Chapter 4
Handcuffing Yourself to Success: Overcoming Procrastination
When MIT professor Dan Ariely noticed his brilliant students consistently procrastinating on assignments, he conducted an experiment with 99 students who needed to complete three papers. Half received evenly spaced deadlines throughout the term, while the other half could choose their own deadlines or wait until the end of class to submit all papers. Surprisingly, 68% of students voluntarily chose restrictive deadlines with penalties for lateness-violating economic theory's assumption that people always prefer freedom and flexibility.
History provides numerous examples of self-imposed constraints to resist temptation, from Odysseus binding himself to his ship's mast to avoid the Sirens' song to Victor Hugo locking away his clothes to force himself to complete "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Economist Robert Strotz first documented this phenomenon in 1955, noting people's tendency to use "commitment devices"-deliberate restrictions on one's own freedom to achieve greater goals.
Commitment devices can deliver remarkable results. In the Philippines, locked savings accounts helped customers save 80% more over a year compared to the control group, despite only 28% of eligible customers opening such accounts. Similarly, MIT students who could self-impose deadlines with penalties produced work with 50% fewer errors than those facing only a final deadline.
Cash commitment devices offer a versatile solution-putting money on the line that you forfeit if you fail to meet your goals. Nick Winter exemplifies this approach, risking $14,000 if he didn't write a book and go skydiving within three months. Despite his fear of heights, he accomplished both goals. Studies show cash commitments help smokers quit, gym-goers exercise more, and dieters lose weight-though only a small percentage of people are willing to risk their money this way.
For those uncomfortable with financial penalties, "soft commitments" offer an effective alternative. Unlike "hard commitments" with concrete costs, soft commitments carry only psychological penalties for failure. The spectrum ranges from soft penalties (public goal announcements) to hard penalties (cash forfeiture), and from soft restrictions (using smaller plates) to hard restrictions (locked savings accounts).
Despite the proven effectiveness of commitment devices, they remain surprisingly unpopular. When offered locked savings accounts at Green Bank, 72% of customers declined, and 89% of smokers refused commitment accounts to help them quit. This paradox exists because there are two types of people: "sophisticates" who recognize their self-control limitations and seek tools to overcome them, and "naifs" who overestimate their willpower.
The key is finding the right balance-penalties must be significant enough to motivate but not so severe they become self-defeating. By acknowledging our tendency to procrastinate and strategically limiting our future choices, we can overcome one of the most common barriers to positive change.
Chapter 5
Remember to Change: Combating Forgetfulness
In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, Todd Rogers discovered a disturbing pattern: 54 percent of registered voters who told pollsters they intended to vote ultimately "flaked out." This phenomenon mirrored what Prashant from Evive Health observed with flu shots-only 30 percent of employees followed through on getting vaccinated despite personalized reminders. The puzzle was the same: why do so many people fail to follow through on their stated intentions?
Forgetting is the most common explanation would-be voters give for not showing up at the polls, and it's a more serious culprit than many realize. The average adult forgets three things daily, from PIN numbers to chores to anniversaries. Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated how quickly humans forget with his classic 1885 study showing we forget nearly half of learned information within twenty minutes, 70 percent within 24 hours, and 80 percent after a month.
In search of a solution, Todd discovered Peter Gollwitzer's research on "implementation intentions." This technique involves making a plan linked to a specific cue that reminds you to act, essentially filling in the blanks in "When ___ happens, I'll do ___." The more detailed and specific the plan, the more effective it becomes-like "Every Tuesday and Thursday right after work I'll exercise, and I'll take the number 17 bus to the YMCA on Main Street" rather than just "I'll exercise more."
When creating effective memory cues, distinctiveness matters significantly. In an experiment at a Harvard Square cafe, customers who were instructed to look for an unusual cue (a three-eyed alien toy from Toy Story) were 36 percent more likely to remember to redeem their coupons than those told to look for an ordinary cash register.
Todd Rogers applied cue-based planning to tackle voter turnout, transforming standard get-out-the-vote calls into more effective interventions. Rather than simply urging registered voters to show up, his team developed "planning prompts" that asked three specific questions: "What time do you expect you'll head to the polls?", "Where do you expect you'll be coming from?", and "What do you think you'll be doing before you head out?" Testing this approach with nearly 40,000 registered voters revealed that these planning prompts increased turnout by 9 percent among those who received calls.
Our planning prompts study with Evive Health showed similar success. Recipients were encouraged to write down when they planned to get their flu shot at workplace clinics, though they weren't actually scheduling appointments or communicating these plans to anyone. This simple intervention led to a 13% increase in vaccinations.
Beyond preventing forgetting, planning forces you to break big goals into manageable chunks-a critical step for making progress on ambitious projects. Just as NASA engineers had to break down the moon landing into specific subgoals, personal goals like "earn a promotion" require breaking down into concrete actions like improving communication with your boss and dedicating specific evenings to study.
