The science of fresh starts
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What insights does Katy Milkman share about making lasting changes?
Does it ever feel like you're paying for 20 platforms to do the job of what really should be just one? That's not software as a service or SaaS. It's SAD, software as a disservice. Replacing your stitched together tech stack with one platform for all your departments? Well, that's rippling. Rippling eliminates the bottlenecks and busy work of legacy tools and point solutions by uniting your global HR, IT, and spend teams on just one platform. And right now, you can get six months of Rippling free when you sign up at rippling.com slash scale. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash scale. Don't get sad, get Rippling. Terms and conditions apply. Imagine there is some chore that you are struggling to motivate yourself to pursue.
In my case, when I started doing this, it was exercising regularly. I was just really dreading that, but knew I needed to do it. It was important for my mental health and good for me in the long run. And it felt great afterwards. It's just that at the end of a long day, that is not where I wanted to be. Katie Milkman is an expert on change, but even she has trouble sticking with good habits sometimes. That's when she puts her social science tool set to work. I was kind of an audiobook addict, and I really enjoyed digging into novels that were lowbrow, and that wasn't the best use of my time. So what I ended up doing to solve my own problem, and others have told me I did the exact same thing, was just engineering a solution where I only allowed myself to enjoy these temptations that I craved, these audiobooks, when I was at the gym.
That was my role. And this rule really transformed my experience. Suddenly I would start looking forward to going to the gym to find out what was happening to my favorite characters. The basic idea is called temptation bundling. It can be applied to lots of things in life. Anytime there's a chore that you're dreading and some temptation that you maybe would feel a little guilty about indulging in, if you could combine those two things and only allow yourself access to the temptation, When you're doing the chore, what it does, it changes the experience of the chore, and it actually changes the equation in terms of our impulsivity so that you look forward to doing that thing you'd otherwise dread. Bundling is a simple and effective tool for creating lasting change.
We're kicking off the new year with a whole episode of science-based insights like this one to make sure your resolutions stick. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. If you're listening to Masters of Scale, it's a good bet you have big goals for the year ahead, both personal and professional.
But you also know that change is hard, sometimes really hard.
How can fresh starts impact our motivation for change?
That's why we've asked Katie Milkman to join us. She's the author of the bestselling book, How to Change, and the co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good initiative at the Wharton School. Katie offers a brilliant distillation of the ways to approach making positive change in our lives and in our organizations.
Katie, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. We're thrilled to have you. Katie, there are young people who grow up dreaming of being professional athletes or on stage or being firefighters or superheroes. You became a behavioral scientist. When does that become a career dream for you? Not when I was growing up. In fact, I think when I was growing up, my most common answer when people asked was that I wanted to be a brain surgeon, which I had no actual aspiration to be.
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