How to Change Quotes

“making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Research has proven time and again that rather than relying on willpower to resist temptation, we’re better off figuring out how to make good behaviors more gratifying in the short-term. Big payoffs far down the road just aren’t enough to keep us motivated.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“We all struggle to line up what we do with what we want.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“many of us choose not to adopt commitment devices because we undervalue them or are naïve about how much we need them, not because we don’t need them or are unwilling to risk the penalty.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Behavior change is similar. You can use an all-purpose strategy that works well on average. Set tough goals and break them down into component steps. Visualize success. Work to create habits—tiny ones, atomic ones, keystone ones—following the advice laid out in self-help bestsellers. But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“You’ll learn that making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“insight: 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.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“According to one recent study, the average adult forgets three things each day, ranging from pin numbers to chores to wedding anniversaries. We’re so forgetful, in part, because it’s difficult for information to stick in our brains, especially if we’ve only thought about it once or twice.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Temptation bundling entails allowing yourself to engage in a guilty pleasure (such as binge-watching TV) only when pursuing a virtuous or valuable activity that you tend to dread (such as exercise). Temptation bundling solves two problems at once. It can help reduce overindulgence in temptations and increase time spent on activities that serve your long-term goals. Gamification is another way to make goal pursuit instantly gratifying. It involves making something that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards. Gamification works when players “buy in” to the game. It can backfire if players feel the game is being imposed on them.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“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). But merely suggesting that people try temptation bundling is enough to produce benefits that last.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“We think “future me” will be able to make good choices, but too often “present me” succumbs to temptation.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“I like to remind cynics that if you flip the discouraging statistics about New Year’s resolutions on their head, you’ll see that 20 percent of the goals set each January succeed. That’s a lot of people who’ve changed their lives for the better simply because they resolved to try in the first place.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“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. Now, studying behavior change, I began to understand the power and promise of applying this same strategy. It’s the very strategy that turned Andre Agassi’s tennis career around by helping him refocus on his opponents’ weaknesses.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“The chart broke down why most Americans die earlier than they should. It turns out that the leading cause of premature death isn’t poor health care, difficult social circumstances, bad genes, or environmental toxins. Instead, an estimated 40 percent of premature deaths are the result of personal behaviors we can change. I’m talking about daily, seemingly small decisions about eating, drinking, exercise, smoking, sex, and vehicle safety. These decisions add up, producing hundreds of thousands of fatal cancers, heart attacks, and accidents each year.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“When policy makers, organizations, or scientists applied a one-size-fits-all strategy to change behavior, the results were mixed. But when they began by asking what stood in the way of progress—say, why their employees weren’t saving enough money or getting flu shots—and then developed targeted strategies to change behavior, the results were far better.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Agassi could see the wisdom in this assessment. He’d always been a perfectionist, but until Gilbert’s remarks, he’d viewed that trait as a strength rather than a weakness.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Plans don't change minds - they only help us remember to do the things we already want to do”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“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. One chapter might start the day you move into your college dorm (“the college years”), another with your first job (“the consulting”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“posts are quickly tweaked by other Wikipedians, but a post that endures unchanged is presumed to be high-quality. Durability means no one else has taken issue”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“percent”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“In one study, we described March 20 as “the first day of spring” for some students and “the third Thursday in March” for others. In another study, we described May 14 as “the first day of Penn’s summer break” for some students and “Penn’s administrative day” (a meaningless designation we invented) for others. Confirming our suspicion about the usefulness of fresh start dates, in both of these studies (and others), when we suggested that a date was associated with a new beginning (such as “the first day of spring”), students viewed it as a more attractive time to kick-start goal pursuit than when we presented it as an unremarkable day (such as “the third Thursday in March”).”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Study after study (mine included) has shown that achieving transformative behavior change is more like treating a chronic disease than curing a rash. You can’t just slap a little ointment on it and expect it to clear up forever. The internal obstacles that stand in the way of change, which I’ve described in this book—obstacles such as temptation, forgetfulness, underconfidence, and laziness—are like the symptoms of a chronic disease. They won’t just go away once you’ve started “treating” them. They’re human nature and require constant vigilance.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“we discovered that seeking out exercise hacks to copy and paste led people to find tips that best fit their own lifestyles. What’s more, taking a more active approach to information gathering increased the time participants spent with their role models, increasing their exposure to good habits.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Consistent with our prior findings, we saw that having any new exercise-boosting technique to copy worked better than just making a plan, regardless of where the technique came from. But interestingly, it was more helpful if people found strategies to copy and paste themselves than if the strategies came from someone else.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Hermann estimated that forgetting follows a roughly exponential decay function. 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”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“The prevalence of naïfs suggests (not surprisingly) that one important function of a good manager is to set up systems that impose costs and restrictions on employees whenever temptation could stand in the way of wise long-term decisions.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“The theory is that there are two types of people in the world. Everyone has self-control problems, so that isn’t the distinguishing characteristic. Rather, some of us have come to terms with our impulsivity and are willing to take steps to rein it in. Behavioral economists call these people “sophisticates.” But not everyone in the world is a sophisticate, as evidenced by the debate that rages whenever I teach Wharton MBA students about Green Bank’s unusual savings product. Lots of people are instead overly optimistic about their ability to overcome their self-control problems through sheer willpower. These types of people are “naïfs.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“Signing a pledge is a particularly soft form of commitment because the penalty is simply the guilt and discomfort you’ll feel if you break your word, to others or yourself. Being at odds with yourself, which psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” is a surprisingly powerful force first studied by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. People often go to great lengths to avoid reckoning with their internal contradictions. Cognitive dissonance can help explain why cults are so hard to leave (after you’ve joined and invested so much of yourself, it’s difficult to admit that you’re unhappy) and why smokers often underestimate the health effects of their habit (if you believe you’re intelligent and also have a nasty habit, cognitive dissonance pushes you to discount or ignore evidence that your habit is, indeed, nasty). Cognitive dissonance is also a handy tool we can harness to change behavior for good. By electing to make pledges and asking others to do the same, we can turn cognitive dissonance into a soft penalty that helps us and them achieve more.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“But what impresses me most is that so many doctors were influenced by their pledge even though breaking it had no monetary penalty. A pledge like this stands in stark contrast to cash commitments, locked bank accounts, and deadline penalties, which I call “hard commitments” because they involve a more concrete cost. The clinician pledge is a prime example of what I call a “soft commitment”—a commitment that comes with only a psychological price tag for failure.”
― Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be