Learning Archives - Page 3 of 10 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Abby, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thanks for having me, Pete. Much appreciated.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about speedreading with you. We’ve only covered this like once or twice before out of nearly 800 interviews. So, I know there’s much more goodness to share. But I want to start with hearing you say you used to hate reading. What’s the story?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think a lot of people feel that way, that when you’re in elementary school, it’s like so great that you can read some fiction and stories are great. And then you get into middle school and high school, and they make you read these nasty textbooks that aren’t fun, there’s no pictures or not many pictures, and things that you have to learn.

So, I got turned off to reading at about that time. I used to love it until I was like in seventh grade, and then it just wasn’t fun anymore. And then I hated it until after college. And it was the kind of thing that was like I never understood why anyone in their right mind would read a newspaper on a regular basis. And I was just averse to reading. Period.

And so, I majored in Spanish in college, which helped because I could read word by word, and it was okay. And so, the comprehension part and such was just a very different animal at that time. So, yeah, I used to hate to read but I learned through a job that I got soon after college, having my degree helped to get this job, that this is not hard to do. This is something that can be learned, and it’s just a set of strategies, strategic things that people can do to become better, smarter, more effective readers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued, when it comes to we can be better, stronger, more effective, faster, can you maybe lay out, like what’s possible in terms of just for normal professionals as opposed to, I don’t know, I’m thinking about memory champions or world record speed readers? Like, what could be possible for us in terms of, “Well, hey, I’ve been reading my whole life and I’m going fine”? What are we missing out on?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, you think it’s going fine but for some people it’s not. It’s like, “I know how to read but I don’t like to read.” There’s this thing that I talk about called your reading attitude. Everybody has one. It’s kind of like…and I say fill in the blank with this, “I am a blank reader.” And I start off all my programs that way, and it basically, if you can put in the word, like, “I am a good reader,” “I’m an avid reader,” “I’m a voracious reader,” those are all like really good positive terms, and that means that reading is something that you will do and you find it valuable, and it doesn’t waste your time, and it typically doesn’t make you fall asleep, and you don’t re-read a lot.

But others that put in the words like, “I’m a bad reader,” “I’m a slow reader,” “a distracted reader,” any of the words that are more negative means that they look at reading like the plague. It’s like, “It’s going to waste my time. It’s going to be boring. I’m going to fall asleep. I’m not going to understand it. I’m going to have to re-read.”

And so, what I aim to help people understand is that they can be much more confident about who they are as readers just by having some strategies. And even if they think they’re really good readers, which they probably are, they can still learn a few more because we haven’t had training since elementary school, pretty much. Most people haven’t taken classes or upgraded their skills. It’s like, “Here’s the words, folks. Go at it.” And that’s pretty much what they gave to us, and then we had to figure out how to manage the reading workload from there on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess I’m thinking about my own story. I think I’m a fine reader. I enjoy reading things. Sometimes I do need to re-read or I do seem slow, to my own judgment, I guess. I don’t know. I haven’t timed it recently. And so, tell us, just what is possible? What sort of benefits or magic is on the other side of mastering this skill?

Abby Marks-Beale
The Rich Habits Institute, did a study about reading habits of the wealthy. And it talks about, and I’m just going to read to you a couple of the percentages. Eighty-six percent of the wealthy loved to read, 85% of the wealthy read two or more educational books every month, 88% of the wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day, and 63% of the wealthy listen to audiobooks or podcasts during their commute to work.

So, for any of your audiences thinking, “Oh, how can I make more money at what I do?” the more that you read, and I encourage more nonfiction, things that are going to make you better at who you are and what you do, that those, when applied, are going to be incredibly helpful for your life and your career. So, I agree that the more that you read, I think, the tendency to make more money is definitely there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Thank you, Abby.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s about feeling more confident about who you are as a reader, if you need that. It’s about having certain strategies to apply. So, some people think that when you learn how to read faster, everything has to be read fast but that’s not true. It’s about creating a gear shift. And I use this concept of five gears, and I show my hands.

So, imagine your hand, you look at your hand, on your hand you have five fingers, which are basically five gears, and gear one is your thumb, and gear two is your pointer finger, three, four, and five appropriately, keep going. So, that’s five gears. Most people are stuck in gears one and two because they don’t know how to get into gears three, four, and five. So, it’s about becoming more efficient, more effective, depending…

Like, if you’re reading something you’re very familiar with, you shouldn’t be in gear one or two. You should be able to get into, minimally, three, and definitely possibly four, depending on why you’re reading something and what you need it for. And so, it’s about… I call it active, mindful, and conscious. Those are the three things that I don’t think readers are when they read. They’re like, “Oh, here I am, my eyes are going to hit the page, and I’m going to hope that I understand what it says.” And it’s very much a conscious process, at least the way that I teach it, and the way that I do it, and the people that learned from me do it.

it’s not going so fast that you don’t understand or, as Woody Allen said, “It’s reading War and Peace in five minutes, and it’s a book about Russia.” That’s like the worst quote and I use it all the time because I hate it but it’s something that people can relate to.

But I want to give you my definition of speedreading because it’s different than other people that teach speedreading. So, it’s a set of active, mindful, and conscious strategies that allow you to get what you need quickly from any reading material in an efficient and an effective manner. So, it’s not about going so fast that you don’t understand. That’s called speed-looking not speedreading. And so, it’s being efficient and effective, active, mindful, and conscious.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you define what is your one, two, three, four, five?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s different speeds. It’s basically gear one and two, they’re anywhere from about 100 to maybe 250-300 words a minute. That would be gears one and two. And then gears three, four, and five are anywhere from like 300-350 all the way up to 1250-1500 depending on what you can do. So, that’s not like wicked fast, although for some people it sounds that way. And the average reading speed of most people that haven’t had training is around 250.

So, if you think about, okay, if they’re in gear one and two, that’s around 250. Then if they could get into gear three, four, or five, they could easily go the other way, which could be 800 or 1000 words per minute when appropriate using certain strategies. So, it’s about using the gear shift, just like your car, like sometimes when there’s traffic, you got to slow down. And when it’s on the open highway, you can go into fifth gear. It’s about knowing what’s on your radar, what’s in front of you, what do you need to know, how much do you already know.

Like, okay, for example, I work with lawyers or doctors sometimes, and I teach them how to read better and faster, I say, “Look, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a doctor, you guys know you have background knowledge that I don’t have. We could sit down with the same study,” they’re reading a study, or they’re reading a legal document, and they’re going to read it probably faster with much better comprehension than I will because I don’t have the background knowledge. You need to have the understanding of the vocabulary, of the concepts, the structure. They have that, which I don’t.

But put them into my world, reading educational material, reading speedreading material things, like I know how to get through that stuff a lot better and faster than they probably can. So, it’s about your background knowledge, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, well, quadrupling the reading speed sounds magically enticingly powerful in terms of what might be possible for just like slamming through an email inbox, or looking through reports, or doing research. Being able to pull that off four times as fast can mean going home early, or having time to do more fun, strategic work, or the people development stuff that is being neglected. So, are you saying that it is, in fact, possible via practice and strategy to read at four times the average speed, if we’re 250, to go to 1000 plus without losing comprehension?

Abby Marks-Beale
As long as you have, number one, the background knowledge, you know what it’s talking about, you’re familiar with it, and, number two, that you’re using the right strategy for the right reason. And so, two things I want to say. One is that in order to get into those gears of four and five, what you’ll find is that you have to use a tool.

And the tools that I talk about are using your hands or a card to read but you have to find something to put on, either your screen or your paper, that’s going to help you track your eye movements because your eye movements, they get tired just going across the lines and back to the beginning, and across the line and back to the beginning. But if you have something moving on your page or on your screen, you’re able to follow it much faster.

And, for me even, to get into those higher gears of four or five, I have to use my hands or a white card to read with. And so, that, for some people is just really uncomfortable because they’re not used to doing it, and I explain that, yeah, it is uncomfortable at first, but once you get the habit, you’re sold on it because that is how you get to those higher gears.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds easy.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
I just get a notecard and move it fast, and that’s all you got to do, Abby. Is that what we’re saying here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, yes but, yes but, the white card, this is my favorite thing to share with people. It’s called the white card method. It’s taking a blank white card or the back side of a business card that’s blank, or a blank piece of white paper, like that, just as I’m seeing it, not everyone is seeing that, but, yes, a blank white card. And if you have like a magazine, newspaper, a book, whatever in front of you, most people would put that card underneath the line that they’re reading, and they would put it below.

And it’s just a natural thing because when we’re learning how to read, that’s where you would put it because you want to leave exposed what you’ve just read so that if you feel uncomfortable, you can go back and re-read it. But as the adult reader, the more skilled reader, you’re blocking where you’re going and leaving available what you’ve already read, which means you can go back. It’s something called regression. You don’t want to go back and re-read things.

