Bonus: A Sit Down With Katy Milkman & Angela Duckworth

From the Choiceology episode "The Power of Self-Control," experience Katy's full interview with Angela Duckworth, where they explore the relationship between self-control and grit.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  For a lot of my life, when things weren't going well, I would say, you know, what is wrong with me? Like, I'm not getting this work done. What's wrong with me? And now I say, what's wrong with my situation? Right? Like, this isn't getting done. Like, I keep procrastinating. What's wrong with my situation? Is the task undefined? Do I need more advice? Am I not sleeping enough? Like, what's wrong with my situation? And I feel like it is a much more productive question to ask because it leads you to solutions.

• 0:39Katy Milkman?

  That was Angela Duckworth, who is my guest on this special video edition of Choiceology. And I'm Katie Milkman, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I'm hosting Angela, who's my colleague here at Wharton. She's also a professor in the Department of Psychology. She is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the book, Grit, the winner of the MacArthur Genius Award, and also my co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. Today, we're going to have a wide-ranging conversation about self-control as a trait. What does it predict? Is it different for us in different domains? And how can we get better at self-control? I really hope you'll enjoy.

• 1:22Katy Milkman?

  Angela, welcome to Choiceology. I am so excited to get to talk to you today about self-control.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Katie, we hang out a lot, but I am particularly, particularly excited to be here right now.

• 1:31Katy Milkman?

  We don't normally dress up this much.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  No, this is about four times as dressed up as we usually are.

• 1:36Katy Milkman?

  Yeah, I'm really excited. So I want to start with a simple definition. Could we just start with how we define self-control? What it means to a behavioral scientist? What's your favorite definition?

• 1:47Speaker 00

  So self-control, as I define it, and I will say, I think, as most psychologists define it, is the successful resolution of a conflict, an internal conflict, where one choice is clearly better.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  And the other choice is nevertheless more attractive. So you have a conflict between what you know is better for you in the long run typically, and a temptation of some kind that typically is more pleasurable in the moment.

• 2:18Katy Milkman?

  So, you know, potato chips are calling to me, but I should eat.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  A kale salad. Yes, yes, yes. Or, you know, here's something which is maybe less obvious than, you know, exercise or savings, or, you know, I probably shouldn't buy that right now because I don't have the money. You know, those are the examples that leap to mind, but I will just give you a personal and recent example. I was in bed last night and I woke up and I knew I had to go to the bathroom. And I was like, I should go to the bathroom. And then I sat there and I was like, wow, it is incredibly hard to get out of this warm bed. And I knew that I would feel better if not five seconds, maybe 15 seconds later, but that was the dilemma. Like, well, I could just lay here or I could get up. And that's the crux of self-control.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  It's not always, oh, this will be better for me in 15 years. This will be better for, you know, the end of my life next year. Sometimes it can be five or 15 seconds. And even then, the delay of gratification, the sort of choice of, oh, I have to do this hard thing, but I could do this, you know, easier thing right now. That's the dilemma of the human condition.

• 3:29Katy Milkman?

  Yeah, and we're all super familiar with it, unfortunately.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Yes, we have, you know, daily experience, I think, all of us.

• 3:35Katy Milkman?

  So how do scientists typically measure self-control as a trait?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So Walter Michel, as you know, was a great psychologist, one of the greatest psychologists who ever lived. I think he lived all the way till he was 94, 95, ended his career at Columbia University. To bring the notion of delayed gratification to the lab, he created a paradigm called the marshmallow test. And I think it's widely misunderstood. The real test isn't what they point to. It's not their affirmation that they have self-control. The real test is how many seconds can that child wait for a larger delayed reward? And the test quantifies in seconds your ability to delay gratification.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  When Walter originally published his data, he was interested in the conditions under which you could wait longer or shorter. But then he soon, you know, these subjects grow up and, you know, these kids are now four, they're five, they're six, they're seven, now they're in high school. He followed some of his subjects all the way into adulthood. And the striking finding, which is a little more complicated than it at first appeared, was that the number of seconds that you could delay gratification in this simple little experiment at age four predicted your SAT scores, your general academic performance, the quality of your social relationships, your likelihood of being delinquent versus a good citizen, et cetera, et cetera.

• 4:59Katy Milkman?

