[Greatest Hits] Harnessing The Fresh Start Effect 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 Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here talking with Katie Milkman, and Katie's a lot of fun.

Aw, thank you.

Talk about TEDx. How did you get to TED or the book? Let's talk about the book, the TEDx and the podcast.

Yeah, all related. So fast forward from what we've talked about. What led me to want to be a scientist? The magic of the social group that I found myself in graduate school that helped me discover what I love doing. And I ended up as a professor at Wharton studying the science of behavior change. And the questions I was interested in are really practically useful. That was immediately clear to me that what I wanted to be studying was questions that would help people make better decisions in their lives, that help them advance their health, their financial security, their education. And that meant that if I wanted to have an impact, which is the reason I'm doing all of this in the first place, right, I'm doing the science because I saw one. I was intrinsically interested, but I also saw an opportunity to make the world a better place. There was meaning in that for me. But if I'm just having a conversation with 100 other scholars in the world who are studying related questions and read my papers, that's not much of an impact in terms of actually making the world a better place. So I got interested in science communication. How can I spread the word about these things we're finding to a much broader audience so that they'll have real lasting impact on lives? And that's what really led to the podcast, the book, and the TEDx talk that you mentioned, they're all part of that second mission. I'd say my first mission in life is advance the science, advance the knowledge. But the second is and make sure that it doesn't die with me, that it goes out to as many people as possible. And I find it fun also, it turns out, which is we've talked about fun before. Fun it one of my favorite findings on the science of behavior changes. If you're doing something fun, you will persist. If you're doing something just because there's a long term goal associated with it, but you're not enjoying it in the moment, you will quit. People don't get that enough. But for me, I'm so lucky that it was fun, the science was fun and I found the communicating about it was fun. And so that's what led me to these other projects.

I can't help myself, but I have to pass this on to you. What. Because I've spent a lifetime training people too. And what they keep doing things that are rewarding, you know, they get positive feedback, you know, and they feel good. You know, they've got to be, you know, they got to hear a yes, they've got to have a get a paycheck, they've got to win an award. They got some kind of positive feedback where they said, this is fun, you know, and also in the process, they start to build confidence. I can do this. But things that are fun, that they have their own confidence, they've convinced themselves they can do it and really be at least above average or even a chance at, great at. Those are the kind of things that people pour themselves into. But it starts with getting them those little successes, those baby steps of success. And, you know, you can really orchestrate that by, you know, you setting them up for success by, you know, small, achievable type goals.

There's absolutely some of my favorite research really reinforces that. There's a study I love from the. This isn't about life achievement. It's more about sort of breaking a bigger goal into a smaller goal. But I think it reinforces your point, the study by Hal Hirschfeld from UCLA and collaborators where they show if you invite people to save $5 a day instead of $150 a month, you, you know, multiply by a factor of several. How many people say, oh yeah, I'm comfortable saving because those bite size pieces, people are willing to, they can see that. And then, then getting the success time and again is a snowball effect. And that has also been shown. So I think the evidence is so strong and not enough people appreciate the importance of those bite size goals that they can see success on.

Yeah, it's like as a fellow at our company one time said, everybody has a goal of being financially independent, but what they're missing is those daily achievable.

Pieces of it.

Yeah, pieces of it where you can set those up where you can feel like, yes, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it because you're going to run into all kinds of setbacks. But if you have the positive things where you can say, yep, in spite of that, I got this done. Spite of that, I got that done, it helps you stay in control of your situation and reinforces you moving, you know, continuing to move forward. And so what came first? The book or the TED talk or the podcast?

I think the TEDx talk was first, which was really. It was a University of Pennsylvania TEDx event. And, you know, I was a good teacher and scholar and.

Well, you were the Iron Professor.

I was the Iron professor, exactly. So that was. It wasn't a huge leap that the local TEDx organizers would invite me to give a presentation. Right.

And then all the other professors hated you. You got selected. They didn't.

I don't. I don't. I don't think they even noticed, actually. So everybody's busy in academia. I don't think anyone noticed. I don't think there was any resentment there. And then the podcast, you know, I'd written op EDS in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and started doing some speaking that outside.

Of just how do you write an op ed in the New York Times and things like that? I mean, you just write it and send it in. Do they ask you?

