The science of fresh starts, with change expert Katy Milkman

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Емадженери сам чор. Yeah.

1:35 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.

1:57 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 a audiobook addict. And I really enjoyed Digging into novels that were low brow.

2:14 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 crave, these audiobooks, when I was at the gym. That was my rule. And this rule really transformed my

2:34 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 impulsity. So you look forward to doing that thing you'd otherwise dread. Temptation bundling is just one of the tools for creating lasting change that Katie Milman shares on this week's episode. We're kicking off twenty twenty five with science based approaches to making sure your new year's resoluti.

3:20 You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. 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 gonna 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. It just seems absolutely ten years later and be like well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This

3:51 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 a lot of big goals for twenty twenty five. Personal goals, professional goals, organizational goals.

4:09 But you also know that change is hard. That's why we've asked Katie Milkman to join us. She's the author of the best selling book How to Change and the co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good initiative at the Warden School. In this conversation Katie offers up a brilliant distillation of the most effective ways to approach change in our lives.

4:31 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?

5:01 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. I think I just like that it sounded impressive and it made jaws drop and I got that positive feedback like wow. It still sounds impressive. It does, yeah. And PS, I don't like the sight of blood and I I get nervous in tense situations, I would be a terrible brain surgeon. So thank goodness I found another calling.

5:26 I didn't even learn this was a field or a possible path until I was a PhD student, actually, which is a little late in one's trajectory in academia. So I got a PhD in computer science and business. Thinking that this wacky thing called the internet seemed to be taking off and maybe learning something about that and how it would affect our choices and. the organizations we worked in could be interesting.

5:50 And it was actually while I was there that During a required microeconomic sequence, I was introduced to the work of folks like Danny Kahneman, who's a founder of the field, author of the best selling book, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, who very sadly passed in early twenty twenty four. So

6:08 Danny founded this field of behavioral economics, and essentially behavioral science is Part of behavioral economics. It's a field that focuses on the ways in which people make Mistakes. Even when they're trying to be perfectly rational.

6:22 And Specifically, it focuses on the systematic and predictable mistakes that we make with our decisions. Things like our tendency to be impulsive, things like our tendency to find losses much more painful than we find gains rewarding. And so take steps to avoid Losses that might look Irrational. We do funny things when we evaluate probabilities.

6:45 So I was really fascinated when I learned about this field and uh decided that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Were you more fascinated for yourself in terms of like how do I make decisions and where am I making mistakes where I think I'm well intentioned, or more in terms of the effect you could have on other individuals in the world if you went into this field? I think initially I was just drawn to

7:11 If that makes sense. So certainly there was an element of me search as opposed to just research. Like I saw myself in the models and in the research findings I was reading, which by the way, I'd never seen myself in sort of the social science. coursework I'd been exposed to before. I ended up being an engineer in as an undergrad because economics did not make sense to me. I just thought

7:32 Why would you possibly think that people are perfectly rational decision making agents and model the economy and their decisions that way. This is absurd. Have you met me? Have you met my roommates? So I was really turned off by social sciences initially, and when I got To this understanding that actually there's a whole field trying to understand our imperfections. I was just riveted and

7:54 It was primarily again. I just thought it was true. And I thought how powerful to understand how people make choices. I started out just being intrigued by the quirks of human decision making. I'm curious though, as you were diving into this field. Was there an inflection point? Was there some moment where you were like, Oh my gosh, this just clicks. This is for me.

8:15 Yes, absolutely. The big moment for me was actually as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I work at the Wharton School, which is the school of business at Penn. And we have a really amazing medical school as well. And I like talking to people from all different backgrounds, interdisciplinarity is sort of in my blood. So I started hanging out over at the medical school with a group of people who studied medical decision making just to learn what I could learn from them. And I was in a seminar one day where someone was presenting some of their research, and they put up a graph.

8:46 And the graph was a pie chart showing the percentage of premature deaths in the United States. That are due to various causes. So Фінзлайк ацидент. Environmental exposures, genetics.

