Episode 402: The Amazing Way Her Senior Thesis at Princeton Changed Her Life with Katy Milkman

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm Larry Weddell.

And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and Again, go to wydellonwinning.comwebinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm with Katie Milkman and Katie is a ball of educated energy professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a very special institution and she's got some special research. I'll let her tell you about it, but she's been a TEDx speaker. She's named one of the world's top 40 business school professors under 40. She's at 2018 began hosting Charles Schwab's popular podcast Choiceology with Katie Milkman that explores her area of study and expertise, which is behavioral economics about decision making, by the way. Ratings 4.8 stars out of 1.2 thousand reviews. Congratulations to you.

Thank you. Very proud of the show.

And so tell me what your voted Wharton's iron Prof. What is that?

That was one of the most fun things I did. Pre Pandemic, we had a competition where professors at Wharton each had to give a 5 minute slideshow slides auto advance every 20 seconds about their research and entertain a room of 500 MBAs. And there was a vote on who gave the most interesting presentation. So. So it was very fun and I suspect we'll talk a little bit about the topic of that, which was temptation bundling. I'll tell you about it more later.

Yeah, but at a young age you've traveled a lot of roads and made a lot of, covered a lot of territory, moving up the ladder and making an impact, doing a lot of things, making an impact. And so congratulations on all of that and developed quite an audience, helped a ton of people, influencing a ton of leaders. Like you say in one Talk, there was 500 MBAs out there. That was just one class one year. And so making a big impact. And how did you get going? Where did this energy and drive launch early? You know, when did someone knock you on the head or did someone offend you tremendously and say, oh sure, yes.

There'S some of that. We all have that chip on our shoulder.

What caused you to become who you are today, you know, or got you started rolling? What thought one idea.

How long is this podcast? How long I answer that to be?

Like I said, I ask all the wrong questions.

It's an interesting, I think, you know, we all navel Gaze. And it's hard to answer. Where does, where does your fire come from? There's so many different sources, I think for all of us, including the time someone insulted us and we had something to prove, including the moment where we found meaning in a project and realized it could change the world. I. If we go like way back in time, I had a wonderful.

What I have found is that these things influence you your entire stinking life.

Yeah, no, they're buried down in there and I'm a 5 year old. I'm worrying about it already and I'm.

Way on the other end of that thing. And a lot of this stuff I realized, you know, if that hadn't happened 40 years ago, you know, I wouldn't have done this or so and so hadn't said that. And so anyway, it's just, you know, you know, I don't want to burn your circuits right off the bat, but if anything, you know, the first thing that comes up that was a formative type. I want to do this, I want to go in that direction. I don't want to do this, you know, yeah, sure, those type things.

As a undergraduate student at Princeton University, I was required to write a senior thesis, which is an original work of scholarship. Had to turn it in in order to graduate. And I don't like doing things unless I do them well. So I was very anxious about this, you know, from starting freshman year. What is it going to be? What will be, you know, this monstrous amount of work. Like what? What will I do that's worthy? And I.

You were a freshman and you were worrying about writing that.

Oh yes, I have lots of anxiety. That's a whole other thing. But yes, I was thinking ahead, thinking what will the, you know, how will I do something that's worthwhile? So I was thinking about a lot for many years. I ended up deciding to major in engineering, which required switching from the College of Arts and Sciences to Engineering. Summer school is a big hassle. And becoming an engineer, operations research and financial engineering is my major. But I loved sort of the arts and sciences component too. And I minored in American Studies, loved literature and I had this extra challenge for the thesis. You have to combine your major and your minor. You're required when you do this original work of scholarship has to over overlapping topics. So. And Princeton, it's called a. It's not called a minor, it's called a certificate. But anyway, I had to do something that combined American Studies and engineering. And I was like, what in the world will I do? And I Ended up coming up with an idea that kind of changed my life, I think, and was pretty formative. It was because of a class I took on the American Short Story, where every class we'd read a short story, we come in, we'd analyze the life of the author, and then we'd talk about the fiction. And I thought, you know, that was so much fun. But is there any basis in fact for this deep work we were doing of understanding who the person is who wrote these works of fiction? Maybe that's what I could study for my thesis. I don't think no one had ever explored empirically this relationship. And I decided to do a statistical analysis of fiction. I chose a decade of New Yorker fiction to read hundreds and hundreds of stories, classify who is the author? Where are they from? What's their gender, race, background, who are the characters in the fiction? Who's the protagonist? What's their story, you know? And is there an overlap? Also, do the editors at the New Yorker actually influence the fiction? Because we assume they play some role. But are there changes in what's getting published when we see shifts in the editor that are noticeable? So I did this huge statistical analysis of New Yorker fiction for my.