You write it and send it in. You. You know, I had, in both cases that I wrote them, it was. There were scientific discoveries that I felt were ready for a wide audience and I could communicate in a thousand words. And we wrote them up and sent them in, and they published it because they thought, oh, this is interesting. We wrote one about how to achieve your New Year's resolutions. Another one about a really different research study I'd done looking at whether or not professors discriminate against students on the basis of their race and gender. And we had some interesting things to say. So in both cases, they publish it. But this, you know, it starts to build a little bit of an audience, and people are like, oh, this person does science and talks about it. So I think that those articles.

Are those articles under your name?

Yes. You will be able to find them if you search for the New York Times.

Katie Milkman, the Iron Professor.

I don't think the Iron professor will yield.

Is that part of your Iron Professor, Katie?

Maybe from here on out, I'll use that as a good suggestion. Actually.

You will.

Now that you're laughing. Wait a minute. I'm going to give you an even better one. I have a newsletter and I sent a joke to my former students. I was like, you know, I'm starting a newsletter because so many of you are in touch and want to hear about what's going on, and I'm going to share the latest behavioral Science. And I said, you know, I joked that I'd name it Milkman Delivers, but that's too ridiculous. And I got all of these emails and all of my students. Katie, you have. You have to call it Milkman Delivers. It has to be Milkman Delivers. What are. You know, are you crazy? That's amazing. So I have a newsletter, and it's called Milkman Delivers. Better than Iron. Prof. I think.

And how do they. Yeah, I think so, too. And they can get that? Yeah, I guess. You have a website?

I have a website. Katimilkman.com you can sign up for my newsletter. It's free and it has a funny title.

Yeah. And in there you put out things. I guess it's coming to your attention or that you're working on as far, scientific breakthroughs, applications.

Yeah, I do it once a month. And actually what it is, I do these interviews with scientists for my podcast, Choiceology, which is this Charles Schwab podcast, where every episode it's an interview with a scientist about a behavioral quirk or bias or some way we could be better. That science has proven matters. And I do these long interviews, but we actually only publish a really short edited portion of them. So I originally started the newsletter as a way that I could share some of the additional content that I thought was interesting. So I publish a Q and A with a scientist every month on a topic that I think is interesting and relevant to current events.

And so. And that's pulled from the podcast.

It's pulled from. Yeah. Podcast tapings that sometimes part of it aired and part of it didn't. Sometimes all of it aired, sometimes none of it aired. It depends.

Yeah, let's get the name of your book for everyone.

It's called how to change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be and how.

To change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Okay. And that's the world I operate in, except not the science part. I deal with the real life side of that. And our approach here is talking to people like yourself who have lived that and let you tell them, you know, the stories.

Yeah, the stories are so important. The book is more focused. The book is full of stories, but it is a. It's a science nerds book. You know, I wrote about the adventure stories of doing the research to uncover the answers to questions about change. So it's. I think it's important for people to know if they pick it up, they're going to, you know, they're going to Hear about, really about the science as well as the stories. It's both.

Right. But the thing is, it's interesting to hear you talk about making things work. You know, like when you're. You're out there, you're doing the research. Is everybody in the professor world writing up op eds and sending them into the New York Times or something like that? I mean, you know. Cause you.

Not everyone wants to do that kind of work, you know, not all of us. I have lots of colleagues who, you know, we sort of think about. There's a spectrum of different types of science from like really. We call it really basic science, like the most fundamental, like understanding how neurons fire in the brain. Right. Or understanding why our orbit around the sun is what it is. That would be more. There's more basic science questions and then there's really applied science questions where it's really practical. Right. You think like vaccines. That's an applied science. And the kind of work I do where I'm trying to understand how do we help people change, how do we get them to save more, exercise more, you know, study harder and get better grades? Those are really applied research questions. It's certainly much more common for someone to be writing op eds, writing a book, having a podcast and so on if they're saying those applied questions. Because you're so close to the practitioner world and the interplay is really useful. Right. Like, I get so much out of even a conversation on a podcast where I'm being interviewed and I get to hear you sprinkle in your practitioner experiences watching Elon Musk or watching. You mentioned someone who started sort of the Khan Academy of the medical world. So there's this back and forth where somebody studying how neurons fire isn't gonna get that benefit necessarily from the public facing work.

How do you get a podcast with Charles? Why is it the Charles Schwab podcast?

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 up.