9:00 And one wedge in that pie chart. Was devoted to decisions we make in our daily lives. That can add up. So think things like getting a cancer screening, taking your medications, eating healthily, uh avoiding cigarettes and alcohol, buckling your seatbelt. So

9:18 This pie chart kind of blew my mind and changed my life because it show that 40% of premature deaths. Are due to behaviors. We could change. I was just blown away by the magnitude of our daily decisions on our longevity.

9:34 And when I learned that It really changed my research trajectory because I thought, Hey, I've been studying decision making, but doing it sort of out of curiosity for the most part, just trying to learn. And there's this opportunity to use this science to make a major dent in really Important problems like Making people live longer, happier, healthier lives.

9:56 And what I love about it is it actually puts you in a position to save far more lives than you could have as a brain surgeon. For sure. I mean, if you think about that scale that it's north of forty percent of deaths are due to the choices we make in our daily lives, and you are helping understand what makes us make the better choices and not just toward them. What an extraordinary impact you can have on the world. So this episode is releasing in January and most people set new resolutions and make decisions about things I'm going to do this year and what I'm going to change. And for some people it's framed as a fresh start.

10:31 Can you talk about what a fresh start is in your world. And as we are setting intentions and resolutions for the year ahead. What's gonna be most effective in making them stick? Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought up Fresh starts. This is actually something that I've studied extensively with

10:49 My collaborator Heng Shen Dai at UCLA and Jason Reese at Wharton. We have done research looking specifically at this peculiar phenomenon that drives not only New Year's resolutions, but actually our tendency to be healthier and set more goals at the start of new weeks, following birthdays, at the start of new months, and following holidays that we associate with New beginnings. So at moments in our lives that feel like chapter breaks, we have this sense that we're turning the page and that there's a clean slate that awaits us. January first is sort of

11:24 The biggest of all fresh starts. It's the one where forty percent of Americans step back and set resolutions. Now, of course, there's no actual change, right? January one is no more different from December thirty first than December thirty first is from December thirtieth, but in our minds. Those kinds of shifts just like a Sunday shifts to a Monday that Demarcate a new period in our life. They make us feel more separated from who we used to be. But a big problem with fresh starts is that all they do is they give us a temporary boost in motivation.

11:56 So they're actually really great moments to do something that's sort of a one and done. If you're thinking about starting saving in uh say four oh one K, a tax advantage retirement savings fund. And you just haven't gotten around to it. but your employer allows you to do that and you can set up auto deductions from every paycheck. Well, using your motivation at a fresh start moment is a great idea. You just need that temporary boost. You need to sort of take one action and then it'll carry you forward. And guess what? Like magically, every paycheck will have a little deduction taken and your retirement account will start to grow.

12:26 Similarly, if there's some important cancer screening like a colonoscopy that you've been putting off, you could sort of sign up for that on in that moment. And as long as you follow through, it's sort of a one and done. But the problem is most of our New Year's resolutions aren't one and done. Most of them require Effort over time as opposed to a single action that will be valuable, and for those The problem with fresh starts is that they really only give very temporary motivation. Sort of as soon as you get to February, it doesn't feel like a fresh start anymore. And this is one of the reasons we know that gyms packed in January, but the attendance drops down again. You need more than just a little motivation. You need more tools, frankly. Science and science has a lot to offer to Sustain the behavior change you

13:08 are motivated to begin in fresh start moments. So how do we optimize for those changes that need sustained work, whether that's exercise or eating healthy or whatever it might be? How do we set ourselves up for success so that we're still hitting that gym in June or in October and not just in January? Yeah, it's a great question. And the the beginning of the answer is that It requires understanding what are the obstacles that you face. And by the way, there's sort of a cute term for this. We've been talking about medical decision making. So it's a medical term. It's called a pre mortem, as opposed to a postmortem. A pre mortem is just thinking, you know, if you fail, what will have gotten in your way? And it can be really valuable to think like this. It sounds kind of pessimistic and negative, right? But actually

13:50 Contemplating carefully what are the obstacles that might hold you back from achieving your goals is a really important step. And once you do understand what are those obstacles, you can solve for them using science. Some of the big ones are the challenge of impulsivity. That we are really drawn to things that feel good in the moment and we tend to care less or way less the long term returns to our investments. On the flip side is procrastination, which is sort of driven by impulsivity, but I like to think of them as distinct because I think they have slightly distinct solutions. Laziness

