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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
My guest on today's episode of Nudge is one of the world's best known behavior change experts.
- [00:06]
Katie Milkman
I'm Katie Milkman and I'm a behavioral scientist.
- [00:10]
Phil Agnew
She's an award winning professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the host of one of the most popular psychology podcasts and a national bestseller of a fantastic book.
- [00:22]
Katie Milkman
I am the author of the book how to Change.
- [00:25]
Phil Agnew
The New York Times told its readers that how to Change was the only self help book they should read the year it came. And there was one moment in Katie's career that inspired her to write that book.
- [00:37]
Katie Milkman
There was a pivotal moment in my career when I realized I was a behavior change scientist.
- [00:42]
Phil Agnew
And in the book she explains how all of us can change our behavior for the better and even to persuade others to adopt different behaviors.
- [00:51]
Katie Milkman
And I got a question at the end of my talk which was are there moments when people are more open to making a change and when a nudge might be particularly well received?
- [00:59]
Phil Agnew
Turns out there there is. Keep listening to learn how you can build better habits, how you can ditch bad behaviors, and how you can use these behavioral change tactics in your own marketing and on your own business. When someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea and by the time they find out, they've already lost a deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot A E O helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot A E O is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for for growing businesses. Today's guest on Nudge is an award winning professor, bestselling author and chart topping podcaster.
- [02:01]
Katie Milkman
I'm Katie Milkman and I'm a behavioral scientist and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And I wear some other hats too. I also am the co director and co founder of the Behavior Change for Good initiative. I am the author of the book how to Change and I host a podcast called Choiceology. And oh, I was going to forget one last thing. I also write a substack. It's called Milkman Delivers.
- [02:27]
Phil Agnew
Katie's book how to Change explains the science of behavior change. It is easily one of the best books I've read on forming habits and persuading others to start. I asked Katie what inspired her to
- [02:40]
Katie Milkman
write the book the inspiration was really that it was my research. It was what I had been studying pretty intensively for almost 20 years at the point when I decided I was ready to share and felt like I had learned enough that I could be useful to other people. So if you go back in time with me a little further than when I decided to write the book. There was a pivotal moment in my career when I realized I was a behavior change scientist and not just a behavioral scientist. And I wasn't just interested in all the quirks of decision making, but specifically in. In how can we make positive changes in our lives. And that was a moment when I was an assistant professor at Wharton and I wandered over to a seminar at the medical school. We have a pretty small campus at the University of Pennsylvania. It's a really cool urban campus. And it means that there's tight connections in a way that there aren't at most universities between pretty disparate fields because you can get to each other so quickly. So about a 10 minute walk to get to the medical school from the Wharton School and we have this thriving decision making group in our medical school, people studying medical decision making. How can we improve people's choices about health? So I'm over there and there's this slide at the beginning of a talk by actually a professor of nursing. She's showing a slide. She hadn't done the work, she's just sharing it. It was a graph breaking down the fraction of premature deaths in the United States that were due to different causes. And she shows this pie chart.
- [04:13]
Phil Agnew
This pie chart is cited in a 2007 paper, which you can see in the show notes. It lists the percentage contributions towards premature deaths, with genetic predisposition at 30%, social circumstances at 15%, environmental exposure at 5%, and healthcare at 10%. But the biggest part of the chart, the parts that captured Katie's attention, was the biggest wedge. And it contributed to 40% of premature deaths.
- [04:42]
Katie Milkman
One of the wedges of the pie chart was daily decisions that we could change about everything from what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke or consume alcohol, whether we buckle our seatbelts in cars. And it completely blew my mind to see that that daily decision wedge was the biggest of all in terms of contributions to premature death. I had absolutely no idea that it was such a big factor. I would have guessed 5%, 10%. I figure most of it was things out of our control. And to understand that the daily decisions we make mattered so much to this consequential outcome really redirected my research I was already studying behavior change to some degree, but I realized the capacity I had, if I focused my energies on this, to actually make a really positive difference on the world, on people's life expectancy. And I sort of also thought about, well, if it's a big part of our medical outcomes, it's gotta be a big part of our outcomes when it comes to our education and our financial security and so on. So that was a moment, in a sense, that led to the writing of my book, even though it's pretty far back in time, before I actually decided to do it, because it gave me this laser focus that has carried forward in my career, and that helped me redirect my research energies to be 100% or nearly 100% focused on behavior change. The book was just a natural outgrowth of that work. It was time to share what we'd learned, what I'd learned, because I was doing it all with the goal of helping people make positive change through science. And I wanted to communicate about that in as many ways as possible.
