Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Today, we're talking about something I struggle with all the time. I don't know about y'all. It's motivation. In her talk at a TED 2022 membership event, social psychologist Ayelet Fischbach offers insight, understanding, and some cognitive tricks to help us understand why we do what we do and, if necessary, get unstuck.
She's in conversation with TED's current affairs curator, Whitney Pennington Rogers, and takes questions from the audience. Coming up after a short break.
Summer break has ended for many of us and you are back at work or at school and have many goals you want to accomplish. This might be a time of motivation or struggle. You find yourself having trouble doing your work, exercising and eating healthily. So you blame yourself for not having more willpower or for procrastinating too much.
According to behavioral science, you can stop worrying about your willpower and quit calling yourself procrastinator.
Chapter 2: What insights does Ayelet Fishbach provide about motivation?
To stay motivated, you need to change your circumstances and outlook, not your personality. I'm Mayelet Fischbecker, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. I've been studying what it takes to be successful in goal pursuit for over 20 years. As an academic, a parent, and an immigrant, I've also struggled with motivation myself.
let me offer a few interventions that can increase your productivity at work, school, and beyond. When monitoring progress, looking back is often the way to move forward. For any goal, you can look back at what you have achieved as well as forward at what you still have to do.
When Min-Jung Koo and I surveyed people standing in a long line for an amusement park ride in South Korea, we found that when they looked back and saw how far they'd come, they were more motivated to wait. Back at the University of Chicago, when uncommitted students look back at the materials that they have already covered for a final exam, their motivation to keep studying increased.
Beware of long middles. We call it the middle problem. We are highly motivated at the beginning. We want to reach our goal and we want to do it right. Over time, our motivation declines as we lose steam. To the extent that our goal has a clear end point, as in the case of graduating with a diploma, our motivation will pick up again toward the end.
In one experiment, Rima Tuatileri and I found that people literally cut corners in the middle of a project. We handed our participants a pair of scissors and asked them to cut out several identical shapes with many corners. They cut through more corners in the middle of the task. The solution? Keep meals short.
A weekly healthy eating goal is better than a monthly eating healthy goal as it offers fewer days to cheat on your diet. It's hard to learn from feedback, especially negative ones. Emotionally, failures bruises the ego. We tune out missing the information feedback offers. Cognitively, people also struggle.
The information in negative feedback is less direct than the information in positive feedback, whereas success points us to a winning strategy. For failure, people need to infer what not to do. To increase learning from negative feedback, try giving advice to others who might be struggling with a similar problem.
Lawrence Chris Winkler, Angela Duckworth, and I found that when students, job seekers, and overweight individuals gave others advice on how to succeed in studying, finding a job, and eating healthily, they were more motivated to follow through. Support intrinsic motivation. You're intrinsically motivated when you pursue an activity that feels like an end in itself.
You do something for the sake of doing it. If you wish you had a few more minutes to finish your work by the end of the day, you're intrinsically motivated. If you can't wait to go home, you aren't. To increase intrinsic motivation, start with selecting activities that you enjoy pursuing. A workout that you actually enjoy is more likely to become part of your routine.
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Chapter 3: How can changing your circumstances improve motivation?
Yes. Intrinsic motivation is critical for success. Because intrinsic motivation is the things that we are getting from doing the activity. And activity is purely intrinsically motivating when it's an end in itself. When it doesn't even make sense to ask, why do I do it? I do it because I like doing it.
Well, when we try to motivate ourselves, usually we have some goals that are not purely intrinsically motivating. Like I need to finish this project at work or I need to study for this class. But still, there is some level of intrinsic motivation. It might be interesting. It might be fun. It might be energizing.
And the more I feel like doing the thing is an end in itself, the more motivated people are going to be. Now, let me also add that this is not intuitive for people. I mentioned that when we asked people to choose between two activities, they went for the activity that paid more and not for the one that they were more likely to enjoy and actually stick at that job later.
We see that there are two mispredictions. People think that Other people don't care about intrinsic motivation as much as they do, and they think that they themselves will not care about intrinsic motivation as much as they end up caring. And that can explain a lot of the professional choices that we make that are not ideal, that
Now, choosing the wrong workout regimen, the wrong healthy diet for ourselves, because we don't quite appreciate how important it is to choose something that is not only a means to an end, but also feels like the end by itself.