  Abstracting away a little bit from that specific test and study to the broader literature on self-control, which has been measured in lots of other ways since as well, could you talk a little bit about some of the things it does seem to robustly predict?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that the best way to measure things, honestly, and I don't want to say best because what does that mean? But maybe the high signal to noise ratio is actually something that gets poo-pooed a lot, which is a questionnaire. When you ask somebody, "Overall, Katie," and I will ask you right now, "Overall, Katie, on a scale from 0 to 10, how self-controlled are you?"

• 5:30Katy Milkman?

  Maybe a 7.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  "Overall, Katie, when it comes to resisting impulses and doing things that are better for you in the long run versus feel-good right now, how do you do on that, 0 to 10?"

• 5:43Katy Milkman?

  Probably a 6.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  By the way, I think your answers reveal something else that I study called reference bias, which is, Katie, you are no 7 and you are no 6.

• 5:54Katy Milkman?

  I'm comparing myself to you, Angela.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Your whole life is delay of gratification. I would say that even though we have our own standards that make questionnaires imperfect, right, because you are not a 7 or 6, you're really probably a 9 or a 10. But still, when you answer a questionnaire like that, and who hasn't answered a question on BuzzFeed or taken a personality test, what you're doing is your brain is cataloging like all of the times in your life that come to mind when you think of self-control and impulsivity, it's opposite, and then you are giving me some summary score? And if you think about that pitted against a single marshmallow test event, I've got now this concatenation of sort of like everything I've done versus just one measure.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  So I will say that questionnaires, though they have their limitations, including reference bias, I think they are a great way of getting at self-control. If you ask me, okay, what will we learn from, you know, studies that have not only tasks but questionnaires, not only questionnaires that Katie answers, but, you know, her husband Cullen answers about her and, you know, friends who know her well? Then you actually have a really strong measure because you have a composite. In studies like that, I'm thinking of one in particular that was published around 2011 by Temi Moffett and a bunch of collaborators. When you follow up people and you have a good composite measure of their self-control, you can ask questions like, which is more important, self-control or IQ?

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Which is more important, your self-control or your socioeconomic status in society? And what that landmark study of a representative sample of, I think it was young people in New Zealand who were followed throughout life, is that self-control emerges as, at least as predictive as IQ. And also, I believe in that study, as predictive as your socioeconomic background. So when you go all the way back to Freud and you wonder why a young, brilliant psychologist like Walter Michel would spend his whole career trying to study one personal quality, I think it's because it is an everyday dilemma.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  And I do think our ability to navigate it does influence how much money we'll save, how much money we'll make, the quality of our friendships, the quality of our romantic relationships, our academic performance, how far we get with our education, and more. So not the easiest thing to measure, but not impossible. Not the only thing that matters in life, but one very, very important thing.

• 8:27Katy Milkman?

  Yeah, that was an amazing summary. I want to pivot a little bit from talking about the trait aspect of it, which we're going to come back to, but to talking about the topic we love.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, change?

• 8:38Katy Milkman?

  Yes. We study change together. We're always trying to help people make their lives better and figure out, how do I do more with what I've got? What can people do with their fixed self-control to improve? How can they have better outcomes?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  You know, Walter Michel was such an interesting psychologist because when people hear about the marshmallow test, and it's been written up, you know, in the New York Times, you know, Colbert Report, it's a kind of like entered popular consciousness. And when, when you just tell someone, oh, by the way, the number of seconds a young child can, can wait for a larger treat when, you know, given the choice between a smaller and a larger treat, like, wow, it does seem to be saying something. They immediately think about more self-controlled children and less self-controlled children. It does seem like a fixed thing and that it's kind of your destiny to live a good life or a bad life, depending on your ability to delay gratification in a way that won't change. And the interesting and I think underappreciated thing about Walter Michel is that he really

• 9:39Speaker 00

  spent his entire career trying to understand, under what circumstances can we delay more? And what are the learnable strategies that you can learn when you're four, or three, or five, or 43, or 83? And one of the most important things Walter found was right there in the delay of gratification experiment itself, because what he typically would do is he would have two conditions, a treatment condition and a control condition. So for example, all of the kids are trying to delay gratification, but in the treatment condition, he would flip the tray over, because the, you know, you've got a little tray in front of you, it's two marshmallows on one side, one marshmallow on the other, but it

