a great example that we want to follow, but the thing I wondered about when you grow up in an environment like that, which is very different than the nuclear family living in houses where we don't talk to each other, is what did you learn about relationships and social dynamics from being in an environment like that?

Ayelet Fishbach: And I would say that when you grow in a community that is there is so much of this small and is together and when you spend most of your day with kids your age and not so much with the grownups and you you learn by doing so, you you learn that you need to get along with people.

They need to be able to walk with with people. If you want to have a meal with other people, then you need to find your way in the group. You need to make friends. Okay. It's a very deep one. And if you are having most of your meals with your family, in which case it is assumed that everybody's included, you don't need to find your way.

And this is not quite as I grew out where you need to find your way. You need to walk with you, you need to get along. That led to my understanding there, there was like also many years of research between where I'm ending and where I started this investigation, but that partially fed into my.

Investigation into the social dynamic in in pursuing goals and how much we work with other people and how much we connect to other people because we share a goal or because they help us go straight, what we want to do. And just to give you an example, how like these very like early life experiences end up with some research insights, many years down the road.

One of the things that we are now studying is how much feeling that the other person knows you and knows your goals is a predictor of relationship satisfaction. Okay. And basically what we find is that people connect to others who they feel know them. And it's more important for me to feel that you know me, then that I know you, okay.

It's a better predictor of relationships. Satisfaction because we are looking for people that can help us with whatever it is we want to achieve in our lives. It could be academics, could be careers, and traveling the world having children and a person that knows us and wants to support us is the person who will connect with.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say that because as you were saying that, it reminded me of this conversation that I had with Anders Ericsson before he passed about the book that he wrote about expertise. And he was talking about how people who are committed to mastery, when they choose partners.

They need people that understand that obsessive drive. He said, he's people think the only reason celebrities date celebrities is because they're both famous. And he said, it's actually not true. He said, and I'm paraphrasing but he said, it's because they also have very similar drives to each other where it's hey, here's an artist or an actor who's married to a musician.

And, when you say it that way, it suddenly makes even more sense.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, absolutely. Of course opportunities matter and there's some data that I think about 20 percent of the couples met each other at work and that makes sense. It's a good work and you meet people. But what makes relationships stick is this feeling that the other person has.

Similar goals, and often that they have my goals in mind, okay, like they, they understand what I'm doing and they are supportive. And for that, we basically design our social environment to support the things that we want to achieve.

Srini Rao: If for your social environment that you grew up in did your parents encourage any particular career paths?

Because I don't know how it is when you grew up in Israel. Obviously, if you grew up in India, it's the standard, doctor or engineer and my dad's a professor. And, I come from a family full of academics, and here I am, this sorting error that God made by giving me to

Ayelet Fishbach: them. Yeah my, my lovely parents didn't really have any specific set of goals for their children, they they actually did not have a college degree.

But I have four siblings and one of them is also a university professor. I I think it they were very supportive. They were very supportive of what we do. And, let's connect it back to, to data, because I think this is a really interesting point. It helps for the child parent relationship.

It helps when the parent pursues similar goals. In a sense like idea if you your parent is an academic and your academic, that's makes it easier to stay that in good relationship. But what matters for success is often not so much for me. What, let me say it again. What matters for success in pursuing your goals is less the extent to which you have parents or other people around you that pursue similar goals and more of how much they're supporting of your goals, that is parents that want their children to be successful at school can make this happen.

You can support that, okay? The children are more successful at school. And this is regardless of how much that the parent by herself or himself was successful at school. So you don't need to pursue the goal in order to support someone. You need to understand their growth and want them to be successful.

And they will like you if you do

Srini Rao: well, which probably explains why most Indian kids get straight A's in school because our joke is basically, are you kidding? Of course we got straight A's in school. Our parents would give us up for adoption if we didn't. Yes.

They don't celebrate it at all. Nobody put our report cards on refrigerators.

Anytime we got A minuses, my dad would just ask, why didn't you get an A plus?

Ayelet Fishbach: And what did you miss? Yeah. Which question you answered incorrectly. Yeah. And it's not about that necessarily like showing their report card and then telling you I did so well at whatever math. It's about the expectation that you will be great.

And we talk about parents, but this is true for everybody in our life. It could be a boss or an assistant, or they could there's someone at the gym that's helping you, okay. And all these people, when they want you to be successful, this is a. The source of the inspiration, these are the best role models.

By the way, we, I don't know how we already got all the way to role models. This is actually the fourth part of my thinking about motivation. The last one.

Srini Rao: Don't worry. I've been known to do that to people. The thing that really what I realized looking back on this experience with my parents, where we were just like, this is annoying.

You guys are turning us into giant geeks. And we have no social life in high school, I think implicitly they were teaching us the value of intrinsic motivation by not rewarding us for getting good grades to the point where at a certain point, they never has to had to ask us to study or do anything.

We just did it which I only recognized in retrospect. But let's come back to that because I know that you write about intrinsic motivation later on. But the other thing I want to ask about is your time in the military, because I know that, Israeli, like all the Israelis I've ever met when I'm traveling, usually are traveling because they're in that gap year after they're done with the military service.

So how, what do you learn by serving in the military? How does it differ from sort of American military? Because here, nobody goes to mandatory military service. I wonder how that shapes the entire perception because I had a a peace activist who was an Israeli guy who became a interdisciplinary artist.