And since we're talking about some of the things you shared in the talk, I'd love to also go back to another piece you mentioned there, which is just about negative feedback. And you said that it's hard for people to learn from negative feedback. So could you talk a little bit more about that and what sort of feedback, how we can lean more into this, the positive feedback as you described?
Yeah.
So let me first say that I don't say that there is not much in negative feedback. There is. There are important lessons in negative feedback. However, it's hard to learn those lessons. And it's hard first because emotionally negative feedback feels bad.
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Chapter 4: What cognitive tricks can help increase productivity?
So we disengage. We tune out. In one of the studies that we ran, we found that People don't remember the feedback and don't even remember the answer when it's negative. They just disengage with the task. They don't learn. The other reason that it's harder to learn from negative feedback is it's much more cognitive. It's not what we expected to hear.
Chapter 5: How does looking back at progress influence motivation?
And so, you know, if you did something expecting something to happen and then it happened, like you kind of had a prediction that was supported with what later happened and you remember it. When you get negative feedback, it's often not what you expected. And that can be a very... confusing experience for people. And so they just don't learn.
It's just cognitively a harder task to learn from what's not. It's learning by elimination. So negative feedback is important. There are often unique lessons in negative feedback, not to mention that if we don't learn from negative feedback, we are probably missing just a lot of the information that is out there. And so we need to be able to do that.
and I mentioned giving advice and one of the strategies that we can use to learn from negative feedback, we also need to realize that it is so much easier to learn from positive feedback. So, you know, whenever we can teach someone through positive feedback, they are probably going to be more attentive and better able to learn.
And you talk about that in the way of giving advice and that sort of puts you in the space of thinking positively towards someone and maybe potentially receiving more positive feedback yourself.
Yes. And not only it puts you in a position of power and doing something useful for the feedback, helping another person, it also forces you to think about what you have learned. And often when we ask people to give advice, in particular people that are struggling, their immediate response is like, what do I know? Why would you ask me? I'm unemployed. Well, not me, but the person we are asking.
I'm unemployed. Why would you ask me about how to get a job? And you kind of need to remind them. Well, you know how to get a job because you've been doing that, because you've been struggling. And that forces the person to think about what they have learned. And so we're kind of tackling both the emotional barrier to learning and the cognitive barrier to learning.
We have a question here from TED member Miriam. They ask, how do we find perseverance and grit for the dreams and goals that take time? So how do we redefine the timelines and bring that into our life?
Oh, Miriam, that's a real problem, right? Because... Because of the middle problem, right? Because we are excited when we start on something. We are excited when we are about to achieve an important milestone or the ultimate goal. And in the middle, we lose steam. We lose our motivation. And what I would say is break your goal into sub-goals.
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Chapter 6: What is the 'middle problem' in goal pursuit?
Saving for retirement is my ultimate example. Saving for retirement is a really hard goal because you need to start working on this goal when you're so far from completing the goal, okay? When it seems like it's going to be a different person that they don't really know that would benefit from pursuing this goal. But you can think about your annual savings.
How much did you save this year for retirement? Note how much you're going to save in total. Exercising goal. People talk about a weekly exercising goal. Now, clearly you do not just want to exercise this week. You will have that goal again next week. Well, you set a weekly exercise goal so it has a beginning and an end and very short middle.
School is an interesting one because it is actually easier in higher education where we break the year more clearly into terms which are relatively short so there is not much of a middle. And for kids, they have the long year, which is kind of hard.
Like you start in September, so maybe you're excited on the first week and then you will be again excited in June when the school year is about to end. But there was such a long middle period. break it into a weekly goal, a monthly goal, something that has a short middle that is not long-term. People are not good at pursuing something where the benefits are very far.
So, I mean, in your research, have you found that people of different backgrounds that, you know, by age or gender or race that they experience motivation differently or that there are certain strategies that are more helpful?
There is a lot of research on developmental effects. You brought up several other variables that just get me thinking in like 10 different directions right now. So let me focus on the age. There are Some really interesting developmental effects. Self-control develops with age, so the ability to put aside something because there is something more important that you want to do.
That's something that develops into your 20s, and that suggests that maybe there is another reason why we should stop calling ourselves teenagers, procrastinators and blaming them for lack of self-control, they are still developing it. At a later age, we see that as people's resources, our physical resources are on the decline, then there are new challenges. And I
Now, I briefly touched the idea that you often need to find the compromise between several goals and you need to think about how you pursue several goals at the same time. In research, we often look at this in terms of finding activities that we refer to them as multifinal. They achieve more than one goal. Okay, it's like My example is bringing lunch from home to your office.