• 10:23Speaker 00

  has like a lip, you know, on the side. So he would flip the tray over in the treatment condition. So you are the same physical distance away from the marshmallows and everything is the same, except for you now can't see them, you can't smell them, you can't touch them. I mean, they're under the tray. That's treatment. And the control condition is just, you know, the way the test usually is, which is, you know, the tray is up and you can see the marshmallows. Under those conditions, children, the same children, really, can wait twice as long, right? And so one of the strategies that Walter, and you know, I study that- And you know, I'm also slightly obsessed with it is a situation modification, right, that you can make small, physical changes to change how tempting a situation is.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  And without increasing your executive function or, you know, changing your brain. I mean, you could just make it twice as easy to do what's good for you in the long run. So that was one strategy, and he spent a lot of time studying cognitive strategies as well. But I think the summary insight, I remember, I remember emailing him. So I sidled up to him. He was not my PhD advisor. I just, you know, desperately wanted to work with him. So I was like, hi, I'm Angela and I love you. Can you please work with me? And he was very patient. And so I remember once I emailed him and I said, Walter, can I say that the most important discovery about self-control is that it can be taught? Can I say that you said that? And he wrote back and he was like, sure.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  So, so I now say that he said that because I have his permission. But I really do think if you look at the arc of his work and all the experiments he ran, and all the treatment versus control and, and what he theorized, you know, as I said, he lived into his 90s, he was thinking very hard about self-control all the way through, was that mostly we can learn it, you know? For the most part, this is something we can change.

• 12:15Katy Milkman?

  Yeah. And I love that message. And I know it's something we both think about a lot. For those who are listening, some examples that might come to mind are sort of, you know, put your phone away, which is something you're thinking about constantly.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Yes, something I'm like telling teenagers across America. I'm like, put your phone in another room, put it in a drawer. Like, yeah, the farther, I, I, I've done a national study with Gallup, right? So it's a nationally representative sample of teenagers across the United States. And the summary insight is the farther your phone, the higher the GPA. So we asked young people, like, you have a big test? Where do you keep your phone? Like, really, where do you keep your phone? And, you know, one answer is, well, I keep it face up next to me with the sound on, like, so I could like, you know, make sure I don't miss any notifications. Then there's a, well, I keep it next to me, but it's, you know, face down and it's sound off. Then they're sort of like, well, like, you know, I keep. It, you know, within real, so it, all these gradations and the last one is I keep it in

• 13:10Speaker 00

  another room altogether. And, and that's where we, you know, can graph, you know, distance from your phone and GPA. And I recently, you know, shared this with our incoming Wharton undergraduates and I had them raise their hand, you know, how many of you keep it, you know, in position one, how many of you can, you know, I had these pictures. And I will tell you at the end, when a few hands go up, right, just a few, how many of you keep it in another room, I can see the hands because there are so few of them. And I, you know, ask the student like, and, you know, almost always, and certainly when these students answer, is that I can't do it myself. I need to change the situation to make this easier. And I think that's what very

• 13:52Speaker 00

  wise people do. They don't try to use willpower because they know that willpower is fallible, something we also violently agree about. And, and so this trick of situation modification that you can learn when you're four, but you can certainly learn when you're, you know, 54. Like, I think this is actually one of the most important things that we should learn from Walter's discoveries.

• 14:14Katy Milkman?

  So important and hopefully really useful to everyone listening. And not just with your phone, right? You can do it with, with the food in your house that you don't want to see, you can do it.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Want to eat it less?

• 14:22Katy Milkman?

  At work.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Push it away, hide it.

• 14:23Katy Milkman?

  Right.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Want to eat it more?

• 14:25Katy Milkman?

  The people you don't want to text in the middle of the night, take them off your contacts list, right?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 14:29Katy Milkman?

  Create friction. So it's everywhere. I want to talk a little bit about differences across domains in life and self-control. So I certainly know people who are incredibly self-controlled at work, but really struggle with self-control, maybe in their personal lives. And one question I have is sort of, how common is that? Is self-control a trait that we should think of as, you know, I am a, I'm a seven in everything? Because I, you know, took the marshmallow test or I took your questionnaire? Or is it something that varies and we can think of as differing across parts of our lives?