So, to use the card effectively, it must go above the first line that you’re reading so it pushes you down and it blanks out or blacks out what you’ve already read so the tendency to go backwards is a whole lot less. You can still pick up the card if you lost your place but it’s really meant like, “Here, let’s keep it going, let’s go straight down,” and it’s very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Okay. So, I’m not cutting out a window pane but rather I’m blocking that which I have already read and bringing it down and…

Abby Marks-Beale
You’re covering what you’ve already read and leaving open what you haven’t read.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that means the notecard border edge margin is above my line, my active line.

Abby Marks-Beale
Correct. Yes. You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, tell me, all I gotta do is get my card, put it at the top, bring it down at a pace four times what I normally do, and, bam, I’m speedreading and that’s all it takes?

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s not necessarily just go four times. You build to that. You start wherever you start, you have a starting point, and then you try that strategy as well as there’s other strategies I teach called keywords and phrases. So, how do you pick up all those words that you’re going over pretty quickly with your hands or a card.

And so, being able to know that one word at a time is not the most efficient, but finding the bigger, more important words in the text is important, finding phrases, groups of words that form thoughts. Imagine throwing thoughts back to your brain at one time instead of one word at a time. The brain loves that. It’s just that it’s about active, mindful, conscious strategies. You stay awake when you read now because you’ve put yourself into a thinking place. I call it a quiet place.

You’ve set yourself up for learning or reading success. You could learn all this stuff in my program, put yourself in a really noisy place, it’s going to be really hard to focus. But if you can get your environment the way you like it to get the concentration you need, then you add all these different things. It’s magical. And it doesn’t mean laying in bed, I hate to say.

It’s like sitting up at a desk or a table, a place that we’ve been conditioned to work. It could be kitchen table. Your work desk may not be the best unless you’re reading webpages because there’s too much to do at your desk. There’s the phone, and there’s email, and there’s to-dos that pop up, and dingers and whatever. It’s like you want to move to a quieter place if you can.

For those that work in offices, go to a conference room or a cafeteria off hours. For those that are entrepreneurs and work from home, just get out of your office to a quieter cleaned-off desk, table, kitchen table, dining room table, but avoid the LA-Z-BOY chair unless you don’t really care if you get too comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then with these phrases, does that mean…I’ve heard the term subvocalize, which means I am reading each word inside my mind’s ear, like your bio, “She has taught thousands to build reading confidence and competence through the knowledge of simple yet powerful active reading strategies.” So, am I not doing that when I’m rocking at the 1000 plus words per minute level?

Abby Marks-Beale
Subvocalization, first of all, know that a lot of people have it because we’ve learned, at least here in the United States, that we’ve learned to sound it out, hear it in your head, called phonics, that’s how we’ve learned. And so, when you learned how to read, they didn’t tell you by the time you had a good sight vocabulary about seventh or eighth grade that you don’t need to do that anymore, and so you just kept doing it.

And so, we have this mental whispering that goes on in the head, and it’s hard to get rid of completely, so I tell people, “Don’t expect it to be gone but the faster you read, the less you can do it because you can only read about 150 to 200 words a minute out loud quickly.” And if you’re reading at 250 or 300 even as your base level, you’re not reading every single word. And so, you’ll read less, mentally whisper less the faster you go, and as long as you’re understanding what you’re reading, it doesn’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s just kind of mind-blowing in terms of…

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, it is, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
…that if I am reading but I’m not hearing each word in my head, although I talk kind of fast and I read words in my head fast when I talk, so I think I am probably around 250-ish. Average sounds about right. I’ve tested it back in the day, and I think it’s been about the same for a good long while. So, then I guess I’m a little, I don’t know, spooked.

My vision is like I’m on a treadmill and I’ve crank it faster than I can really handle, and I’m like, “Ahh.” And so then, I guess I’m wondering, would I, in fact, be able to comprehend, remember, retain stuff that I’m flying through if I’m not saying each word to myself?

Abby Marks-Beale
The short answer is yes, and this is where the active, mindful, conscious stuff comes into play. Like, if you’re going so fast that you’re not getting it, then you got to slow down. It’s about understanding you have gears that sometimes you need to slow down either because of the content or because of where you’re at in that moment of time.

If you’re really stressed, you had a hard commute to get to work, or you just had a fight with your spouse, or you’re dealing with something going on and you’re just really distracted, that can affect it too. So you have to have the most ideal mindset, which is…well, okay, I’m going to back up for a sec because this is something that, over the past 20 years, I’ve been teaching this stuff over 30 years.

But over the past 20 years since we’ve had computers and phones, that people have learned how to multitask but haven’t re-learned how to mono-focus. And so, it’s so hard for people who are so busy, and especially type A personalities, even people like me at times, to just stop and just read because they’re thinking about so many other things.

And so, by learning how to calm the mind, be it through mindfulness techniques like meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing practices, something that can center you will greatly benefit your reading. So, I feel like that’s important to mention because we’re so twitchy with all the stuff that we have to look at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Got you. So, we’re just entering that tunnel of focus and it’s like all that is in my consciousness is this text and away we go. Okay. And I guess I’m curious, is there a place you might recommend? If I want to really take this for a spin, I’m going to get out the notecard and rock and roll, is there a place I can go to readily check my reading comprehension? I’m thinking about Standardized Test from my youth. Reading Comprehension was a section. So, how might I assess my comprehension and check that out to see if, yup, I am really blazing so fast I don’t even know what’s going on anymore?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think the first thing to know is that it’s important just to know what your speed is to begin with. And, of course, people read ideally for comprehension. So, even if you don’t have ten questions after what you’ve read, you can still get your speed. I do have on my website a place where you can take a speed test just so that you can see what your reading speed is.

But if you’re looking for speed with comprehension, one of my books 10 Days to Faster Reading has ten readings in it with ten questions, so that’s a place that you could read and answer questions. Just don’t look back at the reading to get your answers. And there are a few other timed-reading exercises. I would bet if you Google them, you’d probably find them.

I know teachers can use them in high schools. Some do in college-level courses as well where you can get readings with questions. I had one from Jamestown Publishers. I used to teach when I did high school or college. So, you can get books like that if you wanted. You might even find it online as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. Well, so we’re jumping around a little bit. So, we talked about the notecard, and you also talked about word clusters and…

Abby Marks-Beale
Keywords.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there something to do there with the keywords? Or what am I doing when I’m using the keyword method?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, in some ways, it’s hard to just describe. You really have to see it. However, what a keyword is, is basically any word that’s about three letters in length or longer, and it usually gives you the most meaning of a sentence. And so, it’s almost like picking out from a like a 12-word sentence, maybe seven or eight of those words that make sense. But by doing that, what you’re doing is actively consciously looking for the more important words, which keeps you more awake and alive and on task more than daydreaming.

So, daydreaming, regression, and subvocalization are the three evils, if there were such a thing, to reading. And so, mind-wandering is one of the things that happens when you go too slow. And so, by having a strategy, you will tend to daydream less, first of all, which is helpful. And then by learning how to find keywords, you’re going to be able to read almost…it’s just like newspaper headings. It’s just like a headline, that’s what I’m looking for, a newspaper headline. And it’s just like, “I get it. I don’t need all those other words because I got it through these bigger words that are more important.” And you see the other words. You’re just not stopping your eyes on all those words.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you and I know what you mean about needing to see it. As I’m looking at my note draft starter outline questions, which I flexibly refer to and suppose to march through. I’ve got, “What are your best practices for people trying to get into speedreading?” And I’m seeing in many of these words, “What are your” don’t need them; “best practices” that’s big; “for people trying” we’ll take the trying; “to get into” okay, “speedreading.” “Best practices” “trying” “speedreading” like those keywords are maybe a little under half of the total words, and I get the gist of what this question is about.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay. Very cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I just pulled out, I was looking for some reading material next to me. So, I have a copy of my book that came out Speed Reading: A Little-known Timesaving Superpower. Just opened up to squeeze the margin section, just opened it up. I’m just going to read like two, three lines and keywords.

Abby Marks-Beale
And just see if this makes sense to you even though you’re not seeing the other words. “Reading newspaper column quite different reading email. Not just content different, also column width. Average newspaper column, six words across. Average email anywhere 18 to 25 words across. I jump from end one line to beginning next. Much longer email than newspaper makes it hard eyes read. Find the next line accurately.”

Does that make sense at all to you?

Pete Mockaitis
It does. Well, it’s funny, like I’m already jumping the implications, like, “Oh, maybe if the email is wide, I should like shrink the window so that it’s more manageable and it squeezes that in a bit.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah. And not saying it out loud, obviously, by doing it internally, you’ll go a lot faster than if you do it out loud. But it’s about getting good at just finding those bigger words, and that takes a little bit of play and experimentation, but once you get good at it, it’s very helpful for some people, especially people that subvocalize every word because then…and even English as a second language learners find that this is a very helpful tool for them so they don’t have to read every it, that, to, the, to, and, for, if because they look at those words as if they have to all be processed the same way and they don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. Thank you.