14:23 I mean that actually in the most positive possible way. So my PhD is technically in computer science, and we worship laziness when it comes to algorithms, right? The best algorithms take shortcuts. They don't search the whole possible space for solutions. And the human algorithm turns out to be Similar. We're very well designed to seek the path of least resistance. We develop habits so we don't have to think about what we're doing and just fall back on those habits. However, the tendency to be a little lazy and look for the easiest way out can be a major barrier to change. Confidence. If you don't believe that you can achieve something, it's really difficult to get there. You don't believe in yourself. You like, Oh, I just I'm not the kind of person who can run a 5K, or I'm not the kind of person who can save. reliably or who can get that promotion and sort of scale the ladder at work.

15:09 If you don't believe in yourself, it's really hard to invest. the effort necessary to make that kind of progress and achieve those goals. And then the final one I wanna highlight And this is the one that sort of bridges a little bit from internal to external is Conformity. So we're very influenced by the people in our social circles.

15:27 They shape our beliefs about what's possible. And when we are surrounded by people who are sort of cheering us on and also showing us what's possible and who are good influences, that really Shapes. internally what we believe we can do and accomplish and how far we push. So having that support structure and and sort of recognizing the power of conformity and how it can both hinder or help is critically important. So those are that's sort of the list of of the most important things. And then we have different solutions depending on which of those obstacles your pre-mortem suggests might be. Important for you.

15:59 Well, and so if these are kind of the seven deadly sins that keep us from achieving change, what are the most effective things that tend to knock out a significant portion of these seven deadly sins? First of all, you need to set a goal. I'm just sort of taking that for granted. So critically you have to know what it is you're trying to achieve. And then you need to plan how you're going to get there. So say you want to exercise more regularly. Some people think planning means saying something like, Well, I'm gonna exercise more regularly by joining a gym and going. That is not a plan. A plan is detailed. A plan has an if then statement. You would stipulate exactly when will you go to the gym and for how long. So, you know.

16:36 Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at five PM, that's when I'll you'll find me at the gym and I'll stay for thirty minutes and I'll do a cardio workout on the elliptical. That's what I mean when I say a plan. You also might stipulate How will you get there? And do you need to arrange child care so that you can get there? So the more you get into those details, the better. And another thing that people overlook that comes up a lot. It's just finding a way to make Your goal progress.

17:00 Pleasant. If you find it miserable to pursue your goal, if you're just sort of hating every second of it, you will quit very quickly. So it's in contrast to sort of the ethos of Americans sometimes, and certainly the Nike just do it. Mantra

17:16 We think We should just push through pain and maybe pain in fact is even good for us and sort of Builds. Character. But

17:25 The science shows that it's a terrible strategy and that what we actually need to do is try and find a way to make it enjoyable to pursue our goals. Um Anything you can do to sort of Follow the Mary Poppins advice to that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down will improve Outcomes.

17:43 So I appreciate that the new year is an obvious fresh start point. Are there hacks or tricks? To help yourself get to a fresh start. mid year or off cycle or whatever it is. Yeah, no, New Year's is just one. So actually every Monday seems to be a very powerful fresh start when we look at our data. And they come around conveniently once a week. So that's a great one to peg yourself to. Start of a new month also seems to do it for some people. And by the way, I think the psychology of fresh starts exists because it is so common for us to have these setbacks when we're pursuing goals. And it's essentially our psychological immune system giving us away.

