Next Big Idea Transcript: Daniel Pink and Ayelet Fishbach

Check out the transcript of our most recent episode of The Next Big Idea. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or right here:

Daniel Pink: Hi everybody. This is Daniel Pink. Welcome to The Next Big Idea Club. We are here to talk about the latest book in our collection, which is Get it Done by Ayelet Fishbach. It's a fascinating and interesting book chock full of takeaways and ways to think about motivation and apply to our lives. Ayelet Fishbach, welcome from your office at the University of Chicago.

Ayelet Fishbach: Thanks for having me Daniel. I am very excited for our chat.

Pink: So am I. Let's start our chat here with a little bit of personal background. As you know, as a social scientist, there's an old adage out there that all research is me-search. As I read your book, I was curious about that. There are two things. You grew up on a kibbutz. Tell us about your growing up and tell us about your first professional experience, which was actually in the military.

Fishbach: Yes. I would say that, no, we are trying to understand whether people study the thing that they know best or the thing that they don't know at all. And I don't know. I don't know I'm at one or the other. I grew up on kibbutz in Israel. If people don't know what it is, well, at least it used to be a very socialist society. There was no private property, meaning I didn't own anything for most of my childhood. I left the kibbutz to the army. I served at the IDF and discovered Tel Aviv, discovered the option of going there to study psychology. Found a way together. I actually had to take another year just to save enough money because I didn't have any property to save money to pay for college, got into a psychology and never wanted to leave. I'm still in that. Yeah.

Pink: Leaving aside the incredibly delicious irony of having somebody who steeped in a world of socialism ending up at that bastion of free market economics, University of Chicago, leaving aside that deliciousness, do you think that those experiences shaped your desire to study psychology in general and motivation in particular?

Fishbach: I grew up in an environment that is unique and that shaped my understanding in unique ways. And I had these very sharp turns in my life and that makes you curious. And if you are in the business of studying how this situation influences the way people think, the way they make decisions, the way they motivate themselves, then moving from a place where what you care about is what other people think. It's not that you don't care about what other people think elsewhere, but where it's you live with people, you are all the time with people. You share your property with them, which is my childhood. You are very sensitive to people. You are very observant and then moving to a much more individualistic place where it's about your personal passions and what's interesting for you and just sitting with your books and your ideas, these things shape your understanding in ways that are informative. And I think that this is definitely a big reason of why I am a social psychologist.

Pink: I think so. I think it could be as the dime store psychoanalyst here, that it could be why you chose perhaps social psychology rather than developmental psychology or cognitive psychology. And it's a good segue into your book, Ayelet, because at the top of your book about the signs of motivation that draws on probably, what is it now, probably 20 years of research that you've done in this field, you and many collaborators who are named very generously in the book, you offer up the question, which is how do you motivate yourself? But you also give the super short answer, which is by changing your circumstances. And so I was curious since your circumstances have changed so much, whether that gave you some insights into what motivates us and how to use motivation. Now let's go directly to the book. I'm a big believer as a writer in structure. I think structure is everything. Tell us how it's structured.

Fishbach: Okay. What I discovered as I was writing my book is that a motivation science, that is the motivation interventions that we developed as a field, fall into four categories. And that was the big aha moment for me, that was the discovery in writing the book. And then the book is organized by these four parts. Basically there are interventions that we use in order to set better goals, in order to set our goals in a better way. This is the first part. There are all the interventions that we use in order to monitor our progress, in order to go from here, to there, to learn from feedback. This is the second part.

Fishbach: There are interventions that we use to manage multiple goals, to resolve self control conflicts, to find balance in our life. Third part. And then the last part are all these interventions that use the people around us, that refer to how we seek social support, how we work with other people on shared goals, how we use their support of our individuals goals. I took the basic principle that you change your situation to reach your goals. You change your circumstances and exploit it in these four areas of motivational interventions.

