On today's episode, I interview a personal hero of mine in the podcasting world, Katy Milkman. Katy is the host of Choiceology, a podcast about why and how we make the choices we make. Katy also just released a brand new book, How To Change - be sure to check out both of these incredible resources!
On today's episode, I interview a personal hero of mine in the podcasting world, Katy Milkman. Katy is the host of Choiceology, a podcast about why and how we make the choices we make. Katy also just released a brand new book, How To Change - be sure to check out both of these incredible resources!
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Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. In this episode, we continue my interview with Katie Milkman. If you missed out on the first part of the episode, you almost certainly want to go back and listen to that first. Katie is a professor at Wharton. She is also the author of How to Change, the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. It just released on May 4th. She is also the host of the Choiceology podcast. You might already subscribe to that podcast if you don't. I certainly recommend that you check it out. I'm so excited to have Katie on because she's a hero in so many different spheres of things that I care about, behavioral change, behavioral science, behavioral economics, academia, podcasting, all of these things that Katie is doing. She's such an excellent guest as well. She's so easy to talk to. I recommend that not only do you listen to this podcast, but go and subscribe to Choiceology and go and buy Katie's book, How to Change. Let's get straight into the second part of my interview with Katie Milkman. I feel like I've cracked the code for myself on exercise and going to the gym. Part of it is we built a home gym thanks to coded shutting down gyms. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Anyway, and so we built a home gym, but I also, I'm not really sure exactly what has done it for me and maybe you can help me figure it out and maybe it will help other people. I can describe kind of the progression that the progression of choices that I made and I've been very consistent since about November and more consistent than ever in my life in exercise and part of it is that I chose to start doing power lifting with a specific gym. plan. And this plan is kind of a program. You follow the program. It has its multiple weeks worth of kind of laying out the weights that you're going to lift, et cetera, et cetera. And not only that, but you track it and you see the progress that you're making. You get all these pretty graphs and the whole nine yards. And so that's one piece of the puzzle, I think, for me. And another thing that I do is the night before, I set everything up, right? I wear my workout clothes to bed. I know what socks I'm going to wear. My pre-workout is already in the fridge. I've got the coffee ready to make. It's a ritual. Every morning, I make coffee and I pour it in two cups, one for my wife and one for myself. And it feels like this consistency and kind of doing all of that stuff ahead of time that I'm going to be able to do. And I'm going to be able to do it almost be wasting all of that effort if I weren't to get up and follow through with the thing that I've committed to doing. And I don't think I've missed maybe one. I might have been sick or something, or maybe it's a holiday, or I don't know. I've missed very few workouts. And it has surprised me. Let's put it that way. I've been surprised at my own. Yeah, you built a really strong habit there and your habits are working for you instead of against. I don't understand entirely what has happened. So maybe you can break down what you're doing. What you think is happening here. Sure, I can. I can do my best at least. And I should also say, we're talking now a lot about exercise. But everything- There's more to it than that, I guess. Yeah, yeah. All of the things that we're saying really apply. I just told you about a study about exercise. You're telling me about your exercise. All of these insights are not specific to exercise. They can help with productivity at work. They can help with changing your diet. They can help with changing your study habits. They can help with- Yeah, they can help with changing your financial habits. So I just want to throw that out there. It's really all the same principles, but we're going to apply to exercise again. So let me come to your question. There's a bunch of things you've done to form this, but you used a lot of the tricks in the book for forming a habit. So you're on autopilot. And as a result of that, you're not- I call this, there's a chapter about laziness. And you mentioned defaults when we were talking earlier. Defaults are like the ultimate way to capitalize on human laziness and turn it into an asset. In general, just like this is a developer show, right? So everybody's familiar with how great it is to build a lazy algorithm, right? Like an algorithm that can do things as efficiently as possible. It's good. Humans are like that too. In fact, Herb Simon, 1957, I think, Nobel laureate in economics. I might be misremembering the year. He was before Kahneman and Tversky in pointing out that humans were not perfectly rational. And he came from a computer science background. And he recognized maybe if we model people like a computer with limited memory and limited capacity to process things, that could be helpful. And I talk about that in this chapter on laziness, because I think laziness is a human asset. And one of the ways that we can conquer it is actually by turning it into even more of an asset when we want to build habits and routines. So one way to use laziness to our advantage is through defaults. We just set good defaults and the automatic path. There's nothing unhealthy