18:23 To set that aside and be optimistic despite what has gone a little bit wrong in the past. So that's my sense of why we probably. notice these naturally and naturally go about life in a way where we're sort of looking for the next Clean slate. I want to talk about two other terms that come up a lot in your work and in the field. Somewhere on the bookshelf behind me is uh

18:49 You talk about nudges. What are nudges and what are the most effective nudges to generate the behavioral change you want to make in your life? I love that you brought up Cass. He's one of my favorite people and my favorite co authors of mine. Cass is amazing. So Nudges are Tools that motivate

19:05 behavior change without changing your incentives or the information you have, sort of not using the typical policy levers. that we think of, right? Like, oh, I'll tax sugary beverages and that's how we'll get people to drink less of them, or I'll ban them entirely. Those are the kinds of tools policymakers usually use, but a nudge would just make something more psychologically attractive without actually making it more expensive or say sharing calorie count information that might update your beliefs. So There are quite a lot of nudges that can be effective when it comes to behavior change and

19:37 Actually this whole research body is really at the heart of what I study. So Cass's co-author on the best selling book, Nudge, Richard Thaler, likes to say my research is all about snudging. self nudging Which I'm glad I didn't name my book Snudge because

19:54 I don't think it would have been a bestseller, but you never know. You know, Richard is brilliant. He won a Nobel Prize. Maybe his title would have been superior to mine. We talked a little about making a plan, sitting down and saying, like, when will I do it? Where will I do it? How will I get there? Being prompted to do that. That's a nudge. If someone who cares about you is trying to encourage you to

20:16 Follow through on Your goals. They might prompt you to form a plan. Another example of a nudge, maybe the most Well known nudge is a default, a change in default.

20:28 A default is the outcome you will get if you don't take some other action. So Think of you know you get a new computer, you boot it up. And it has like defaults, you know, it has a default font size. You don't have to decide where you want all the icons to appear on the desktop or what font or sort of What color scheme

20:45 It will automatically choose a bunch of things for you. That are normally popular and that are normally good choices. So you don't have to make a hundred thousand decisions before the computer Works. And we wanna think about how we can snudge ourselves into better decisions with defaults. You can think about defaults in your home in terms of like what are the snacks available in the pantry? That's the default. It's low friction.

21:09 to reach for whatever's there. Do you have carrots and hummus that are available to you when you get the munchies or Doritos. Of course, if you're dying for Doritos, you can hop in the car or walk around the corner and get some, but you've created a default when you set yourself up so that the thing that is most available that's on hand Is the thing that's Good for you. Making the lazy and easy path the one that is healthy and beneficial in the long run.

21:38 Still ahead, I talked with Katie Milkman about how to translate these tools into ways to achieve organizational goals. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

22:26 Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana Al Calyubi.

22:43 And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale.

23:12 You can find this interview and more. On our YouTube channel. Are there systemic nudges that leaders can put in place for their teams. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a lot of different ways to think about

23:26 nudging that might lead to more productivity benefits. You might for instance do something like set defaults on everybody's calendar regarding Deep work time if you feel that's something that's missing. Maybe you um If there's something that you'd like to see people do more of, sort of sending calendar invites and breaking out time, of course, people can decline it. They can right, they can opt out, they can schedule over it, but you might think about sort of

23:52 that kind of a default or a nudge that could be very useful for productivity. Helping people set goals is a kind of nudge. We did some research This was with a volunteer organization, but I think it highlights the power of specifically nudging people towards productivity goals. So it was work with this organization called Crisis Text Line. It's a resource for those times of need. And it's powered by a volunteer army of crisis counselors who are sitting waiting to talk to someone who needs support in a moment of crisis. The problem with these volunteers, they go through a ton of training, but it's a hard job, right? And not everybody fulfills the 200-hour commitment that they make to the organization each year. And having those volunteers on hand is critical to the success of this organization. And we said, hey, we know something about goal setting. We know that it's really important when you have a big goal like that to break it down into bite-sized pieces for people so that they will see how they can make proximal immediate progress. So we said, let's change what you're saying. Let's just remind them that's four hours a week. Sign up for your four hours a week to get there. Let's just do the math for them. And when we made that small change, we actually saw

24:56 About an eight percent increase in productivity across the board, and people were volunteering more. There's something called the goal grading effect, where we're more motivated when we get close to a goal. And that means if you have a 200-hour yearly goal to do something, you're not gonna be motivated for a long time until you get really close to 200 hours. But four hours a week, well, I'm motivated almost right away because I can chip away at that progress quickly. and and see that I'm really getting close to the end. If you're a leader and you're thinking about productivity to think about sort of what are the things you want your team to achieve this year, this quarter, and how can you break those down into bite-sized components and remind people regularly of sort of what you're expecting from them, whether it's on a daily or a weekly basis in a way that that isn't vague, but rather concrete, so they can feel that goal gradient effect. Yeah, I mean it's um one of the things that I said to my kids since they were little, as as they head off to school, it's let's go win the day. And