Pink: Sure. We want to choose our goals. We want to monitor our progress as we pursue those goals. We inevitably have to juggle multiple goals and we are going to want to, or need to, enlist social support in meeting those goals. It's a lovely way to think about it. And I think what's interesting is that there are discreet takeaways in each of the four sections, but there actually is some commonality and I hope we can bring that out here in a moment. Let's talk about how do we choose our goals. I started writing down a list derived from your research and in part one of how we choose our goals. And I did it and it's very simpleminded, formulation of X is better than Y. Okay. I'm going to give you one of those and you can tell me whether it's right, and if it is, what we should do about it. Approach is better than avoid. When we set our goals, goals where we're approaching something are generally better than goals where we're avoiding something. Is that accurate? And if so, tell us about it.

Fishbach: This is accurate with one exception. Okay.

Pink: Oh, okay.

Fishbach: There is the exception that avoidance goals sound urgent. If I tell you that you should not eat red meat, you think that you should start now. If I tell you that you should eat more green vegetables, you think that it's okay to start next week. But with this exception that refers to urgency, approach goals are better, approach goals are more attractive, more enticing. Avoidance goals, do not goals, tend to bring to mind the thing that you are trying to avoid. How do you know that you are not drinking, that you are not thinking about your ex, that you are not doing the thing that you should not be doing. You check yourself. And by the process of checking you bring this to mind. This is one problem with avoidance goals. The other problem is reactance. We tend to react against our avoidance goals that we want to do something exactly because we set our mind not to do it.

Pink: Give us an example of what an approach goal is and what an avoidance goal is just so listeners understand the distinction, then we'll move on to some other ways of setting goals.

Fishbach: Good question. In Dan Wagner's old studies, an approach goal is to think about brown bears, an avoidance goal is not to think about white bearers.

Pink: Well said.

Fishbach: In our everyday life eat healthy food is approach. Avoid unhealthy food is an avoidance goal.

Pink: Right. Okay. It's not binary, but we want tilt a little bit more toward approach than avoid. Now you also make a very interesting point here drawing on research about having means as our goals. Tell us about that, the difference between the means to achieve a goal and the goal itself and not getting confused on that and how that can interrupt our motivation.

Fishbach: Yes. So to get your intuition of why it's not a good idea to set your goal as pursuing a means, think about how much we all dislike investing in means. We don't like to pay for parking. We don't like to pay for shipping. We don't like to pay for gift wrapping. We don't like to invest, in this case, our money in something that's not the goal itself. It's not the food in the restaurant. It's the valet parking to get there. And that's true for other resources as well. We are not excited about studying for prerequisite class. We want to study for the classes we will take after we finish that.

Pink: Right.

Fishbach: We don't like to do something that is not the thing itself. And often, by defining what we are doing as the thing itself, you get people to be more enthusiastic, be more willing to pursue it. And in my book, I talk about research showing that if you set your goals as what you are trying to achieve and not the means, not the way there, not the shipping, then you are going to be more motivated. You're going to invest more.

Pink: There's a very intriguing study that you did dealing with a signed copy of a book and a tote bag. Tell us about that.

Fishbach: Yeah. A few years ago, my colleague here, Richard Thaler, got his book out, "Misbehaving," and we auctioned his book, his signed book to a group of our MBA students and their average bid was around $23. We then auctioned a tote bag, a nice tote bag, that actually cost about as much as the book with a book in it to another group of MBA students. And the average bid was $11 less than the $23 that people were willing to pay for the book alone.

Pink: Let me stop you for a moment, just to put a very fine point on that. For the price of the book, they bid 23. For the price of the book and the tote bag, they bid roughly half.

Fishbach: Yes. Which paints that in economic terms, the value of the tote bag was negative.

Pink: Again, I think this is so crazy, but tell us the point that it illustrates. You mentioned it before, but let's put a fine point on it.

Fishbach: Yes. Obviously, it's crazy and obviously people are not going to do it when you present the two deals next to each other. Okay. If you can see that you can get a tote bag for free, then you're not going to say don't give it to me. But if you just see the tote bag and you bid on the tote bag, then you are walking towards a means. You're not walking toward the goal. You are paying for a bag that will only carry the free book. And that doesn't feel right to people. They don't want to invest in means.

Pink: We know that approach is generally better than avoid. We know the thing in itself when we set the goal is better than going after the means. You also seem to indicate, and tell me if I'm right or wrong here, that fewer goals is better than more goals.

Fishbach: Fewer incentives are better than more incentives.

Pink: Fewer incentives. Okay. Go ahead. Tell us about that.

