Learn Big Things About Yourself by Tackling Big Problems 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 with Kate Milkman, and Kate is a professor, among many, many other titles they've given her at the Wharton School at the University of Business. And she's lots of successes. She's a podcast speaker. Tedx speaker. Well, she runs a podcast and author of how to the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. And so talk about. You know, I get the idea, Kate, that the fact that you had these wide interests and you had to combine them into a question for your thesis, and it was such a hard thing to do, but you figured out how to do it since it was so unique that you made yourself right from the beginning. Following that, you carved out a real special place for yourself with your effort and your, you know, your topic. But the way that you taught yourself how to pull that off, I bet that had a lot to do with informing you about attacking and making things happen that you wanted to want it to happen the rest of your life. You know, you want to do something big, you want to do something special, something you get excited about, and then you found it was a huge thing, but you pulled it off anyway. Sounds like, from what I know, the story of your life and your approach to things move forward.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. I think it taught me that you can have a wacky idea that seems too big to pull off and you just can see it through, and it can be magical and it can excite lots of other people and generate a lot of great conversations and great outcomes. So.

So yeah, it seems like that can be. That can be a good place to be. Elon Musk, you know, et cetera. You know what I'm saying?

I wouldn't compare my successes to Elon.

Musk, but it's something impossible that can impact a lot of people for good. You know, big, big things. You wonder if it's possible. And because the thing is, Elon Musk didn't know what he was getting to either when he started. You know what I'm saying?

Right. Well, most of us don't. When you build something normally, you, you know, you have some kind of dream, whether it's to build a, you know, a Rocket ship or a senior thesis as a college student, whatever it might be. But you know, we all have our level and then, yeah, it's an adventure. And once you realize you actually can achieve it and you've pulled it off, it makes you more and more ambitious about what else can I do that would be good for the world?

Well, you know, I was interviewing a doctor last week and he was talking about when he got into school. He wasn't really that motivated to study and everything, but he decided he wanted to be a doctor for some reason. But there was a beautiful blonde in the, in the first chemistry class, I think he got in. And he knew his only chance, he, he, he decided his only chance to get her attention was to have great grades, you know, to be at the top of the class. And that was his, that was his thing. But he said once he dug in, he pulled it off and then he said he found out he liked it.

You know, and so that's a good life lesson too. If you don't explore, you know, sometimes it's a funny thing that leads you to explore and then you discover anyway, the computer scientist in me is loving that. It's like a multi armed bandit problem to throughout a really nerdy term.

Right. And he, he got the girl, but he also got, you know, Dr. And you know, head of this, head of that. But he's also started MedCram, which has millions of subscribers, you know, a medical, basically a medical Khan Academy on YouTube. And so, you know, when you have those things, you lock in on something big, it can lead you to other big things because in the process you find out what you're capable of. That had to be a great confidence builder to pull it off, but also to have other people reinforcing you that. Some people may have thought it was a stupid idea, but you know, there was a lot of knowledge about it.

Some people thought it was a stupid idea. In fact, I still treasure the fact that Joyce Carol Oates sent me an email telling me that she thought my thesis idea was vapid at the core. And she might have been right.

Vapid.

But it's pretty awesome to have Joyce Carol Oates insult you when you're in your 20s. I was like, I did something right. She's paying attention.

Vapid at your core.

You know, not everyone thinks art should be statistically analyzed, let's just put it that way. And I'm going to give a point.

I'm going to put a free idea out there for somebody who wants to write books. Somebody needs to Grab these withering insults. Professors make these vicious, withering insults because most of them are hysterically funny if you're not on the receiving end of.

It, you know, I could hysterically funny. And I was on the receiving end, so.

Oh, okay, there you go.

But mostly in hindsight.

Yeah, in hindsight, yeah, it could be a lot funnier. But as you move forward now, you get past the thesis and then what happens?

I started a PhD program. So that was. It was enough information from working on that project that I could tell, okay, I like research, I really like doing this. This is fun. And I started a PhD at Harvard in computer science and business because, I don't know, there was this little thing called the Internet that was kind of taking off and I thought maybe there would be neat questions at the intersection between these two fields around E commerce and all the data that was going to be pouring in as a result of that. I get there, I have to take a microeconomics sequence. And I had hated microeconomics as an undergrad. I hated it so much. Actually, it's what made me switch to become an engineer because I had thought, I want to do something with math that's applied practical. I took microeconomics and I was like, what is this? This is terrible. None of this makes any sense. None of it seems right. So I switched and became an engineer. But I had to take it as a graduate student and it was totally different. And I fell in love with the field. The reason was that I was introduced to this new burgeoning part of it called behavioral economics that was not just taking a simple assumption saying like, people are optimal decision making machines and let's use that to understand the economy. But instead it said, actually there's systematic and predictable ways that people make mistakes. They are impulsive, they hate losing, they overweight small probabilities, and that leads them to do crazy things in the face of risk. So all of this was being introduced. It was sort of. It was a brand new field. It was heavily influencing folks at Harvard. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. It's fascinating. It's all true. I see it and I want to study that and I want to figure out actually not just to understand all the ways that people are broken, but like, what can we do to fix people? How could I be of use by studying this? So that's. That changed my life. That was like the next major life event because now that's what I study and have been studying now for almost 20 years.

Well, one of the things where I've.

Think that would be fascinating is a little bit different. Thing is like, how can you help them fix themselves? You know, because, you know, of the mass of people out there that are going down the drain in their life, not all of them, in fact, very few of them are really motivated to change things around, you know, but that's.

