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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
My guest on Nudge today has spent the past year completing a pretty bizarre challenge.
- [00:06]
Patrick Fagan
I committed myself to doing one new thing for every week of the year. Some of them quite small things like I watched my first sunrise, I wrote to a serial killer, he didn't write me back. Whereas some of them were larger. I went to the Middle east for the first time. I went to a My Little Pony convention. I did all sorts of things.
- [00:26]
Phil Agnew
This year long experiment in happiness involved doing one new thing every single week. But did it make him happier? And can we apply his findings ourselves, not just for our own happiness, but perhaps in our life and in our work? Keep listening to find out. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioural science. But that is exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped by 25%, qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow. Today's guest on Nudge is a renowned expert in behavioral science, psychology and marketing.
- [01:28]
Patrick Fagan
Hi, I'm Patrick. Sometimes I ask people to call me Pat. Please don't do that. I don't like it. But the reason I ask people sometimes is because research shows that a shorter name or nickname can make you more likable. Which I think is where I could use some help.
- [01:42]
Phil Agnew
In his books Hooked and Free youe Mind, Patrick explains how you can apply behavioural science not just in your work, but also in your general day to day life.
- [01:51]
Patrick Fagan
And that's the kind of thing I do as an applied behavioral scientist is take psychological theory and think about how to actually use it in the real world. Like, yes, optimizing your own name, but also websites, adverts and so on.
- [02:03]
Phil Agnew
He's worked with dozens of companies like Google and Warner Records, helping them apply behavioural science.
- [02:09]
Patrick Fagan
I was also at Cambridge Analytica, but not in the political department I will say.
- [02:16]
Phil Agnew
And for his latest project he wanted to apply behavioural science in his life.
- [02:22]
Patrick Fagan
So I'm doing a project called Just Do Stuff, which you can read@justdostuff.co.uk where I committed myself to doing one new thing for every week of the year.
- [02:33]
Phil Agnew
It's not just sunrises and little pony conventions. Some weeks this challenge had a fairly major impact on Patrick's life.
- [02:41]
Patrick Fagan
I explored my relationship with technology a bit as well. For example, going a week without TV, 24 hours without any screens. I let AI control my day for a whole day.
- [02:52]
Phil Agnew
But why? What inspired Patrick to do this?
- [02:56]
Patrick Fagan
I did it because I wasn't in the happiest place. I was going through some life changes, just had a new baby, buying a house, these kinds of things. We were just coming out of lockdown and I realized a few experiences taught me just how powerful and important experiences are to your wellbeing and happiness and just life in general.
- [03:18]
Phil Agnew
Patrick realised how important experiences are to him after a fairly strange experience a few years earlier.
- [03:24]
Patrick Fagan
After researching my last book that I co wrote with journalist Laura Dodsworth about how to not be influenced if you don't want to be, I joined a couple of cults. She really kind of forced me into it, going to this retreat in the woods for a weekend. I really wasn't looking forward to it, but actually it's one of the best things I had done for a long time. It was kind of a wake up call that, oh, I love doing stuff, I love doing stuff. And so I committed myself to like doing more of that as a project and it was really transformative.
- [03:56]
Phil Agnew
Clearly Patrick isn't taking the easy option here. Joining colts is hardly an easy way to gain new experiences. It's probably a lot easier to just join a running club or a choir. And logistically, Patrick's project was a pretty hard one to undertake.
- [04:10]
Patrick Fagan
It sounds quite simple, one new thing for every week of the year. But actually it was quite difficult to make the list to find things. Some things I thought would be quite easy actually, words. So I thought it'd be quite easy to find a psychic, for example. But it's actually. They never replied to my emails. Maybe I should have just put a request out in the ether. It's actually, as I said, logistically quite difficult and it was also quite expensive for me at least. I spent about £12,000 across the year, although I will say the mode was 0 pounds, so most of them were free.