And he basically said his time in the military is what led him to become a peace activist.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, I would absolutely identify with that. And I didn't really like my time in the Army and I didn't want to go. I was not a great soldier. But I learned that that they, my resistance is much more grounded in ideology.

It's not just that. It's not something that I enjoy doing, but it's something that I, that I often disagree with on more ideological basis. And that nevertheless, because in Israel, everybody had to to be a soldier. There are great people actually, you know what, it's not just unique to Israel.

There, there are great people in the army, actually here at the University of Chicago here. We get many veterans in my school and they are often my best students. I actually find myself thinking about how much the military experience either was good for them or that is attracted wonderful people.

So I you can never know whether these people were great to begin with or the experience changed them, but it would have known it, even though I. I do not support most military actions and do not feel comfortable in a very hierarchical system, which is the military. I personally feel much more comfortable in the academic system where everybody can argue their point and there's no upper and

lower management to some extent. I did. There are things that you learn from being in a different system and there are wonderful people that that come out of this more rigid kind of operation.

Srini Rao: I definitely want to talk about education because there's no way I'm, I don't let any single professor out of this conversation, out of my podcast without talking about education, but Before we get there, I wanted to ask you about what your experiences were with culture shock when you first came to the United States.

What did you find odd in comparison to where you were

Ayelet Fishbach: before? It would be a much shorter answer if I told you what I did not find odd. You you go into the injunction when you don't have a, like a green light just for you, right? You turn left and like people are driving in front of you like, that was crazy. What are they thinking? Yeah. That and then that.

Like they are huge, okay, and like you can make, do your shopping for hours. And they're like so much stuff and this is crazy. Who, who needs a dozens types of yogurt. Just learning that, the culture and how what people mean when they present information in certain way.

And it's funny because now when I. Go back to Israel, you often hear from people that Americans are polite and and maybe insincere, and maybe it's hard to know what they mean. It's not hard to know, you just need to be part of the culture, okay, that I actually don't think that people hear.

In Chicago are any less direct than the people in Israel. It's just that, that they are using a language that's less direct and cultural code is less direct. And so you need to know how to win that you need to understand. When a person wants to continue the conversation with you versus not, and it's not as direct as let's continue this conversation sometimes versus I never want to hear from you again.

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Srini Rao: Yeah, no, I, it's funny cause I think you're absolutely right. There are certain cultures or person would just abruptly end the conversation and say, I don't want to talk to you anymore. I remember a friend of mine called me in college once. And she's another Indian girl and I pick up the phone and I was like, I'm stoned and I just smoked a joint.

I don't want to talk to you. And I hung up and she called me back and she's Srinivas, that's not how you talk to girls. I'm like, okay, here goes. But but you just, you're right. Like we definitely are very mindful and we're polite even when we're not wanting to be. Like we're not, we tend not to say what we're thinking a lot as Americans, I think.

Ayelet Fishbach: I think the expression, see you later, okay, doesn't mean anything, right? It's basically the same as goodbye. Yeah. Okay. But in other countries, see you later is very different than goodbye. And so you if you come here and you don't know the culture, you might be confused about what see you later means.

Srini Rao: When that person doesn't call you back or see you again.

Ayelet Fishbach: There is not, yeah, it's not literal. Yeah.

Srini Rao: at the University of Chicago, which is one of the most elite universities in America, particularly in certain fields like business and economics. I only know this because it was one of those places that I kept.

Getting brochures from, I still very distinctly remember the University of Chicago College Admissions essay question and I remember I wanted to apply just because it's one question, the essay question was write a short story that takes place in the frozen food section of a grocery store and I never forgot that, but the reason I wanted to ask you about education in particular, you are a person who studies motivation and you're at one of the most elite educational institutions in the world where people, I think, just By default are naturally motivated people who are at a place like that are motivated.

But if you were tasked with redesigning our current education system from the ground up using the principles of motivation from your research, how would you change it? And I realized we

Ayelet Fishbach: that. Exactly. I just thought that either the best job or the worst job, which is that designing education. And I believe in intrinsic motivation.

I, sometimes I believe I can stand intrinsic motivation. I use that finding that intrinsic motivation is probably the best predictor within adherence to whatever people are doing. And of course, to education. And so I, I think that one thing that I would really focus on is how to make study more immediately rewarding.

Okay.

,

How to make the process of studying closer to to the goal that you achieved by studying, which is the aha moment the feeling that you just discover, just to realize that you did not. Realize before, or that you're just enjoying yourself. It's just a fun place to, to be at. Okay.

And the University of Chicago is very much a fun place to be at. At not every academic institution is this is enjoyable. Okay. Often that the classes are too large. So you don't feel acknowledged. Okay. You feel anonymous. Often there there was not sufficient challenge, okay, so it's either too easy or too hard, but not quite tailored to your level to create like this level of curiosity and that and challenge that we know increases motivation.

There was, now, a study that, that I ran with Katie Woolley a while back in a school in Florida, it was just an average school. And what we did was going to a math class and playing music bringing some snacks and and colored pencils. Okay. So we're basically making it a party.

And what he found is that the students were studying harder, okay. They were attempting more math problems. Now, I mention it because in Destiny, we increased intrinsic motivation. We made that this hour of studying math more fun, not by actually making the math more interesting. Okay. So we took the indirect route to get there.

We played music. I personally cannot walk when there is music playing, but for these kids, that made it a fun class, okay, that made it interesting and different and they were intrigued and so I would really focus on how to make every hour that you spend in school an end in itself, okay, something that feels good, that feels right, that could be, okay.