Okay. So, we talked about getting in the right mindset and maybe it’s some breathing practice or mindfulness or a distraction-free space where it’s just the text. We talked about looking at the clusters of words and then the notecard, starting at the top, and then scooting on down to cover what we have already read and put it at the top of each line, and not needing to subvocalize, and we can rock out at four times the speed without losing comprehension with practice. That’s exciting.

Abby, tell us, what are some of your top do’s and don’ts that we haven’t covered here? It sounds like there are some more tools with regard to margin use. What’s the story here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s a lot. There are so many different pieces of this whole concept. I think, probably, one of them is about the purpose that a lot of people when they sit down to read, they don’t really know why they are reading what they’re reading, and, even more importantly, what do they need to get from it. And the reason I say that is because there are times when you’re going through something where it’s like, “Why am I reading this? It’s not going to meet my objective,” but it’s there so you feel like you have to read it.

And so, when you know that you’re not going to need it, you can skim over it. I teach people how to effectively skim. You can skip it without guilt and just say, “I read this because I read the rest of it because that was what I needed, and I didn’t need that piece.” And I give an example of, let’s say, you wanted to read about, I don’t know, like chocolate. Like, you’re reading a book on chocolate. That’s a good one. You want to know about different kinds of chocolate and where they’re made, and blah, blah. But then there’s a chapter that just talks about one maker of chocolate, Belgian chocolate, and you’re like, “Nah, I don’t really like Belgian chocolate. It doesn’t really matter.”

And so, there’s like a whole chapter, 12 pages on this one person, and you’re like, “You know, I’ll do a quick skim and find if there’s anything really interesting here but I’m not going to spend a lot of time because it doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t float me in some spiritual way, personally or professionally.” So, you become very selfish, I think, when you read active, mindfully, and consciously because you don’t want to spend time on things that aren’t worth your time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. And I heard it said somewhere that if you can determine in one minute that a 30,000-word book will be of no value to you whatsoever, then it’s as effective as you having read all 30,000 words in that one minute.

Abby Marks-Beale
That’s a great one. I like that. I agree. I agree 100%.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, I agree.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, what else are the top do’s and don’ts you’d put forward?

Abby Marks-Beale
So some of my other favorite things, that reading on screen, which is the bane of so many of our existence, there are some really cool apps. I demonstrate them when I do webinars and I like to share them whenever I can. One is called BeelineReader.com. B-E-E-L-I-N-E Reader.com. And so, you go into, like you’re looking at, I don’t know, Fortune magazine or Vanity Fair, whatever, online, and you’re reading an article. There’s all these videos and pop-ups and things that are just like distracting you, and it’s so frustrating.

And when you put BeelineReader onto your computer, it can do really two things. Number one is it color-codes the lines so that it’s easier to read. So, it goes from black to red, red to black, black to blue, blue to blue, black to black, so it’s easier to find the next line. But then when you do this thing called activate in clean mode, it takes out all the ads, all the pop-ups, and it puts the article in basically standard-length lines all the way down the page in the colored texts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is like the coolest app, and I use it all the time when I’m reading longer articles, like, “I don’t want to read with all that stuff flashing at me.” And so, I think it’s like $9, $10 a year to have that on my browser.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, it’s a really cool thing. I like that a lot. And then another one that I like and I tell people about for learning how to process words faster, is to get the free app of something called Spreeder, S-P-R-E-E-D-E-R. The free app of Spreeder, you can copy the words that you have on that article, just copy them, and paste them into Spreeder and you can force-feed it to you at different speeds. And so, one word at a time, you can set it up. You play with it. It’s fun and it’s free. And it’s another way to get the eyes and brain used to communicating faster. It’s just one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, a lot of cool things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take when you’re focused in and reading fast, are you more or less tired afterwards? Because, on the one hand, I can see, “Oh, man, I’m draining mental resources because I’m just going bananas in terms of fully dialed in and focused and slamming through so quick.” Or, is it like, “Hey, by being completely absorbed in that which I was doing, it is actually sort of like a flow state rejuvenator”? Or maybe it just varies person by person. What’s your take on this?

Abby Marks-Beale
I think it’s both. I do think it’s a flow state rejuvenator. Definitely, when I’m reading something that is very interesting or something I really want to learn, and I sit down at a desk and I have it in front of me, and I’m using my hands or a card to read with, and I’m really dialed in with it, then when I’m done, I’m like, “Wow, that was so good.”

Like, I read a book on an airplane. I went down to Florida last week and I just read half the book on the way there, and half the book on the way back, and I’m like, “Wow, that was awesome. It was so good.” I didn’t feel tired from that at all. But if you read too slowly and you don’t have a purpose, it’s very draining because you’re sitting there trying to learn it, you’re trying to understand it, and it doesn’t really work.

And you can get so much more done when you have that purpose in mind. And, obviously, you don’t want to read it unless you’re a night person. I don’t know how people read at 10:00 or 11:00 at night unless they’re really night owls because that’s like the last thing I want to do. I read like a couple pages and it’s my nightcap to go to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that’s a great illustration of the gear system. It’s like, “I’m chilled out, I’m lying down. I’m not looking for max speed, max wisdom. It’s just like here’s a soothing thing that’s a bit interesting.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Or, “I’m at the beach. I’m on vacation. I don’t really want to read so fast,” or, “Maybe I do because I love the book and I want to read fast.” It’s always a choice once you have those five gears in place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, we talked about screen reading, there’s a few tools right there for us. Anything else you recommend, like maybe just shrinking the windows to get the width or margin in a certain spot? How many words or inches should I be going for? Because I got a big old screen here and I can resize this window anyway I want. So, what would be optimal for my speed if I am not going to leap over to BeelineReader or Spreeder? How do I think about my windows and my line width?
Abby Marks-Beale
So, some people like the six words per line that are a part of like a newspaper column, and if you like that and you find satisfaction reading quickly across those lines, then get your screen to six to eight words per line. Otherwise, if you look at like emails, it could be anywhere from 18 to 25 words per line, and if that’s comfortable for you, you could do that. But if it gets to be a lot more than that, the eyes have a really hard time tracking all the way across those lines, and then back accurately to the beginning of the line.

And so, you can use, I’m sharing this really special with you, Pete, just so you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Is that you can use your screen like the white card. So, you take the text that you have in front of you, line it up to the top of your screen, like if there was a ruler there or just the top of your webpage, and you use your scrollbar, hopefully your mouse can do it one click or two lines at a time. And so, as you click it on your scrollbar, the lines go up into the “black” just like covering it up with the white card, so you’ve adapted the white card to the screen. Does that make sense in how I described that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very easy, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
Okay. And so, it’s another way to use the white card but on a computer screen or a Kindle or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s just easier to use that way.

Pete Mockaitis
And my mouse likes to make giant leaps when I click it but I could just use the down arrow and bo-boom, bo-boom.

Abby Marks-Beale
You can use the down arrow. You could also change the settings of your mouse just for reading purposes. It can be one line at a time when you go in your settings, so that’s another way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Abby Marks-Beale
Oh, there are so many other things but I think one of them is about creating a manageable or a quality reading workload instead of a quantity. I think a lot of people have stuff stacked up be it on their computer, or on paper, on their desk, on their nightstand, in their bathroom, in their backpack, whatever. There are so many different things, places that they have stuff. And after a while, it’s just like, “What am I going to get to next? I don’t even know.”

And so, by really evaluating what you have in your pile, and so I’m going to give this to you, too, because you’re a nice guy and I know the people, they would like it. And so, it’s a quick four-step process, so if you have a lot of stuff to read and you’re like, “I know there are stuff there that I don’t want,” and you put it in there six months ago, six years ago, and you just never got to it.

The first thing you do is kind of put it all together and then put a number on it on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is, “Totally worthless, totally not worth my time. Yuck, I hate it,” to a ten, “This is like the best thing ever. I love this. I can’t wait to get to it. It’s so good.” And so, you rank it on a scale of zero to ten, and anything over six, you put in one pile, anything under six, you put in another pile. The stuff under six, you recycle, get rid of, don’t need it, don’t want it, it leaves right now, it’s not worthwhile to use, so get rid of it.

And then what’s left, you think you’re done but you’re not. Now you have to say, “Well, how much time do I have to read on a regular basis?” If you only read five minutes a day, get rid of a lot of your stuff because you’re just not going to get to it if you’re just thinking you will. So, making more time to read is really important but then managing, “How much time do I read with what I have in my pile?”