- [04:45]
Phil Agnew
Spending 12,000 pounds on a project that just might make you happy is a fairly risky undertaking. But Patrick was confident it would work because he has some evidence to back it up. Evidence that proves that experiences can provide more happiness than material goods.
- [05:04]
Patrick Fagan
There was a diary study where they had people measure their happiness after purchases and they found that after a experiential purchase rather than a material one, people were happier. I think about 6% happier. Statistically significant difference.
- [05:21]
Phil Agnew
A similar 2003 study titled to do or to have that is the Question. Great title. It asked 97 British Columbia undergraduate students to recall a recent purchase. Half were asked to recall their most recent purchase over $100 and that purchase had to be made with the intention of gaining a life experience. So this is stuff like concert tickets and travel and dining out. The other were also asked to recall their most recent purchase over $100, but this time made with the intention of acquiring a tangible object. So clothing, electronics, jewelry, that type of thing. The participants then rated the purchases on a scale from 1 to 9. They rated how happy the purchase made them, how much the purchase contributed to their overall happiness, and a bunch of different other measures as well. The researchers found that those who purchase experiences rated those purchases as more happiness inducing than the material purch. In fact, they said the experiences made them 13.4% happier. This was conducted back in 2003, but Patrick says the results would probably have been even more pronounced today.
- [06:29]
Patrick Fagan
It's also particularly true in our current context. I think there's two things that are generally making people a bit miserable. Certainly were making me miserable. One is screens. So there's some research showing that screen time is linked to unhappiness and mental health outcomes. I think Gene Twenge did a study showing this correlation between screen time and unhappiness.
- [06:52]
Phil Agnew
It's not just unhappiness. A recent study titled Time Distortion for short form video users split 62 college students into two groups. The first group was the TikTok group. They watched TikTok for 15 minutes. The other group was the reading group. They read for 15 minutes after both groups completed an academic task and then they were asked to estimate the duration of both activities. So both the reading or the tiktoking depending on their group and their the academic task as well. The findings I think are rather eye opening, but perhaps they're not surprising. The TikTok group significantly overestimated the time spent on both TikTok and the academic task. Afterwards, the reading group, they had no overestimation. In fact they had no time distortion at all. They estimated the time accurately. The TikTok usage caused what the researchers called upward time distortion. They made people believe that activities last longer than they actually do. This means tedious activities like chores and exercise and studying. All of these things will feel significantly longer if you spend a lot of your day scrolling through TikTok looking at videos on there.
- [08:04]
Patrick Fagan
There's this book called the Shallows about how the Internet, that kind of Internet based information is not processed in a deep way. It's quite superficial shallow. It's not really encoded to memory. There's a meme that you never see a smartphone in your dreams and I certainly can't think of that happening. And that if that were to be true, it's probably because again, you're not encoding it deeply into memory and so it doesn't surface in your dreams. So screens make us unhappy. They're not really purposeful or meaningful. And also being stuck indoors, especially post lockdown, can make us stressed and miserable as well. One lockdown study in Israel found that lockdowns, being indoors from lockdowns caused people's amygdala to grow, which is of course the threat processing part of the brain. It just makes people stressed really being indoors, not going out in the sun and the fresh air and getting exercise. So just getting out and doing stuff is really important for your physical and mental well being.
- [09:02]
Phil Agnew
And funnily enough, the least enjoyable activity Patrick experienced was something he could only do by looking at his phone.
- [09:08]
Patrick Fagan
The worst activity by far was day trading. I wanted to see if I can make £100 day trading in plus 500 because I thought that would be life changing. You know, I can just sit on the beach, use my phone for an hour a day and make a living. And I did make a hundred pounds in that first day. The next day I got a little bit cocky and I lost two and a half thousand pounds. And that was the most expensive activity. And I was pretty distraught, mostly because it was just such a waste of money. I didn't have anything to show for it. I said to my wife, I lost two and a half thousand pounds. And she goes, well, you made £100 yesterday, so it's only 2,400 if that helps. Which it didn't.