Challenging, could be just pleasant could involve music and dancing but also scratching your head and trying to figure out and discover something how to make school about that, how to get kids to be intrinsically motivated. And unfortunately, I think that this is much more likely. In the private system and we need to do much more in the public system for the, lower school, but also for college education.

Srini Rao: I think that of all the answers I've heard, this is one of the first ones that people have given you. The first person has given me an answer that didn't talk about the content, but about the design of the experience. And that's so fascinating. I never thought about it that way. Because. Yeah, I was a Berkeley undergrad, and when you were talking about classes that are too large, I'm thinking to myself, yep, I'm anonymous.

So anonymous, in fact, that I had a cousin who was in a math class, calculus class, our freshman year, and he said some guy walked up to the professor like 20 minutes after the midterm ends. Even the professor had been yelling at him to stop. And he went up to the professor, he looked at the professor, he's do you even know who the hell I am?

And he stuck his exam in the middle of all the blue books and just left. I thought to myself, this is what you learn at a place like Berkeley is how to manipulate bureaucracies. The thing that I wonder is why are we so resistant to this change or why is the system at large so resistant to a change that has been standardized?

Because you talk about intrinsic motivation and when I look back at college, granted, I also didn't understand a lot of this at that age, but every choice I made was extrinsically motivated. It was like, Oh, you know what? It's the late nineties. Everybody is majoring in computer science because guess what?

Everybody's getting rich in Silicon Valley. So I tried my hand at computer science only to discover I'm terrible at computer science after two semesters. But I noticed that looking back, I thought to myself, wow, every single choice I made throughout college was based not on curiosity, but on how would this help me get a job.

And I don't feel like I was alone in that, particularly at elite institutions, I think that's quite common.

Ayelet Fishbach: It's not necessarily a mistake to the extent that Many things that you will find enjoyable, you might not experience this immediately. Okay. So maybe you will enjoy computer science, but it will not be that the first couple of weeks of that no, in, in another study that, that we ran with like the second CD improv club here in Chicago which is basically a famous improv club that runs classes where you can go and learn how to develop your confidence and your presentation skills by doing improvisation and most people that are not like professional actors.

They feel very uncomfortable the first time that they do this. I know I felt very uncomfortable. And so learning improv is for, the lay person is not something that you will do in the first class and would feel like that's the best thing I ever did. Maybe learning computers for you at Berkeley.

And that's fine. They actually, what we found is that if we tell people to, to embrace the difficulty, can you see that you're going for the first class is to feel uncomfortable, they were more motivated to come back to the next class. Okay. They fell when I, I had the goal to feel uncomfortable.

I feel uncomfortable. That's going well. And so I am not saying that you should only do what feels immediately comfortable. You might never read any book that is challenging, yeah, you might not watch any show that, that takes some time to get into, or it often requires looking at this picture again and again until you, you finally click, perseverance is good, but eventually you need to enjoy what you are doing. Okay. And and the mistake is to think that you can have your entire career doing something that you don't like. That's going to be a very unsatisfying career. And I will again go with data because I really, I think in terms of data.

And another study on intrusive motivation with Kailin. Willie was a PhD student working with me here faculty at Cornell. We had people choose between listening to the song, Hey Jude, and And listening to a loud alarm. And the trick was that the loud alarm paid more.

And so the majority of our participants, about 70% chose to listen to the loud alarm. So basically they're telling us no, I, I failed to listen to the loud alarm over Hey Jude. By the Beatles. And then they they do that. And what we find is people. Chose the alarm, regret their choice.

They, when they have fidelity, they say I would rather get a 10 percent pay cut and listen to the nice song. All right. Yeah, try to have more songs in your career than loud alarms. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Let's get specifically into the book and I think I want to tackle this in probably what is somewhat a nonlinear order first, because.

It's the beginning of the year. People are listening to this and the thing that I think happens at the beginning of the year, and we've had Katie Milkman here, whose research I know you cited in the book is that it's a temporal landmark. Despite the fact that there is this power to temporal landmarks, New Year's resolutions often end up being more like fantasies than real plans, and one of the things that you say is fantasies might feel good, but they're largely ineffective as a motivational tool, and when abstract goals become too abstract, they're at the risk of turning into fantasies that substitute for action.

And I read that and I just sat here imagining all these people who sit around on New Year's Day making plans that are fantasies or putting vision boards that they're going to stare at and thinking to myself, so you're just going to sit on your ass and stare at this thing and every one of these goals is going to materialize, which is why I wanted to have you as a guest because you specifically told me you think about everything in terms of data.

So let's talk about how we don't become a victim of fantasies when we are at a temporal landmark like the start of the year.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, I, first, I agree that temporal landmarks work, okay. And around new year, people think about resolutions. We looked at it for a few years here in the U S and last year, we ran some studies in China around the new year and we found that this is a time where people set goals, not all these goals will fail, okay.

But. And so when we follow up in ours, there are some people that are still pursuing, but some people have already dropped their their goals and we keep following these goals. All the way until the following November and and I remember most of the people had dropped their goals and still about 20 percent are still doing that, the thing.

And it's interesting to think what makes people stick to their goals. There are a few factors you mentioned. The degree to which that the goal is is a plan as opposed to a fantasy. And, fantasies, what characterize them is that you you envision yourself already achieving the goal.