- [06:23]
Phil Agnew
Perhaps the most well known way that Katie has helped people make positive change is through her work on a principle that I've spoken a lot about before. It is the fresh start effect.
- [06:34]
Katie Milkman
So the fresh start effect, it describes our tendency to feel like we have a fresh start or a clean slate, a new beginning, at moments that feel like the start of a chapter in our lives. And those can be tiny chapters. So it can be something as small as a new week, or big chapters, like the start of a new year, the celebration of a milestone birthday, moving to a new home or community, taking a new job, getting a promotion. Those are all moments that give us a sense that we're starting a new chapter. They come from the fact that we actually don't think about our lives linearly. We think about ourselves like we're characters in a book. And we break the way we tell our life story up into chapters. These chapter breaks give us a sense at those discontinuities that who I was before, you know, last year, the old me was a little bit of a different person than who I am. In this new chapter, there's some distinction we can draw. And we can say, last year I didn't get around to getting in shape or getting my finances in order, or really pulling my weight at work. But that was the old me, and this is the new me. And the new me is going to be different. And so that optimism propels us and that sense of disconnect to make changes that we wouldn't be brave enough to make at other moments. And it also seems, seems to be the fact that the discontinuities give us a sense that we should step back and think a little big picture about our lives. Often we're just sort of going through the motions and not reflecting. But these discontinuities, these chapter breaks, they lead us to step back and broaden our view and set goals that we might not otherwise set.
- [08:12]
Phil Agnew
In her book, Katie writes how we are more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation, the sense that we failed before and will thus fail again. People feel distanced from their past failures during a fresh start event. They feel like a different person, a person with reason to be optimistic about the future.
- [08:37]
Katie Milkman
So that's the fresh start effect. It's work that I did with my former doctoral student Heng Chen Dai, who's a UCLA professor, and Jason Reese. We started the work after I went out to Google and, and visited their headquarters almost 15 years ago to talk to a bunch of their HR leaders about some of the challenges they were having with motivating employees to make important changes related to adopting healthy habits. And I gave a talk about nudging and how this could be helpful to their team. And I got a question at the end of my talk which was, are there moments when people are more open to making a change and when a nudge might be particularly well received? And that question was so fantastic, it started me thinking about what would those moments look like? What do we know about this? And I brought the question back to my then student Heng Chen, and Jason, who was visiting Wharton at the time. And I said, look, I had this immediate intuition, which I bet you have too, which was like, New Year's is a moment when people make change. 40% of Americans set New Year's resolutions. But my intuition is that that's actually just a microcosm of a broader set of moments when we have a sense of a clean slate and a fresh start. And I want to study this. And they were like, yeah, that's really interesting. Let's, let's get into it. And so we've collected lots of data. Hang Chen immediately started crunching numbers. I had some data on my laptop at the time on gym attendance habits of undergraduates from another project that I sent her. And she started looking into that. And we found that the very same undergraduate is more likely to go to the gym at these fresh start moments, like the start of a new week, month, year, semester following their birthday, with the notable exception of 21st birthdays. And you can suspect why that might be different. In the US that's the age when we get to drink alcohol. And so 21st birthdays are normally not spent at the gym.
- [10:32]
Phil Agnew
Katie found that undergraduates at a campus fitness center were more likely to visit the gym not only in January, but also earlier in the week after a school holiday, at the beginning of a new semester. And, and after their birthdays, you are less likely to start working out on a Friday or right before summer holidays, but more likely to start the day after your birthday or the first day back at university.