Where I eventually went with it was sort of not just understanding what can be fixed, but yes, also, can people learn things about themselves that can help them change? And also can policymakers, can organizations serving them help them save more for retirement or financial emergencies, achieve better health outcomes, take their medications, exercise regularly, eat healthy, study hard so they get good enough grades to go to college and earn a higher living? All of these things, you know, how could we use science to help achieve those goals? That's where my work has, has essentially gone over the last couple of decades.

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.

And so when you got there, you heard this, you got attracted because you found out this was going on the key point that you got that. So I'm assume, I'm assuming that you pull that off, since you seem to be able to pull off what you, whatever you lock in on.

Well, I don't, I don't know if I've, I've ensured that all people are financially secure and healthy and get a college degree. So I don't know if I'd say I pulled it off, but I think we've made some advances in the science.

No, I'm talking about being able to study, get involved in the studies.

Yes, absolutely. No, I was able to make that U turn from my computer science.

How far had that science gone when you got at that point? Because I'm sure it's gone a long way since then because there had to.

Be, it was a really exciting time. So that's, you know, it's always like, are you in the right place at the right time? There's so much luck in life and I absolutely was lucky in that. Nobel Prize had been Awarded to Danny Kahneman in 2002 for his work on behavioral economics with Amos. Tversky sort of laid the groundwork and said, like, look, here are some systematic and predictable ways that people make mistakes. So I show up as a graduate student two years after that, and there's more excitement than ever about this young new field of behavioral economics. There had also just been some early work published by folks named Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in 2017, but they had written about how, okay, now that we understand there are limitations to the human mind, a next step is to sort of design policies with that in mind to try to help improve outcomes. But that was a really new idea. It's like a year old when I showed up in graduate school and people were starting to talk about that. So I was there just the right moment when there was all this building excitement around the ideas that would eventually sort of carry me forward, and I would become a part of this movement towards using behavioral science to change behavior for the better. So I would say, you know, lots of luck being in the right place at the right time. And then I've been able to, I hope, make some. Some contributions.

So how many years were you there?

Graduate school is five years.

Good lord, I never understand. You gotta really love it.

Oh, I really love it. It's the best. Also, actually, wait, let me just. For anyone listening who's afraid of graduate school but thinks that science sounds fun, I just have to throw out five years just talking to brilliant people about ideas. It's like heaven. There's nothing scary about it at all. And you get through college, that's four years. There's way less classwork in graduate school. Just a couple years of classwork. And the rest of the time is thinking about ideas, talking about ideas, crunching numbers and writing up research papers. So it's actually. It's not. It does. It's what I've been doing for the rest of my life.

Yeah, I actually. I've had people explain that to me. It's just hard for me to believe it, but it's fun. How far did that progress while you were there? You know, and what. How, you know, was there progress being made or people just saying that, you know, going around in circles?

No, I think there was good progress. Things were evolving. The data sets were getting bigger. The. The enthusiasm was building. So. And I don't think, frankly, that I had much to do with that. I was just in the right place at the right time, and I got to hang out with these folks and sort of get be part of the magic. But I wasn't. I was just a grad student. I wasn't a leader.

Was it focused on their behavior leading to failure, or is it focused on behavior leading to success? You know, it's almost a waste of time for me to tell you now, Katie, if you're going to go to grad school, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this because you know this. You get a problem that people go to this. You know, there's, there's like a million ways people can screw things up, but there's very few ways they can win. And so that's what this podcast is about, and that's what I focus on, is how do winners approach situations that allow them to have success that is important to them, you know, like, what's winning? Winning is for you to accomplish things that are important to you, that matter to you, as opposed to wasting a whole lot of time, energy and resources and then falling flat in your face, you know, and, and ending up frustrated even though you made a major effort.

I think I can say the magic for me in graduate school, at each stage of the career, the sort of thing that went right is different in graduate school. The thing that went right, besides being lucky to wander into this interesting field at a moment when it was just blowing up, the other thing that went right was finding the right group of people to surround myself with who made everything fun and successful. And I found a mentor fellow named Max Bazerman, who's a professor at Harvard Business School, who's first of all, one of the greatest mentors in sort of the history of business academia. The number of top scholars he has trained is actually mind boggling now that I'm on the other end and training people. And I look back at what he's achieved like it's hard for my head not to explode. He's just staggeringly good at helping people succeed in this career path. And, and his name is Max Baserman.

Max Baserman.

And he had an. Or a group of students around him who were also extraordinary interdisciplinary scholars interested in questions related to how do we make better judgments and decisions. Who became almost like family. And that, that was so important. Those, those people are still some of my closest friends and collaborators. In fact, my book is, is dedicated to my two families, sort of my, my natural family, if you will, who I love very much and also my academic family. And I. Many of the work, the projects I've done, that event gone on to be well cited, influential have been with members of that group of graduate students who was in Max's orbit during that five year period. So that's a sort of other thing like finding your people, finding your tribe, finding the group that will support you and that's on the same path with the same goals. That can be like family and you can do it together instead of just.

Increases like you said, of people that make it fun, that you enjoy because you multiply, got people to share the experiences with and also bounce ideas off of that are tuned in. You know, it's like drums, you know, they got. Drums have got to be tuned.

It's exactly like jazz, actually.

It's like beat a drum, the other one picks up the vibration, you know, otherwise it's, it's off. And that's the same way in relationships and choosing your friends.

And in my line of work, ideas come from collaboration, novel ideas. They don't come from a vacuum. They come from, as you said, it's riffing. It's like jazz. You're improvising together and being around other excited, enthusiastic people with a similar set of interests. Is when magic happens in science.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that. It's like I heard this a long time out on a ski trip to Keystone, Colorado, believe it or not, where I was talking to the videographer out there and he said, when people talk, magic can happen. And you know, that's not it entirely, but that's the nut of it right there.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works you 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.