Fishbach: Yeah. By the way, also fewer goals are probably better accepted.

Pink: Yeah. Yeah. You're exactly right. That's what I meant. That we sometimes try to have multiple incentives for the same thing, but what you're saying is that can be confusing and diluting. Tell us about that.

Fishbach: Yeah. Multiple incentives confuse us about the reason that we pursue our goal. Incentives in general are our mini goals. They are the things that we get on top of the main reason that we do something. Okay. Maybe we want to exercise in order to be healthy. And we also give ourselves incentives, the nice coffee that you get after you exercise or whatever, as it turned out, when you add incentives, you often confuse people and ourselves by the reason that you are pursuing the goal. And so the old research on over justification found that when you pay kids to draw pictures, they don't want to draw anymore. And what we found most recently is that when we tell kids that food is healthy, that it will make them strong or help them learn how to count to 100.

Fishbach: This where three year old kids, they don't want to eat this food. In a way when the food only serves one goal, which is, I like it. It's fun to eat. Then people, kids in this case, want to eat it. When there are two goals, I like it, but I also get something out of it, the kid or the adult is confused about, Hey, why do I have it? Is it because it's good for me, because there is a pay, because I will learn something. I will be smarter, whatever. It's confusing.

Pink: I think one of the interesting things here is that a lot of our intuitions about motivation are off. That when you actually examine our intuitions and test them, as you're testing them in experiments, that they're wildly off. I'm in Washington, DC. If we were to pull people off the streets off of Washington, DC or Hyde Park where you are, and ask people what the bidding would be on that tote bag and book versus the book, everybody would say, well, of course, they're going to assign a higher price to two things rather than one thing. But that turned out not to be the case. I think that if you said that, tell kids that carrots help them read and count better. Some people might say, ah, it's not going to have any in effect. Some people might say it'll boost their consumption, but I don't think anybody would say it would decrease their consumption.

Fishbach: Yes. I agree. They're not going to say that it will decrease their-

Pink: Yeah.

Fishbach: ... Consumption. That was quite counterintuitive. And I often find that even if people have the intuition, unless they think about it, it doesn't come to mind. As you go through your life, unless you stop to analyze, maybe if you analyze, you will get to the right answer, but you just don't analyze, you use your intuitions.

Pink: Another thing that I derive from this, this is a pretty sturdy finding, but maybe you can explain why it's the case, is that intermittent rewards, intermittent incentives seem to be more effective than regular conveyor belt incentives.

Fishbach: Yeah. This is something that I actually test my MBA students intuition every year and they never get it. They always suggest that you need to reward the behavior every time in order to make sure that the person is doing it right. And as it turned out, if you reward behavior only sometimes, people are more excited. They want to know whether they will get the reward, what will happen this time when they try it. It's one reason why bonuses are often more motivating than your base salary. We also know it from animal research that intermittent enforcement works partially because the animal or the person just doesn't know if the rewards are still in place. I don't know if the police is on Lake Shore Drive today, so I'm going to drive slowly, just in case.

Pink: Intermittent is more effective than regular, which again, I think when we explain it makes sense. But I think our gut instincts are often, as your MBA students' gut instincts were, it's like, well, no, you have to be regular. You have to be consistent. You have to be like that. Okay. Here's another one. Okay. We got this whole formulation going. In general, X is more important than Y when we're setting goals here. This is a good one, I think. Excitement is more effective than importance. I think that's counterintuitive. That being excited about a goal is more important than the goal itself being important.

Fishbach: Yeah. It is more predictive of whether you will pursue the goal.

Pink: Whether you're excited about it is more predictive than whether the goal is important. If you have an important goal of losing weight, being healthy, that's a very important goal, but importance alone doesn't have a lot of predictive value about whether people pursue a goal. Is that accurate?

Fishbach: Yes. We set goals because they're important for us, but the variance that comes from how excited we are about pursuing them is the main predictor of success. That is you set your goal to eat healthier food because you want to be healthy. But then how much you found the healthy foods that you like, how excited you are about the meal that you are going to have today, this is a better predictor of adherence to your diet. We find this basically for every goal, for New Year's resolution, for exercising, for studying, for doing a good job at work. Excitement is what predicts success. Now, this is not to say that people should resolve to eat more ice cream and watch more TV, which might be exciting. They suggest that once you have set your goal to eat what's good for you or exercise or whatever, if you can make it exciting, you have a better chance.