- [09:50]
Phil Agnew
So what about some of Patrick's more enjoyable experiences? Well, I asked him to share one.
- [09:56]
Patrick Fagan
Well, I can tell you haven't lived until you've held a strange man's grizzled face between your hands and had to stare into his eyes for a full minute.
- [10:04]
Phil Agnew
This is Patrick's experience at a cuddle workshop.
- [10:07]
Patrick Fagan
A cuddle workshop is where people go along to have physical touch with, with other people. It was certainly a memorable experience. It was the one I was looking forward to the least. I was dreading it. I also hated it at the time. But it was also kind of the most memorable. It was, I would say, transformative. I have a great story from it as well. But there are a couple of psychological behavioral principles that made it so meaningful. The first being the importance of socializing the bonding, social element. As I said, social experiences tend to be more memorable and enjoyable. There was a study that found that even chocolate tastes 28% more chocolatey when it's eaten with someone else. Good news for Maltesers, I guess.
- [10:55]
Phil Agnew
In this 2014 study, 23 female undergraduates at Yale University were asked to taste a dark chocolate bar. Sometimes they ate the bar in the company of others at the same time as someone else. Other times they ate it alone without anybody else there, and they had to eat it while doing another task. So in this experiment, it was looking at a piece of artwork. What they found was that the women rated the taste of the exact same chocolate bar because it was the same chocolate bar in both scenarios, while they rated it 28% worse, 28% less tasty when they ate it alone rather than when they ate it in a group. So this, for me, explains why meals taste a hell of a lot better at a restaurant rather than when I order that exact same meal and eat it at home on my sofa. There's something about being in a social environment, about being with other people, about being in a restaurant with other people as well, that makes food taste better.
- [11:50]
Patrick Fagan
So socializing is important. I mean, I did experiments where I went bungee jumping and there were no people involved. And to be honest, it was kind of boring. I was just pushed off a ledge with a rope. Whereas Cuddle Workshop or the My Little Pony convention or the BDSM nightclub, which I only went to as an observer, by the way, I'll be very clear, it was the people really which made these experiences. And the second principle for the Cuddle Workshop is the principle of struggle. So in our kind of tech obsessed age, technological providers and suppliers and brands are always trying to make our lives easier and reduce friction. And there's a lot to be said for that, obviously, but it kind of makes us miserable not having friction. We actually need some kind of effort and purpose and struggle, if you like, to feel like we have meaning and to be happy in our lives. And we value things more if we put effort in. There's a principle called the effort justification effect, where participants who were made to go through a harder, more effortful ritual to join a discussion. So with no ritual, they just joined the discussion. With mild ritual. They read out, I think, some words or statements which are kind of a bit embarrassing, and for severe ritual, they read out some words or statements that were very awkward and embarrassing, and then they engaged in the discussion and afterwards rated the quality of it. And if they put a lot of effort in a Very severe initiation. They rated the quality of discussion better.
- [13:19]
Phil Agnew
This is a 1959 study by the legendary researcher Elliot Aronson. If you've listened to Nudge before, you will have heard me cite him an awful lot. And also, also his colleague Judson Mills. In the study, 63 female college students were asked to read aloud some explicit sexual words and two graphic passages from a novel before joining the group. That is the high ordeal group, if you were wondering, they had to read all these sexual words in two graphic passages, something nobody would want to read in front of strangers. It was under the pretext that they were joining a discussion on the psychology of sex. So it sort of made sense as to why they had to read this stuff. Those who were in that high ordeal initiation rated the group. So the people in the group are 17% more intelligent and they rated the discussion. So the actual discussion that they would then have as 22% more interesting than those who joined the discussion without having to do an initiation at all. Now remember, the researchers had set it up so the other participants in the group shared the exact same insights. They spoke in the same way, they had the exact same discussion. They showed the exact same level of intelligence. The only difference was the initiation. And when people put that effort into joining the group, they valued that discussion far higher.