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Early in my career, I had a graduate student named Eli Tsukiyama, and he had the exact same question. He said, you know, if you're a seven, are you a seven everywhere? Or are you sometimes a four and sometimes a 10? And so we did something very simple, which is we made a very long questionnaire about all of the places that one needs self-control. And we did this by asking people, like, where do you fail in your own self-control? And then we made this catalog. For a while, we called it the Seven Deadly Sins Study, because it looked like there were seven categories. And then I think it ended up being eight. Very inconvenient. But anyway, there are categories that are familiar to us, like food, like alcohol and drugs. Porn, that showed a strong gender difference. You can guess which way it went.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  There's gambling. There is impulse shopping. There's also emotion dysregulation, right? Like something, okay, confession here. My domain of greatest struggle is probably my temper, which you don't get to see much, because we are not married. And you are not my daughter. But talk to my daughters and my husband. They'll be like, oh, my gosh, mom is like a volcano. Usually, she looks like a mountain, but occasionally, there's an eruption. So there are these different domains. And when we ask people, like, oh, do you do this? Do you do that? What we find is that people vary so much between one domain and another. For me, for example, I just told you, and it's true. I really do struggle with my temper.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  So when I'm really mad, it's like wild horses. I just like, just, I find it very, very hard to regulate what I say, regulate what I do, to not throw objects, you know, to not do things that honestly, I regret, like moments later. However, if you ask me, like, well, how hard is it for you to regulate eating? Right? Or drinking? Right? I don't think you've ever seen me finish a glass of wine. I'm like, I don't have any... Desire, really, and that's what Eli and I discovered. So not only do people vary considerably across the domains of life, how self-controlled they are, but the key is, because we asked them a bunch of other questions, is that it's not that they're better at suppressing impulses in some domains than others, it's

• 17:15Speaker 00

  that the very impulses themselves are weaker or stronger for them. And it can be very idiosyncratic. So the name of the game when it comes to self-control is that not only can you change it and learn strategies that you can apply to every domain of life, there is inherently a lot of variability within your current situation. And one way to have more self-control is to simply avoid certain temptations or domains, like you know that your Achilles' heel lies in a certain domain, and you just kind of arrange your life so that you're not... And I'll just use one example that's not personal, but alcoholics try not to hang out in bars, you know?

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Like, if you are really struggling with drinking, struggling with drinking in a bar is not the domain or the location where you can be successful.

• 18:04Katy Milkman?

  And I think I remember you telling me at some point that one way to think about it is that actually, if you look within a person, and tell me if I'm misremembering this, but if you look within a person, sometimes you see as much variability within them in self-control strength across these different contexts as you would across people. Is that a reasonable thing?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  In the study, yes, yes, exactly. In the study that Eli and I did, it wasn't even like one-to-one, it wasn't like, oh, there's as much variability within a person as there is across people. It was more like five-to-one. I mean, there was so much more variability within a given person across the different domains of their life than there was between people, right? Sort of like Hades' average self-control versus mine, et cetera. To put it more poetically, the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who spent a lot of time reflecting on, as he wrote an essay in French, of course, on his inconsistencies, right? And he had observed that he could be calm in one situation and completely dysregulated in another.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  He said he could be brave in certain situations, but a coward in another, a giver in one situation, a taker in another. And he said, you know, we are more unlike ourselves than we are unlike other people. And I think that really captures what not only my study, but many others, Will Friesen and others who, you know, do research where they kind of ask people like, where are you? What are you doing? And like, now answer all these questions on, you know, among other things, self-control, but also, you know, how talkative are you right now? Like, how confident are you right now? How tired are you? Right, like, you know, and there's just so much more variability in our personalities in general within ourselves. I mean, there is a, there is an angry Katie and a calm Katie.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  There is a studious Katie and a lazy Katie. And so, so again, I think this insight is not just an academic insight. If we recognize that, then we can put ourselves in the situations that bring out our best.

• 20:03Katy Milkman?

  Agreed.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  You know, I've been thinking about this for, what, like years?

• 20:08Katy Milkman?

  Well, actually, that brings me to my next question, which I think I've never asked you, Angela, which is, what first got you interested in studying self-control?

• 20:15Speaker 00

  If I go all the way back to, I know you went to graduate school right, right out of college, which I find, you know, mind blowing and I'm jealous because, you know, I'm, I'm chronologically older than you and I, I'm, I'm also late to the game of academia because I went to graduate school when I was 32. And I spent a decade between college graduation and my first day of my PhD program in psychology, mostly in education. So I did some, you know, work at McKinsey and others, but I was mostly a classroom teacher. So I spent a lot of time with kids going through puberty, trying to get them to learn algebra. And that was, you know, a PhD in psychology right there.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  And for me, I think one of the first insights that never left me as a, as a motivator, as a muse for the research that I do now, is that you don't have to spend much time with, I mean, you know, you've got a young son. I, I've spent a lot of time with undergraduates as you have. Young people have great Brains. Are they all Einstein? No, they are not all Einstein. But their brains are like their knees and their hips. They work better than ours do, right? I mean, they're just smart. They're smart enough to learn algebra. And I knew within days that the kids I was teaching were smart enough because I saw them learning other things that were a lot harder. So for me, there was a puzzle, which is like,