about it. There's nothing unhealthy about it. There's nothing unhealthy about it. If I put something unhealthy in my fridge, then the default snack food, it's going to be like a whole lot of work to go and find an unhealthy snack. That's an example of a life default. The other kind of default we can set, though, is by very deliberately forming a habit. And the way habits form is we create a series of cues that then trigger. And this is, by the way, been written about in a lot of wonderful books about the power. There's the power of habit by Charles Duhigg that I think really basically gets it right. And, you know, there's atomic habits and tiny habits that both come out in the long run. And there's a lot of things that we can do to help people the last few years and good habits, bad habits, which is the one of those books that was written by a scientist, Wendy Wood, the world's expert on habit. These are all wonderful reads. They all laid out this simple formula cue followed by action, followed by something rewarding that makes you feel like, you know, proud of yourself, happy, satisfied, followed by repetition. And after you do this for a while, and how long is another like really interesting question that my team and I have studied, it might take as, you know, it depends on the context, but depends on the frequency. We just really were, we just talked about a paper today in a seminar series I host that suggests maybe 198 data. This is the average amount of time it takes to build an exercise habit in one data set, but it depends on the person, the context. Anyway, you repeat enough with that reward and you get habit. And now, now like, I don't even have to think about it just happens. And it's like natural. It's my lazy tendency in the morning. I like, I just, it would be bizarre and off kilter and uncomfortable if I didn't do this. So you've built a habit and you mentioned you have this like program that you do. First of all, you mentioned a bunch of cues, right? You've got the whole system down where you're wearing the clothes, you get up in the morning, the coffee, the smell of it, all of these things cue you like it's time. You know, I know this, I know what the next step is. So I'm not going to forget. My habit is really clearly cued by those things in terms of rewards. I'm sure you're proud of yourself. So that's one reward, but it's interesting that you also have this sort of system where you're visualizing your success. You're sort of accountability built into that. You're seeing how, how on track you are. All of that is basically a reward system that you've created and that's giving you positive feedback. So anyway, you've basically done a lot of the smart things that someone would tell you to do if they were an expert on forming habits. Very textbook example of somebody accidentally forming a habit, basically. It doesn't sound that accidental, actually. It sounds like you were, it was premeditated. It sounds like you set yourself up for success, which is, I think that's actually a really important point. Like we can be systematic and analytical and use like the engineering side of your brain to solve these problems. They're just like the problems we solve in other walks of life. It's just that normally we don't apply that sort of analytical approach to behavior change and we should. Yeah. Respect the thing that is human in you rather than trying to push against it. Or I don't know. I think, I think maybe, the most unfortunate thing that we do when we start thinking about why have I not been able to make the change that I want to make is we create this kind of attachment to our worth or our ability or our capability, those kinds of things. We say, oh, obviously, I haven't made this change because I just can't. I'm unable to do so. And I imagine it seems like that would be a kind of self-reinforcing thing that the more that you believe that or the more that you kind of repeat that mantra to yourself that, oh, I just can't do it, the more or the less likely you are to seek out ways, alternative pathways to actually solve those problems, make those changes you want to make. Is that true? Yeah. So you're pointing to another chapter. Which is about confidence and the importance of believing you can. And so that's absolutely true. There's a huge amount of research showing that if we don't believe we have the ability to do something, we're much less likely to succeed. In fact, the placebo effect is the most famous example of this, right? But it goes in the other direction. You believe that your doctor has given you medicine that's going to cure you of something. It's like a sugar pill, but it turns out sugar pills are effective against curing 60 to 90 percent of disease. And so you're pointing to diseases by, you know, in a big recent meta analysis, which is just mind boggling, right? From like curing knee pain to cancer. I mean, just like unbelievable the number of things you can. You shouldn't give people sugar pills for cancer. Let me edit that out. But so let me say that again, because I don't want people thinking I just said that you should give sugar pills for cancer. I understand. But sugar pills are amazing and they create positive, positive change in almost every medical condition you can think of, which I just find absolutely extraordinary. And it's that once you believe something is working, it literally changes physical outcomes as well as as well as your own well-being. So so confidence is really important. So what do we do about it? Of course, then is the question. Well, let me first actually back up to a chapter in the book about getting started that is based on some of my research and is really closely related to this idea. So I have been studying for about a decade, a phenomenon that my co-authors and I call the fresh start effect, where at the beginning