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

by Katy Milkman

“Instead of you succeeding,” Gilbert said, “make him fail.19 Better yet, let him fail.”

But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness preventing progress, and then pounce.

An engineer can’t design a successful structure without first carefully accounting for the forces of opposition (say, wind resistance or gravity). So engineers always attempt to solve problems by first identifying the obstacles to success.

if you want to change your behavior or someone else’s, you’re at a huge advantage if you begin with a blank slate—a fresh start—and no old habits working against you.

She learned that 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.

The bigger the landmark, the more likely it is to help us take a step back, regroup, and make a clean break from the past.

These findings, combined with Hengchen’s, make it clear that 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.

The barrier is simple: Doing the “right” thing is often unsatisfying in the short-term.

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.5

The moral of this research to me is that temptation bundling certainly works best if you can actually restrict an indulgence to whenever you’re doing a task that requires an extra boost of motivation (such as making it possible to listen to audiobooks only at the gym, and not in your car or on the bus).

Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device.

We forget nearly half of the information we’ve learned within twenty minutes. After twenty-four hours, about 70 percent of it is gone, and a month later, we’re looking at losses of approximately 80 percent.

cue-based plans vastly increases their likelihood of goal achievement. Further, the more easily a person can detect the cue needed to enact their plan (thanks to details and specificity), the better.

was taught about the subclassification of animals first into kingdom, then phylum, then class, then order, then family, then genus, and finally, species, I learned the phrase “Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk.

Angela pointed out that in addition to reducing forgetting and short-circuiting the need to think about what you’ll do in the moment, planning forces you to break big goals into bite-size chunks.

If defaults are set wisely, you’ll still end up making the best decision even if you don’t lift a finger—an opportunity most of us relish, thanks to our efficiency-loving operating systems.

Although there are many different ways to nudge behavior change, the term is often used as a synonym for setting good defaults because this type of nudge, which harnesses human laziness for good, has proven so valuable.

The beauty of good habits is that, like defaults that you can “set and forget,” they take advantage of our inherent laziness.fn5 Once honed, habits put good behaviors on autopilot so we engage in them without even thinking about it. In fact, in a fascinating series of six studies conducted with children and adults, psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth proved that positive habits are key to what we often mislabel “self-control.”

But it’s now clear to me that to put good behavior on autopilot, we can’t cultivate it in only one, specific way. The most versatile and robust habits are formed when we train ourselves to make the best decision, no matter the circumstances.

Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence in their ability to control their own behavior, motivation, and social circumstances.

Recognizing this gave Lauren a creative idea. Too often, we assume that the obstacle to change in others is ignorance, and so we offer advice to mend that gap. But what if the problem isn’t ignorance but confidence—and our unsolicited wisdom isn’t making things better but worse?

George Dantzig.27 The story goes that George arrived late to his statistics class in 1939 and assumed the two math problems on the chalkboard were homework. So he copied them down to solve that night. He found the problems more difficult than usual, but he returned to class with the answers after a few days and apologized to his professor for taking so long. Soon afterward, the professor tracked George down, brimming with excitement. As it turned out, George had solved two “unsolvable” open problems in statistical theory because he believed they were merely difficult homework assignments with known answers.

What we think we’re capable of is crucial when it comes to behavior change.

But where excess confidence can help as well as hurt goal strivers, underconfidence can only stymie their success, so it’s critical to address.

Giving people unsolicited advice can undermine their confidence. But asking them to give advice builds confidence and helps them think through strategies for achieving their goals. Giving advice can also help us act, because it can feel hypocritical not to do the things we advise other people to do.

Your expectations shape your reality. So, convey to people that you believe in their potential, and surround yourself with mentors who send those same positive signals to you.

This may well be thanks to something social psychologists Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House first pointed out in 1977 in a now famous paper on what they dubbed the “false consensus effect.”9 The paper describes a general tendency humans have to incorrectly assume that other people see and react to the world the same way we do.

Kevin offered up some unforgettable words of wisdom: “When we diagnose someone with diabetes, we don’t put them on insulin for a month, take them off of it, and expect them to be cured.”5 In medicine, doctors recognize that chronic diseases require a lifetime of treatment. Why do we assume that behavior change is any different?