I'm already confused.

You're confused? Okay, tell me what I'm confused.

No, I'm already confused. Just forming the idea for this study.

It was just, you know, something that I was curious about that I noticed in the world. And I was like, wait. I could. I could collect data and answer that question, and that would be neat, and no one's done that before, and that seems worthwhile. And then the adventure I went on was truly magnificent in terms like, it was so much fun. I love everything about it. I loved, you know, reading the fiction. That was fun. I loved crunching the numbers and being able to say, oh, my God, look, women write about men more than men write about women. And it's a statistically significant difference. That's so interesting. I wonder why that is. Oh, and minorities write more about white protagonists than the other way around. I wonder why that is. Is it easier to. If you're in a country that's sort of dominated by another group, do you find it more natural to sort of step outside of your own experience and outside of your own skin than if you're a member of a dominant group? What does this say about us? It was fascinating. I loved every aspect of it. I got to go visit the New Yorker offices, interview the current fiction editors, see manuscripts that had been submitted. People opened their doors to me. And told me about the process, ended up getting a bunch of press coverage. The day I graduated, there was a big article about it in the New York Times that was magnificent because all these people were so interested in what I was so interested in. I couldn't believe people cared. That was the formative experience in that I found I loved analyzing data, being the first one in the world to know the answer to a question, that I was decent at coming up with questions other people also found intriguing, that it was super fun to talk about this. All those things were amazing.

Repeat that question that you had in your mind. Make sure I understand the question. The question in your mind that you.

Research was, do authors write about fiction that. Do they write fiction that was influenced by their own experience? Do they write about characters who resemble them? Do they write about places? How fictional is fiction? Sort of was really the question. And is it useful to dive into the biography of a author to understand what they've written, when they've written a work of fiction? How relevant is that? That was really what motivated it. And then, of course, it expanded from there, and I ended up studying other things. Once you've collected this huge, you know, data set, there were all these other interesting things because no one had done anything like this before. And that just taught me that I was passionate about social science, that I was interested in questions about human nature and what motivates people, and that I like crunching numbers to come up with quantifiable answers to those kinds of questions.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion.

In assets under management, and has done.

Well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar. Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others.

Move, where did this anxiety to excel? It could come just from sports, but to the point that where you get in college and going to get into Princeton, and immediately you're concerned about what you're going to write your senior thesis on so you can get out, so you spend four years.

Well, first of all, I don't think that was atypical. There were a lot of people there who were like, oh my God, this huge looming thing. Because it was actually most universities like in the peer group don't require such a thing. It's optional. Like, you can get honors if you write a thesis. But this was an unusual thing about Princeton. I think everyone who'd come to Princeton was like, oh, gosh, should I have gone somewhere else that wouldn't put me through this particular hoop? So there. I think it was common to find people in the dining halls having conversation like, oh, my God, the senior thesis is really scary.

What do we do? So that rite of passage. Yeah, right. Yeah. So that's a common thing at Princeton. At Georgia Tech, where I went to school, the big dilemma was, I've got to pass the swimming course.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We did not have that requirement.

Seniors hanging around forever putting off the swimming course.

That's funny. Yeah. No, there are a lot of schools that have that. I don't think I had to do a swimming test at Princeton. I don't remember that. But that is. Yeah. There's different hoops that were put through. Right. And whatever it is, it's daunting.

Right. And so from this, you got. Why did you think that was valuable? Just, you know, why did you. Why did it dawn on you that that would be a valuable thing, you know, question to answer? Because it's kind of. It's kind of a foundational question.

Yeah, it is. It. I think it dawned on me in the. Just literally in a lecture that I was sitting through that I loved in a class I absolutely adored. But there was no. You know, there were these two things I was doing simultaneously. Right. I was taking these engineering classes and, like, sitting around thinking all day about, like, Kolmogorov Smirnoff tests and Poisson distributions and Markov chains. Right. The whole world of, like, thinking about data and statistics. And then my other classes, I was sitting around analyzing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and what motivated them to write these stories, and what did the stories mean and what were the metaphors? And there was no overlap. And I think the. And this is something that's been true throughout my career, that's been a source of pleasure and success is just trying to recognize there are these worlds that don't talk to each other, and when you can bridge them, you can create neat things. And for me, it was sitting in this class, hearing about the biographies of these authors and understanding that there was a hypothesis or an assumption built into the way that I was being taught about American literature. But then I realized this has not been tested, and it would be neat to know empirically how valid is it all Right.

