How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.

She has figured out how to line up her actions with her goals and dreams.

the secret to a better life is not to eradicate the impulses that make us human but instead to understand them, outsmart them, and whenever possible, to make them work for us rather than against us.

Behavior Change for Good Initiative—an

an ambitious project we’ve led for the past five years, investigating what it takes to change habits.

forgetting is the silent killer of even our most ardent resolutions.

making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important.

fastidious,

aficionados.

swig

“You try to hit a winner on every ball,” he said. It was a serious shortcoming. No one can hit an outright winner on every shot, Gilbert pointed out, and trying to do so was eroding Agassi’s confidence bit by bit each time he fell short.

“Instead of you succeeding,” Gilbert said, “make him fail. Better yet, let him fail.”

feeblest

touted

pesky

I was confronted with strong evidence that our small, daily failures to exercise or eat healthfully aren’t trifling human foibles, but rather are serious matters of life and death.

an estimated 40 percent of premature deaths are the result of personal behaviors we can change.

small decisions about eating, drinking, exercise, smoking, sex, and vehicle safety.

engineers always attempt to solve problems by first identifying the obstacles to success.

when it comes to changing your behavior, your opponent isn’t facing you across the net. Your opponent is inside your head.

small changes accumulate into big results.

sprawling

whimsy

tchotchkes,

If you can’t persuade people to alter their behavior by telling them that change is simple, cheap, and good for them, what magical ingredient will do the trick?

starkest

people might be more open to change when they feel they have a fresh start.

rather than perceiving time as a continuum, we tend to think about our lives in “episodes,” creating story arcs from the notable incidents, or chapters, in our lives. One chapter might start the day you move into your college dorm (“the college years”), another with your first job (“the consulting era”), another on your fortieth birthday, and yet another at the start of a new year or millennium.

the start of a new life chapter, no matter how small, might be able to give people the impression of a clean slate.

labels matter to our behavior.

the “fresh start effect.”

when we’re seeking to change, the disruptions to our lives triggered by physical transitions can be just as powerful as the fresh starts spurred by new beginnings on our calendars.

top performers suffered from resets,

resets helped underperformers up their game but harmed people who were already doing well. This was an important and cautionary lesson: Not everyone benefits from a fresh start. When you’re on a roll, any disruption can be a setback.

maybe you were making great progress with a new health regimen—smoothies for breakfast, salads for lunch, home-cooked dinners every night. But then came your summer vacation, and countless funnel cakes later, you never did get back to your healthy habits.

holiday breaks turned out to be negative influences: students who had formed new gym habits failed to resume them after they returned to campus. The effect of the disruptions was total, reversing the students’ progress.

while fresh starts are helpful for kick-starting change, they can also be unwelcome disruptors of well-functioning routines. Anyone seeking to maintain good habits should beware.

it may be possible to boost a wide range of goal-directed behaviors if we just get the timing of our invitations right—from

if you’re hoping to make a positive change in your life but are pessimistic about your chances, perhaps because you’ve failed before and worry another attempt is likely to turn out similarly, my advice is to look for fresh start opportunities. Is there an upcoming date that could represent a clean break with the past?

66 percent more Odenplan metro visitors chose the stairs over the escalator after the piano keys appeared, which is exactly what the Volkswagen team hoped would happen. Knowing that walking up even a few extra steps each day can make a difference to people’s health, they designed the piano stairs as a creative solution to a common problem.*

Economists call this tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards “present bias,” though its common name is “impulsivity,” and it’s unfortunately universal.

snarky

incorrigible

When joining a new gym, we head straight for the punishing but maximally efficient StairMaster.

long-term benefits are typically the impetus for pursuing a goal or making a change. If it weren’t for the long-term benefits of exercise, studying, saving, healthy eating, and so on, many of us would never bother. But there’s reason to worry that an eyes-on-the-prize mentality could be a mistake. Lots of research shows that we tend to be overconfident about how easy it is to be self-disciplined. This is why so many of us optimistically buy expensive gym memberships when paying per-visit fees would be cheaper, register for online classes we’ll never complete, and purchase family-size chips on discount to trim our monthly snack budget, only to consume every last crumb in a single sitting. We think “future me” will be able to make good choices, but too often “present me” succumbs to temptation.

psychologists Ayelet Fishbach and Kaitlin Woolley suspected that people could tackle tough goals more effectively if they stopped overestimating their willpower. They predicted that if people focused on making long-term goal pursuit more enjoyable in the short-term by adding the proverbial lump of sugar to their medicine, they’d be far more successful.

encouraging people to find the fun in healthy activities led to substantially better results, leading people to persist longer in their workouts and eat more healthy food.

Rather than believing we’ll be able to “just do it” (as Nike implores us), we can make more progress if we recognize that we struggle to do what’s distasteful in the moment and look for ways to make those activities sweeter.

“a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”

Anyone who has taken care of children knows it’s absurd to tell them to focus on the long-term benefits of completing a chore. If it isn’t fun, kids simply won’t do it. Although adults have somewhat better neural circuitry for delaying gratification than children, we’re fundamentally wired the same way. We just fail to recognize it.