This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome!

Michael Norton
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book and rituals. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most important or meaningful or fun rituals for you personally and what makes it special for you?

Michael Norton
One of the weird or most specific idiosyncratic ones in my family is that we do, we started this during COVID, during the pandemic when joy was in short supply, I guess I would say. And so, we decided that we would start sticking candles in foods other than cakes. And so, we have a tradition now of happy meatloaf to you where we sing, we put candles in meatloaf and sing the happy birthday song to the meatloaf, and then blow out the candles and then have the meatloaf.

And it’s, on the one hand, completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s completely ridiculous we put candles in cakes also, it’s just that we’re used to it. So, for me, it’s just an example of how random rituals really are. Even the ones we’re used to, when you unpack them, turn out to be often pretty strange in their own right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I love about that is, yes, it’s weird and it’s idiosyncratic and all that, but it does, I think there’s more joy, there’s more connection, there’s more family fun in the food experience by doing that. So why the heck not? Just go ahead and do that.

Michael Norton
This is one of these things that many, many rituals can bring much more emotion to things than, otherwise, we can get out of them. And I think that’s kind of a gift, actually, of rituals is that they can elevate things from boring to something more meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fun, now you got me thinking about family food times and whenever I make something and the kids ask, “Oh, what’s in it?” I think they know what’s going to come. I’ll mention a few of the ingredients, but then I’ll take on sort of a super sweet tone of voice, I’ll say, “But you know what the most important ingredient of all is?” And they’re very much onto those, they’ll say, “Love.” And I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s just fun, so we do it.

Michael Norton
The other day I made a “joke” that I thought was funny, and my 9-year-old daughter, she didn’t react, she was silent. And so, I said, “You know, that was supposed to be a joke.” And she said, here’s how she did it. She paused and said, “Sadly, I know.” That was the biggest burn maybe of my life from that. So, I feel your pain on they know what’s coming and they’re not always super impressed, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, Michael, rituals are kind of fun. They’re kind of nifty, but could you share with us, what makes them a potentially valuable, important things for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
Yeah, I think that when you look at people’s work lives, what we found was, so one of the things we did with rituals is we started in a couple of domains like grief. And then we would talk to people and they would say, “Oh, but have you looked at it in this domain, like marriages? Have you looked at it in families? Have you looked at it?” And, eventually, of course, “Have you looked at these at work?”

And one of the things we found was that rituals really pattern our entire workday because, starting at home, actually, because we have our morning ritual that we do with our coffee and the things we read and the people. Many people have stuff they do on their commute. That’s kind of a ritual that they do every single time.

Then you have something when you get to your desk. Often people have a thing that they do every morning. Then there’s lunch, they have a thing that they do. Then there’s team meetings and different teams have different rituals. Then at the end of the day, you close stuff down to leave. Then when you get home, you’ve got something to kind of leave work behind and get back into your life mode.

And so, you just have, I’m speaking quickly because all of these we’ve looked at, but you can just see how they, we think of rituals as these weddings or something, kind of they happen very rarely, but we see, really, that they’re embedded in our lives at home and at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so they happen, sure. They are ever-present. And you make a distinction between a ritual and a habit. What is that distinction?

Michael Norton
Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Michael Norton
Do you, in the morning, brush your teeth first and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I shower and brush my teeth.

Michael Norton
You’re saying that as though it’s obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
More specifically, I dip into cold water and then brush my teeth while warming up with hot water simultaneously because it was cold in that cold water.

Michael Norton
Interesting. And how would you feel if tomorrow I said, “Change that up. Change the order”? Can you do the toothbrush first?

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, we could. It just feels disappointing.

Michael Norton
So, the first question, oddly enough, about half of people brush first and then shower, and the other half shower and then brush, this is true like all over the world, so humans haven’t decided what the right order is. But the more important question to your question about habits versus rituals is about half of people, if I say, “Do you mind switching the order tomorrow?” they say, “Sure, absolutely. No problem.”

And about half of people say something like, “I don’t want to. It would feel weird,” you said disappointing, “I have some negative emotion around changing the order.” And for me, I mean, those are the simplest behaviors we engage in, but you can see, for some people, brushing their teeth and showering, it’s like a habit, “You know, I have to do these six things in the morning and I can check them off in any order. It doesn’t matter to me.”