So, you want to read things that are of value to you, things that float you spiritually, personally, professionally, and then make sure that you make the time to do it because that’s how you get a pile that’s under control. You don’t want to have boxes and boxes or bookcases and bookcases of things you’ve never read. That doesn’t help. So, it’s about being attracted to your reading workload instead of repelled.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Abby Marks-Beale
I think, actually, I have two. One of them is, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” That’s by Henry Ford because sometimes I have stinking thinking, so it does help quite a bit. And the other one is “There has to be a better way.” That’s another quote. I don’t know. I say that. I don’t know who says it but I always think just when I think things aren’t working, like, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.”

Pete Mockaitis
That makes me think of, I think, there are some infomercial pitch man, at least that’s how…my wife and I say that to each other. We do it in a British accent, in a slow informercial-ly voice, “There’s got to be a better way. Well, there is, Abby. Buy my product.”

Abby Marks-Beale
I like that. That’s good.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I quote this study, it’s called the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting. It’s E-B-B-I-N-G-H-A-U-S in case anybody wants to look it up. And, basically, when you read something today without any active, mindful, conscious strategies, you’re not going to remember more than 10% of it three days from now unless you talk about it, re-read it several times, or experience it in some other way.

And so, by becoming more active, mindful, and conscious to begin with, you remember 50%, you don’t remember just 10. You remember 50% or more because of the intention. And so, I love this Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting, and so you need to repeat and re-read and experience with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, you’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Abby Marks-Beale
I’m going to say that one of my favorite books is called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope. He’s a person that I followed at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Meditation. It’s a really good book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Abby Marks-Beale
BeelineReader. I think BeelineReader is my favorite tool for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Abby Marks-Beale
Favorite habit for me is probably doing exercise that feels good and doesn’t cause pain, which is like I’m a swimmer so I swim laps and walking and yoga, but I don’t like things like lifting weights because they cause problems for me. Yeah, just things that don’t cause pain.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s more what I quote to them. It’s kind of my tagline, that, “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.” It was a fortune that I found in a fortune cookie when I decided to start my business in 1988, and so I keep that. It’s just to me very powerful. “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.”

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, thank you, to my website at RevItUpReading.com, R-E-V-I-T-U-P Reading.com. And there’s the free test that you can take, the speedreading test. There’s also a free sneak peek which will allow you one module, which actually introduces the phrasing concept in my favorite exercise called discipline your eyes. You can get all that for free. So, I encourage people to go check that out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Abby, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun reading.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you. You, too. I read a lot. It’s your turn.

Pete Mockaitis
Barry, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, no, it’s a pleasure to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom about your book Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Could you kick us off by sharing a key thing that you’ve unlearned that has proven quite valuable in your own career?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah. Well, even writing the book is probably one of the best examples. I have a solid history of D minuses in English literature through school. I’m dyslexic. I think if I told my teacher that I managed to write one book, never mind two, that they wouldn’t actually believe me. So, it was kind of, for me, one of the big unlearning I had to have is actually how to write a book.

And as conventional wisdom, I always say that writers sort of sit there by a roaring fire with a perfect velvet jacket on and a glass of wine, and just like tearing out pages and pages of content. Believe me, I tried that but it didn’t work for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Too hot?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, not too good. And, yeah, I would sit there for hours just with writer’s block and I couldn’t quite get the words on the page, and it was really frustrating because I felt like I was doing everything, the tips that people told me. And it’s a real challenge. So, then I started to think about, for me, “Well, how can I sort of reframe what I’m looking at? My existing behavior is not working, so, therefore, I need to unlearn. I’m not getting the outcomes that I’m aiming for writing whatever it is, 10,000 words, 10,000 words a day. Whatever I’d set myself.”

So, I started to actually think about, well, reframe my thinking away from just typing as the only way to create content, and I actually started thinking about content. It’s actually really like creating a book is content. And there were suddenly many ways to create content. Typing is just one of them. So, I started to think about other ways to create content. I could record it. I could speak it. I could interview. I could have someone help me.

So, I landed on the idea of actually talking because that was the most natural way for me to share my stories. And what I did is I got a journalist to interview me. So, we would write down, like some bullet points that I wanted to cover in each chapter, and a journalist would interview me, and I would just tell stories about what the chapter would be about. And we would record it and transcribe it using an AI transcription service.

So, we’d speak for 45 minutes, and I’d get in the region of 20,000 words, record it and get a copy of it in text very, very quickly. And the journalist would then sort of go through that copy, edit it really fast, and send me like this sort of early version of a chapter that was sort of relatively raw but it was edited. And it gave me something to react to. It’s like an MVP or minimal viable product or chapter.

And, suddenly, as I would read through it, then I’d be like, “Oh, no, that doesn’t need to go here,” and I’d remember things I’d forgotten to say. So, we got into this iteration really fast. And that literally got me there. I actually unlearned how to write a book by learning how to speak about the ideas that I wanted to talk about.

And the product of that is Unlearn. And then, yeah, many people are often surprised when they realize when I say I didn’t write hardly any of it. I spoke most of it and I got somebody to work with me, and an AI to transcribe it, edit it, and ship it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. So, you unlearned the notion of what writing a book looks like. And in so doing, you found an approach that worked for you, and that’s beautiful. Well, tell us, when it comes to zooming out a little bit and broadly speaking about people and unlearning, any other big surprises or aha discoveries you’ve made while researching and putting together Unlearn?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, the notion of unlearning was the thing that probably struck me the most. So, the first book I wrote was Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. It was part of our recent series, or the lean series, and it was more successful than I could’ve imagined, to be honest. And when we released that book, a lot of, sort of medium to large scale enterprises or scale of startups were sort of saying, “We’re not a startup. We’re actually scaling our business, so what do we need to put in place to make us successful?”

And, suddenly, I was in the room with like Fortune 500 executives or startups in Silicon Valley that was scaling rapidly to work with them, to help them grow and innovate their businesses. And I was fortunate to spend time with these people, some of the most competent talented people you could ever hope to meet. And what I kept discovering was that while learning new things was hard, what was even harder was letting go of their existing behavior, especially if it had made them successful in the past.

So, the unlearning even in itself was a big aha moment for me, is that the real skill is not learning new things; it’s actually recognizing when your existing behavior and thinking is actually limiting your success, and then how do you find ways to adapt or innovate yourself to meet the sort of changing market or situation that you’re in.

And that was really my big inspiration for sort of writing Unlearn and the stories and the examples and so forth that are captured sort of within it, and have just sort of been really the things that have driven me on continuously to sort of do this. And for many people, it’s interesting because unlearning is sort of an act of, if you will, sort of vulnerability. You have to sort of say that, “What I know is actually limiting my success, and, really, I have to sort of shift out of it.”

And for many people, that’s very difficult because their success is tied to their behavior. Their behavior and actions are tied to their identity. You’re asking someone to change their identity, in a way, and that is extremely difficult for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe walk us through an example that illustrates the unlearning process that would be helpful for professionals looking to become all the more awesome at their jobs?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, probably sort of one of the classic examples that I cover in the book is working with a senior executive from a Fortune 100 bank, and she took over the role or went into the role, and everywhere she went, first day, people just kept asking her to make decisions, everything from what direction should the company go in, right down to what paperclips they should order. Every single person was just turning to her to say, “What do we need to do here? What do we need to do here?”

And, for her, that was a signal. She was like, “There’s a decision-making problem here. I shouldn’t be worried about what paperclips we’re ordering. That should be people are confident and inspired enough to do that. Like, why is everything from paperclips right through the company direction landing on my desk and everyone freezing?”

Now, the process for unlearning is it’s a three-step process. It’s first about this recognition to unlearn, identifying or diagnosing where your existing behaviors are not working. In fact, the way I defined unlearning is it’s a process of letting go, reframing or moving away from one’s useful mindset and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past but now limit our success. So, it’s not forgetting, removing, or discarding your knowledge or experience. It’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and making space for new information to come in to inform your decision-making and action. So, the first step is a diagnosis.

So, straight away, this executive could diagnose that nobody was making decisions, and that is not the outcome that she was aiming for. She wanted to have a high-performing organization where people could take responsibility and have an accountability to make decisions at the appropriate level, depending on the decision to be made. So, that was a signal for her.

And so, I sat down with her, and I got her to say, “Well, let’s describe it. Let’s describe what success would be. If this is the behavior that needs to be unlearned, how could we talk about division or the objective or the outcome you’re aiming for the people would be achieving?” And I got her to sort of write a story about it, write a vision statement for what would be true in the world if they had unlearned this challenge.

So, she wrote down things like people would be making safe-to-fail decisions, that they’d make small decisions to understand. If they had to make a big decision, they’d break it into smaller parts and learn along the way what works and what doesn’t. And this sort of learned helplessness to make decisions would be removed, and all of her direction would be what success is and why it matters. None of her direction would be how to achieve it. The teams would offer opportunities on how to do that.