- [14:30]
Patrick Fagan
There's also things like the IKEA effect, where if you assemble something yourself, as you know, of course you value it more than if it comes preassembled. So having that kind of commitment, investment, effort is actually quite important for well being. I think, you know, happiness comes from two things, broadly speaking, pleasure and purpose. I think today we're very much focused on pleasure in our day to day lives, but probably quite lacking in purpose. So having experiences which actually add a little friction is not always a bad thing. And I think there's an important takeaway there for brands as well, that it's not always about making things as easy as possible, but actually adding a bit of experiential friction. Like I heard of insurance company and they really streamlined their claims process to the point where customers didn't trust it anymore. It was too easy, it was too quick and actually put them off. So a little bit of experiential friction, not always a bad thing.
- [15:23]
Phil Agnew
But the activity that really taught Patrick about the effort paradox wasn't the cuddle workshop, it was a dance class.
- [15:30]
Patrick Fagan
Yeah, so I went to a dance class with my wife for Valentine's Day. It was hosted by Oti Mabusu from Strictly Come Dancing, which my wife loves. So her Strictly Come Dancing fantasy came true. If by fantasy you mean awkwardly shuffling around a warehouse offhanger Lane and they had mirrors up on the wall everywhere so you could see yourself dancing, which you might not believe. This film, terrible at dancing. It's not really in my nature, and so it was very, very awkward and uncomfortable for me. However, that awkwardness and lack of comfort actually bonded me and my wife. It was a very fun memory that we made together and that we talk about together. So again, it had. It was social. It was something my wife and I did together which bonded us. You know, back in my dating days, I used to have a rule that always take your date to second location, so you go from the first bar to another one, or better yet, an arcade or something, because then it feels like an adventure you're going into together and it's kind of bonding. And secondly, of course, there was a lot of struggle. There was a lot of effort involved, not just the physical effort of dancing, but overcoming that barrier, pushing myself out of my comfort zone to do something I really didn't want to do. Surrounded by strangers and mirrors and a celebrity was hard, but it was. That's what made it meaningful.
- [16:49]
Phil Agnew
Patrick's proving something that I've spoken about a lot before on the show. Effort increases enjoyment. This is true not only for the individual experiencing the effort, but also those witnessing the effort. Patrick's partner, I believe, would have felt a more profound love for him when she noticed how hard it was for him to attend the dance class, how much effort he was putting in to overcome his anxieties. All of those things would have made her appreciate him even more. Effort. It leads to enjoyment. Social activities beat isolated ones. Screens reduce our enjoyment and they warp our sense of time. And experiences are perceived as more enjoyable than material purchases. But what happened when Patrick did this?
- [17:31]
Patrick Fagan
I did infiltrate a Just the Oil meetup.
- [17:34]
Phil Agnew
Find out after the break. Marketing against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. If you want to know what's happening right now in marketing, what's coming ahead, and how you can lead the way. This podcast is perfect for you. If you want an episode to get you started. I would suggest you search for my episode on Marketing against the Grain. Just search for Phil Agnew on the Marketing against the Grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the perils of using AI for marketing. So go and listen to Marketing against the Grain wherever you get your podcast. Welcome Back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. I'm chatting with Patrick Fagan who spent the past 52 weeks doing 52 new experiences. Here's one of his more peculiar experiences.