Pink: I think that this is in some ways, slightly counterintuitive. That this idea that the way to motivate yourself, and maybe it's an American puritanical thing, is to steal yourself, to tighten your resolve. And we don't go and say, well, why don't we try to make it more fun?

Fishbach: Yeah. I agree with you in that this goes to the problem of not understanding that the way to motivate yourself is to change your environment, to change your circumstances, to find the healthy food that you like. It's not really about willpower, or at least not just about willpower. It's not about telling yourself that tomorrow I'm going to be a much better person. It's about making my goals accessible and easy and fun and being in a place where that's what comes to mind

Pink: And to take it to one level and you have a whole chapter on this is to make your goals where you can inherently valuable, so that the thing itself is what is motivating you. We call it intrinsic motivation. You have a whole chapter in that. Let's define intrinsic motivation, because you do a very careful job in the book of saying what it is and also what it's not.

Fishbach: Yes. Intrinsic motivation is an awfully confusing concept. Intrinsic motivation is the motivation that comes from doing the thing. It's not for achieving the goal. It's not some long term consequences. It's the value that we get from pursuing the goal. It's the positive feeling that what I'm doing feels good, that it feels right. That it might be fun. It might be exciting. There might be some challenge that I address as I do this. It's what happens at the moment. The misconception is to think that intrinsic motivation has specific contents. That it's just about creativity. Or that it is-

Pink: Or curiosity or whatever. Yeah.

Fishbach: Yeah. This is where it started. The reason that we think that intrinsic motivation is curiosity is because back in the days, animal researchers found that animals are curious and they will explore their environment without expecting any reward. Curiosity is intrinsically motivating. And that created the confusion by which this became one of the same. They are not. Anything can be intrinsically motivating-

Pink: Sure.

Fishbach: ... If it is part of pursuing the goal, if the goal feels right to you.

Pink: And certain kinds of sports exertion is intrinsically motivating. And even you have the misconception that economists have, which is that intrinsic motivation is anything you don't get, is anything not involving pay. And it's not that.

Fishbach: Yeah. Making money can be intrinsically motivating. Now it's not the best example for intrinsic motivation because most people, most of the time think about their salary as something that happens later. I'll work now. I'll make my living later, but it can be intrinsically motivating if it is-

Pink: If you're gambling, it can be intrinsically motivating.

Fishbach: Exactly.

Pink: Because it's the instant feedback for some kind of pursuit that you're in. It's a measure of, it might not be the thing itself and it might not be the fact that it's denominated in dollars or rubles or whatever, but it's the thing itself. You're getting that instant feedback and you know how you're doing.

Fishbach: Exactly. Gamblers are intrinsically motivated to make money and is exciting for them. It happens at the moment. It might not be good for them, but you see intrinsic motivation. And so once we understand that intrinsic motivation is that the immediate feedback that this feels right. Now, we can think about how to bring intrinsic motivation to the goals that are important for us, which might be exercising more than gambling.

Pink: Right. Right. Generally good life guidance. Less gambling, more exercising is probably pretty safe life lesson here from Ayelet Fishbach.

Pink: Good summary here. We know that in general approach goals are better than avoidance goals. We know that excitement is often more predictive than the goal itself being important. We know that in many ways, fewer incentives is more effective than more incentives. We're getting better in the first part of the book at actually shaping our goals. And I think in some ways that's undersold in a way, because the goals we set out, it's any kind of thing that is directional. The trajectory that you're on is inherently going to determine your course, so setting the right kinds of goals is very important. Now we're in the next stage here. We've set our goals. Now what we have to do is we have, to use your phrase, we have to keep pulling. Setting a goal is necessary, but it's not sufficient because we have to continue with our efforts there. And so let's talk about that. One of the most important things that you see that you talk about in sustaining a motivation is the importance of progress. Explain why that's important. And then tell us a little bit about how we can harness that.