So, writing this sort of story, it gave her these sorts of outcomes that she talked about, the learned helplessness disappears, her direction of what success is and why it matters. She wouldn’t be saying how to achieve it. And, straight away, we wrote those down in an unlearning statement that would basically say, “The company would’ve unlearned when 100% of her direction is what success is and why it matters. Zero percent of her direction is how to achieve it. Zero percent of people displayed this learned helplessness when making decisions.”

So, suddenly, she had sort of had this statement that would encapsulate this unlearning of decision-making as a problem within that company, and she actually shared this with a bunch of her team to sort of for them to understand as like what would be success criteria for unlearning it. And then the next step is to sort of re-learn. It’s like getting people to try new behaviors to try and move towards these objectives or outcomes that we’ve described.

And so, I always get her to sort of like pick one of these outcomes that she originally had described to sort of focus on. So, there was the learned helplessness, how to achieve a decision, or what success is and why it matters. And we picked actually that this one, zero percent of her decisions would include how to get there.

So, she took this sort of very bold sort of stance. And I often say to people, “If you want to re-learn, it actually means you have to do something uncomfortable,” and people mostly write down like simple things that they would try that they’re used to, like just be quiet for a moment, or don’t be the first to speak when someone offers a problem, or let all the team speak before she did.

But the one she chose was even more uncomfortable. She said she wasn’t going to make any more decisions. So, if someone came to her and asked her to make a decision, her immediate reaction would be, “What do you think?” So, introduce this tiny little new behavior. Now, you can imagine when you’re a Fortune 100 executive, and you sort of announced that you’re not going to make any more decisions. It would cause panic across the company.

But the way that we made it sort of safer, rather than just sort of never make a decision again, she was just going to try it for one day. So, for one day, make it sort of safe-to-fail, she’d think big but start small about trying to conduct this new behavior of not making decisions, and asking people what do they think.

And this is sort of the moment that we call a breakthrough. So, a breakthrough is literally when you start to get this new information, new behavior, new action, and the results that actually give you a feedback statement that you should keep doing what you’re doing or do something different. So, literally, she went into work, I think it was on a Tuesday. I think it was a Tuesday. And every time one of her team came in to ask or to make another decision on something, she sat there and said, “That’s interesting. What do you think?”

And what that did was something really magical. It allowed her to learn. It allowed her to learn about the people and what help they might need. Because some people, when she asked somebody, “What do you think?” would freeze, would be sort of “Ah, I don’t know. I really need you to make this decision. I don’t have enough confidence or control to do it.” So, she could realize straight away that person would need coaching.

But other people, when she asked, “What do you think?” would say, “Well, we’ve got three options. We can do option A, and here’s the pros and cons of that. We could do option B, here’s the pros and cons. Here’s C and pros and cons. I think we should do C, and here’s why.” So, instantly, she could go, “Great. Let’s do C,” because she could see the rigor and the thinking that her team had actually performed, and it gave her confidence to say, “Right, that’s the direction we should try. Let’s do it.”

So, this simple act of just not making a decision and asking people to sort of say what they think sort of revealed all these insights about who is able to make decisions and should be encouraged to make more, versus who was hesitant to make them and needed coaching and support to sort of get there. And instantly then, she just gets this uplift in performance because once she starts doing that, all her teams start replicating that. And then, suddenly, you’ve got this big performance improvement where you can start to eradicate decision-making problems.

So, that’s an example of a sort of unlearning statement and going through the diagnosis of decision-making, the re-learning of actually thinking big and starting small, defining outcomes, and taking a small new behavior, which was not to make decisions, and ask people what they think. And then the breakthrough was seeing this insight or learning from the team about who could respond well and who needed help. And that sort of informed her to keep doing, and that’s literally the cycle of unlearning.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you for that story. That’s really cool. And I’m curious, as we zoom into individuals listening here, are there any key questions or prompts you find super useful to surface, to highlight, to assess, to diagnose, “Aha, I may have an outdated or suboptimal belief or practice or mentality that I would do well to unlearn”? Like, what’s sort of the canary and the coal miner, some key indicators that I should be on the lookout for?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. And the simple question many people that ask is, “How do I know what I need to unlearn?” And to diagnose, there’s a set of questions that I ask people. It’s basically getting you to think, “Is there a situation where you’re not living up to the expectations of yourself? Maybe there’s somewhere you’re not achieving just sort of outcomes that you desire. Maybe you sort of tried all the things that you can think of and you’re not getting a breakthrough. Or, maybe there’s a situation that you’re avoiding altogether because you just can’t think, ‘How am I going to tackle that?’”

These are all the sort of signals that your existing behavior is not working. So, not living up to your expectations, not achieving the outcomes you’re aiming for, situations you’re avoiding or struggling with, or maybe you’ve tried everything that you can think and you’re still not getting a breakthrough. I’d even ask you that, Pete, and you probably can come up with four or five answers straight away. And these are all signals that our behavior is not actually helping us achieve the outcomes that we’re aiming for. And, therefore, we have to unlearn, we have to try something different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as you’ve seen a lot of workplaces, are there some common examples that pop up again and again and again in terms of, “Oh, these are some things that would be great to unlearn”?

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, I think like risk-taking is always a big one, like people’s risk aversion, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, trying new things, being willing to fail. These are all decision-making. It actually comes up quite a lot. These are sort of like the commonalities, I guess, that I hear from a lot of people, is how to help them sort of get those breakthroughs, is trying new things that they’ve never done before.

A lot of it is about, I think, when people perceive that there’s risks for both personal and perception, that if they try something and it doesn’t work, how they’d be perceived. That one really comes up a lot, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s juicy. And so then, if I was working on that, how might you help coach me through that emotional stuff?

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah. Well, first of all, it’s just a recognition, people diagnosing that that’s the heart of the issue. Most people sort of write it up as, “My boss won’t let me do something,” or, “We’re stuck in the status quo. We’re struggling to do new things. We don’t innovate in my business.” Like, a lot of people would sort of deflect it off to company not allowing them to do things.

And a lot of it is sort of then helping people recognize, well, first of all, you have agency and you can try. So, how do we make it safer for you to try? Or, you feel safer that if you fail, how you’ll be perceived? And one of the mantras in the book was this notion of thinking big, start small and learn fast. So, it’s important to have a big aspiration or big outcome that you’re aiming for because that allows you to sort of shift your thinking and your behavior, potentially, to get there.

But the way when you’re trying to make big changes is you don’t take big leaps. You take small steps and learn your way through. So, when somebody has a big idea to change their business, what I often say to them is, “Right. Well, write down that big idea.” Amazon has a famous practice where they get people to write press releases to describe what the world would be like if their product was in the market in two to three years’ time, what would be fantastic about it.

Now, with the way that they start is they don’t do a huge big project. They start small. They run some experiments with small customer bases to see what works and what doesn’t, and then sort of grow it from there. So, what I often say to people is if you have a big idea to change the way your company works, don’t expect that you can walk up to the CEO and get millions of dollars of funding and a new team, and then just sort of start working on it.

Do something small to start testing if that idea is going to work. Pick maybe one or two customers and sort of show them a very naïve version of the product that could work or could not, and get feedback and show that it’s working or not. And even if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. You will have learned something from those one or two customers about what success could be or what’s the right product that they’re looking for and iterate it.

So, these are the ways that you can think big and start small, to start tackling uncertainty and be successful as you try new ways of working new products, etc. And so, that’s what we do most of the time is just coaching people how to think bigger but start smaller so they can learn what works and what doesn’t in a safe-to-fail manner. And once they sort of get into that habit, then they’re able to take on these more audacious goals as they sort of see success moving towards it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, tell me, Barry, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Barry O’Reilly
No, I think, like the message from me always with this is, like I experienced that I’ve got to unlearn stuff all the time. It’s tough sometimes to recognize the actual reason you’re not being successful is yourself, that you can’t get out of your own way. So, I think a bit of humility, a bit of not trying to beat yourself up too much when you’re not getting the success, I think, is quite important, and recognize that a lot of this is a sort of journey, a learning journey, if anything, a constant iteration and experimentation on yourself. And if you see it like that, it can be a fun journey to go on rather than beating yourself up along the way when things don’t work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Barry O’Reilly
One of my favorite ones, and people will have to buy the book maybe to find out what chapter was this one, is that something always gives up. Either the problem gives up or the person gives up. But if the person doesn’t give up, ultimately, you’ll get the breakthrough that you’re looking for.