- [10:59]
Katie Milkman
We saw that in the gym data. We looked then at data from Google. Naturally, I'd gotten this idea to do this project when I was visiting Google, so of course we had to involve Google data in the project. So we looked at search trends for searches for the most popular New Year's resolution, which unfortunately, I will say it's not like for better or for worse, I think it's kind of sad. But the most popular New Year's resolution is diet. So we looked at searches for diet. We see exactly the same pattern. They spike at the start of a new week, month, year following holidays that feel like fresh starts. So think about, like seasonal holidays that mark the shift of seasons and not so much holidays like Valentine's Day.
- [11:37]
Phil Agnew
Katie's book came out in 2021, and I wondered if diet searches still peaked on January 1, and they do in 2022, 23, 24 and 25. The first week of January saw the highest number of searches for the word diet.
- [11:52]
Katie Milkman
And then we also were able to get a data set from a website called stick.com with 2Ks, those founded by some behavioral scientists who wanted to help people set goals and commit to achieving those goals by putting money on the line that they'd have to forfeit if they didn't achieve them. We, we were able to get data on when people set all different types of goals, both about their health and their finances and their work and their education. And then we crunched the numbers again. And I shouldn't say we really, I should say Hang Chen. Hang Chen was the amazing lead on this work. She crunched the numbers and found again for all of these different types of goals, the same pattern that people set them more at the start of a new week, month, year following holidays that feel like fresh starts following birthdays. And so we had this package of results that were really clear that were correlational. And that of course, then propelled us to start Doing some experiments to see if we could use fresh start dates to change behavior.
- [12:48]
Phil Agnew
This is important. So far, Katie has seen correlational data of fresh starts. In the real world, more people go to the gym after their birthday. We've heard that so far. But if you show potential gym goers a fresh start date, well, would that date make them more likely to go to the gym? That's what Katie decided to test.
- [13:11]
Katie Milkman
We did some lab experiments where we just invited people to choose a date when they'd want to make progress on a goal that they had been meaning to get around to. And we gave them calendars that had different dates marked on them. Some calendars would show, for instance, the start of spring. Others would just label that as the third Thursday in March. And what we found is that when we labeled dates that had fresh start feelings associated with them, there's a huge spike in people selecting those dates, as opposed to, when we call it, you know, the third Thursday in March, when
- [13:46]
Phil Agnew
the 20th of March is framed as the first day of spring, 25% of people chose that date. When it was framed as the third Thursday of March, only 7% chose it. The framing alone, with no actual change to the date itself, more than tripled people's preference for starting their goal on that day. This is significant because it shows that the fresh start effect isn't just about genuinely meaningful dates, like New Year's, for example. It shows that it can be manufactured by simply labeling a date as a new beginning.
- [14:18]
Katie Milkman
We also did a field experiment with a few employers who had employees who were not saving for retirement or were under saving, where we sent them invitations to either begin saving right away first best, or if now wasn't convenient and attractive, they could choose instead to check a box to start saving at a time delay. And we either offered them a time delay that corresponded to a fresh start date. So again, think, you know, birthday, start of spring, New Year's. Or we offered them an equivalent time delay that wasn't associated with a fresh start date, meaning if your birthday's in two months, we'd flip a coin, and you either get the opportunity to save now or after your birthday, or the opportunity to save now or after two months. So it's literally the same offer. But in one case, we've highlighted the fresh start associated with that opportunity. We also had some placebo holidays, meaning sort of holidays that we knew weren't fresh start. So days like Valentine's Day. We tested this with thousands of employees, and what we found is that compared to offering an equivalent time Delay option to save. Offering a fresh start date increased savings substantially 20 to 30% over the next eight months just for getting that fresh start framing in your offer instead of, you know, you can put it off two months, three months, et cetera, whatever the equivalent delay would be.
- [15:43]
Phil Agnew
Katie writes that by reminding people of an upcoming fresh start, these people will be able to make the same opportunity for behavior change more appealing. These findings show that it may be possible to boost a wide range of goal directed behaviors if we just get the timing of our invitations right.
- [16:02]
Katie Milkman
All of this work to me basically shows that one, we're naturally attracted to these fresh start moments as times to pursue change. And two, there are opportunities to nudge people that are particularly valuable at fresh start moments when they're more open to change or in anticipation of fresh start moments when they think change would be more appropriate. And so I think that work has captured a lot of imaginations because it's so practical and also feels so intuitive. Most people can resonate with a moment when there was some shift in their surroundings and their life experience that made them feel more open to making other changes simultaneously. And so I think because it's so intuitive, it's become one of the better known findings from my career.