- [18:25]
Patrick Fagan
I did infiltrate a Just Stop Oil meetup. Infiltrate, just a fancy word for saying I found a meetup and went to it. I was probably the only non kind of activist there and it was really eye opening in that it made me empathize with them. In the past I had this view of them that was kind of quite abstract and taken from the the media really or clips online. These are really annoying people. I hate them. Why are they doing this? They were just kind of two dimensional monsters, I guess in my head. And then going along and meeting them and interacting with them was very revelatory that I felt that these are real people. Of course rationally, you know, I can say that human beings progress to us, but going along actually could feel it. I could hear their concerns and I can understand why they were doing this stuff. And it really made them into flesh and blood people. So that was a big pillar that I learned from some of these experiences was empathy. Like the My Little Pony convention going to that I thought they'd all be weirdos, but leaving it, I realized that only most of them were weirdos. But again, it made them into like flesh and blood, real people. And there was also an interesting moment at the Just a While meeting where another person who I guess you could say had infiltrated, stood up about five minutes in and he went, you're all nutters and stormed out. And he was calling them nutters. They were calling him a science denier. And they weren't having any dialogue, they were not talking to each other. So it's kind of sad that these two worlds of bubbles exist and neither of them are going to get anywhere if they don't talk to each other. So that really was the key thing I learned from that experience was empathy and the power of experiences to make you see things from another perspective.
- [20:08]
Phil Agnew
It's clear Patrick learned quite a lot from that experience, but he doesn't rank it as his best experience. In fact, Patrick's best experience. Well, it really surprised me.
- [20:19]
Patrick Fagan
I think funnily enough, the best experience I did was letting myself be a slave to AI for the day. So I was on holiday, to be fair, so I suppose it biases it a bit. But you know when you're on holiday and you have that anxiety of you're not using the time well enough, should I be lying by the pool, Should I go sightseeing? And so I thought, you know what? For this day, I'll just let chatgpt tell me what to do. And it sended me to this little island where the man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned. It controlled my food. I ended up eating three cheese pizzas that day, which was enjoyable at first, but soon, soon less so. There are a couple of things that really stood out. First of all, it made me less frightened about ChatGPT, at least at that point. It was a couple of years ago, but at least at that point, it didn't really understand context. So, for example, I arrived on the island, and when I stepped foot off the island, I asked it what I should do, and it said, make sure you pack lots of water and a sun hat. I was like, I'm already. I'm already here. So that was a bit annoying. And it was very hot and I did get very thirsty. Also, obviously it made me eat three pizzas, so it wasn't that kind of contextually aware. And also it didn't have a will of its own. I was always kind of pushing it to tell me what to do. It didn't kind of have its own will or ideas for what I should do. But the second thing it taught me is a really key principle that I learned in other experiences is escape that with an experience. And this can obviously be a brand or marketing experience as well. It's not always what you're going into that's important, but rather what people are running away from. And I think letting AI decide. My day was so enjoyable because it freed me from the burden of choice and responsibility and risk. And so if people want to go into your fantastical marketing experience or your VR world or whatever is probably because they're trying to get away from anxieties or stress or boredom in their daily life. And that came through in a few other experiments like the flotation tank. I couldn't distract myself with Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever like I usually do. So I was forced to face up to some anxieties that I had actually doing that was really nice. It was like a massage for my brain. I resolved that stress I had, but mostly I and I think most people don't do that. We just distract ourselves instead. But that's one of the reasons I think experiences can be so powerful.
- [22:53]
Phil Agnew
Patrick became a slave to AI for a day. It was his best experience, and yet he was quick to tell me that he wouldn't want that experience to last any longer. He wouldn't want it to last a week. In fact, he said many of his experiences were fantastic, not because he loved the experience themselves or because he wanted them to last for a long time, but because he learned something from it and he was glad that it didn't take over his life, was glad that it was a novel different experience.
- [23:18]
Patrick Fagan
Yeah, I had that feeling with the casino as well, because in the casino I did actually double my money. So I wanted to take out a thousand euros. My wife insisted that I take out a hundred and I doubled that. And then I was quite annoyed with my wife because this is my kind of mindset, which is probably why I can't gamble. I wasn't happy to have won a hundred euros. I was upset that I hadn't won more. And I was starting to think, what if I had taken out all my life savings and doubled that? So I probably won't do that again. It's probably for the best. But it did. It was a transformative experience. It did change my life. I mean, one of the main things I'm taking forward now is kind of clearer boundaries with work and making sure that every weekend I do something, it doesn't have to be a big thing, but the weekend just gone. We all went to crazy Golf, for example, and then to her Nando's, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but beforehand I probably wouldn't have done that. You know, we would have just stayed indoors all weekend.