So you have this question and you come up, you get the answer and how did you get. Did you get validation or they have to sign off that, you know, this is. This is what I'm going to write on. So you don't waste a lot of time.

Yes.

Yeah. People had to sign off. People were like, this is kind of wild. This is kind of ambitious, but okay, let's give it a shot. And then I had. I just had amazing mentors. I had a professor in the English department, William Gleason, and a professor in the operations research department, Renee Carmona, who are like, we don't normally talk to. I'm an English professor, I'm a mathematician. They don't normally have a lot of overlap in their orbits, but both were excited and happy to sign on and sort of co advised the thesis.

Part of that, though, is I think that you'd have to agree they picked up from you that you were somebody who would do something with the time they spent with you would be time well spent because you would follow through, you would value it.

Yeah, absolutely. They could tell I was excited and they knew me from classes.

Excited. Yeah.

I wasn't going to be a waste of their time. I think that's right.

And so when you got into. How did you make that happen, though? I mean, you got to. How'd you find the time? How did you get into the New York area? I mean, how did you go about. See, there's one thing you find in business. I'll teach the business professor. The value of an executive in business is the fact, you know, the ability to say no, because everybody be bringing you all these great ideas. And the thing is, yes, it is a great. If it is a great idea. Yes, pat him on the back is a great idea. But the big thing, if the make or break is do we have the ability to execute? And on that basis, usually lack of people, lack of funds, lack of whatever. Great idea back, put it on the back burner. Got to say no for now. And.

So anyway, I agree on this project. It was like I needed it to be something I myself could do that I wasn't dependent on anyone else. Like, I didn't need to go get a data set. So I figured out that we had Firestone Library, was the library on campus. And in the bowels of the library in the stacks, I found they had bound copies of every New Yorker that had been published for the last 50 years. And so I was like, okay. There was nothing digitized at that point. I'm going to have to go check out these massive volumes. I was going to be in California for the summer before my senior thesis, working in San Francisco for an investment bank. I'm like, okay, I'm going to ship these boxes of bound volumes and I'm going to read a little every night and code the data. And that's how it's going to get done. And then once I got it all coded up, then I'm going to. Then I'll analyze. But it was like I knew what the steps were at a timeline. I knew I had to depend on me, and I could depend on me. I got started early, you know, it was just like plowing through it. And it was fun because reading fiction is fun. And then once I'd done it, once I'd done the reading and had the data, the analysis was trivial, right? That the data was the magical part. It was like, oh, run some T tests, run some correlations. Really simple stuff. For someone who was used to working with data at all, getting into the New Yorker was hard. I don't remember how many emails I sent or how many people, but a lot. And, you know, it was like a lucky connection. Somebody thought this sounded sort of interesting. So, you know, some friend of guess.

How many emails and people you contacted. Guess.

25, 30.

There you go.

Yeah, it's not. Not like, oh, Jess, jackpot on the first attempt. And then. But I had something interesting to say by then, which was also, of course, how did you.

You know, if it's the same thing, they'll, you know, delete. You know, delete. So you have to make it a little different. You have to sneak in a different way. So how did you go? How did. See, that was a problem. I mean, that was a problem. You saw how to break in there.

I think it was a weird project, right? To say, like, I just read a decade of the fiction you published and analyzed it, and here's what I've learned, and I'd like to come interview you and understand better what the selection process looks like, because I think that would inform the way I think about this thesis project. That's a weird email to get, right? I'm sure these people are getting cold emails all the time. Like, you know, hi, please read my story. I would like it if you would publish me in the New Yorker and make my life better. But I don't think they got a lot of emails from undergraduate thesis students who analyze their data. So I think they were pretty interested. Roger angel, who's still there, is, you know, sort of been a part of the fiction department for 50, 70 years. He's been there a long time. He, you know, he saw that he was part of something historic. He knew that and it was meaningful to him. And then he thought it was neat that somebody had was looking at it in the same through this lens and giving him a new perspective. So he was very excited to have me. As I recall, when I visited, it.

Was really fun, a lot of fascinating information and helping me set up the next question I've got for you, but I'm going to save that for the next episode. Thanks so much, Kate, and congratulations on how far you've traveled in a short period of time. And we're going to get in depth on that in our next episode.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.