- [16:56]
Phil Agnew
You are more likely to go to the gym if you plan to go on a Monday. You are more likely to start saving if you plan to do so after a birthday. You're more likely to persuade customers to visit your store if you ask them to do so on the first day of spring. But fresh starts aren't just linked to specific moments in time. Katie went on to tell me that they can be triggered by what she calls a reset.
- [17:20]
Katie Milkman
So for Heng Chen's dissertation, she decided to look at a slightly different kind of fresh start. We called them resets. So moments when the way your performance is being tracked has a discontinuity. So if you think about the way that maybe a salesperson is having their performance tracked, maybe they have a monthly sales goal and then it resets every month or I wear a Fitbit and every morning I'm at zero steps, which is kind of annoying because it's like, oh no, but I made so much progress yesterday. So it's a fresh start in that it's a reset of that tracking. And she ran a series of experiments for her dissertation showing that when we have those kinds of performance resets, it gives us the same type of fresh start benefit if we've been underperforming. But actually when we've been on a roll These disruptions can be harmful. And I think part of the fresh start effect we really focused on, most of us have goals that we'd like to accomplish and that we haven't been making progress on. And fresh starts can jolt us into starting. But there's also a sort of nasty side of it, which is if things have been going fabulously and we have a disruption in our lives that can be harmful.
- [18:37]
Phil Agnew
But resets are all around us. Every Monday morning, my Garmin tells me that I've run a grand total of 0.0 kilometers that week. Each new term, when Casey's students walk into her classroom for the first time, all of the work they have done in the previous courses has no impact to the grade they'll earn from that. So semester, wherever you look, earning reports, sales records and other statistical compilations of performance, these are constantly being wiped clean. Yearly, monthly and weekly. Heng Cheng wondered if these resets changed behavior. To find out, she looked to the world of sport.
- [19:15]
Katie Milkman
She then went out of the lab to look and see if she could identify a case where this might happen in the real world, in the wild. Not that the lab isn't the real world, but, you know, surveys and scenarios aren't quite the same as people facing real incentives that are quite meaningful. And she ended up studying it in Major League Baseball, where there's a lot of trades that happen in the middle of a season across teams, players who get moved from one team to another. And it turns out that if you're traded with within the same league to another team, all of your performance statistics, you know, your runs batted in, etc. They are retained, you know, so you just keep tracking from how you've been doing so far. But if you're treated across leagues, everything's wiped clean and you start again. You have to build up a new batting average, etc.
- [20:11]
Phil Agnew
This happens in football as well. For example, Semenyo, who transferred from Bournemouth to Man City last winter, kept his goal tally with him because he was transferring between Premier League teams. His first goal for Man City added to his season total. Whereas Conor Gallagher, who signed from the Spanish La Liga league, well, his goal tally was wiped clean. His yearly total was reset when he transferred to the new league.
- [20:38]
Katie Milkman
And she thought this was a really cool way to look at this particular type of fresh start in a very controlled manner. Because lots of things change when you change teams. You have a new coach, you have a new home. Home, like that's not just a psychological reset. And this cool, natural experiment allowed her to, because she could Say what's the difference in how that trade affects people when they get the full reset, all their performance statistics wiped clean, or when they get just the change in scenery but their performance statistics aren't altered.
- [21:11]
Phil Agnew
Hencheng analyzed 40 years of major League Baseball data to see if these reset trades changed performance.
- [21:20]
Katie Milkman
What she found is that when you're traded across leagues and you get this true fresh start in your performance statistics, you see a larger impact on people's subsequent performance, but it diverges depending on how they've been doing in the season to date. So people who are having a really crummy season getting traded across leagues is better for them than getting traded within leagues. It gives them more of a sense of a fresh start and they improve their performance more they than the people who are traded within league. But if you've been having a great season, then that cross league trade is actually more harmful for you than a within league trade because all that reset is not what you need. You want continuity. And so I thought that was a really clever field demonstration that she was able to do of another type of fresh start and to highlight something that we kind of knew already from our intuitions but hadn't been able to find a clever way to prove, which was that when things are going well, fresh starts are not actually the thing you want. You want minimal disruption when you're on a roll.
