The Medicine Goes Down

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in a most delightful way. When you give people temptations that are only accessible to gim like tempting audio books they can only listen to while they're exercising, you see about a 50% initial increase in exercise and a decent amount of persistence on those kinds of behavior. So we can, i think, use temptation bundling more than we do. There's all sorts of ways that we can link pleasures with what we normally perceived to be a chore so that it no longer feels so onerous.

When Katy Milkman was a newly minted professor at Wharton, she came across a statistic that stopped her cold: 40 percent of premature deaths result from personal behaviors we can change. Katy decided to do something about that, and for the next decade, she conducted groundbreaking research into the science of achieving lasting behavior change. In “How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” she shares what she’s learned. The Next Big Idea Club named “How to Change” one of the best books of the year, and in this episode, Katy sits down with our curator Daniel Pink to tell him why a change in the weather can help you save money, how Harry Potter got her in better shape, and what an accidental breakthrough in mathematics reveals about boosting your self-confidence.