So they actually started the podcast without me. I'm a. I got to join the team. After they'd had a very successful first season with another host, still under the same thing. Choiceology. Yeah. So I've been. This is where. Oh, God, we're working on this. I can't remember the 10th season now. There's one season with Dan Heath, who's a really wonderful science communicator who's written about behavioral science. His brother is in my field professor at Stanford, who I've known since I was a graduate student. And Dan did a great job with this initial mission. So Schwab wanted to create a podcast that would help educate their audience, you know, including like current, current customers and hope for customers about topics that might help them make better financial decisions. So that was their vision. They brought him on. They wanted to have science in it. And then when I sort of came in and took over, the podcast morphed a bit because I wanted to go deeper on the science. And I, I, I'm not sure how they found me. I sort of got an I got outreach saying, are you interested? And I listened to some episodes and I was like, wow, this is neat, this. And they have a really big audience. And this is a way that I could expand the influence I'm having in terms of communicating about what I think the most interesting science is to help people.

How much of your life does that take to do that?

Not very much, actually. It's a very small amount of my time, which is one of the other things that's wonderful about. There's a fantastic production team that does a lot of story chasing. They do a lot of the work. We choose the topics together. So I come with a big list of things and get to choose who I'll interview, who's going to be the scientific expert. But then the team does most of the heavy lifting. There's a story we tell at the beginning of each episode to illustrate whatever point we're making. And I interview the expert. And I actually am not involved in this sort of story chasing. There's a whole other team that does all of that work.

How many, how many episodes a month do you put out?

We make 12 a year, so.

12 a year?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's an off season and an on season, so. But it's not a huge time commitment, which is part of. It's been really fun for so many reasons. One of them is it's not a heavy lift. It has really big impact. Cause there's so many people who listen. I also, you're doing this, you know, not everyone has a taste for it, but wow, do I love the interviews. Cause I learned so much and it gives me all sorts of new ideas to get to go. I have to go probe these scientists who are a little outside my area. You know, I know their work, but I don't know it super well. Get to ask them these questions and generates all sorts of ideas. I've gotten so much smarter and I think better at teaching as a result. And so it's had these funny ancillary benefits when I thought it was just going to be a communications experience. It's much more.

So how do you think about your life right now? I know you enjoy it, but you're somebody who has, I think since we've started these interviews, you've had like 5,000 emails have load up in your tray. And so I don't want to depress you.

I don't love the email part. That's not my favorite part of my life.

I don't want to depress you. But this is going to come to an end and those emails are going.

To be, they're going to be waiting for me.

Read me, read me.

Yeah, true. Oh yeah, you are depressing me. Stop, stop.

But it's, you know, it could be silence, crickets, you know. Yeah. There's always worse problems. This is what we call a happy problem.

Okay.

This is how we look at this. It's a happy problem, Katie.

It's, it is, it's so great to have so many interesting things coming across.

But you got a five year, have a five year old. What kind of, you know, where do you live? What's your life? You don't have to give us your street address and phone number or anything.

But my 5 year old would actually. If you were here. There was a period when he was three where we were meeting people on the bus and he would just tell them our address and we were like, you have to stop doing that. It's very friendly. I live in downtown Philadelphia, which is pretty close to the campus of the University of Pennsylvania where I work. So it's a walking distance thing. Although obviously for the last couple of years, mostly I've been hanging out in my house, in my home office. I've got a five year old. My husband's a physicist, he's an astronomer and he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania too, which is really fun. Very lucky to be married to a brilliant academic who's constantly teaching me things. And I love my job. I have the best job in the world. I get to wake up in the morning and go think about ideas and talk to smart people and cook up new schemes to try to make the world better with science.

When you think about your future, for you, what would be a dream come true if all of these. The compounding continues? You know, meeting more and more people, you know, the research reaches a new level. How do you look at your future? I'm sure there's going to be another book. You know, when you're doing continuing research, there's always more reasons to put out the next book and the next book. But have you thought about being out of being on speaking tours and things like that to get the message out, or do you feel like the message about this is going to get out sufficiently? Well, doing the approach you got?

I've done a lot of speaking. I continue to do that. I'm happy. The book is, you know, was a bestseller. The New York Times just named it one of the eight books to read about healthy living and oh, great, 2021. So, you know, it's doing well. The podcast is doing well. I'm an ambitious person who's normally looking for the next thing, but I have to say I'm really happy. And I think that when I think about what's the next big goal, it's all in the science. I feel really great about the communications. What I really want to do is make more progress on scientific discoveries that can help better lives.