- [22:28]
Phil Agnew
Players traded to a different league get their stats wiped and start fresh. For struggling players, this is a boost. They are free from their bad record. They perform better. But for players in good form, losing their strong stats actually hurts them. Fresh starts when you've been failing but can harm you when you've been succeeding. A struggling salesperson probably performs better in a new quarter. A high performing manager might do far worse if they're moved to an entirely different team. And likewise a successful entrepreneur may struggle to secure funding in a brand new field. The fresh start effect alters our behavior. It changes our performance and our motivation. But we've only just scratched the surface of Katie's research. After the break, we'll look at how Katie helped 2000 students achieve better grades using behavioral science. Legal disputes are expensive and time consuming for a small business. They can be genuinely threatening. That's something I thought about when I decided to sign up for an FSB membership. The Federation of Small Businesses Legal Protection Scheme gives you legal expenses, insurance built specifically for small businesses, plus 24. 7 access to legal advice and expert tax guidance, all included from jury Service cover of £250 a day with a maximum up to £2,500 to business related legal proceedings. You're never facing it alone. Visit get.fsb.orguknudge or click the link in the show notes and use code nudge to get 10% off your membership. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after listening to today's episode of Nudge is Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clarry, and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals, Success Story features Q and A sessions with successful business leaders in marketing, sales, and it covers everything from big businesses to startups and entrepreneurship. So go and listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far Katie's explained her most well known work, the ideas behind the Fresh Start Effect. But Katie wasn't done there. After the Fresh Start work, she went on to study motivation and specifically how to help students achieve higher grades.
- [24:53]
Katie Milkman
So this project was led by Lauren Eskris Winkler. She is now a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. But at the time when we started the project, she just finished her doctorate as Angela Duckworth's advisee and was a postdoc working both with me and Ayelet Fischbach at the University of Chicago. Lauren had this really interesting and important insight about how we encourage people who are struggling. And she got this insight from doing a bunch of interviews over years with people who were not achieving their goals. She was talking to people who were, you know, struggling students, struggling salespeople, and asking like, what would help you achieve more? Like, how could you become grittier? How could you become more successful? And in the process of doing these interviews she made some really interesting observations. But first she was really intrigued by how great the advice was that these people had to offer when asked like, what would help you? It wasn't that there was a lack of insight. They had all sorts of insights. Maybe they hadn't been prompted to think about this before, but once prompted, she was amazed by the depth of their answers and the sophistication of their answers about what could help them. A second thing she noticed was that people loved being asked to be clear here.
- [26:11]
Phil Agnew
People loved being asked for their advice.
- [26:14]
Katie Milkman
She felt a lot of these folks were used to just getting unsolicited advice constantly from strangers about why they were underperforming and they expected this to be another one of those sessions where someone was going to say like, I'm going to coach you I'm going to fix you. I'm the scientist. But instead to be asked, what do you think? They just felt so great about that. It was so motivating. She started to wonder if we sort of have the recipe wrong for when people are struggling. If we so often go to people and just offer advice, that maybe there's actually a potent solution in asking people to give advice, because in doing so, a few things happen. One, and she thought this might be particularly important, you're conveying to them that they have more know how within them than they might have appreciated. And you're giving them a confidence boost. You're helping them realize, like, I have wisdom and sophistication and savvy that's appreciated by others, even if I haven't been performing at the top level so far. Second, they're going to introspect about, you know, what might work, and they're going to think about things that would work for them when they give advice. And then third, if they say it out loud or say it to someone else and coach someone else, they're going to feel hypocritical if they don't take that advice themselves. There's also something called the saying is believing effect, where we say something out loud, we start to believe it, or we say it to someone else, it makes us believe it more deeply. So she thought maybe there'd be sort of a magic formula that comes from all of this, that if we put people who are struggling in the position to offer advice to others, it might actually improve the advice giver's own outcomes.
- [27:46]
Phil Agnew
Lauren didn't just pose this argument. She ran studies to see if giving advice improved the advice giver's own outcomes.