And for other people, even these silly innocuous behaviors, have something in them, some emotion in them that makes them quite different from just a boring habit because we care about what order they’re done in. And when we do it in the right order, people say, “I feel ready to face the day.” And when they do it in the wrong order, they say, “I’ll feel weird all day.”

So, rituals, you know, people in robes with candles is further out on the continuum. But even with tooth brushing and showering, you can see how the same behaviors, for some people, they’re kind of black and white, “Let’s get them done.” And for other people, they get imbued with something more, like putting candles on meatloaf imbues it with something more.

And one thing that I like about the shower and toothbrush thing is you can see it’s not just that rituals are good. Rituals provoke emotion in us, which can be very positive, but sometimes very negative as well. So, it’s almost like a risk-reward. If you have a morning ritual, if you do it the way you like, you feel great, but you run the risk of, you know, your kid comes in and interrupts you, and now you can’t do it the way you like, and now you feel worse than you would have if you never had the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a helpful distinction. There are some emotional stakes in the world of ritual. Okay. And tell me, any other surprises you’ve learned as you were studying this in depth?

Michael Norton
I asked people, so if something bad happens and you have a superstition and you say, “Knock on wood,” how many times do you knock?”

Pete Mockaitis
About two-ish?

Michael Norton
Two-ish. So, about half of people knock twice and half knock three times, and they don’t know why. They don’t know when it started. They get very upset with each other. I can do it in a classroom and see half of them do it one way, half do the other way. They look disgusted at the other people, like, “What is wrong? What kind of a person would only knock twice instead of three times?”

And if you’re a three-knock person, and someone knocks twice, you have this potential energy of you’ve got to have the third knock or everything’s going to go really wrongly. And this is, again, this idea that, first off, it’s just knocking on a thing. We knock on things all the time and we don’t worry about how many times we knock, but it gets imbued with a crazy amount of emotion and meaning that I actually feel like I’m warding off bad things happening to me and my loved ones if I knock the right number of times.

And that’s what’s, to me, really so surprising about it is that, again, like brushing your teeth, knocking on a table, they’re so mundane. They’re so, in a sense, unimportant. Well, dentists would say brushing your teeth is very important, but in the grand scheme. But they provoke this insane amount of emotion, feeling good, feeling bad, with knocking on wood, feeling angry at other people for doing it “wrong” so that it constantly surprised, honestly, in all the work that we did, and how it’s often the small things that provoke an enormous amount of emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is surprising. And I’m intrigued, when it comes to rituals and work, you opened the book sharing tales of writers Flannery O’Connor and Maya Angelou with their rituals. How might we get some of the reward side of these rituals and more of it?

Michael Norton
You can spend, basically, a day of your life, if you want, Googling a celebrity’s name and the word ritual. Any athlete, any musician, any politician, just type their name and then type ritual, and it is astonishing how many of these people have some kind of ritual that they do at some point during their day or during their life. And they’re very elaborate and they’re very idiosyncratic.

And so, one of my favorites is Rafael Nadal, who has, if you are a tennis fan, you already know where I’m going. Before every serve, he has a very elaborate thing that he does with his forehead and his wristbands and everything. And he even, it’s been described as he picks his wedgie before every single serve. So, he’s got very elaborate sort of thing.

And when you ask him, “Why do you do that? Would you be okay without it?” he will say, “Yeah, no, of course, I could still serve without it. But when I do it, I feel ready.” And I think that’s really, really key because it’s not that…well, there’s two things. One is, if he doesn’t do it, he’s still Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players ever.

The other thing is, if I copy his ritual, I still stink. Unfortunately, rituals aren’t magical, where somehow if I turn around three times, I get to be amazing. That’s not how they work. But what they can do, again, is change how we’re feeling. And he’s telling us that he’s feeling nervous about the next serve. And this ritual that he’s come up with makes him feel like he’s in the zone and ready to go.

And we see people using those kinds of rituals, even every famous person, as I said, but also people just in their everyday lives. And one of the most common ones that people will say, if I say, “Have you ever done anything before a meeting or before a big talk or you had to present to the whole team?” and people say, “You know what, I do actually do something.”

And I say, “Well, what do you do?” And they kind of lean in kind of like they’re conspiratorially, and they say, “Well, I go into the bathroom and I check under the stalls to make sure nobody else is there. And then I stand in front of the sink and look at myself in the mirror and tell myself, ‘You can do this.’”