Fishbach: Progress increases motivation. With progress, we feel more committed. We feel more able. For all or nothing goals, there's actually more than we get for our efforts. If you think about four year college, the first year only gets you a quarter of a college degree. The last year gets you a full college degree. And so nobody's quitting college in their last year, but about half of the people that start college will quit in the first couple of years. Progress by itself increases motivation. And why is that important? Because for every goal that we are pursuing, we can monitor our progress either in terms of the glass half full, what we have done, or the glass half empty, what is left to do. And it's pretty critical that we get it right. It's pretty critical that at the beginning, when we are not sure about our ability, our commitment, we will look back, create our baby steps, create the things that we have accomplished. And after the midpoint, when we are pretty sure that we are committed, that we can do it, look at everything that you haven't done yet.

Pink: Okay. This is really important. And I knew this research and I actually use this myself when I run and it's transformative. Up into the midpoint, the best way to sustain your motivation is to look and see how far you've come. If I'm going to run five miles, before I get to the 2.5 mile mark, I want to say, wow, I've run a mile. Wow, I've run a mile and a half. Wow. I've run two miles. Wow. I've run two and a half miles. Then, when I hit the midpoint, I change, right? This is what your research is saying. And you say, oh my gosh, I only have two miles left. I only have a mile and a half left. I only have a mile left. And I think that's powerful on the thinking about all kinds of things. Is the glass full or is the glass half empty? We tend to associate that with optimism and pessimism, but you're talking about it in an entirely different sense.

Fishbach: Yes. It's nothing about pessimism or optimism. It's just whether you look at what you've done versus what you still need to do. And it's not trivial for people. Actually, teachers often have the wrong intuition to start with negative feedback. The new student is, give them low grades, and then they will see improvement over the year. Totally the wrong intuition. Because if someone is starting something new and you highlight how bad they are and how far they are from excelling in the subject that is not going to help their commitment.

Pink: At the beginning, look how far you've come. Past the midpoint, look how little distance you have to travel. I think that's been so useful to me. There is a difference that I didn't know about here on the glass half full, glass half empty, or do you look back at what you've achieved or do you look forward at what you still have left to do? You say there is a difference between experts in novices here.

Fishbach: Yes. Your running example was great, was very clear. Often our goals are now more ongoing, eh, and it really matters of how much we feel that we are studying, or we are already the experts. For a novice, it's better to look at what you have achieved. For an expert, it's better to look ahead. For me, I only wrote one book. I should look at the book that I have completed. You, Daniel, should think about all the books that you haven't written yet.

Pink: That keeps me up at night. Every single night I think about that. You also later in the book, talk about feedback and how we get feedback as a way to sustain our progress. But you say that the way we deal with feedback for novices and experts should be different. Explain what you mean by that because I think there's some really, really good guidance there.

Fishbach: And we should give novices positive feedback. With expertise, people are more able to learn from constructive negative feedback. Now it's always hard to learn from negative feedback. And I talk a lot about that. There are many interventions that we design as a field to help people with negative feedback, but it is much more possible when people feel committed when they feel like the expert. I give the example of a committed parent. If you feel that your parenting is not going well, if you get negative feedback from your family or from your kids, you feel that you should work harder. You are committed. If there's another relationship in your life that is not very committed and you get negative feedback, then you say, oh well. I'm not going to keep in touch with that person. When you are committed, you can learn from negative feedback.

Pink: And actually in some ways our commitment to something plays a big role in our motivation and even our behavior actually, again, I think this is somewhat counterintuitive, our behavior plays a role in our beliefs about our own commitment.

Fishbach: Yes. When we do something, we become more committed. And this is a basic principle in the behavioral science.

Pink: Yeah.

Fishbach: This is self-perception. This one is not intuitive to people. Often-

Pink: Exactly.

Fishbach: Right. Just do it. Okay. And evaluate your commitment after you do it. Just try it. Just see how it works and then think about whether you like it, whether you think it's important, whether you want to do it again.

Pink: Let's take another beat on middles, because you've done some fascinating research on midpoints and the effect that they have on us. Tell us what happens in the middle and what we should do about it.