To create your own cue-based plans, consider the how, when, and where of your intended action. Choose distinctive cues that are out of the ordinary, schedule timely reminders that appear exactly when you need to act, and develop checklists for more complex plans. Just be careful not to overdo it-having too many competing plans can be overwhelming and diminish your commitment.
Chapter 6
Harnessing Laziness: Making the Path of Least Resistance Work for You
Laziness, widely viewed as a vice to overcome, can actually be a powerful tool for behavior change. While our tendency to take the path of least resistance can work against us when trying to develop new habits like studying instead of watching Netflix, it also prevents us from wasting time and energy. Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, points out that taking shortcuts is exactly what the best computer algorithms do to conserve processing power.
Penn Medicine's remarkable success with generic prescriptions came from leveraging people's tendency to take the path of least resistance. During a routine system upgrade, an IT consultant made a small but powerful change to the prescription interface: adding a checkbox that required physicians to actively select if they wanted brand-name drugs instead of generics. Since doctors, like most people, tend toward efficiency, they rarely checked the box-only 2% of the time-instantly boosting the generic prescription rate to 98% and saving millions of dollars.
When defaults can't be changed and we face repeated decisions, developing good habits becomes crucial. Habits-behaviors repeated so often they become automatic-allow us to act effectively without conscious processing. Neuroscience shows that as habits develop, we rely less on reasoning parts of the brain and more on areas responsible for action and motor control.
Habits develop through consistent repetition in stable environments with some form of reward. Classic experiments by B.F. Skinner showed that animals develop habitual responses when behaviors are consistently rewarded, and these behaviors persist even after rewards stop. More recent economic studies demonstrated this with college students who were paid to visit the gym eight times in a month. Even after payments ended, these students continued exercising at twice the rate of control groups, showing how temporary incentives can create lasting habits.
While forming habits is valuable, adopting new ones isn't simple. Milkman and Harvard professor John Beshears tested habit formation at Google's corporate gyms, expecting to find that consistent routines would build stronger habits. Surprisingly, their research revealed that people encouraged to exercise at the same time daily (dubbed "Rigid Rachels") became inflexible-if they couldn't make their regular time, they wouldn't exercise at all. Meanwhile, those encouraged to exercise flexibly ("Flexible Fernandos") developed more robust habits, learning to adapt when circumstances changed.
Benjamin Franklin, despite his early years as a "philandering wastrel" in London, transformed himself through a systematic approach to habit formation. During a lengthy voyage back to Philadelphia, he developed a strategy to cultivate thirteen virtues by tracking his daily successes and failures with charts, marking failures with black marks and leaving successes blank. Similarly, comedian Jerry Seinfeld follows a comparable philosophy centuries later, committing to writing a new joke every day and tracking his progress with the motto "Don't break the streak."
By understanding how laziness works, we can transform it from an obstacle into an asset for change. We can strategically set defaults to make laziness work for us, build flexibility into routines to create adaptable autopilot responses, track our behavior to avoid forgetting and ensure accountability, aim for unbroken streaks to prevent habit disruption, and piggyback new habits onto existing ones by linking desired behaviors with already established routines.
Chapter 7
Building Confidence: The Foundation of Successful Change
The author explores how giving advice rather than receiving it can boost confidence and motivation. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler discovered that people with lower confidence make less progress toward goals, but asking struggling individuals to give advice rather than receive it can significantly improve their performance. In a large experiment with Florida high school students, those who spent just ten minutes giving study advice to younger peers saw improved grades.
The "saying-is-believing effect" explains why giving advice helps us follow our own guidance-we feel hypocritical if we don't practice what we preach. Drummer Mike Mangini attributes his career success partly to being asked to teach others, which boosted his confidence. The author suggests creating "advice clubs" where peers help each other make decisions, as she did with her "No Club" to help decline time-consuming commitments.
Our expectations profoundly shape our outcomes. In a remarkable study, hotel housekeepers who were simply informed that their work constituted good exercise lost weight and lowered their blood pressure over four weeks without changing their routines. This demonstrates how our beliefs affect our reality-the housekeepers likely approached their tasks with more vigor once they viewed them as beneficial exercise.
When pursuing goals, small failures can trigger the "what-the-hell effect"-where minor slips lead to complete abandonment of our efforts. My colleague Marissa Sharif developed a clever solution: allowing herself two "emergency" skips per week for her daily running routine. When tested in a research study with participants completing online tasks, people given "mulligans" for missed days significantly outperformed those with either strict daily requirements or more relaxed goals.
Beyond building in allowances for emergencies, how we interpret failure matters tremendously. Carol Dweck's research shows that a "growth mindset"-believing abilities can improve through effort-predicts success, while fixed mindsets lead to defeatism. Encouragingly, we can learn to view setbacks as opportunities rather than reflections of innate limitations, as demonstrated by interventions with students that improved academic performance and course selection.