Okay. So you're already like at your ideal whatever physical shape. Okay. You're already like So you envision yourself winning the medal, or the person who has not been drinking, or the fully employed person, whatever it is that you want to achieve. And this fantasy. Is not really a recipe for an action.

It's nothing like a plan. Okay? A plan for getting a job means that I will call my friends and my connections and I will walk on my resume and here are the steps that I need to take. And and the goal is to take all these steps so that eventually. Employed. It's very different than fantasizing about having a job.

Gabrielle Otting and did some studies in which she found that when gosh, I believe it was law students , it was students in some professional setting when they were fantasizing about having a job. That by itself actually decreased their motivation to send applications. It was when they had a plan that they were.

Sending applications. Fantasies are fun and nice. And like on New Year Eve, when you think, I don't know, holding the champagne, it's nice to fantasize about how the year is going to be terrific for me. But it's not a self control strategy. It's not going to get you anywhere. And so just don't count of this as a motivational strategy, indulgence.

Yeah,

Srini Rao: You talk about three traps in setting and framing a goal. One you say setting a goal that's too specific or concrete instead of an abstract goal. Setting a term goal in terms of something you wish to avoid rather than something you wish to approach. And I don't remember what the other one was because I think it was tied to all this.

So what are these traps at? How do people avoid. But then the other thing that struck me was how do you find this balance between abstract and concrete? Because I know in Steven Kotler's research, one of the things he talks about is the fact that clear goals are a flow trigger. How do you tie the abstract to the concrete, is what I'm saying.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. So you mentioned a few things. The abstract and the concrete is interesting. And it's interesting because in a way, it's like the how, which is the concrete. This is necessary because I didn't, I will not know how to do something unless I answer this question. The why, which is the more abstract is necessary because why would I do it if I cannot answer that?

The why. Okay. What we find is that you need to ask both questions and. Basically, when you set a goal, you want to ask a few why questions. You mentioned that taking a college class. I need to take this class. Why? Okay. Because if I pass this class, I can take the next class. Why? Why do you need to take the next class?

Because I want to get this college major. Why? Okay. Because I want to get into some profession. I would want to understand some problem. Ask these questions. Okay. Go more abstractly, understand that the reason behind what you are doing. Then at one point that, that why becomes too abstract. Okay. And if you just ask this question enough times, eventually it becomes just because I want to be happy.

Okay. And at that point I say but we all want to be happy. And if you think about how to be happy, so now let's go one level below. Okay. Stop asking how. That is not necessarily going to get you to take this class. It's like how to be happy. That's not by studying computer science for you.

And so if the why becomes so absent that it's no longer connects to how, or if you don't get back to where you started, when you asked the how questions, then then you became too too absent. It is no longer useful. Now, this is on the level of understanding the relationship between your means and goals.

How every goal is a means to something else and how to structure it such that you understand your overriding goals, your upset without losing sight of the concrete. There is also research that shows that just being in an abstract mindset, okay, so it's not about a specific goal, it's just being able to think more abstractly about your life helps you basically understand your priorities, okay, think about what you want to achieve with your life and just have a better understanding, which is often something that is easier.

From some distance. So there is research by Ko Chop and Liberman and Ken Fujita, that shows that just this mindset of taking some distance, some looking at things from above allows you to look at your life and as. Am I even doing what's best for me? Yeah. Being able to share your passion with your son is magic.

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Srini Rao: Let's talk about optimism. You mentioned Gabrielle Ottingen's work. And I remember the thing that stood out to me most from that book was the story she tells about Michael Phelps, where she says, people visualize themselves winning the gold medal, whereas Phelps visualized himself not winning the gold medal because his goggles got filled with water.

And because of that, when it happened, he was prepared. And this is a battle I have with one of my best friends constantly. Cause he thinks I'm negative and I think he's a delusional optimist. And we balance each other out beautifully. Like I always say, you should anticipate the worst so you can be prepared for when it happens.

And he's just no, you should just expect the best. And you talk about this, you say that optimism caused by the planning fallacy is a mistake. You'd wish to correct. It happens because when budgeting time and money, people tend to focus on the task at hand while neglecting all other demands on their resources.

And, I thought about this when I started reading Don Moore's book, Perfectly Confident and how. We tend to be overconfident about things that we can't control. So how do we balance optimism with realism when it comes to setting goals?

Ayelet Fishbach: That's a good one. And I know what I hear you about always having for the worst.

The thing to think, the thing to remember about optimism is that optimism is often a motivational strategy. It's often a way to challenge ourselves when you you get up in the morning and you say I'm going to fly many flights of stairs today and I'm going to finish a project at work and I'm.

Going to cook an amazing and healthy meal and work like that to, to get connected to like some relationships, some people that I didn't talk to well. You're optimistic, right? There's no way you can fit all this to, to one day. But you're also motivating yourself to work on all

,

these different goals.

And basically what we consistently find is that these optimists, these people that say that they will do more and that they will do it sooner are doing more and sooner. They, that is, they might not quite meet their unrealistic expectations, but they will do more than if they expected very little.

Okay. And so when someone when a student tells me that they will finish the assignment way before what I think is reasonable go for it. Okay. Challenge yourself. Okay. Think that you can finish it very quickly. And, if you expect to finish it sooner, then you're going to start working on it today, as opposed to procrastinate and leave it for.