• 21:41Speaker 00

  hey, you're smart enough to learn what I put on the blackboard, but you just failed my test again. And I think it didn't take me long to realize that what they were really struggling with was not the material at an intellectual level, but with that dilemma of, you know, I could study right now. I could pay attention to what you're saying in class right now. But there is something else that I could do that is more immediately pleasurable. So self-control as a teacher seemed to me at the crux of success and failure in school. And when I did become a psychologist, it was the very first thing that I came to study. I wasn't studying grit. I came to my PhD advisor, Marty Seligman,

• 22:24Speaker 00

  and said, I want to study the ability to delay gratification and to do hard things now that are not the most fun thing you can do in the moment.

• 22:33Katy Milkman?

  I actually didn't know you came planning to study self-control and not grit. So I'm glad to know that. It's funny how we fill in, backfill these stories since we met mid-career. But I actually want to ask you to distinguish between those two things. So many listeners, if not all, will be familiar with your incredible book, Grit, and your incredible work on grit, which I think, hopefully, I'm defining correctly as passion and perseverance towards long-term goals.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:56Katy Milkman?

  I just wanted to ask you to distinguish between grit and self-control. What's the difference between these constructs and what they predict?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  So I'll tell you the story of how this happened. And hopefully, this will distinguish between these very close cousins that are self-control and grit. So easily confused, I think, very related, but not the same. So I get to graduate school and I say to my advisor, Marty, I'm going to go do this. And, you know, you asked me earlier, like, how do you measure self-control? That was the first thing I asked myself. I was like, OK, now that I'm here, like, how do I measure self-control? So I, you know, made up a kind of- A marshmallow test for teenagers. So I said, here's a dollar. If you want to like have the dollar right away, you can. But if you want to give it back to me, I'll come back in two weeks and I'll give you $2. Right? So we saw which teenagers, you know, picked what. By the way, that was correlated with all the other measures of self-control that we

• 23:45Speaker 00

  had, like questionnaires that they answered and their parents and their teachers. We created a summary score. We found that self-control predicted their end of year report card grades in middle school in Philadelphia as well, actually better than their IQ score. So that was sort of my start. I was really thinking about Freud. I was thinking about the Delve gratification work that Walter had done. I was trying to do it in teenagers. It confirmed my hypothesis that I had from when I was a teacher. But around the end of the first year, my advisor, Marty, and I were having conversations about doing hard things that are even harder than learning algebra, like winning the Nobel

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Prize, like winning multiple gold medals, like scaling Everest, like founding a company, like really hard things. And in our conversations, it became clear to me that it could be that there's something that is like self-control, but is not the same thing. Why? Well, when I started to interview people who were at the top of their game, which is where I began, I was like, I don't know, just go and call some people who were the best, you know? Go talk to an Olympian, go talk to a CEO. I found that many of them were not classically self-controlled in the sense of like, oh, I'm really good at reining in my impulses. I, you know, arrange my whole life so that I don't have to encounter temptation.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Sometimes they were, often they were, but sometimes not quite. What really came through in these interviews was they had an incredible passion for what they were doing, a kind of voluntary obsession. They used words that you would use for a lover, you know? Like, I'm devoted, I'm loyal, I love this. Kobe Bryant, when he, you know, reflected on his basketball career, wrote, you know, wrote, and I mean wrote, like he wrote the screenplay for a documentary. It's like, dear basketball, it's a love letter to basketball. I gave you my heart. I gave you my all. You know, love Kobe, XOXO. So I was like, okay, this is not quite the same thing as self-control and delayed gratification.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And the other thing is there is a quality about grit, which is about stamina for the very long run. In self-control, in that moment, you are wrestling with a decision and you are victorious. Grit is on a time scale of months, years, decades, and sometimes a lifetime. So I think these are related, right? They're both about goals, right? They're both about achieving something. They are about the future. But I think self-control is where you have a little war inside yourself. You know, there's wise Katie and foolish Katie, or Katie who wants to stay in bed a little longer, Katie who knows that she should get up.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  With grit, it's really about having an abiding devotion to something that is intrinsically motivating and working at it, you know? Doing the work every day for a very, very long time.

• 26:47Katy Milkman?