How does that happen? You get bigger grants. How does that happen?

Yeah, bigger, bigger grants. You know, part of it happens is actually bigger ideas. Just continuing to have conversations with brilliant people from all different disciplines and cook ups new ideas about what might really have an impact and then bigger partnerships. So finding organizations that are willing to invest in massive randomized controlled trials. That's the kind of work I do to test ideas. So we did something a couple years ago that just got published in Nature that was with 24 Hour Fitness and it involved 60,000 of their members trying to figure out over four weeks, could we get them to exercise more regularly. So that's a really big study. But you can get bigger than that, right? There's a lot more than 60,000 people in the world who want to be physically active or, you know, we're starting to think about partnerships on trying to reduce college attrition because, you know, a third of people who start college in the United States don't.

I got an idea for you.

Okay.

Studying the performance productivity of teams where they like their boss or their leader or their manager and they don't. Or they don't like, you know what I'M saying, is this an encouraging. Is this a positive person or a negative person? Because I think one of the most destructive, hidden things out there is some of these people in authority positions that have gone rogue. You know, for some reason they've gotten into an addiction or they've just done the same job too long, they're taking it for granted, and all of a sudden now they're cooling it. And they haven't admitted that to themselves, but they're like, you know, a drag on everything, everybody underneath them. But being able to ferret out, you know, like, if you're a big multinational corporation, you have tens of thousands of people around the world, it would be great to have a program that could track or monitor that, because that would be one of the biggest. To me.

Yeah, you're talking about cool people, analytics stuff. And I should say there are so many brilliant scholars who are specifically studying teams. You're making me think of Amy Edmondson and her work on psychological safety. And there's conferences of people who are focused on groups and their interactions and their leaders. I mostly study individuals and the decisions they make about their own lives and about the outcomes that will have long term rewards if they can see them through. But where the short term, there's some pain. Right. Like putting money aside or exercising or quitting smoking or studying hard. So it is. It's a different field, but there's lots of cool opportunities for overlap. And I absolutely agree with you that better understanding teams and leadership styles and how to diagnose failure is a burning question, but I will say there's great people working on that.

Oh, that's. That is great. I'm. I'm so excited for you and what you're doing and looking forward to getting into your podcast and get your book and attempt to wade through the science. I bet it's not that bad.

Well, I hope it's not bad.

Yeah, I bet it's not.

Science isn't that dense. It's a light read.

You're. You're too good of a communicator for it to be a dense read. So, anyway, thank you for saying that. Would you like to give a final word to the people who've been listening.

And.

One final connection to them to pass on from your, you know, your research and writing?

Yeah. Yeah, sure. How about one final word? Being one of the most interesting things I've learned in my career studying behavior change is how important timing can be to success and motivation. I've studied something called the fresh start effect, that there are moments in our lives when we feel like we're turning the page to a new chapter, we have a new beginning. And of course New Year's is the most famous. But these come along regularly, whether it's because it's a Monday or the start of a new season or the celebration of a birthday, or because you've moved to a new role or gotten a promotion or moved to a new city. When those moments come, we're extra motivated to pursue our goals. And I just wanted to mention, I think it's really underappreciated how much we can gain when we lean into those opportunities and set goals properly set goals in the way we were talking about earlier. What's the bite size component you're going to tackle each day instead of just the big long term ambition that you may never achieve if you don't break it down? So look for fresh starts. Make sure you take advantage of that motivation and that you set goals wisely so you can get from where you are to where you want to be.

That would be a phenomenal book right there. The Fresh Start Effect.

Well, it's a chapter of my book. I feel like I thought about writing a book, but I thought it would be a little bit empty in that it just gets you started. And that's one of the problems with it. If all you have is a fresh start effect, you begin to change, but you don't see it through. And so it's a chapter. It's the first chapter.

I'm looking forward to staying in touch and catching up on all your research. So thanks so much for taking the time.

Thank you. This is really fun.

Hopefully we can do this again down the road because I know you're going to be making big breakthroughs in identifying patterns that work and patterns that don't work. And it'd be great to hear. So thanks so much.

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 you in order to move up as fast as possible, I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go Go.