25:45 I think what you're speaking to is just the concept of if we can get the micro wins, they build up them to the macro wins, right? And so it's a great prompt for organizational leaders to think about how do we set those goals where we can feel like we're winning. So one of the things that I've been challenged by in the couple of much bigger companies I've worked in where I've been in leadership roles, but not at the very top of the organization is how do I affect change. in the overall organization when it's not necessarily the nature of the organization to go where I want things to go. For leaders who are in big organizations and are trying to drive change from below, from the middle, from near the top.

26:27 Are there specific pieces of advice for them that you think are really helpful? Yes, there are many. I do think it's a bit of a different kind of change than what we've been talking about, right? So Now we're shifting from the person wants to change and what are the tools we can give them to support their success. to I need to persuade the person to change.

26:47 And then of course, once they're persuaded, they may need all the same kinds of tools, but the persuasion challenge is the first challenge when it comes to leading an organization and trying to facilitate change. My favorite research on persuasion comes from Robert Cialdini, who sort of Wrote the book on influence. It's called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. And it has a series of principles it walks through that are evidence based on how we can be more persuasive, not in a yucky way, actually. It's sort of focused on avoiding coercive at persuasion. How do you dodge that? And also how can you ethically persuade others? To join in a direction that's good for everyone. So I highly recommend that book. Probably my favorite tool of persuasion, which

27:30 relates to some of the barriers to internal change as well is understanding the power of conformity or the power of pointing to others who are say early adopters and are making progress. It turns out that if people are told, hey, the majority of my peers are doing thing X, it makes me much more excited to do it. So if you already have decent adoption, you're just trying to bring along sort of the last 40%. Which by the way is often the case, like Just by de being a decent leader and saying, We're making this change. Maybe you get 60% of people to do it, but then you've got 40% who are really not bought in. But often one of the things that can persuade those laggards is to point out, look, 60%, the majority of your peers are already doing this thing. And that really changes behavior because no one wants to feel left out or missing the boat.

28:11 most large organizations are structured like a pyramid to the org chart literally looks like a pyramid, right? And often, not always, the folks near the top are incentivised not to change. They're compensated based on things growing incrementally. So if you're not at the top of the pyramid, how do you think about

28:34 helping nudge toward productive change above you with people who are incentivized really differently than you think they should be or than you want them to be for where you want the organization to go. The more hoops people have to jump through and the more they have to think about it. The more resistant they'll be to change to the extent that you can make it one click or one step like here's the memo you send out to make this happen. Like I've already written it for you, and and here's the e list to populate like just everything you can do to take thinking out of the equation and and make it. One step. Just like that sort of one click shopping.

29:08 That is really helpful. And to the extent that Those are barriers that is someone in the middle who's advocating for a kind of change that someone at the top is sort of worried, oh How would I get this done? You show them the easy path. You've got the plan already. All they have to do is sort of sign on the dotted line and it's and you'll take care of the rest.

29:27 That matters not only for changing micro decisions, but it can be really appealing for changing Big more consequential decisions as well, because so often people are just worried about the ease of execution. And if you can show that you've taken care of that. That can be very persuasive. What is one change that most people think will be easier than it turns out to be? I mean, every change people think will be easier than it turns out to be almost uh it's that's maybe the most consistent thing about change as we

30:00 Have inappropriate expectations about how straightforward it will be because We have the tendency to imagine all the ways we'll succeed. But We tend to have to be disciplined.

30:12 to think about all the bumps our path. And this is part of why You know, if you've ever Planned a project, whether it was a renovation project or a Product launch. You're always behind.