While overconfidence is often criticized as a problematic bias, believing in yourself is crucial when pursuing ambitious goals. Underconfidence can only stymie success. We should surround ourselves with people who believe in our potential and support our growth. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler's research shows that unsolicited advice can undermine confidence (implying someone lacks ability), while asking for advice boosts it (conveying trust in their capabilities). Even how we compliment matters-praising "natural" talent fosters a fixed mindset, while acknowledging effort and improvement encourages resilience.
By cultivating supportive relationships, positioning ourselves as advice-givers, forgiving small failures, and viewing setbacks as growth opportunities, we can overcome self-doubt and build the confidence necessary for lasting change.
Chapter 8
The Power of Social Influence: Changing Together
Every February, I conduct a social experiment in my Wharton MBA class where I email all but three students to applaud when seeing the dean's photo. The uninformed students invariably join in the clapping, demonstrating how we conform to avoid feeling like misfits and because we assume others have information we lack.
This powerful social influence explains why Scott Carrell studied how randomly assigned squadron mates affected cadets' performance at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Analyzing data from 3,500 doolies, he found that for every 100-point increase in squadronmates' average verbal SAT scores, a cadet's first-year GPA rose by 0.4 points-potentially explaining why his twin brother outperformed him despite Scott having been the better student in high school.
When Kassie Brabaw became a resident adviser at Syracuse University, she found herself training alongside five vegetarians. Though she'd been intrigued by vegetarianism but never thought she could manage it, watching these peers create delicious, varied meals showed her it was possible. By copying their strategies-eating veggie omelets, black bean soup, and risotto-she successfully transitioned to a meatless diet for four years. This "copy and paste" approach works because it allows us to emulate successful strategies we observe in others.
Hotels that encourage towel reuse provide a perfect case study in using social norms to influence behavior. When signs simply requested reuse to save water, many guests declined. But when psychologists revised the messaging to state "75 percent of guests typically use their towels more than once," towel reuse increased by 18 percent. Even more impressively, telling guests that most people who stayed in their specific room reused towels boosted compliance by 33 percent.
However, when Scott Carrell tried to help struggling Air Force Academy cadets by deliberately grouping low verbal SAT performers with high performers, his well-intentioned plan backfired dramatically. Instead of the positive peer influence he expected, the squadrons became polarized, with students segregating themselves and struggling students performing even worse than with random assignments. This failure reveals a crucial insight: social influence tactics can backfire when there's too stark a difference between overachievers and those needing improvement.
The pressure of being watched and judged can significantly alter our behavior, sometimes driving positive change. When twenty thousand Michigan residents received letters showing their personal voting records alongside their neighbors', promising to release updated information after the upcoming election, voter turnout increased by an astounding 8.1 percentage points. This accountability tactic works like parents using Santa's omniscience to encourage good behavior in children, but can create backlash when used coercively.
Even when good behaviors aren't yet popular, highlighting upward trends can be effective-showing that enrollment in a program has doubled signals that the behavior will eventually become mainstream. For personal change, surrounding yourself with successful role models is powerful; if training for a marathon, connect with experienced runners who can guide and hold you accountable.
Chapter 9
Maintaining Change: A Lifelong Journey
The obstacles to change-impulsivity, procrastination, forgetfulness, confidence, and laziness-are like chronic conditions requiring ongoing treatment rather than one-time interventions. An Opower study where households receiving energy usage reports compared to neighbors reduced consumption showed that when reports stopped, conservation efforts decayed 10-20% annually despite two years of habit formation.
The key insight: treat change as a chronic challenge rather than a temporary one. My student Karen Herrera maintained her health transformation by consistently using multiple strategies-regular weigh-ins, meal planning, workout scheduling, calorie tracking, and temptation management techniques. Similarly, I've successfully maintained changes using these strategies, finding maintenance easier than initiation once the right approach is established.
When obstacles shift, your approach must adapt too. Sometimes goals need recalibration-if the gym isn't working, perhaps walking, basketball, or home workouts might better suit you. Finding tailored goals matching your strengths makes success more likely. With consistent application of customized solutions to your specific obstacles, evidence shows lasting change is possible.
The science of behavior change isn't about finding a single magic bullet but about developing a personalized toolkit of strategies that address your unique challenges. By understanding the specific obstacles that stand in your way-whether they're related to timing, impulsivity, procrastination, forgetfulness, laziness, confidence, or social influence-you can apply targeted solutions that make change not just possible but sustainable.
Remember that change isn't something you accomplish once and forget about. It's an ongoing process that requires attention and adjustment as circumstances evolve. But with the right strategies in place, you can transform your life one small change at a time, building momentum toward the person you aspire to become.