of a new year, you know about New Year's resolutions, but also at the start of other new cycles in our lives. So after celebrating a birthday, start of spring, you know, following following other landmarks like the beginning of a new week or a month. And I should say the start of spring has to be called out as such or else we don't do it naturally. But naturally, these other landmarks that we think of as new beginnings. We are more motivated to pursue our goals and more likely to say visit the gym, set a goal on a goal setting website, whether it's about our finances, our education or our health. And if encouraged to begin saving, for instance, we're more willing to open or start saving following these kinds of landmark dates that feel like new beginnings. And one of the reasons we've shown is that at new beginnings, you feel like the past failures have been wiped clean. You feel like you have a clean slate. This is a new. You're in your life. You're you're turning a new page. That was the old me. You know, that was last year's Katie who couldn't figure out how to do that. But I can do it now. So your your failures feel more further in the rearview mirror, almost like the failings of a different person. So that can also give you a confidence boost. And those fresh start moments are particularly good time to get going. But there's a lot of other things you can do to boost confidence when that's a challenge as well, including sort of surrounding yourself with the kinds of people who give you confidence. So social is really important to confidence, who your role models are, if the people around you are encouraging you and supporting you. It turns out mentoring other people on something that you find challenging can actually help you, too, in giving advice to other people, because it boosts your confidence. You believe in yourself more when you when you see someone else looking to you as a role model. And it also causes you, by the way, to sort of dredge up ideas and insights that you might not look for if you weren't motivated to help someone else. And that are likely to be able to help you, too. And once you've told someone else, hey, you should do this, you're going to feel silly not not following through. So there's a lot about confidence in the book. And I hope some of those insights are helpful. Absolutely. Very helpful. You mentioned something that is probably a bit unintuitive that although I guess for a lot of software engineers, you probably who are listening to this probably understand the value of mentoring others. And the idea that teaching kind of reinforces the knowledge that. Otherwise may not have been as solid. I am curious. Are there other things that you would say are not intuitive. I'm sure there's, there's a quite a laundry list of them, but things that you would call out as maybe surprising or a moment you remember writing in the book that you were just kind of overwhelmed by how, how strange or odd it seemed that this was true but it turned out to be true. Yeah, that's a really good question. One finding. And I'm going to take you to the gym again which is funny because so few of anyway. We're going to go to the gym actually, there is a lot of research on behavior change in gyms in part because I think of it as like the, it's like the fruit fly for for habits researchers say something very similar. It seems like it's like the test lab for behavior change. It's a really good place to, I mean it's not the only place we go and there aren't that many. I don't know that many gym examples actually in the paper but it's a place where I have another example that's, that's counterintuitive, but yeah it is. It's a place where you can observe really easily and objective outcome like we can't, it's harder to study smoking or eating decisions because someone has to tell you. There's so many cultural things entwined with those as well. Well, yeah, that too but it's more that it's really hard to observe right it's done in the privacy of your own home and, and there's no like way to monitor that the way that we can monitor did you show up at the gym or not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Day in and day out and it's a thing you need to do every day so, so it's a really nice or like doing your homework. Now in online school actually it's a little easier to monitor that but traditionally, right you couldn't like see if a kid was studying or not you you saw their grades but it's really hard to monitor that daily decision so anyway, we go to the gym a lot for our studies because of that. Anyway, the book is not about gym attendance. I don't want people to leave with that with that sense. Okay, so here's my counterintuitive gym study, it was actually done at Google. So probably lots of software developers. were part of this study. And we were trying to figure out if we could create a stickier habit. And we knew from past research that a way you can create habit is basically by rewarding people repeatedly for going to the gym, following a cue that's consistent. We've talked about this habit loop a little bit already. And we thought there's two ways you could imagine doing this. And we literally tested these two ways. One is you reward people for consistency. And that is if they go to the gym, they tell us their preferred time, say it's noon for a workout. And every day they go to the gym within a couple hours of noon, they get paid. And we'll do that for a month. And then we'll see, have those people formed a lasting habit? And the comparison was a group that is rewarded for going to the gym any old time. So they get paid whether they go to the gym at noon, 5, 9 a.m., no matter what. And it's easier, of course, to get paid for going to the gym at any old time than only going to the gym at noon. And so we did that. And we did that. And we had to, we fiddled