- [27:54]
Katie Milkman
And she started running a series of experiments to look at this. Her early work was in the lab. So looking at this in environments where she's just surveying people and asking them to give advice and say, I'm going to share it with others and then asking them how are they performing. But I love to get out into the field and see if these things change behaviors in the wild. And Angela does too. And so we teamed up with Lauren to test this in a pretty large randomized controlled trial with roughly 2,000 high school students at schools around Florida. We told these students truthfully, at a fresh start moment. It was the beginning of a new year, the start of a new quarter in their school calendar, that we wanted their advice on how to study more effectively. And we were going to share that advice with younger students. We brought these thousands of students into labs computer labs at their schools and randomly assigned them to either be in the condition where they were asked to give advice to younger students or not.
- [28:57]
Phil Agnew
Half the students read a letter from a younger fourth grade student who said they were struggling to stay motivated with their schoolwork. The letter ended with a question. It asked, how do you motivate yourself to do stuff like this? The older students then wrote back with their best advice. The other 50% of students read a letter from an expert teacher. This teacher gave them tips on how to stay motivated, telling them to always try their hardest, put in the full effort and keep working even after the school day ends. The students then wrote a brief reaction to that letter from the expert teacher.
- [29:33]
Katie Milkman
So it was about an eight minute questionnaire, some multiple choice, some long form answers where we're asking them to give advice to younger students about how to study more effectively and to write a short note as well that would go directly to someone else who's hoping to do better in school offering them advice on studying. So eight minutes and what we found is it significantly improved students grades in their target class and in math. Now whenever I share this I feel the need to emphasize that these are not huge effects. It's an eight minute intervention. We are not turning C students into valedictorians by prompting them to spend eight minutes offering some study advice to others. We're seeing about a one point change in GPA on a scale from 50 to 100. So these are small shifts, but they're statistically significant and pretty exciting considering how light touch the intervention is.
- [30:29]
Phil Agnew
Also, the students who gave advice spent on average 26 minutes per week on their vocabulary studies in the month after the intervention. Whereas the students who received advice spent just 23 minutes per week. Three minutes less giving advice increased student study time by 14%. Katie writes how giving a handful of study tips to other students didn't turn C students into A students, but it did boost performance for high schoolers from every walk of life. Strong students, weak students, students in the free lunch program, and students from wealthier families all saw small improvements in their grades after advising peers.
- [31:12]
Katie Milkman
My takeaway from that work and from Lauren's other work is is that when we give people the opportunity to offer advice to others, it actually helps the advice giver. And so without becoming unsolicited advisors constantly, which we know is not so great, we need to find situations where our advice would be valuable to others and look for those, especially when it relates to a goal we share.
- [31:38]
Phil Agnew
It's fascinating. Prompting someone to offer advice led them to feel more motivated than when they were given the very same advice by someone else. So how can you apply this insight? Well, here's how Katie applies it.
- [31:52]
Katie Milkman
I actually have an advice club in my life which is a really important tool and social support in my life. It is a group of other women faculty, also science communicators at other top business schools, who have very similar goals. And we agreed years ago that we would reach out to each other when we were facing tough decisions and we'd sort of, you know, offer our free advice to each other. And at the time, we were thinking of it as just like we need outside wisdom sometimes. And this is an amazing way we can sort of barter that. And, you know, we thought it might have nice benefits as a way to stay socially connected to other people we liked. But what we didn't appreciate and became clear after I did this research and, and, and just reflecting on the experience is that each of us felt that in giving advice, we gained a tremendous amount, maybe even more than in getting advice. Because every time someone came to us with a challenge, we could see clearly from that outsider perspective, like, oh, this is definitely a no, or this. This is definitely a yes. This is a good choice. And here's why. When we look at things dispassionately as outsiders, it's easier to see clearly and make good decisions. But then when the exact same choice would land on our plate a few months later, because inevitably we faced very similar decision challenges. We'd already offered advice on how to handle it, and it was much clearer what to do. I would encourage listeners who have aspirations and goals that they've set and who doesn't to look for opportunities to form advice clubs so that they can share in these benefits that you get. When people reach out to you for wisdom and find ways to mentor others, it's a really powerful tool for improving your own performance. And it makes you feel good because giving makes us happy. So it's just a win, win, win.