This is healthier and saves you time and it's often better food, at least for me. So you achieve several goals at the same time. With older age, often you need to give more thought into
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Chapter 7: How can negative feedback be utilized for growth?
You have not made progress, so let's just double the effort. Let's work harder on it. If your interpretation is lack of commitment, well, that's not great because now you assume that you did not make progress because probably you cannot make progress and will never make progress. And we can see how that kind of thinking is not very healthy.
And so what we found in studies is that when people frame past failures, some setbacks, as lack of progress, that increases motivation. I did not exercise yesterday. I should definitely exercise today. When they think about this lack of commitment, this is where we see a problem. I did not exercise yesterday. I might not have it in me.
Maybe I will never be able to be the person that I wanted to be. It's up to you. The framing is something that you can choose.
Well, one member asks about procrastinating for fear of failing. Do you have any tips for dealing with that?
Yes, there is some little show on what we call self-handicapping. And self-handicapping is an interesting phenomenon. It's like the student that purposely did not sleep the night before the exam so that if she doesn't do well, she can blame the circumstances. She can say, well, I was too tired to do well.
And we see that sometimes people do that because they are afraid to try, because they are afraid about what failure might mean for who they are. I think that as a society, we should probably just have healthier relationships with setbacks. There is a lot of work in motivational science about how to learn from failure, how to learn from setback.
Probably the basic thing is to understand that there are lessons in there. That was not a wasted experience. That made me the person that I am. That enriched me somehow. Think about it. If you try to cook something and you burn the dish, well, you don't have dinner, but you learn something about cooking. Think about what you've learned.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure we have a lot of people on who are part of teams or, you know, working in groups. And Ted Member Colm, they ask about how you can motivate and unstick a group of people, a team. They lead multiple medium-sized teams and sometimes can sense that they're feeling a lack of motivation among the team members.
Yeah, well, the larger the team, the larger the problem with motivation is. Basically, this is what we call social loafing. When there are many people that can do the work, then we all tend to leave the work to someone else. And we see these effects really increasing very rapidly with the size of the team.
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Chapter 8: What role does intrinsic motivation play in achieving goals?
Approach goals are better than avoidance goals. What do I mean by that? When you invite people to bring more positive thoughts to their lives, this is much easier than when you tell them not to think about something negative. They push away negative thoughts. When you invite people to bring more healthy foods to their diet, that's easier than removing foods from their diet.
Do not goals are problematic, in particular when we think about the long run, when we think about doing things more than today and this week? There are two reasons. One reason is that this approach, this to-do goals approach, tend to just bring to mind what you need to do, whereas the do not goals tend to bring to mind what you should not do.
So if you think that you should stop doing something or stop thinking about something, how do you know if you are successful? You ask yourself, do I still have this forbidding thought? Well, by asking, you bring it to mind. The other reason is just reactance. When I tell you that you should not eat something, this is exactly the thing that you want to eat. Like, don't look to the right.
Well, everybody's not looking to the right. Right. Let me also say that the one big advantage of avoidance goals of do not goals is that they seem urgent. If I tell you that you should stop each red meat, then it seems more urgent than avoidance. let's say, eat more green vegetables. And so avoidance goals have their place in our life. They seem urgent.
Now, the question was also about needs versus wants, which somewhat overlap with the approach avoidance, but not totally. There are things that we feel like we absolutely require to do, that we might feel that, like, You know, a high school degree is like, I need to do it. This is absolutely a must. Where is a higher education? I want to do that. Like that might be an extra bonus.
That might be a wonderful thing to do. And then we find that there are different emotions that are associated with these different goals. So, you know, where is success on a need? Successfully pursuing a need is more likely to be associated with feeling relieved and, oh, I did this. Success on a want goal and an aspiration is more likely to make us proud. They can make us feel that we...
We've done more than we should have done.
Head member Joniel is just curious about sticking to a schedule and how important that is to reaching a goal and tips for doing that.
Yeah, thanks for asking about schedule. Many people like to have a to-do list and kind of going by the to-do list. Just a personal anecdote, when I was debating the many covers for my book, one of them has a to-do list that was proposed by the publisher. And I said, well, I can't have a to-do list on the cover because... I don't recommend to-do lists and I don't write about to-do lists.
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