30:23 Because you envision all the things lining up, everything will go smoothly, the sink will be delivered on time, or like the software engineers will be able to just whip this right up. And then, you know, you didn't think, oh, but there'd be bugs in the code, or yeah, the supplier would be backed up. So you don't anticipate all those potholes. And all those bumps in the road, and that turns out to be True of change we si the way it'll work out and we don't imagine those negative possibilities. And so it's harder than we expect. But I think actually the more we can

30:51 Remind people. That Setbacks are actually the norm. And it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. The more we can prepare people for that, then the less hopefully discouraged.

31:03 they will be and the more they can adopt a growth mindset and have mulligans and so on and use these strategies that will allow them to overcome it. But I actually can't think of any canonical example of change that's particularly hard. I think the answer is it's all harder than you expect it to be. There's a lot of research showing that teams that are diverse in every respect racially, ethnically religiously, socioeconomically, et cetera. tend to have stronger outcomes. And yet a lot of organizations that want to achieve diversity goals are struggling to get their thoughts on how to nudge organizations in the direction of achieving those diversity goals.

31:39 Yeah. It turns out that a lot of the Science that we can use to achieve other goals also is relevant in this context. One of my favorite

31:49 Findings. That's a really simple one. Is just uh related to how we hire. So when we make hiring decisions, often it's sort of one off one at a time. We're making choices, you know, does this person fit? You know, should I hire this person to join my team? And sometimes that's by necessity, and there's no other way to proceed. You have turnover and you have to replace headcount of one. But What we have shown in our research is that when people hire in sets

32:13 meaning, you know, let's hire five at a time. We'll bring on all our new folks together. We'll hire five people all at once in April instead of sort of one person per month from January through May. When people hire in sets, they actually tend to hire more diverse Groups of people. Then when they hire one off? Over time?

32:31 And the reason for that is when we look at a set. we start to think about the value of diversity and recognize a property of a set that like maybe I don't want five people who sort of have the same background in terms of their training and their upbringing and you know where they worked before. And that might not be optimal. And I want some diversity in that. And if you hire one at a time, There's no such thing as thinking about the diversity of an individual, and you're not focused on that broader team as much that they're joining. So one simple way

33:00 to increase diversity that many organizations might want to be considering is sort of making sure whenever they can that they're batching hires so that the evaluators are responsible for bringing in a group and will just attend simply to diversity and the ways in which it can be an asset, as opposed to having that feel like an invisible feature because every individual is sort of Equally diverse in some respect. I will before we wrap just tell you a quick personal story. My father was a smoker when I was growing up. I loathed that he smoked. It was scary that he smoked. And I crumpled up his cigarettes and threw them in the toilet when I was maybe seven or eight years old. He got very angry and it led him to make a commitment to quitting.

33:41 and put a jar in the kitchen and every day he didn't have a cigarette. he put the amount of money he would have spent on cigarettes in the jar that day, and then there was some extra amount he had to put in if he Broke his pledge. And at the end of a year, we had enough money to take our first family trip to New York City. And it's a core memory for me going on that trip. And so I I love the combination of positive and and negative incentives there. And for me, it's deeply personal, the impact that these small behavioral changes and reward systems and punishment systems can have on change.

34:15 And also the power of accountability and sort of the people around us in our lives making us see the past that's best for us. So it's also pretty wonderful that you were there to motivate your dad to make that important health change and highlights how much Having a partner and change is important. I'm tearing up a little. And look, to your point about preventable deaths. My father just celebrated his eighty first birthday. And it's a pretty good bet he wouldn't have if he hadn't quit smoking. So deeply grateful for the work that you do and the impact you have on the world and for spending time with us at Masters of Scale. Thank you.

34:47 Was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. If you're listening to this episode near the top of the year, you are at a fresh start moment, and even if you're not, you can make one. Capitalizing on fresh start moments is a key takeaway from what Katie shares. The easiest choice is often the best choice.

35:08 As you're setting goals for the new year, consider employing the strategies that Katie Melkman has shared. The science tells us you'll have a better shot at success if you do. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scales await what original.

35:39 Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legerski, Masha Makatanina, Brandon Klein, and Timothy Lou Lee. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday.

36:01 Our head of podcasts is the tall Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.

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