And I say, “You’re like the ninth person today to tell me that you do that.” So, people think it’s very weird to do that. And yet it’s incredibly common in our, again, everyday lives that people do something when they’re feeling nervous to help them feel subjectively like, “I’m ready to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. But that specific ritual of going to the bathroom, making sure it’s empty, and then checking, looking at yourself in the mirror and the pep talk is something you’re hearing again and again.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And what I love is it’s not like it’s in some ancient text, and it’s been happening for thousands of years. For example, there weren’t mirrors at one time, so you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to.

But people often develop independently the same kinds of rituals. Because if you think what they’re doing, you need privacy in order to do this, to psych yourself up, because you’re going to talk to yourself sometimes. And the place to do it is in the bathroom rather than in the lunch room or something like that.

So, we’re pretty creative when we come up with rituals, like picking your wedgie also is not in ancient text as far as I know. But then once we have them in place, they’re our go-to. And we really try to do the same thing every time when we’re feeling nervous before something big.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, does it work? Will we give a better speech if we give ourselves the pep talk or we pick a better serve if we pick the wedgie?

Michael Norton
This is, mean, the sad thing is, so when we started studying rituals, we did have the hope that, somehow, we would discover some magical sequence that humans could engage in that actually would make them different people. You know, that somehow if you clapped 19 times, you had the strength of, something like that. And, unfortunately, again, that’s not what we see there. They’re not magical.

But what I teach undergraduates, many of them are really gifted athletes who, by the way, all have their own pre-performance rituals as well. And one of the things that they say is that when they do their ritual, they’ll often use the phrase, “It kind of helps me get out of my own way, that my thoughts and nervousness are getting in my way of performing the way I know I can perform, and making me actually mess up in a sense. Like, I’m not in the zone, I’m not ready to go.”

And so, I see these rituals, it’s not so much that they make us magically better, although I wish they did. It’s that sometimes they’re actually just allowing us to perform at the best level that we’re capable of. And that, in and of itself, is a useful tool to have. For me, even if rituals didn’t affect performance at all, one reason they’re so ubiquitous is because they’re still working in the sense that they’re helping us psychologically deal with something that’s very difficult to deal with.

And we often see that with rituals, is that they work not so much that they change something dramatic in the world, it’s that they change something dramatic within ourselves. And that’s very, very useful for humans in all sorts of different situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, if I can go from, I don’t know, average level of Pete Mockaitis, sharpness, creativity, enthusiasm, empathy, whatever, whatever I’m trying to drum up to, you know, near peak levels relatively quickly with a ritual, that sounds super handy. So, let’s go for it.

Well, now you got me thinking about Tony Robbins and Power Moves, and some of that “Rah! Rah!” I guess that’s just one of many flavors of ritual that some folks may engage in to shift their internal state to something that’s helpful for what’s ahead of them.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And we do see, we’ve looked both at the level of the individual, “What do I do when I need some emotion that I’m not having?” And we’ve also looked at the level of the team or the group and see whether those are the same or different.

So, for example, I will sometimes have, like an audience will stand up and I’ll show some things on the board, like clap twice, stomp three times, clap six times, stomp six times, etc. And I just kind of show it to them and see what they do. And what audiences do is they start clapping and stomping and they very quickly sync up with each other.

So, they’re all stomping, I didn’t tell them to sync up, but they all sync up. So, by the end, they’re really, really in unison, everybody doing the same thing. And when we asked afterward, “How close do you feel to these people?” they say, “I feel closer than I did before.” So, we can a little bit engineer via group rituals, something that changes how we feel about the group.

But the other thing that’s important, again, it’s the risk-reward thing with rituals, that’s true that it can make us feel connected to people like us. But if I have people who do the ritual on purpose wrong, so everyone else is stomping and I’m still clapping really loudly, people are enraged at the person because they say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

And so, at the same time that they’re helping us sometimes bond together with people, they’re also making us dislike people who are doing it differently from us. And it’s this fine line between, if I’m doing a ritual or we’re doing a ritual and we think it’s good, that’s terrific. But if we start to think that our ritual is right, is correct, that’s where we start to see, “Well, now if we’re correct, anybody else doing anything different is incorrect.” So, we’re not just good. It’s that they’re bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fascinating. It reminds me of some of Bob Cialdini’s work with regard to troops marching in unison and formation, it has an impact, or siblings or friends doing a song dance piece that’s coordinated, it has a similar uniting impact.