And that was really interesting for me as a notion to sort of think about. It is a little bit of a battle of wits between the problem you’re trying to tackle and the person, or yourself, trying to tackle it. And, really, half of the way to succeed is to keep showing up. If you just keep showing up, something will give. Either the problem will sort of give and you’ll get past it, and, hopefully, before the person gives up because then the problem wins. So, that’s always motivated me to keep being persistent and to keep showing up, and I really enjoyed that quote.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, I think my favorite example in the book is Serena Williams, and her story is just purely phenomenal. She’s sort of an against-the-odds story. And also, the success that she had and continues to have is sort of totally unheard of and a total outlier for the sport that she plays in. She actually is getting better as she gets older, which is sort of unheard of. Most tennis players retire at the age of 27. She’s 40 and she’s still competing at the highest level, getting to finals and being successful. So, yeah, really a fantastic story that I open the book with, and would highly recommend people check her out.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Barry O’Reilly
It’s called Maverick, and it was basically written about a small little factory in Brazil where the CEO, who took over, whose son who took over from his father, started using all these contrary methods to manage people that were much more about empowering people rather than the typical, let’s say, corporate institutional management techniques, and they had massive success. So, I highly recommend people check out that book. It’s one of my favorites.

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

Barry O’Reilly
I like the Shure SMB mic. Sounding good when we’re on podcasts, I think that’s one. One thing I learned, I think, through the pandemic especially, is that it’s really important to have good sound when you’re communicating because when the sound is bad, it makes it harder for people to listen. When you’ve got good sound, it makes it easier for people to listen and more of the information goes in. So, yeah, get a great mic. That would be my tip for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed. And a favorite habit?

Barry O’Reilly
At the moment, well, there’s two. One is making a really nice coffee in the morning when I wake up. That’s definitely, that’s my special time. And then exercising as much as possible. I think one of the things I really learned as well, especially as I work in a venture studio called Nobody Studios, and I work with a bunch of biohackers. And this idea of like persistently improving your whole, both like mental activity, like doing exercises like this, reading, writing, etc. but also the physical aspect of how important it is to exercise and sleep.

We’re actually working on a sleep company at the moment, and it’s just been fascinating to me to realize and learn how important sleep is to our actual performance, in general. So, now I’m somebody who…I used to stay up and think I could get by on six hours of sleep at night, but now if I don’t get eight, I get angry at myself. So, it’s been really interesting to learn some of these habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Barry, now you got me curious about, if you’re allowed to disclose, what’s the sleep company and what transformational insights have you gleaned thus far?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, the first one is how important sleep is. I think most people sort of undervalue how important it is. It’s the most restorative process that we have, so no surgery or amounts of vitamins or supplements are going to improve your wellbeing as much as sleep. So, it’s actually one of the most important things that we have to do.

So, yeah, some of the habits that I have had to unlearn was like going to bed late, or a routine to actually optimize when you do go to lie down to sleep, that you get the maximum sleep, that you can get a high-quality sleep at that. And it’s everything from the triggers, simple things that people might say to you, like don’t drink coffee, or don’t have high amounts of sugar, or don’t let your body be in a stress state when you go to sleep because you actually can have negative sleep, which hurts you more.

So, all of these things have been really fascinating to sort of learn and discover. And, yeah, if you follow our venture studio, Nobody Studios, you’ll see the sleep company when we launch it to the public in the next couple of weeks. I’m pretty excited about what it’s going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate; folks quote back to you often?

Barry O’Reilly
Well, I think just even the word unlearn. It seems to be one of these provocative words that people go, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly what we need to do. We don’t need to learn more things. We need to unlearn some things.” And I think it’s been a fascinating way to connect with people in terms of the interest area, or a way to describe something, or a notion that many people have felt but weren’t able to put word on it. So, yeah, I think unlearn, that’s it. It’s a fun one. Let go of past success to achieve extraordinary results. It’s all in the title.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Yes. So, I’m pretty much Barry O’Reilly on every social platform you can imagine, or BarryOReilly.com. And if you’re interested to follow our studio, we’re at NobodyStudios.com. Go check us out on the web and similarly on most social media platforms.

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

Barry O’Reilly
Yeah, just think big, have a big bold aspiration that you’re aiming for, that something you think could change, but start small. What’s the first small step you can do to start moving towards it? And you’ll learn fast what works and what doesn’t. So, that’s my message to everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Barry, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with Unlearn and all your adventures.

Barry O’Reilly
Thanks very much. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Katy, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Katy Milkman
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how to change once and for all. You’ve literally written the book on this and I can’t wait to hear your insights.

Katy Milkman
Well, I’m excited to share.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe to kick it off, could you share maybe what’s maybe one of the most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans doing behavior change while researching the book How to Change?

Katy Milkman
That’s a great question. I love starting with that question. Probably it’d be a study I ran at Google that had the most counterintuitive finding to me. And it was a study where, actually, my collaborators and I were trying to figure out if we could create more durable habits around exercise in people if we got them to build really consistent routines, which is what our read of the habit literature suggested makes habits sticky, like, “Always at the same time of day, I’m really, really grounded in that routine and now it becomes like second nature to me.”

And if we could build that, we thought, then we sort of let go and we’d see these lasting habits. So, we ran this experiment with Google employees where we basically, for a month, gave them rewards for either visiting the gym at the same time of a day, a consistent time that they’d said was ideal for them, or for any time, whatever they wanted. So, about half of their visits ended up being at a consistent time but the other half were all over the place.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, one group was rewarded only when they went during the time they said and the other was rewarded regardless?

Katy Milkman
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Katy Milkman
We actually varied the size of the incentives so we got variance in how often people went, and we basically ended up with two groups who went the same frequency but in different patterns. One is going very consistently, the other is more variable when they go. And then the question was, “What happens at the end of this month?” And we were sure, we knew, it was going to be the people who had that consistent routine, and we were wrong.

And what we found out is that the reason we were wrong is not that we had our model completely messed up, it was true that the people who had been really consistent in their exercise who would basically train to be automatons, the same time, same time each day. Those people actually were a little more likely to keep going at that same time, but if they didn’t make it to the gym at that time, they didn’t go at all.

And the folks who had built a more flexible habit ended up with a more durable habit because they went a little less often at that magic time, it was the best time each day for them, but they went at other times too, and at that they went more. And that was really surprising to us that, it turns out, and I write about this in the book, I call it the power of elastic habits. I really expected, from everything I’d read, that those consistent cues would be critical to durable habit formation but what we found instead was that it bred rigidity, and that if you’re going to get something done, you need to be flexible, and just say, “I’m going to do it no matter what,” not, “I’m going to only do it under this narrow set of circumstances.”

So, I think that’s really interesting and it was a really important takeaway and counterintuitive to me. Although, now it makes sense, in hindsight I can see why that’s important but it’s not what I expected. And we surveyed professors of psychology in all the top universities, and 80% of them also were surprised. They predicted strongly, “Oh, yeah, that consistency, that’s what we know about habits. Consistency breeds habit,” and it’s just not what we found.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, that’s striking. And so, well, there’s one gem right there, so thank you.

Katy Milkman
You’re welcome. That’s a great opening question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s zoom out a little bit in terms of, okay, your book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Can you lay it on us sort of the big idea or key theme or thesis associated with this work?

Katy Milkman
Yeah, absolutely. So, the key idea behind this book is that there’s a lot, of course, of great books and a lot of great knowledge out there about how to change and, yet, it’s not getting us where we want to be for the most part. People are still looking for these kinds of books, still trying to figure it out, a lot of us aren’t where we want to be. And one of the things I have found in my career, devoted to studying this topic of where change comes from, is that I think part of the problem is we often don’t focus on what is actually obstructing change for a given individual, for a given challenge or a given goal they’re trying to achieve, and tailor the solution to that obstacle.

We sort of grab one of those big ideas off the shelf that sounds sexy and appealing, like, “Set big audacious goals and then break them down,” or, “Build a really tiny habit and piggyback.” Like, there’s all these ideas that are out that are appealing but they won’t work if they’re not solving for what’s holding you back.

So, that’s kind of the big idea behind the book. There’s all these different things that can be barriers to change, whether it’s, “I don’t enjoy doing the thing that I need to do to change,” or, “I keep forgetting to do the thing and flaking out because I’m too busy and it’s just, I can’t prioritize it,” or, “I’m having trouble getting started,” or, “I don’t have the confidence to change. I don’t believe I really can and that’s holding me back,” or, “My peer group is not showing me the ways to do it and is a bad influence.”

Like, what is the challenge and the solution then will be different. And we can make more progress if we actually diagnose what’s standing in the way, and then use the best science to solve that specific problem. And I see this all the time in my work with companies, that they have some behavior, “We want get people to save more for retirement,” or to get their flu shots, or to be more productive. Like, let’s just grab from this bag of tricks from behavioral science and we think we’ll be able to slap a solution on it, but if there isn’t an understanding of, “Well, why aren’t people saving? Why aren’t they productive? What’s holding them back?” that is matched to the solution, we don’t get very far.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s resonating a whole lot. I’m getting chills in terms of like there’s much truth here.

Katy Milkman
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in a way, it seems like self-evident, “Well, of course, you should figure out what’s the challenge and address it.”