So optimism is often a self-control and a motivational strategy. But some optimism is is a fallacy and some of it is just not not taking everything that you need to take into account when you make a plan. So you need to. To consider whether this ambitious plan that you have for yourself or for the people around you, how important is to actually be accurate.

If accuracy is critical, then beware of the planning fallacy. If accuracy is not really the concern, okay, what you're trying to do is like moderate yourself to climb the mountain, then go for it. Okay. So come to the planning fallacy, you will also will climb more mountains than if you didn't. So basically, if

Srini Rao: we're, having been making a cancer treatment drug or working in a hospital, we want to be aware of the planning fallacy.

If we're making art or writing a book, we could use it to our advantage. Yes.

Ayelet Fishbach: Also, if at work, if you set a schedule for yourself that will affect other people. Then the coordination is going to suffer if your predictions are inaccurate. . Okay? But if you set some aspirational deadlines for yourself for when you will finish some projects that you have at home and that no one else is really affected by those, then they are motivating yourself and there is no harm in being behind that on your project.

I, I strongly believe that they call these like overachievery and people they are very much those people that plan for too much.

Srini Rao: That's fine. Okay. So I think that brings a perfect segue into talking about incentives because you say to optimize the impact of your incentives, you want to reward the right thing, whether it's teamwork, creative solutions, successfully preventing harm.

Or pest free neighborhood rather than lots of dead rats. Of course, recognizing that you've incentivized the right thing for yourself. When I read that, and this just came up in my mind, I thought back to two programs when I was in elementary school, probably, which I'm sure your research has come across, D.

A. R. E., the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, which apparently did absolutely nothing to combat drug use. I was like, I went to D. A. R. E., I had a friend who told me once, he was like, The way he interpreted Dare was don't do any of this stuff. It feels really good and will make you, feel really interesting feelings.

And he tried every drug under the sun after Dare. I can tell you it didn't work on me. We'll leave it at that. But then there was another one that I very distinctly remember this in third grade. If you read four books every month, you would get a pizza personal pan pizza from pizza, Indian parents making you eat Indian food every day.

Personal pan pizza was like the greatest thing in the world, but it didn't actually increase the number of books people read. So talk to me about how we design incentives, particularly in situations where you're dealing with outcomes that you can't control. So for example. I had a client who came to me once or potential client who said, I want you to help me sell a million copies of a book.

And I told her, I was like, I can't help you do that because I've never done it. And I think you're setting yourself up for failure because you can't control that in any way at all. So in particularly in terms of in places like that, where we have outcomes that we have no control over, how do we create the right incentives to stay motivated?

Ayelet Fishbach: So that was a very long question, but let me just clarify something that you cannot possibly argue that. Pizza is better than Indian food,

Srini Rao: right? No, I, trust me, I made that argument when I was in third grade. Then I went to college and within a month I was just like, God, I want to go home and eat some home cooked Indian food.

Now, most of the time when my mom is we're ordering out, we're like, why the hell are we ordering out?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah just wanted to make sure because my parents, yeah, made like the best cuisine on the planet. I would not.

Srini Rao: Trust me, that was unsophisticated, third grade thinking

Ayelet Fishbach: that makes sense. You mentioned the dead rats, just that this quote will make sense. I, in my book, I'm talking about that, the Hanoi massacre, which is basically a French colonist program from the beginning of the 20th century where they in Hanoi.

In Vietnam they offered residents 1 cent per a dead rat. And surprise, surprise that people were starting to breed rest so that there are more dead rats so that they can claim the money. So that, yeah, that's another good quote comes from . Yeah. So lot of examples for incentives systems that, that backfire.

Okay. So that, that you might actually not need to Have the right so that you can claim the prize or that you find a different way or that I know people are doing something that is unethical because this is the way to get the reward. Okay. They're like you're getting paid for reading four books.

What if you just say that you have read four books, you just check them out of the library and never read them, right? So you say, you find other ways, right? And so this is a, like a problem with incentives. We know that incentives sometimes do work now. Incentives work when we understand them as as an additional kind of mini corn, so that so that the main reason that let's say I think that someone doesn't want to use drugs is because they they feel that they.

Will have a better of something, a better life and they will be able to experience things in, in, in a better way. And then they can also get something from their teacher within the, as an incentive. The main reason to read a book for a child is because the book is interesting. And the book is not interesting.

The child is going to read the book. And then the incentives it says. And we are also going to recognize you as as a person who reads their books, the extent that kids even think that this is a worthy reward. And then this is useful. The worry with incentives is that often they obscure the purpose of why I'm doing it in the first place.

Okay? And so if there is no very clear, like long term. Rewards for pursuing a goal is the only reason is that the short term incentive that can actually make you forget about the long term goal. And to give you a concrete example like that, the reason that people should want to drive under the influence is because.

That will significantly risk their life. Okay? So their life expectancy will be significantly lower if they will drive under the influence. But if people believe that the reason not to do that is that you will get caught, or if kids believe that the reason that you should not do that is because you have not turned 21 yet, and we are getting two.

And in trouble then they might get confused about why why they are doing it in the first place. And they know where they might turn 21 and then drink too much beyond what is healthy and still fun. And they might drive under the influence when they are less concerned with that police and being around it and risk their lives.

And this is just 1 example, but that illustrates why incentives can confuse us and confuse others when we set incentives for them. Lots of work in behavioral economics on incentives they need to match the activity. It's actually increases motivation when you pay people for any activity that involves like luck and gambling, that people are excited about that.