And you used the word enraged. It’s so funny because I have had the experience of like I’m in church, right? And someone is praying the prayers way slower or way faster than the collective, and I find that irritating. And then I’m like, “Hey, Pete, we’re in church. We’re doing a good thing. Maybe, like, just try to be patient with it,” you know.

But so, I find that encouraging. It’s like, “Okay, that is a common human phenomenon. When the vast majority of people are doing a thing in unison and someone is deviating, it’s irksome.”

Michael Norton
George Carlin had this line where he was talking about driving a car, and he said, “Anyone going slower than you is a moron. And anyone going faster than you is a maniac.” And I think, unfortunately, it’s still true that we feel that way about people doing things differently than we’re doing them.

But when you add this ritual element, you’re talking about religious rituals, but even with clapping and stomping in a classroom, we do see that people start to say, “We’re doing it right, you’re doing it wrong. And I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’re doing over there.”

Even though I’m aware, it’s fine. As you said, they’re praying. It’s not that they’re disrupting everybody on purpose or something like that, but we have it in us to say, “No, no, this is the way that we do this. Everybody should agree on this is exactly how we’re going to get this done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s eye-opening in and of itself in terms of human nature and what’s inside us. I’d love to hear, since you’ve talked to so many people about their rituals, we’ve heard a common ritual associated with doing a speech or presentation. What are some useful rituals for we’re about to hunker down and enter into some productive deep work focus mode?

Michael Norton
So, again, there’s the individual level, and then there’s the if we have to do it on a team. We’ve done lots of research on the team dynamics on how to think about rituals and how they affect teams. And one of the things, so if I go to a company and I’m supposed to be some ritual guru or whatever I’m supposed to be, even though I’m not, what often companies want is, “Can I give them kind of an out-of-the-box ritual that they can have all their employees do that will somehow make the employees really happy and everybody likes it?”

And if you’ve ever been in a company where they tried to do that, your number one reaction is not, “I love this.” It’s, “Why do I have to do this stupid thing?” It’s like everyone’s had a manager who watches TED Talks over the weekend, and then comes in and demands that you do whatever the TED Talk told them to do.

So, there’s this sense that what organizations want is, it’s a pejorative word, but like a cookie cutter ritual, and that can lead to real reactance from folks and from teams. And so, what I do instead is I encourage people and their teams to think about what they’re already doing, “So, what are things that your team does that other teams don’t do that are kind of idiosyncratic to you that are meaningful to you?”

And teams will have all kinds of different things. Once they start to think about it, inside jokes are a good example, actually, that we have this little ritual where, you know, we always say this one thing. Those are the kinds of rituals that are already having an emotional impact on us. We see that.

We see that teams at work that report having these rituals actually report having more meaning in their work, that there’s some transfer between this meaning of this ritual that we’re sharing and the meaning of the work that we’re all doing together. And so, lots and lots of examples.

One of my favorite examples of a team ritual actually happened again during the pandemic when people were working from home. This team that had daily meetings and had had them for years had to go remote. So now, of course, they’re all on Zoom with little faces on the screen. And what they started to do was, at the beginning of every meeting, everyone would click the emoji that reflected how they were feeling.

And so, you would look at this screen with 20 faces and you could quickly see kind of the average, sort of extracted from emojis, but also see who’s doing well and who’s not doing that well, “Maybe I should follow up with them later.” And it became a ritual at the beginning of every meeting.

And what was fascinating to me is they had never done anything like that when they used to meet in person. So, there was no going around the table and saying how you’re feeling, because you can see how different that is. It’d be weird to make everyone at the table, one by one, go around and say, “I’m struggling today.” That’s not typically something we do at work.

So, even though remote work distances us from people, this team used it actually as a way to use the technology to bring them closer together via something silly, like clicking emojis. And so, the randomness again of the things that people come up with on their teams, that very quickly become very meaningful to them, where if someone starts to start the meeting without the emojis, people will stop them and say, “No, no, no, wait, we have to do the emojis first and then we can start the meeting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, it’s interesting, you say going around and saying how you’re feeling is not typical of meeting behavior, but I have been in some workplaces where they do that. They call it check-in and that’s come up a couple of times with the podcast.

And so, in a way, that’s kind of intriguing how a ritual that emerges in one context can really serve as an inspiration for, like, when they do go back to the office, like, “Hey, you know what, it’s like, it feels like we’re missing something. Well, this is, maybe feels out there to us, but let’s give it a shot in person,” and away you go.