Katy Milkman
It does seem self-evident.

Pete Mockaitis
And, yet, we don’t.

Katy Milkman
It’s astounding how often we don’t, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you lay it down, lay it on us then, what’s maybe the menu of categories of obstacles and the best practices for deconstructing or addressing those obstacles? And then, maybe even before we go there, how do we go about identifying it and zooming in on it very well? Because, for example, when you say, “Why don’t people save?” like, “Well, I just don’t have enough money. I don’t have any spare money to save. I guess we’re done.” And so, it’s like, “Well, no, not quite. I think we got to dig deeper.” So, yeah, let’s start there. How do I identify, like, what’s the crux of the obstacle here?

Katy Milkman
I think the answer is probably most people will recognize themselves and a specific problem when they see these different discussions.

So, for example, I mentioned it’s not fun. That’s a really common one. I don’t know if that’s not a super common one for retirement savings. Most of us aren’t like, “I want it to be fun to save. And I find it dreadful and dreadfully unpleasant in the moment to do it.” That’s more like exercising or eating right or really focusing at work instead of scrolling social media. But that’s a category of obstacle.

Another category of obstacle is, “I don’t see how I can do this. This doesn’t seem doable.” I think that’s a big one, and retirement savings is actually is like, “Wow, it doesn’t feel feasible.” And that can come down to confidence, it can come down to what you’ve seen other people like you accomplish, and how, if you’ve learned their techniques and skills for doing it.

Another category can be, as I mentioned before, just flaking out, like, “There’s just a lot going on and I can’t get this to the top of the list, and I keep spacing it when it’s time to actually setup the 401(k).” So, it depends on which one you see yourself in, and I think it’s not like a category of problem, it’s always the same answer for different people. For some people, savings is also about procrastination, like, “I mean to do it but tomorrow I’ll get around to do it,” and then tomorrow never becomes today.

So, I think the goal of the book is that the reader will be able to see themselves as they see the classes of challenges and see what the solutions are. And there really are some experimentation individuals have to do, like, “Oh, I thought this was right solution for me. I tried it. Oops, I had diagnosed my barrier wrong. Really, that wasn’t what was holding me back. It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to the gym because I thought it was incredibly unpleasant. It was that I just hadn’t made the time to do it with the right people and I didn’t have the right social network and the right structures.”

So, there’s different problems for different people even for the same outcome, there are some commonalities.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then it sounds like one way that you diagnose kind of like the core obstacle is you try something and you realize, “Hey, it turns out that wasn’t it at all. Okay.”

Katy Milkman
That’s one way. Hopefully, I think that will be one way. I also think another way will be looking, for the book and even for this conversation, and seeing yourself in the challenge. So, I do think people will be able to self-diagnose if they just give a little thought. I think normally that’s not the prompt we get. Instead, we get a solution, like, “Here’s your solution. This is going to work for you because it works for lots of other people,” instead of some thought about, “Why is it that I can’t motivate myself to do X.” And often, introspection is going to be enough. We’re not that hard to understand when we look internally in a lot of cases.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s say that if I am thinking about, “Hey, what’s my obstacle?” and then what I come up with is something lame, like, “No, I just don’t have enough time”? Like, what does that really mean and how do we get deeper?

Katy Milkman
Yeah. Well, “I don’t have enough time” isn’t the kind of obstacle that the book is about because that’s not an internal obstacle. So, the book is really about how are you holding yourself back. “I don’t have enough time” is an external obstacle, like the way you structure your life needs to change. And I think you’d get some ideas about that once you’ve read the book about, “Oh, okay, does that mean you really don’t have enough time or do you just need to restructure yourself and your life differently?”

But the book is more about, so, if you’re like, “I don’t have the resources,” that’s a different kind of challenge than, “I can’t get myself to and I need to find a way to get myself to do something differently.” Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I hear you. And I guess maybe you’re kinder than I am to our imaginary interlocutor here. I guess when I hear “I don’t have enough time” I guess I just don’t buy it as my default.

Katy Milkman
Oh, yeah. And it can also be like, “I don’t have a priority to do this.” So, the book is not to convince you that you need to change. The book is for someone who has a goal, they want to achieve it, they haven’t been able to get there, or maybe they haven’t tried yet, they’re ready to try, and it’s going to offer the best science has for them about how they can set themselves up for success.

It doesn’t guarantee success by any stretch changes really, really hard but, hopefully, I think my career has been devoted to understanding what is the best knowledge out there, what’s the best science out there on how we can change, and I’ve tried to put it all in one place so that, for someone who’s motivated and ready to give it a shot, it’ll give them the best chance available.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And I think that precondition right there says it all in terms of, like, if you’re really motivated, “I don’t have enough time” is probably not going to be what you say is your obstacle because, by definition, you think it’s important enough to make some time, and it might just be tricky to actually figure that out in a calendar, like, “No, for real, where do these 30 minutes actually emerge from?”

Katy Milkman
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, maybe can you lay it on us, perhaps like the top three obstacles and some of your favorite solutions to those obstacles?

Katy Milkman
Sure. Okay, I can give you one that I love because I’ll probably pick on ones where I have done the most research personally which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most important ones but they’re the ones I find most interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Katy Milkman
So, one of them is impulsivity, and I’ve touched on this a little bit already and things I’ve said, which is like people are wired to look for instant gratification and to dramatically discount things that are good for us in the long run, which is why it’s so hard to drag yourself to the gym and eat that healthy food when there’s a pizza right next to it or a brownie calling your name, stay off social media, study for a test when there’s more exciting options that, even though you know clearly what’s good for you in the long run, is just not fun to do in the moment.

And I think one of the really interesting things research has shown is that people, generally, when they face a challenge like this to motivate themselves to do something that’s not that enjoyable in the moment but that’s good for them in the long run, our inclination is to just try to push through and look for the most effective way to achieve our goal.

So, if we’re, I’m going to go back to the gym, but there’s lots of places you can think about this, if you’re choosing to work out at the gym, most people are like, “I’m going to do the most effective workout on this first trip to the gym,” as opposed to an alternative, which would be, “I’m going to do the most fun thing I can do. I’m going to do the Zumba class. It’s not going to burn as many calories per minute maybe but I’m going to enjoy it.”

Same thing with healthy foods. We look for the basket of foods that’s most sinless as opposed to a healthy food that we actually enjoy eating. Or, you need to study and do work, like do you try to set up an environment where you’re really going to actually enjoy it? Maybe there are some people around that you’re studying with, or you’re in a coffee shop that you like, and you get yourself your favorite drink and you feel great. Or, are you just going to try to do it in distraction-free environment because that’s the most effective?

So, most of us think effective, and what research shows is we’re actually better off trying to do the fun workout, eat the tastier, healthy food even if it’s a little worse for us, and study in a way that’s a little less effective but more fun if we want to persist because we’re so wired for that instant gratification. We won’t push through, we think we will, but we won’t, if it’s not fun.

So, I think that’s a really important insight and it actually is really related to some work I did early on in my faculty career on something that’s a very specific solution to this. I call it temptation bundling. And the idea is only allowing yourself to enjoy some indulgence that you look forward to but maybe you shouldn’t indulge in too much, some guilty pleasure, while simultaneously doing something that’s good for you and productive so that now you start to crave.

Maybe it’s trips to the gym to binge-watch your favorite TV show, or trips to the library because you’re always going to pick up your favorite Starbucks Frappuccino en route, or folding the laundry or home-cooked meals because you’re listening to your favorite podcast at the same time. So, if you can temptation bundle, suddenly, this thing that was a chore, actually becomes something you look forward to.

And I’ve studied this and show that it can help people exercise more, and found in my own life, of course, that it also is very effective for solving all sorts of dual self-control challenges. So, in general, a principle is, make it fun, and then temptation bundling is one tool to do that, and the obstacle is when something isn’t instantly gratifying, and because of impulsivity, therefore, you aren’t making progress on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. And that just seems like a game-changing insight distinction right there. Because of our impulsivity, don’t go guns blazing for the most effective path, but rather the most enjoyable path if what you want is consistency and persistence, like, that’s huge. Thank you.

Katy Milkman
That’s beautiful, yeah. And I only gave you one, you asked for three. I was like, “I have to breathe in here.”

Pete Mockaitis
You’re allowed to breathe. Your temptation for breathing can be bundled to more insight, Katy.

Katy Milkman
I will breathe while giving insight, okay. A second one that I like, is actually, I’ll call it the getting-started problem. And that is even though we want to do something, or motivated to do it, like finding the moment where you’re like, “Okay, and now I’m going to take action. I’m going to do something. I’m going to do something about it. This is the moment action is beginning.” It’s hard to get over that hump from visualizing it to doing it.

