Katy Milkman
speaker
200 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 2 Apr
Katy Milkman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
start of a new month, following celebration of certain holidays, particularly the kind that we associate with fresh starts. So those are all moments when we feel like we've opened a new chapter. And we have a couple things that go on at those moments. One is that we feel like, okay,
This is a moment when I want to step back and think big picture about things because you recognize that there's that break point. You think actually about your life like you're a character in a book. The way we organize our memories and structure them, it's not linear completely. Instead, it's like the college years, the years playing sports, the years living in Boston, whatever they are.
that's how you structure your memories and and that means there's actually implications for the way you live your life because when you get to one of those chapter breaks that's when you do this big picture thinking interesting and you also tend to feel like your identity is shifting right so you like step into a new role as you you know i'm i'm turning 40 in the year ahead and that feels like a big break to me like i will be
in a different age category when i became a professor i vividly remember like that was a huge shift in my identity i felt like a different okay i have a different set of expectations and roles and ways i should dress and talk and that identity shift that can come even if it's something as as small as you know you're stepping into a new year and you feel like the new year new you you can look back and say well you know
Last year, my old job when I was a graduate student, I didn't manage to eat right. But that was the old me, and this is the new me. And so you feel the sense of optimism and disconnect from those past failures.
It's so interesting. I do think that even when things are good, we can have these kinds of fresh start experiences that shape us in positive ways. I'll give you an example. I had a phone call. I was driving here from Santa Barbara this morning. I had a phone call with a friend who just got tenure. And he is thinking big. His life is great. Tenure is a great event.
Oh, yeah. Fair enough. Not everyone is part of my weird world.
Yes. Okay. So in academia, if you're a professor, this is like the be all and end all of your career. You're working really hard. You get your PhD. You get your assistant professor job. You work really hard. You write a bunch of papers. You teach a bunch of classes.
And if your university says, you know, you're doing great, if you're good enough, they bestow upon you tenure, which means permanent job. Job security basically can't be fired unless you do something illegal. And they're saying, like, you have now total academic freedom. We're no longer going to be evaluating you.
We trust you. And it's like this bizarre institutions created to help people take risks. But it is a big moment in the life of an academic when they get to that milestone. It's like there's nowhere else to go. You've climbed to the top of the mountain. And so it's really exciting. It often happens to people around their 40s, sort of like midlife, when you might already be having some
introspection going on about like, why am I here? What's my purpose? So a lot of academics step back at that moment and think, why do I want to do now? What do I want to do next? I've been climbing and climbing to this point. And I was having this conversation with a friend on the drive here who had reached that point and was having that exact, okay, what's next? And
wanted to talk about writing a book since I'd written a book. And like, what is that? Like he thinks that might be the next big adventure for him, but nothing is wrong. Everything is right. It's just that he reached a moment. He reached an achievement. He, he got to the top of a mountain and looked around and realized, okay, I've climbed to my goal and it's time to figure out what the next one is.
And I think that can be a fresh start too. That's positive.
It's a fantastic question. I'm going to give you a somewhat frustrating answer. It frustrates me. I don't feel like academic research has wrapped its arms around identity the way I would like it to because I think it is unquestionably so important, right? The labels. we put on ourselves obviously matter, but I feel like we don't know nearly as much as we should.
It's one of the things I'm most interested to study. It's your next book. Maybe, maybe. We know a little. One of the things I think is most relevant to the way I think about identity is mindset, which is it's different than identity, but a mindset can come with or can be triggered by an identity.
And one of the barriers we haven't talked about yet to change that I think is really important is whether you believe you can change. And identity and mindset are a big part of that. So we know a lot about mindset from work, for instance, by Carol Dweck at Stanford, who's done this incredible... Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Exactly. And that's sort of an identity, right?
You identify with being someone who can grow or you identify as someone who is X, right? Like, you know, I'm only this smart. I'm only this capable. So in a sense, there's an identity that comes with believing you can grow or an identity that comes with believing you can't. There's also wonderful research on the placebo effect and how that extends beyond just medicine, right?
We know about it in medicine that, like, if you believe a sugar pill is going to make you healthier, you actually... experience physiological benefits. But there's some really interesting research showing it's beyond, you know, we think of it in this medical context, and that's where it was first studied.
Actually, I learned from a children's book, like Ben Franklin studied this, and I don't know if you know mesmerizing. Interesting. That term comes from Dr. Mesmer, who was the original sort of charlatan in France who was giving people fake medicine. Interesting. Anyway, and Ben Franklin figured it all out.
It does, it was like, and it's also a wonderful children's book. So I wish I'd known that before I wrote my book, it would have been in there. Anyway, there's a lot more though than just the medical component to placebo effects, right? When we believe that we will achieve something that also can improve our achievement, right? When we believe we're gonna get an outcome.
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