So kids that play a game of luck when they were paid in some tokens, they were more intrinsically motivated. The same kind of incentives decreased motivation to solve problems for another group of children. This is a classic study already by R. E. Kuglanski going all the way to the seventies, you take the same incentive.

It works for playing a game of flat. It undermines motivation to solve problems at school and it's really just that. Understanding how people think about the monetary incentive in this particular situation.

Srini Rao: What about the situation where, like I said, we have an outcome that we can't control, for example, like somebody who wants to write a book or grow a blog?

Because I know that you tie it to progress and having read Teresa Amabile's book, it took me a long time to realize that if I could And this is what I always tell people is measure your progress with metrics that you can control. Don't measure it based on, basically like metrics and things that you know, like things like traffic or how many people want my books.

That was a huge shift for me that ironically helped me accomplish my goal of selling a thousand books.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. So you want to monitor progress. Do you want to feel that there is progress and and working on a goal without experiencing progress can be quite upsetting in that you really feel like you're not moving anywhere.

In order to be able to see progress, there are a few things that you can do. And what you mentioned, which is probably where I would start measuring. On something that you can evaluate. Okay. I, it is the example, I'm not the first one to give it, but I use the example of calories, which are notoriously very hard to monitor.

We don't actually know how many calories we consume. We don't see calories. They are very hard to. To calculate. So it's just not a great metric. Okay. Having half of your plate veggies this much is here. Okay. This is something that you can see. The other thing, so sometimes it's really hard to see progress when you look ahead.

So look back. Yeah. If you just thought something, okay. If you mentioned a goal of selling let's say 1000 books. If you only sold at 20 or 30 or 40, then looking back and see that you have both from 20 to 40 is much more motivating that look ahead and see that it's so far away.

Okay. They, it's walk off. And like, when we walk on a project and we are just at the beginning, it's easier to look back at and look at what. We've already done it also increases commitment, and this is another example for a study that we ran this time in Seoul with Ming Jang Koo. Where people working in an advertising company were more motivated to stay in their current world when they reflected on what they've already achieved, when they monitor their progress in terms of looking.

And by the way, they were actually more motivated to move on and move to the next one when they were looking at what's still missing. Okay. When they were monitoring their progress in a more like intuitive way of. That's what I still need to do.

Srini Rao: So there's one other aspect of this that you talk about, and that is this principle of maximizing or maximizing attainment when it comes to goals. And I remember thinking to myself, that made so much sense to me because it's okay, I'll make my goal to write a thousand words a day. And it actually helps you accomplish all of these other goals, which are like writing books, publishing blog posts consistently.

Can you explain the principle of maximizing attainment and how it relates to the dilution principle that you've talked about? Because it seems like the principle of maximizing attainment, correct me if I'm wrong, is the antidote to the dilution principle.

Ayelet Fishbach: Think, I'm not sure I understand your question. Yeah, no,

Srini Rao: fair enough. Okay. So you talk about this dilution principle, which as I understand it, when we're pursuing too many goals, it pulls us in multiple directions. We don't make progress towards any of them. But then this idea of maximizing attainment, as I understood it, was that you could have one activity that helps you accomplish multiple

Ayelet Fishbach: goals.

Got got it where you see that the discrepancy. Yes. So by the principles of maximizing attainment, you want to now achieve more for your investment. Okay. So you want to choose that the exercise that improves your health, but he also get to catch up on your TV and then being entertained and maybe do it with a friend.

So you also have some quality time with them and a bunch of other things. By the principle of dilution, when an activity achieves only one thing, then there is less of a perceptual dilution. So it feels very much for that thing like that. The person that thinks about exercising only in terms of running, okay, the heavy runner for them, there is Very strong connection between running and feeling they are in a good shape.

There is no other way to feel this way. And they don't run for any other reason. And so now we can sometimes experience this tension. Where if you get more for your investment then your investment doesn't feel like it's uniquely related to any of these goals. I would say that it still makes sense to maximize attainment.

It just that you need to understand why it's not intuitive for you. It's not intuitive for you because when you don't maximize payment is when it feels so, , when you have no, like I give it like, I remember the one point I had a student that told me about another professor that is is so smart and that like this other professor was so impressive and I asked Mike what's so important to you?

Why do you think this person is such genius and so smart? And my students said, because I don't understand what they're saying.

what? And so know if someone is is unclear and and doesn't teach very well, then you might think that they are smart by some like logic of dilution. But it's not that you want a teacher that that doesn't communicate very well, and that it doesn't relate to you very well because like the, they, you will perceive a stronger connection between their academic achievements and their communication style.

And maybe that was not a good example, but hopefully you, you understand the idea that like, let's take food. Maybe that's a better. Hey, you want to eat food that is healthy, and tasty, and available, it's in Susan, it's not too expensive. Now it's a fallacy to, to think that food that is not tasty is healthier, okay?

Or that, that food that is unavailable right now, okay, that it's out of season is is tastier. Okay, it's not like that you really need to find the food that serves all these goals. So you need to go for maximizing entertainment, realizing that your mind will often play this trick on you and getting you to think that if it's good for one thing, it's probably not good for the other.

Srini Rao: It got me thinking about surfing. So I started surfing and I noticed my mom would think that this is all about exercise. It has nothing to do with exercise. That's just a convenient fringe benefit. Like you talk to anybody who surfs snowboards or skis, any of these things, they're like, no, this is just a way to, to exercise.