- [33:41]
Phil Agnew
Right before I ended my interview with Katie, I asked for one final bit of advice myself. I wanted to build better habits in my own life. I found myself starting lots of new habits but not sticking with them. So I asked her what tips she had to help me stick with my habits.
- [33:59]
Katie Milkman
Yeah, we know that habits are not so different from skills, in that practice is how we build them. So repetition is critical to forming durable habits. We put more on autopilot after we've repeated. Just as a person learning the piano is able to start thinking about other things once they've sort of learned to read the music and it becomes more natural and intuitive. If there's a habit you hope to build, you really want it to be on autopilot so you can start thinking about other things and not deliberating every morning about whether or not you're going to go to the gym. Because it's just what you do and there's no consciousness, well, would I rather do X, Y, Z or do I? Is this the right choice? So when we put things on autopilot, by repeating them, we gain benefits and durability. And there's lots of research supporting this, mostly not mine. Actually. My favorite paper on this is by Gary Charnas and uri Ganese from 2008, I believe. And it was a study of gym goers where they paid people either to go to the gym eight times in a month or once in a month or actually not at all. And then they, after the payment period ended, just measured who kept going and found that the people who'd been paid to go more often had formed more stable and lasting habits even after the rewards were gone. And this builds on lots of research in animals showing similar patterns. So it's really important to repeat these things that we want to turn into habits in order to build automaticity again so that we're no longer deliberating, we're just doing. And we're able to free up mental capacity to focus on other things. And. And again, that deliberation leads to sometimes deciding it's not worth it. And if we can short circuit that and just do it, because it's what we do, we end up seeing more sustained change.
- [35:54]
Phil Agnew
Katie, in her book, writes that the easiest way to build a habit is to never break the streak to keep repeating behaviors day after day so they become the norm. She says that this logic explains why birth control pills always come in 28 day packs. In her book, she writes that scientifically speaking, the pills are only necessary on the first 21 days of a 28 day menstrual cycle. However, most birth control packages include seven sugar pills along with the 21 hormone pills. To ensure that people on birth control won't fall out of the habit of taking that medication during their off week. To stick with a behavior, you need to repeat it. To encourage better behaviors, you should give advice. And to initiate a new behavior, you should start on a fresh start date. That is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. Thank you so much for listening and I'm very keen to say a massive, massive thank you to Katie Milkman for Coming on Nudge I've been trying to get Katie Milkman on the show for years. I first read her book how to Change five years ago and I absolutely loved it. I reread it for today's episode and it's just as good as I remember. Her work is tremendous. Her studies are fascinating. So if you haven't read a copy of this book, go and pick up a copy. I have left a link to it in the show notes. Now on today's episode, Katie and I covered the Fresh Start Effect. But the Fresh Start Effect is just one of many dozens of different behavioural science principles that can affect your work and affect your marketing. If you want to learn about the many, many more behavioral science princip, then I suggest you go and check out the Nudge Vaults. The Nudge Vaults is an app built by me and it contains over 550 different behavioral science insights that you can apply to your business and to your work. Everything in the vaults is cited, tagged and easy to search for. It makes it very easy to go and look up the seven different studies I have cited on the Fresh Start effect and you will even see when you look up those studies, tips from me on how you can apply those insights to your business. Plus, I have built an AI powered chatbot to help you apply these principles. For example, right now I can ask the chatbot, which is called Volt GPT, how can I use the Fresh Start effect to improve my podcast strategy? And straight away it tells me this is the first tip it gives. It says, Phil, use specific days in your call to action. Instead of vague timing, anchor your ask with a specific day. So don't say check out my latest podcast episode, say Listen to the new podcast episode this Monday. I really like that one. I should start using it. So for you to start this week off right, why don't you go to nudgepodcast.com and click Vault in the menu there. You can sign up straight away or you can get your first 50 insights for free. So go and have a look. That's nudgepodcast.com vaults that is all from me today folks. Thank you very much for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. So please do. And start your week off right by listening to a new episode of Nudge when next Monday comes around. Cheers.