with the incentives and we randomized that simultaneously. And what we ended up with is two groups of people, basically, one of whom's going to the gym half of the time around noon and the other half the time at, you know, whenever else. And I'm choosing noon. These are people who've told us the time that's convenient. So half the people are going to the gym at the time they prefer and they're getting rewarded for that. Okay, sorry, let me back up. I just botched this. I think I understand what you're saying. So, yeah. Let me try to start. Say it again. OK. All right. So so in this study, we wanted to generate two groups of people, one group that's going in the gym consistently at the same time and another group that is going at a variety of times. And we thought if we can get people going consistently at the same time and then we leave them alone, they're going to have formed a stickier habit. So using a reward scheme, we basically got some people to go to the gym for a month and 80 percent of their visits were at a consistent time. Another group went to the gym for a month, the same amount, same frequency, but only about half of their gym visits were at a consistent time. The other half was all over the place. And what we wanted to know is this month is over. Which group will have a stickier habit? And we were pretty sure it was going to be the people who had formed that consistent C. And what was really interesting and surprising is that we were wrong. It was actually the group that had been more flexible in their exercise routine that ended up having the stickier habit. And here's why. What we found is that the people who had been rewarded for a really, really stick sort of narrow habit, I will call it a really, really rigid routine. They did actually keep going to the gym at their preferred time, their sort of regular time, slightly more, than the other folks. So they had formed a habit around that particular time for exercising. But if they didn't go at that time, they didn't go at all. Yeah. Gave them an excuse not to go almost. Exactly. You miss your noon workout. Poof. Well, throw up your hands. You don't go. The other folks, they didn't go quite as often as the other crowd at that regular time, but they were more likely to go, period, because sometimes they didn't make it at their regular time and they would still go to the gym at other times. So it turned out that we had this vision of sort of like routinization as the key to habit formation. And it's true. Cues and consistent routines are part of the foundation of habit. But we also discovered that flexibility is part of the foundation of habit. We call, we call sort of, I have a chapter in my book about habits in the section on what I call elastic habits, because it's really important to be able to sort of roll with the punches. And it's funny because I was a tennis player growing up and I realized like I learned this intuitively in the way that I trained. You don't train like hitting a ball in the same place in the perfect position every time you want to hit a forehand, right? You like, you have to run and learn to hit it off balance. And like when you're running back for a lob and that's what teaches you to deal with all of the situations that a match throws at you. But if we, and yet we have this vision of training habit as this sort of like you do it under the perfect circumstances and repeat. And in reality, when life throws you curve balls, now you're not able to do it. So it's like, well, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. So it's really important to be flexible. And that was a big surprise. And that was a long answer, but hopefully helpful one. No, that's great. It teaches me that I likely, you know, I'm getting ready to go on vacation. We're going to a little cabin. Good for you. And yeah, thankful to get out of the house. We love being at home, but wow, we've been at home, you know. We all have, haven't we? I know. Thank goodness I like my house, but vacation sounds good. And since I've done this thing where I've created this, you know, wonderful gym at my home, I can't take it with me. And so in my head, I'm thinking, oh, well, am I going to allow that to be an excuse to just not work out while I'm, you know, I really want to be active while I'm on this vacation. And I've already kind of- My advice is be flexible. Yeah, exactly. I've decided that, you know, I might need to start thinking about how can I make my routine a little bit more flexible so that when I have these curve balls thrown at me, and I think this is really important. And we can relate all of this to software engineering quite easily, I feel like. When we have, for example, we have servers going down, what do we do? Oh, we just leave work, you know, that doesn't seem good. And so, you know, I think that this, there are some principles here. It's interesting because it seems like it's kind of echoing, you know, sunk cost fallacy almost, where you have this idea that something has passed, right? That, that, uh, the time that you would have done it is, is somehow inextricably connected to the action itself, uh, or the situation or whatever it is that you would have done the thing in. And that since it has passed, then, you know, it's gone. It's kind of like, um, if I break my diet early in the day, then I'm probably going to continue breaking it throughout the rest of the day. If I eat something unhealthy at lunch- Got it. By the way, that's called the what the hell effect. It literally, that's a scientific name, the what the hell effect. I just, it's fun, Oh, tell me more about that. You just described it perfectly. Once you, you know, you have some goal. Oh, like throw your hands up. What the hell? Right. Exactly. It's called the what the hell effect. It's been documented most frequent. The most classic illustration is with dieters, but it happens in other domains, too. You break your goal and you say, what the hell? You know, you go to your cabin. You stop exercising. Quarantine situations. Yes. I'm sure there have been many what the hell effects around the world. Unfortunately. Yes. It's a pernicious one. And anyway, the elastic habits research that we did, I think, is very, very closely related. It's sort of a solution to it's it's a way of preventing the what the hell effect from getting the better of you. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very hard one to think. And it also reminds me a bit of the gambler's fallacy. The idea that our previous actions are kind of connected to some other outside forces are playing and observing our actions. And, you know, I guess passing down luck or misfortune, depending on our previous actions. It's interesting. Yeah. I see what you mean. We'll get right back to our interview with Katie Milkman right after we talk about today's sponsor, Voyage. Every successful engineering project I've ever been a part of had one thing in common. Every team that I've been a part of. Had the same thing in common. That is that every one of these, they all practiced iteration. And in order to iterate on a project, really what we're talking about is gathering feedback, getting everybody around to look at the work that's been done and to go back and adjust some things. And this seems like it should be easy, but you've probably felt the pain of trying to deploy all of these changes that you have locally to a staging environment. And if your team is large enough, you've got a lot of collisions happening. Sometimes people are accidentally overriding your staging environment. You have to spin up all of these extra, you know, pieces of your infrastructure in order to support that staging environment. And Voyage is here to stop that. 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She brings you the evolution of evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution I wrote a paper about that. We could talk about that later. Anyway. Oh, that sounds like a plan. I'd have to read the paper first, I suppose. Okay. So this is the conundrum that I found myself in. We've been talking all about health and the coronavirus are certainly connected. I've received the first dose of my vaccine. Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful. Thank you. It seems a little bit wild that I qualify. The reason I qualify is because I'm above a 30 BMI. Even though I'm powerlifting on a regular basis, I probably shouldn't qualify, but I've taken advantage of that qualification and I've gone and gotten it. Here's the question that ran through my mind. I'm right above that line, just barely. Right. And I probably could have lost the weight to drop below that line. And in my head, I'm trying to do the calculus of the benefits of losing that weight versus the risk of delaying my COVID vaccine by multiple months. Yes. Perverse incentives. Exactly. I'm just wondering how often do we have, what is the research on this idea that we have one incentive to actually do something that is unhealthy in order to do something that is healthy? I see this in my son all of the time, by the way. He's three years old. I tell him that we need to stop playing the game now. I tell him that we need to stop playing the game now. I tell him that we need to stop playing the game now. I tell him that we need to stop playing the game now. Or else he can't play the game later. And he chooses always, of course, he chooses to continue playing now. Yeah. He doesn't have the neural circuitry yet, really, for delaying gratification. Right. To be able to forecast. Yeah. But temptation bundling may work for him in a few years. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And his prefrontal cortex is still forming, self-control. You can do the marshmallow test with him in a couple of years and see if he can wait for the second marshmallow and it'll tell you whether or not he's going to grow up to be successful or what. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's what they say, right? Yes. Yes. Anyway, it's a long story. Actually, you can already predict probably better. The replication of that has been problematic in recent years, I believe, right? You know, there was a lot of brouhaha about it. My read of the data is it was nicely replicated. The twist that makes everybody sort of, I think, misinterpreted as a non-replication was if you control for everything under the sun that predicts self-control and use the marshmallow effect, you don't get much out of the marshmallow effect. But the marshmallow effect is real. It's just if you know a lot of other things about your son, you could even do a better job predicting than this one test. But I don't think that's at all surprising. What's surprising is that a marshmallow test can predict something as well as your socioeconomic status and your observations of your child and your knowledge of your child. So anyway, it replicates. It's just that other things also predict and probably predict much better, which isn't surprising. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, okay. So, okay. So I actually feel like I lost the train of the question. The question is about the perverse incentives. Yes. Oh, thank you. I was like, I'm so interested in marshmallows right now. What were we talking about? I just want to eat a marshmallow. I don't know. I have to say, by the way, there's a reason there's a chapter in my book about forgetting. I struggle. Anyway, we all have, we have limited memory. We have limited rationality and we need solutions. Yeah. So I actually, I don't, I don't think perverse incentives are super common. They may be, they may be, they may be, they may be, they may be, they may be, they may be, they may be, of health. I think this is a pretty weird one. A lot of people wrote about in New Jersey, if you're a smoker, you could get the vaccine. So people were taking up smoking. They're like, yeah, can't you smell it on my breath? I'd like the vaccine now. I'll quit tomorrow. Yeah. So that's pretty weird. We're living through a pretty weird moment, I hope. I hope we're not going to be having these kinds of pandemics every decade. And I hope this is pretty unusual. In general, so I think perverse incentives, they're not something I get into a lot of detail on in the book, except to say there is sort of a chapter on how you can structure incentives for yourself optimally and you can reward yourself in ways that will sort of help ensure you succeed. And then I think what you're saying about your son is a little different. He's not facing perverse incentives. He just has a feature of human nature working against him, which is he's impulsive and bad at delaying. And that really comes back to what we talked about earlier with recognizing that this is a limitation. We have some goal. We have something we value. We almost always prioritize our instant gratification over what's good for us in the long run. Or we do that in a lopsided way. It's called present bias. You can call it impulsivity or giving into temptation. And so if we recognize that about ourselves, there's a whole slew of things we can do. But it's not really a perverse incentive so much as an imperfection. I would say in our design. And again, you asked earlier about evolutionarily, like, does it make sense? And lots of people make evolutionary arguments about why you'd want to overweight the present dramatically relative to the future, you know, thousands of years ago, because you didn't know if you were going to have a future and if you didn't have dinner tonight. Yeah. Yeah. So this seems like one of the things that probably made sense long, long ago and doesn't make so much sense now. And so we have to work up, you know, it's an uphill battle. But the book goes into a lot of detail. Yeah. And I think that's a really good detail about how we can tackle that one. Yeah. Katie, I realize that we are running up on our time here and I could probably talk to you for another three hours. Oh, likewise. This was really fun. We'll have to do another one of these sometime. I do have two more quick questions if you do have the time to answer. Just a really quick shot questions. Answers. Because, yeah, I probably have to run the next five minutes or so. Okay. Excellent. Hopefully it's not too hard of a question. Yeah. What do you wish more people would ask you about? Oh, gosh. That's a really good question. I should have an answer to that. What do I wish people would ask me about more? I don't have a great answer to that because I feel like we've talked about it. I think people do ask me the questions I want them to about, you know, what works and what's surprising. And what's useful. Maybe that's one of the nice things about studying such practical topic that I actually, I think I get asked the questions I want to be asked. So I don't have a good answer to that. That's great. That's very rare, by the way. Most people, I've had a very wide variety of answers to that. Like, for example, somebody said, barbecue. I wish more people would talk to me about barbecue. I love barbecuing. That's hilarious. Because that's not what I do in the public. They just don't talk to me about it. Yeah. I do what I love very publicly, actually. That is maybe the number one reason that I feel my life is great is I love what I do. Yeah. The second question is a very simple question. It's another 30 second question. If you only had 30 seconds to provide advice to software engineers of all backgrounds and all experience levels, what would you tell them? Yeah. I think if I had to pick one insight that can help anyone be more productive, the insight would be recognize that you can't just sort of achieve your goals or become better at whatever it is you want to do by pushing yourself harder. You need to recognize that there are strategies that you can use that will make it less of an uphill battle. That, you know, pushing yourself hard isn't the solution. It's rather being smarter at it. Yeah. At the same time, you may want to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways to find ways your book? Well, thank you for having me. People can find my book on any bookseller's website, pick your favorite one, whether it's local or global. My website is www.katymilkman.com. And if you go to that website backslash book, you will also find links to all the many places you can buy the book and you can read a little bit more about it, read some of the blurbs and so on. Excellent. Thank you so much, Katie. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was really fun. That wraps up our interview with Katie Milkman. Thank you again to Katie for joining me on Developer Tea. Make sure you go and check out Choiceology. Make sure you go and buy the book, How to Change. Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. We are made possible by our incredible sponsors. Today's episode was sponsored by the American Academy of Sciences. Sponsored by Voyage. Go and check it out, voyageapp.io for automated staging environments. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to join the Developer Tea Discord community, head over to developertea.com slash discord. That is an open invite now. And I love having software engineers in there talking about all kinds of things. We talk about current events sometimes, what's going on in the industry. We talk about jobs. We talk, you know, everything you can imagine talking about. With other software engineers, like-minded software engineers. That's what we talk about there. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.