Fishbach: This is the middle of the academic term at the University of Chicago. And guess what? I had the fewest people showing up to my class this week. This is the middle problem. We lose steam. Our motivation to do things is lower and also to do it right. Not to cut corners, to adhere to our ethical or performance standards. In a way at the beginning, each action feels like it makes a difference. It matters. You expect to remember what you do. Toward the end, well, your last action will achieve the goal, so super excited. And also you expect to remember the things that you will do last. In the middle, the actions tend to feel like a drop in the bucket. And we don't expect to remember what we do. And this combination is not good for motivation. You should keep middles short. Middles are not good for motivation.

Pink: Yeah. Yeah. You also have one of my favorite studies, which is the study of Hanukkah candle lighting behavior. Hanukah is a holiday that Jews celebrate where one of the rituals is to light a candelabra that has eight candles. And what you'd found in actually tracking people's candle lighting behavior, which is freaking ingenious in itself, is that people were lighting the candles on day one and maybe a little on day two and on day eight, but completely sagging in the middle. Even our ethical standards can drop a little bit in the middle. What's an antidote for addressing the middle problem?

Fishbach: Short middles. Saving for retirement is a really difficult goal-

Pink: Yeah.

Fishbach: ... Because the middle is your life. Make it an annual goal. Make exercising a weekly goal. If you have-

Pink: Okay.

Fishbach: ... A weekly exercising goal, clearly you also want to exercise next week.

Pink: Right.

Fishbach: By the fact that you made it into a weekly goal, you made the middle shorter. Just get rid of middles as much as you can.

Pink: I'm going to read you two interesting observations that happened to be in my notes paired one after another. Advertising ice cream as kosher reduced non observant consumers' interest in it and mouthwash that burns is perceived as more effective than mouthwash that doesn't. What does that tell us about juggling goals?

Fishbach: Yes. I really like these studies. What's going on here? Well, in general, we like activities, products, means that allow us to achieve multiple goals. This is what I refer to as feeding two birds with one scone.

Pink: Right.

Fishbach: It's great. You can get both exercising and spending time with a friend by going with them to the gym. But what happened is that when a product or an activity or a means serves more than one goal, then it seems to have a weaker connection to each of these goals. And when the product that you mentioned serve two goals, but you don't really care about one of these goals, now you no longer see this activity, this product as serving the original goal as well. The ice cream that serves both the taste goal and the religious goal, if you don't have that religious goal, then you just assume that it's not very tasty.

Pink: Right.

Fishbach: And I love the burning mouthwash example because this is a counter final means. It helps you with one goal while interfering with the goal to just have a pleasant sensation in your mouth. It's a very basic low level goal. And the reason that people prefer that the burning mouth was is that they think, well, if it hurts, then it must be great. We make this mistake all the time.

Pink: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's interesting from a consumer marketing perspective. And again, this is what I keep coming. If you have your MBA students or your MBA students have graduated, they come back to you to say, Hey, I'm working at a consumer products company and we're dealing with this brand of mouthwash. And somebody says, they're on a meeting. You know what we should do? We shouldn't make it taste pleasant. We should make it hurt. We want our product to hurt. And everyone will say, what are you crazy? What are you crazy? But it turns out that hurt is a signal in a sense of the product's efficacy. All right. Let's go to one last point here, Ayelet, which is some very interesting stuff because we are ultimately juggling multiple goals.

Pink: And I think there's some really good lessons in there. Multiple goals in terms of things that are related to each other, things that are not related to each other. And I think there's some good guidance in how we can juggle more effectively. As we've set the right goals, we're sustaining our progress. Ultimately though, we are going to have a lot of goals and sometimes they can flick and sometimes they just distract, so you've got some guidance on there. Let's just go for a few minutes to the final part of the book, which has to do with, and in a way it's a capstone to what you were talking about because you say the way to motivate yourself is to change your circumstances. And I think the most important component in our circumstances are the people we surround ourselves with. And so you talk about social support. Tell us about social facilitation and why is that important?

Fishbach: Social facilitation happens when others are around us and that makes it easy to pursue certain tasks. It makes it easy to exercise or to concentrate on your work or not to do anything just because others are there and they are around you and they are watching you. It's why many people choose to work in a cafe, is why many people go to the gym. Why go to the gym again? Maybe you could do the same at home, but over there, people are going to watch me. And it's why records are being broken when the audience is there, when people are watching you.