Just a convenient benefit of something that just feels really good. It's a fringe benefit. But it also had this huge ripple effect on every

,

area of my life. I got up earlier every day. I drank less. I stopped smoking when I drank. And it was all of it due to this one thing, which I feel like is the principle of maximizing attainment at work.

Yes.

Ayelet Fishbach: I love this since then. Yes. So you can get all these extra benefits and you understand how the perception of of conflict is often misleading. It's often an illusion. Like by, by doing one thing, you'll actually facilitate another. Okay. By that going on education, you're actually helping your work.

Okay. It's not a conflict, okay? And leisure is a way to support your work just as much as working, he said, is a way to afford your leisure time.

Srini Rao: Let's talk about two final components of this. One is how motivation fluctuates over the course of a goal, because, I think as yours and Dan Pink's work have showed in his book.

When I, as I understand it now that, we're very motivated at the beginning, the motivation dwindles in the middle, and then it picks up steam at the end. And I've seen this myself too, where, you closer you are to the finish line, the more you're motivated to finish. So let's start there.

And then we'll talk about a learning from your failure.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. So this is the middle problem. And if there, there is an end, okay, then motivation will. Pick that. Suddenly motivation is high at the beginning. In the middle is when we we lose sight. Our actions seem to have much less impact, okay?

Thank you.

If you're at like let's say four year college, the first year you feel like I already did my first year. Like the last year when I was done, like in the middle age, you don't feel like your efforts really. Does something, okay, we when I studied, this is with Rima Toit Hilary, who's now at Northwestern where we looked at Jewish people in Israel lighting the menorah over the eight days of Hanukkah, okay.

And if you're unfamiliar with the tradition, the only thing that you need to do for Hanukkah is just lighting this menorah for eight consecutive days. And almost everybody disease on the first day. The majority disease on the last day in the middle is when they didn't quite follow the the tradition.

And middles are when it's harder we want to keep them short. We want to work harder on increasing our motivation in the in the meeting. So as, as much as you can. Just try to have short term goals, okay if a weekly exercise goal, it's not that you don't want to exercise next week, but it's a, by having it as a weekly exercise goal, you have a short meanwhile.

So an annual saving goals, of course, I also want to save next year, but by thinking about this in terms of one year, there is a less of a long middle, and this is helpful.

Srini Rao: I love that. It makes me think instead of committing to swimming every day of the month, I said, okay, I'm going to go three times this week.

So the middle becomes shorter.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, exactly. Yes. So sometimes it doesn't make sense. So I'd like having a morning swimming goal, that's hard, but try to get to that, that lowest unit that is sensible. You can actually engage in that.

Srini Rao: Yeah. So I think the thing is, everybody here knows that you need to learn from your failures, but there's something that you said that really struck me.

You say negative information on failure has two features that often make it superior. It tends to be unique. And while it's rare, it's also more elaborated. And the reason that struck me the most is my dad and I were driving back from the airport last night and my brother in law and I were asking him about PhD students.

And he tells me this story about how he failed one of his students in the qualifying exam. And that student actually asked that my dad be removed from his qualifying exam committee the next time around. And when he came up, for a second, when my dad actually was the one who gave him a recommendation for another job, and he said, he went to that student, he said, see, you realize that because I failed you, your knowledge improved significantly.

And he said, yeah, now I understand that. To your point we don't really learn very much from our successes. I never sat around and said, okay, what was the cause of the success? I don't ever do the postmortem when something is successful. I definitely do when I fail at something. I

Ayelet Fishbach: love this example.

There is actually as your story suggests, there is often not enough that is being learned. And negative feedback, and often the lesson that people take from negative feedback is just don't go there, don't try that it's not for you. Don't choose your dad as an advisor because he gave me negative feedback, which is of course the wrong lesson, but very intuitive to people.

So we don't learn a lot from negative information, from negative feedback, partially because it doesn't feel good. So Okay. But also partially because it's harder and it's just not intuitive for consumers, for example, to look at negative reviews when they're choosing a product, it's much more intuitive to, to look at positive reviews.

So this is the kind of the negative information that is not personally relevant. I don't own this product that it shouldn't hurt me if someone else is writing something negative. But it's not the information that I think I should look at. And what we find is that often actually negative information is the best predictor of success.

So it, it enables success as in your example, it motivates someone to try harder and it predicts success in the sense that Negative information is often informative, you read negative reviews in my previous example, and you know whether these complaints are serious or not. Okay, if if someone tells you that they're the prices so in, in a restaurant are too high then you don't have much concern about the quality of the food.

And if they tell you that that they got stomach flu after eating there if you read positive reviews, they tend to be quite generic. They have less. Information in if someone highlights what is wrong about the way you do something well, maybe what they highlight is actually a very minor, very easy to change, very small things.

And I can predict that you're doing your job pretty good that they highlight some, something much more substantial. Gentlemen. Negative information and negative feedback in particular is not only necessary in order to learn what's not there, which is often harder, it also informative to the extent that there was more violence in negative feedback and you can see where the complaints, the criticism is more substantive or not.

Srini Rao: It's funny, I had a student who asked for a refund on one of my courses. And to your point, he gave me so much feedback, he basically wrote probably a page and I went and immediately looked at all of it. I was like, okay, you want implementation exercises done? Like he gave me things that I could do to actually make the course like I didn't get him to buy the course again, but he made me see flaws that I didn't recognize.