Michael Norton
And my guess is, I don’t have the data just to be clear, but my guess is that the average report when you’re doing it in person one by one is more positive than the average report if you’re clicking emojis. Because it’s much harder as a person in a meeting to say, “I’m really struggling today.”

People do, of course, but it’s a bigger barrier. So, it is this question of, “How do we do a check-in in a way where people feel that they’ve been heard and also that they’re able to really share how they’re really feeling?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. Well, lay some more on us, favorite rituals that seem to really be impactful for folks at work.

Michael Norton
Very, very simple one, and this will be no surprise, is how teams deal with lunch. Lunch at work is a funny thing because we have to eat lunch. We usually eat it, in the US anyway, we usually eat around noon.

And other than that, what we do and how we do lunch is really up to us. So, you can go and get something and eat it in your cubicle by yourself and never talk to anybody. Or you can, you know, go out to a 300-person restaurant. You can do whatever you feel like doing.

But what we see teams doing, and they report it when we survey them, is they often have something they do at lunch that makes lunch just a little bit, back to our earlier conversation, a little bit more emotional, a little bit more meaningful, not just putting food in our faces because we need caloric intake.

And just as an example, one team, it’s a five-person team, they would, every day of the week, was one person brought lunch for everybody else. So, you do it on Monday and then I do it on Tuesday. And in the end, what they’re doing is everybody’s eating lunch every day. That’s not that interesting.

But if you think of what they’re signaling with that ritual, it’s that on one day a week, I’m taking care of everybody else on the team. And every other day of the week, the team is taking care of me. It’s a very strong signal.

And this team felt it was very important to be not just like automatons at work, but human beings. And you can see how their ritual that they came up with really, actually, tries to reinforce this idea that we care about each other. It’s not just that we’re here to punch the clock.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Well, tell me, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Norton
I guess I would say, if you think of how to kind of incorporate rituals, I think people often are thinking, you know, “Should I add something to my life to make it more ritualistic?” And the idea, of course, is not that the more rituals you add, the better your life is. I can get messy very quickly.

But what I do encourage people to do is kind of take almost an audit of your current rituals and see when you’re doing them and how you’re doing them. You can think of family dinner, what do you do? You can think of you and your spouse, do you have little things that you’ve been doing for years? Your teams at work, even what you do in the morning.

And just notice, actually, all the places that you have these little behaviors that you’ve been doing for a long time that are meaningful to you. And even if you don’t add new ones, appreciate those ones a little bit more so the next time you do it, you’re really owning it as, “Oh, we’re doing our silly thing we do when we have dinner every night. We’re doing it again. This is our family thing that we do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like that a lot, and I think you can bring savoring to so many things and enhance them.

Michael Norton
Love that.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was at a class and someone talked, we were talking about rituals or things they really appreciate. This man talked about how he savors the candy, if I’m saying it right, Ferrero Rocher, you know, those little balls with the crunch.

Michael Norton
My daughter loves them.

Pete Mockaitis
And he described it with such detail and sensory language, it’s like, “Is this person a poet?” And it really struck me, it’s like, “You could do that to anything, savoring the warm water or scent of soap on your hands you wash them.” And I think it speaks to what you brought up at the beginning, the difference between a habit and a ritual, “Yeah, I wash my hands,” or it’s like, “Ooh, I savor the multi-sensory experience of hand washing.”

Michael Norton
One of my favorite examples on savoring is Oreos. So, Oreos are just a cookie like any other cookie and, yet, there’s an entire culture around eating Oreos, which is, “Do you twist them apart or not? Do you lick the filling out first?” And people have very strong preferences about this. If you go online, you’ll see, actually, there are serious debates about the correct way to eat an Oreo.

From my standpoint, it’s not that there’s a correct way. It’s that you’re taking a cookie, which is a nice thing to eat, and you’re turning it into something a little more interesting. It’s got a little, to your point, a little more in there because, “You know what, I’ve been dunking it this way for 20 years. And, by the way, my mom used to dunk it this way as well.” So, you get these really strong emotional reactions on, as you said, things like eating something or washing your hands.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. All right. Well, let’s hear now about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Michael Norton
I heard a quote a few years ago, “Fame is a mask that eats at the soul.” And I think of it, not that I’m a famous person, but all of us in life, we move forward in our job and we start to feel like we’re important. And so, it’s fame, it’s going to give us, it’s like importance is a mask that eats at the soul.