- [24:14]
Phil Agnew
Now, honestly, listening to all of this, I was fairly inspired by Patrick's project. So I wondered if he had any tips for people listening who wanted to do something similar.
- [24:23]
Patrick Fagan
Getting started, you don't have to do one new thing for every week. You could do one new thing for every month. You know, 12 new things in a year. And there are these small things you can do. Like, as I said, I saw my first sunrise, I ate my first doner kebab. It doesn't have to be. Have to be huge things. Although I would like to go to North Korea, which is now open. So if anyone's up for that, feel free to get in touch.
- [24:45]
Phil Agnew
Patrick spent an hour in a flotation tank. He visited the Middle East. He went on a stag do sober. He avoided TV for a week. He had a colon cleanse, a psychic reading, and he ate his first Donna kebab. But before ending, I wondered if he thinks all of these experiences and the 12,000 pounds spent well, if all of this was worthwhile.
- [25:07]
Patrick Fagan
I think so. I think it's made me more empathetic, more. I would say it's made me happier than my my wife might not say that, but I think so. And I improved my health, for example, not just from talking to the acupuncturist, but just getting out of the house has been really, really good for my mental health, the physical health. I wasn't, as I said, all that happy beforehand because of being indoors and screens and everything, but now endeavoring to actually get out and do things more has made me happier for sure.
- [25:40]
Phil Agnew
Patrick documents all of his experiences@justdostuff.co.uk There you can read about his VR theater experience, his experience drinking breast milk, which really did not go well, but is a is a hilarious read, and his experience trying to make a new friend. It's a very, very funny newsletter, but it also has lots of behavioral science in there. So I many of you listening will really enjoy reading it. I signed up to it myself. I love getting his emails every week and you can too for free by just going to justdostuff.co.uk that is justdostuff.co.uk and you can get Patrick's newsletter for free on there. But Patrick and I did not stop our chat here. I went on to ask Patrick about another one of his previous experiments. His previous project. See, Patrick had spent a year, not last year, but a few years before, trying to deliberately change his personality.
- [26:36]
Patrick Fagan
So it first started with me working out what do I want to change? And really I got it down to I want to be more extroverted and less neurotic.
- [26:45]
Phil Agnew
This experiment started to go wrong in many weird and interesting ways.
- [26:50]
Patrick Fagan
Yeah, I was exactly the same and I read that I should walk with slower, longer strides to appear more confident. I was doing it and all my friends were pointing at me and laughing saying, what are you doing?
- [27:01]
Phil Agnew
It's another very, very interesting chat. I've never spoken to someone who actively tried to change their personality. I wasn't even sure it was actually possible, but Patrick assured me he was and he's got some great examples of what he learned along the way. If you want to hear Patrick's attempt to alter his personality for a year, then you can listen to the bonus episode for free. We recorded it, we put it on YouTube. It's very easy to get access. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes, enter your email address and you'll be taken straight to that bonus episode. If you are already an email newsletter subscriber for Nudge, then you just have to click the link in today's email. You'll find the bonus episode there. Otherwise, just click the link in the show notes, add your email. You'll be taken straight to YouTube straight to that bonus episode. It will subscribe you to the newsletter, but you can unsubscribe immediately if you like, and you'll get to hear how Patrick attempted to change his personality for a year. Patrick's genuinely hilarious. This chat is is possibly even funnier than the one we had today, so I really hope some of you can go and listen to that. Thank you so much for listening. I've really enjoyed putting this episode together and I hope you enjoyed listening to it. Bye bye.