Pink: I thought what was interesting is that you have, I don't think it's your research, but you site research, I think, about how athletes perform better in front of a crowd rather than without a crowd. There's some interesting things about how even mental performance is better in front of people, rather than solo.

Fishbach: As long as this is a dominant activity for you, as long as this is something that you are good at, that you have practiced, that you did many times before. If you bring the audience to watch a child doing some athletic performance that can interfere with your performance. My son might find it hard to-

Pink: Right.

Fishbach: ... Get the ball to the basket when people are watching him.

Pink: Right? Because your son is what, 10 years old or something like that.

Fishbach: How do you know that?

Pink: Well, it said in the book that he's eight. And so the book I'm assuming was written two years ago. Using my incredible quantitative reasoning powers, I said, he must be about 10.

Fishbach: I'm impressed. Usually people don't update the ages of other people's kids.

Pink: We are our circumstances. And one of my circumstances is that I'm a parent. But leaving me aside here for a moment, let me ask two more questions that sort of relate to this. One of them not directly. The other one more directly. You also talk about learning from other people's mistakes and how we're better able to do that. There's some fairly recent research, I think, that you've done. I thought that was quite interesting. That when we make mistakes, we often don't learn from them nearly as much as when we watch other people make mistakes.

Fishbach: Yes. This is research [inaudible 00:42:04] and Chris Winkler. And what was interesting here is that in general, we learn more from hands on experience. We learn more when we do the thing, but as it turned out, when someone else fails that doesn't sting our ego. When someone else gives the wrong answer, then I can remember the wrong answer and infer that therefore the correct answer is the one that they did not choose. When people were giving the wrong answer, often they learned nothing, often they couldn't even tell us what was the wrong answer that they chose. They so much didn't learn anything that they suppressed the experience. They didn't even know what they were doing there. And that is less likely to happen when you watch someone else failing. Which, we don't want people around us to fail, but we want to share our failure with other people because even if it's hard for us to learn from them, we can help others. There will be more knowledge if we talk about failures.

Pink: Yeah. Yeah. And you make it another very interesting point there that failures are typically not public. They're not well exposed. And so that's inhibiting learning in the bigger sense. You want to play tennis, watch YouTube videos of people perhaps hitting the ball the wrong way. One last thing. You have chapter 14 and we'll end on this. You say that goals make a happy relationship. What can we learn from the science of motivation to improve our relationships? I'm assuming you're talking mostly about our romantic relationships, but just our relationships in general. What's a takeaway and insight that we can deriv from this research to apply to our relationships?

Fishbach: Yeah. I talk about romantic relationships mainly because most of the research is on that, but it's not just. Any relationship in our life is in somewhat connected to our goals. Meaning that we get closer to people that help us with our goals and we move away from people that are not supportive of our goals. And so the way to strengthen relationships is to work on the goals, to see how someone can be helpful for our motivation. We see that our motivations are really the feel of our relationships with the people around us. We also see that people are ending relationships when they are no longer supportive.

Pink: Once again, it goes back to this big point that our circumstances have a big effect on our motivation. And to some extent, maybe more than people realize, we have some sovereignty, we have some control over our circumstances. Or am I overstating that?

Fishbach: No, you are stating it right. I would say that I could mention that Marie and Pierre Curie story, which I think might make it.

Pink: Oh, sure. It's a lovely story about a couple that supported each other and achieved at an extraordinarily high level. And I didn't even know about her daughter, but go ahead.

Fishbach: Marie and Pierre Curie, the Curie family got more Nobel Prizes than any other family in the history. And basically Pierre insisted that Marie will get the first Nobel Prize, will be named on their first Nobel Prize that helped her. She helped him with their discoveries. They had two daughters. Their oldest one in Nobel Prize in chemistry with her husband. Their one daughter that didn't get a Nobel Prize, married someone who did get a Nobel Prize. And so the family was just so supportive of family member's scientific pursuit in such an amazing level.

Pink: We need to get rid of the Kardashians and replace it with a show called the Curies and that would be much more inspirational and useful. Ayelet Fishbach, what a pleasure talking with you. Ladies and gentlemen, her book with this brilliant orange cover will tell you how to get it done. Thanks for being with us.

Fishbach: Thank you so much, Daniel. Love talking to you.