And I think, and I should say, and also my tendency to, as I move forward in my career, start to think that people are treating me a certain way because I’m amazing, instead of because I’m their boss is a very common mistake that people make. And it does change who you are.

So, I think a lot about, and I can see people the world where fame or importance kind of changes their soul a little bit. And I’m always on the lookout in myself and in the people I love, we check each other to make sure that we’re still staying true to ourselves even if we got a big promotion or we get famous or whatever it might be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, after this conversation, you’re slightly more famous in the world. So, I hope your soul doesn’t get any nibbles from this conversation.

Michael Norton
Well, I was at zero, so anything is going to bump me up past my current level.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Norton
I completely love this study. Chris Hsee, who’s at the University of Chicago, the paper is called “Overworking.” And he sets up this thing in the lab where you can do two things. You can watch funny videos, or you can do a really boring task and get a Hershey’s Kiss. And you can do this for a while.

So, you can always choose to watch a video or you can choose to work in order to get paid with a Hershey’s Kiss. So, he’s basically setting up life, which is you can work for future rewards or you can goof around right now.

And the thing that he finds is what people do is they overwork, meaning, he’ll say, “The only Hershey’s Kisses you can eat are the ones that you eat. You can’t take any with you,” which, again, is a metaphor for life, like you can’t take it with you. But what he finds is people can’t stop working. They just keep accumulating Hershey’s Kisses, and there’s this giant stack of them.

And then when the thing is over, they try to eat as many as they can. They don’t feel good about it because they’re eating too many, and they leave them behind. And I love, obviously, the metaphor that he has in that thing, which is we really get stuck sometimes in there’s some currency that we’re earning, often it’s money, but it could be respect or fame or anything like that.

And we become so consumed with getting more of it that we forget everything else about life that might be an enjoyable kind of thing, like our families and our hobbies and things like that. So, I think of that very, very frequently. One, I just love the elegance of the design and also the funniness that it’s Hershey’s Kisses. And it really relates to this fundamental human question about how we’re managing our well-being and our time here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Norton
My favorite book is The Gift by Lewis Hyde. And it’s a book about gift giving across kind of the human lifespan, meaning as long as humans have been around, we’ve been giving gifts to each other. And so, he really looks to see what’s the role of gifts in human life. And they play an incredible amount of roles in everything, in our relationships, at work, at home, all of these little gifts that we’re giving.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Norton
That would be, I guess the tool, not quite a tool, but my lab group. So, we have some faculty, some PhD students, some postdocs, some undergraduates, we meet and we brainstorm. And social science really is about trying to notice things in the world that nobody has noticed, and then trying to study them. And the only way to do that is to use a bunch of brains.

Yes, you could sit in your office by yourself and try to come up with all the ideas, but, really, when you’re thinking about social life, social brainstorming is the way to get it done. So, I couldn’t do any of the things that I do without the luxury of using all these other smart brains that are around me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Michael Norton
I think one thing that people have told me is that when someone says something like they’re struggling with something in their life, having a problem at work. And then they say something like, “I know it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, you know, there’s wars happening and things like that.” We have a very common instinct to do that, to downplay our own problems.

And I think one of the things that I always say to people is, “Whether that’s true or not doesn’t help you with your own problem. It’s still your problem and it’s still very important to you or we wouldn’t be talking about it.” So, let’s not judge our problems against other people’s problems to determine how important they are. Let’s deal with them together because they’re problems that are affecting you and we’d like to do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael Norton
It’s very difficult to remember. It’s MichaelNorton.com. It’s a very boring website, I’ll say, but there’s one part on it that is a quiz. It’s a rituals quiz. And it doesn’t take that long, but we ask you questions about rituals in different parts of your life. And then we give you a little feedback on how you’re doing and where you might think differently about it. And it’s fun to do with your spouse or partner as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
I would think about being intentional in meetings, actually, like thinking about what the beginning of a meeting is supposed to do and what the end of a meeting is supposed to do instead of just starting and just trailing off at the end. Really think, it could be a ritual, obviously, that you do at the beginning and end.

But even more, I think, just kind of making the meeting about something, and then at the end summarizing what the meeting was about so we don’t just feel like we’re sleepwalking through everything all day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, thank you.

Michael Norton
Thank you so much.