I thought to myself, wow, this is actually really useful. And I made major changes based on what he told me, even though he didn't buy the course again.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah. So this is as I'm listening to you, this is such a great example for what most of us intuitively don't do. Okay. If someone is asking for a refund for my service, I not want to ever see them again.

Okay. To be able to engage with them and actually hear what they have to say, requires some confidence, some expertise some retrieving our mental resources, curing our ego. Let me say that often thinking about what advice I would give to another person is It is a way to force yourself to learn from such negative experiences.

Srini Rao: Yeah. So I'm, sometimes I think negative feedback can be useful. Other times I think it's just cruel. So for example book reviews are a really good one. Like I will always say, okay, let me go look at the best review of a book. Let me go look at the worst review and see what the contrast is between the two of them.

But for example, I had a book that hit the wall street journal bestseller list. It was a self published book. This woman's review was, I hope this guy is a better surfer than he is a writer. And to this day, that's the only one of my book reviews I can quote to you by memory. But that's not particularly useful feedback, but I've had listeners who are, this is the one piece of feedback I always listen to when I see this come in and I know it's a criticism.

They always preface it with, I love your show, but, and I'm like, okay, this is somebody I need to listen to.

Ayelet Fishbach: That's the, yeah, this is interesting. And I know when we look at at book reviews, which we did some work with book reviews, we actually, we look at the positive and negative within the same review.

Okay. So we were doing a different exercise than what you just did they, they taking I think one style with you That might not necessarily have a lot of information and that could be for all kind of reasons. Yeah. Publishing a book myself, I learned that there is a whole, a community of of people who will write negative reviews with some like business calls in mind.

So let's not go there. Yeah. That's. That's really not about psychology more about strategy and unethical strategy. But if you look at professional reviews and you separate the good comments from the bad comments, okay, like the comments about what we love about the book and the comments and what could be improved.

Then we often see that there is really useful information in that in the negative review. But this is conditional on that, the reviewer is trying to help, right? Like they were really trying to be accurate. That

Srini Rao: helps. Yeah. No, absolutely. Let me wrap this up with two final questions.

I, let's wrap this up with a concrete goal, which I think everybody has some semblance or variation of this goal at the beginning of the year, and that's to make more money. Let's just apply all of your principles to that one idea. Let's just say, okay, I want to increase my income. How do we use what you've taught us to do that?

Ayelet Fishbach: Oh, by the way, the most common new year goal in our data is house related goal the most common is exercise more, eat better financial goals, which is for many people it's getting a job, getting a promotion and maybe getting out of debt and all this in a way related to make more money.

Therefore I think around 20 percent if I remember it correctly. Yeah. So let's with that make more money. Okay. Think about four things. Okay. How do you set this goal? So why do you want to make more money? Money is, this is a means, like for most of us, it's not an, okay.

So what is it you're trying to achieve? Ask like this, why questions, understand your goal. Can you make it intrinsic? There are fun, interesting, challenging ways to make money. Can just think about a way that is engaging for you. The approach calls usually work better than avoidance goals.

So think about it more as just approaching financial comfort than avoiding the discomfort. Parts to monitor progress. How do you do this and how do you know how much money I. You were making and how much you are father from where you have started and closer to where you want to go.

If your goal is to make a million dollar I would say probably better to look back unless you are extremely wealthy. To begin with, Kayla, and look back to the at what you have achieved. Monitor your progress. Where you can see progress and not where it's going to be so far and daunting.

Learn from negative feedback. There are a bucket of motivational strategies your other goals. Okay. So you want to be more financially comfortable, but this is not the only thing that you want. Okay. You probably also want to take care of yourself as a person. Okay. You want to grow intellectually.

Okay. Mentally. You want to connect to people. Maybe you want to be healthier. Maybe you have goals for your family and members partner, where your kids, whoever is around you. Maybe you have some societal and goals, how everything fits together. Okay? And how are you going to create that, the right balance?

Other ways in which you can make money, but also achieve these other goals. Okay. These are the paths that you want to take. Okay. Alternatively, there are possible ways where you could make money by undermining everything else. Okay. And this is probably not the best path for you. And then the last packet of interventions and strategies that we can use is social support, which is where we started this conversation.

So who is with you? Okay. Who's helping? Okay. Who's standing in the way? Okay. Did you tell your family that this is a goal for the next year? Are they on board? Okay. If you are going to work more hours, who's going to help you with that? If you are going to buy next stuff, which is, by the way, Great idea, regardless of whether you want to have more s right, , like everybody's buy less stuff and is my, my, the people that live with me that share the house on, are they on board?

They how are they going to help? Can we analyze together? What is their stuff that we need to stop getting and working with with other people are, is really a recipe for success?

Srini Rao: Beautiful. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? No the, I

Ayelet Fishbach: think that what's hard for me here is that I like mistakes. So I don't want to make some something perfect, something unmistakable. And I would go with Person that transform mistakes.

Beautiful.

Srini Rao: I really can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom and insights with listeners. I'm so glad that we are getting to kick off the new year with this message. To our listeners, I love that it's backed in real science and not just motivational mumbo jumbo.

Where can people find out more about you your work the book and everything else that you're up to?

Ayelet Fishbach: Get get it done, surprising lessons from the science of motivation and hopefully that will help and go on my website, idealogicalrespect. com, and I try to provide lots of information and there I'm also on social media and I would just love to hear from your audience.

Srini Rao: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show. With that.