And I had this really interesting conversation with one of the HR leaders at Google about a decade ago when I was visiting and presenting. It’s actually as a precursor to doing the gym study I mentioned earlier on habits, I was telling them about some of my other work on nudging better decisions, helping people through use of behavioral science, make better choices at work about everything from enrolment in 401(k) plans to getting flu shots, you name it.

And this question was, “Okay, Katy, totally sold. We should be using behavioral science to encourage more productivity at work, more use of health and wellness programs, more retirement savings. But is there some optimal time to encourage that change? Is there some moment when people are particularly likely to hop on the bandwagon if we offer up tools that will help?” And I thought that was such a fascinating question and I didn’t know of any research that really addressed it so it ended up guiding my work for the next several years.

And what I immediately thought of, which came to mind, for you, too, when I posed that question was New Year’s. We all know that at the beginning of a new year there’s like this huge boost in people’s enthusiasm for starting resolutions. Forty percent of Americans set some sort of resolution. Many of them fail but they at least give it a shot which is more than we can say for many other times of the year. And I wondered, and my collaborators and I wondered, too, like, “Is there something bigger going on there? Is it just New Year’s or are there moments like that? And why New Year’s?”

And what we realized is, of course, there’s this like, it’s a social construct now, there’s norms around it, but part of it, what’s going on, is that at these moments, like New Year’s, that feel like a breaking point in life, we step back and think bigger picture, and we also feel some sort of dissociation from our past failures, because, “Oh, like, that was the old me last year, and the new me has a clean slate and I’m going to be able to do the things that were tough before and that seemed insurmountable.”

So, that sense of a clean slate and identity shift, boosted optimism, the tendency to step back, actually arises at a lot of moments in our lives that basically serve as chapter breaks in the way we structure our narrative. So, there are small ones like the start of a new week. There are big ones, celebrating a birthday, moving to a new job or a new city, becoming a parent. All of these moments turn out to make us feel like we have a clean slate and a new beginning, and people are more likely to do things like create goals on goal-setting websites, search for the term “diet” on Google, go to the gym, at these moments, and so I think that’s really interesting.

So, my team has studied specifically temporal landmarks, so moments that actually don’t involve a change in our lives but there’s also research that’s shown when you move to a new place, you move to a new job, those moments are productive times for change because, literally, you have a clean slate. You don’t have old bad habits to fall back on and you have an opportunity to build and structure new routines and not walk by the Dunkin Donuts on the way to work on this new commute.

And so, whatever it is that has been tripping you up, you have that clean slate in addition to the psychological clean slate. So, in that sense, I think the obstacle there is, “How do you find the motivation to get started?” And our research points to looking for these moments that have fresh-start resonance as jumping off points, and also nudging other people to notice them.

So, we found, for instance, if you just mark your calendar with the first day of spring on it and give you an option, like, “When might you want to start getting reminders from us to pursue a goal you’ve been meaning to get around to?” and March 20th is labeled first day of spring. Now, it triples your excitement about getting reminders to start your new goal in that day than if we gave you a calendar without labeling March 20th the first day of spring.

So, we can do, and we ran a study where we invited people, thousands of people who weren’t saving adequately for retirement, to sign up for our retirement program at their employer to start setting aside a portion of their paychecks in retirement savings. And everybody got an identical offering, you could start saving right away or you could delay a few months. But some people that delay, we labeled, and it corresponded either to a birthday or to the start of spring, and we said, “Do you want to start saving after your next birthday? Do you want to start saving at the start of spring?”

So, we’re literally making an apples-to-apples comparison because everybody is getting that same offering but some people don’t have it labeled for them as their birthday. It just says in three months. And we see a 30% increase in savings over the next eight months when we’ve invited people to start saving after those fresh start dates.

Pete Mockaitis
I was just going to ask, Katy, so not only do we have more enthusiasm to start but the proof is in the pudding. They actually do it afterwards.

Katy Milkman
Well, I do think a really important note is that, in that case, we set ourselves up for success because it’s an auto…it’s like a self-fulfilling thing.

Pete Mockaitis
You flip the switch once to do it, yeah.

Katy Milkman
Yes, and those are the best things to do at fresh-start moments because the motivation wanes and that’s why so many New Year’s resolutions fail. So, it only solves one problem, which is getting started, and the rest of my book talks about how you solve all the other problems so you stick to it and actually get somewhere with your goals. But if you can put it on autopilot, how about if that’s my third answer, but it’s not a super original and it is a super powerful one.

Anything we can put as a default so that it is just self-perpetuating, that’s a huge win because an obstacle to change is laziness, but you can turn it on its head and make it into a solution if you set defaults, like in that moment of motivation, you sign up for the retirement savings plan on January 1st, and now it’s going to just kick in. You’d have to actually lift a finger to change it and, goodness knows, you’re never going to. Or, cancel all of your subscriptions that you don’t really need, one day a year, when you’re feeling motivated after your birthday. Those are the kinds of things that can sort of be gifts that keep on giving. Or, signing up for an educational program or subscription of some sort that’s really valuable. Those also can carry you forward and sort of have like riptide-like effects.

So, if you can use that moment, when you’re feeling motivated to do something and lock in a change that will continue, that’s really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. So, let laziness work for us if you can somehow shift it such that the default of doing nothing benefits you, then that’s awesome.

Katy Milkman
Exactly, which is what happens when you sign up for a savings program once, that just keeps going. Or, when you enroll in school, I mean, you still have to show up, but you’re going. It’s hard to get out. Like, the path of least resistance is to go for the thing that you’ve put a down payment on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Katy, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Katy Milkman
No, this has been so…you’ve asked such good questions. I feel like I’ve been giving you really long and detailed answers, like highlights of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love them.

Katy Milkman
So, I’m excited. Thank you for the great questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, maybe I’ll give one more. What should we not do? And maybe something counterintuitive, like, “Hey, I’ve heard I should do this, but maybe I shouldn’t.”

Katy Milkman
I’m not a big fan of setting like really big audacious goals, like that model, and just assuming that will carry you forward, because without actually getting into the nitty-gritty structures, like I do think people try to think about a north star huge objective and that having that could be really valuable, and I think it can be distracting, it could be overwhelming. There’s also research showing that if you make too many, set too many goals, and then plan for each of them, that’s really demotivating because you can’t do it all and you sort of throw up your hands and give up.

So, I think sort of too big and distant and dreamy and not broken down is bad, and too many objectives that you do break down and plan for is bad. Like, focusing on one thing at a time, that’s a little bit of a stretch but it’s doable and you can plan for it, and then you can use these tactics to help you is the right way forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, great. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Katy Milkman
Is it “Well done is better than well said”? Is that Ben Franklin, I believe? I like that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And how about a favorite book?

Katy Milkman
My favorite book is Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, and that actually has a new edition coming out later this year which I’m really excited for. Though, I’ll also say, my second favorite book, and it’s really close, is Influence by Bob Cialdini. I know you’re a big fan too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Katy Milkman
I assign both of those books, by the way, to all of my MBA students at Wharton. I love them and read them every year, and they’re just classics and truly wonderful and have changed the way I think about the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit for you?

Katy Milkman
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t call it a habit. Can I say a favorite behavior?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Katy Milkman
Because habits have this very narrow definition in academia where we’re like it’s on autopilot. Okay, so like a favorite behavior or this thing I do, which is I choose to work with people I really, really admire and enjoy spending time with so that work for me is a treat intellectually but also socially. And I feel really lucky to have the privilege of being able to choose who I collaborate with. And so, that has made my career tremendously fun, and I think it’s part of what’s helped me be productive and successful in my career as well.

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

Katy Milkman
My website which is KatyMilkman.com. It has all sorts of information about my book How to Change, about my podcast Choiceology, I have a newsletter called Milkman Delivers, which is a name that I was shying away from but my MBA insisted I had to go with, and about my research.

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

Katy Milkman
I would say one of the biggest takeaways from all of my research on behavior changes that, and we sort of started here, it’s super important to expect that there will be things that don’t work out, that if you are too rigid in your expectations of yourself, if you set up habits that are too rigid, if you set up goals that are too rigid, and let yourself be discouraged when things don’t work out according to plan, and don’t push through, you just won’t get very far.

And in change, anticipating setbacks and being prepared for them, having a backup plan, is just absolutely critical. Even in habits, we found that it was critical to be flexible and build flexible habits. So, it’s “I’ll always…” not “If only…” kind of habit. And I think that’s critical to everything. It comes up again and again in my research, how important it is to find ways to get back up after you’ve fallen down, and to be expecting that that could happen and planning for it.

So, my words of wisdom would be don’t let yourself be discouraged too easily, expect that there’s always setbacks. But on the path forward, it’s, hopefully, two steps forward and one step back, and just be prepared for that and set yourself up for success when you hit those roadblocks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Katy, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. I wish you lots of luck with the book and all the ways you’re changing.

Katy Milkman
Thank you. So lovely to chat. Thanks for having me on the show.