  I love that. And I think your research points to very similar solutions, actually, that changing our situation on the long-term scale is also helpful.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, in less obvious ways, right? Because with the phone, you're like, oh, we'll put it in another room. I mean, you know, people usually, by the way, figure this out, right? Like, people figure out that if they put their phone in a drawer, if they charge it in another room when they go to bed. I mean, they figure out. But I think in a less obvious way, also for grit, right? So if you ask me, like, is grit genetic? I'll say, sure. And then if you ask me, like, but is it learned? I'll say, sure, because that's true of self-control, grit, extroversion, and as we know, name it, right? So everything about us is nature and nurture. The nurture part of grit is, I think, putting yourself in situations that will incline you to express and to develop passion and perseverance. I'll say something from this very morning.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  So before this conversation, I had another conversation with the founder of this program called City Year. And it's a kind of a domestic Peace Corps, right? And if you've ever seen the volunteers in their red jackets that have like a little sun on them, that's City Year. And something we agreed on was just this observation that we'd come to independently that for someone to really develop, to have passion and perseverance, they need a mentor, right? Like, we couldn't think of a single person that we had ever seen grow up to be a hardworking, dedicated, human being who loved what they did, who didn't have a mentor, a beloved tennis coach, an amazing, for me, you know, sophomore and senior year high

• 28:23Speaker 00

  school English teacher, right? I wouldn't be a writer if I didn't have Mr. Carr, right? Mr. Carr took a ditzy cheerleader who mostly wanted to have keg parties and be popular, and introduced her to the love of words that she has today. So, that's a situation less obvious than like, hey, put your phone in the drawer. Like, maybe you can unplug it and put it in a different room. But, but I think you can change your situation by, for example, sidling up to the older, wiser people in your field, the Walter Michelles that you would do anything to work with. Well, introduce yourself. I, I think, I think being in each other's orbit has changed us, right? Like, you are my academic BFF. I am 25% more efficient because I'm like, oh, I'm gonna do that. Like, whatever Katie does,

• 29:06Speaker 00

  do that. You'll be 25% more efficient. So, so I think there are ways in which people can change their situation to bring out their grit.

• 29:13Katy Milkman?

  I love that. And I was gonna say, Angela, I sidled up to you, and it brought out.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Well, we sidled up to each other.

• 29:18Katy Milkman?

  It has been so wonderful. Okay, I have to ask you questions about how do we apply this, and, and then I'll wrap up. So, what do you do differently in your life? In particular, after studying self-control, what, what are some of the big takeaways that you use, you know, as a parent, as a mentor, as a leader of organizations, as a spouse? How do you, how do you behave differently?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  So, Jason, my husband, hates this, but I really wanted to get to bed at a regular time. So, all the sleep specialists tell you, and you know I don't sleep very well. I'm like, is it because I'm middle-aged? Is it because I do not sleep very well? So, I need every advantage, right? So, so one of the things that all sleep specialists tell you is that you should have a consistent bedtime. But, like many people, when it comes to bedtime, I'm like, oh, I'll just check 25 more emails. Like, I'll just get to inbox zero. Like, I'll just, you know, I'll just like tidy up the counter, and I'll just like look. So, you know, 10 o'clock becomes 10:30, and, you know, and then suddenly it's 11:30, and now I'm off my schedule. So, I programmed Alexa. To say like, Angela, it's time for bed at exactly 10:00 PM. It goes off seven days a week.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  And then I can't figure out how to make Alexa not say it twice. So to Jason's continual annoyance, like at 10 o'clock on the dot, Alexa says, Angela, it's time for bed. And then a second later, Angela, it's time for bed. And do I, you know, hop out of my seat and like, you know, start brushing my teeth? Like, no, but I will tell you that little nudge works. And there is something about just being told that it's time. First of all, sometimes I lose track of time and I'm like, oh, it's 10 o'clock. Like, whoa, how did that happen? And I guarantee you, and I guarantee Jason, that that situational little hack, right, is helping me, right? And so that's why I haven't unprogrammed it. I'm like, you know what, honey? I need this. Like, so, you know, he's good humored. So that's a kind of really obvious and simple thing. And I think other people have, you know, their other tricks.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  You know, almost everybody I know now knows about temptation bundling, that work that you've done, showing that, well, if you have trouble working out, you know, go watch, you know, Jennifer Aniston's latest Netflix series or, you know, like your favorite podcast or like get into your gym clothes before you, you know, do anything else. Because once you're in your gym clothes, you're like, okay, fine. I'll like, I'll go work out. So I have a lot of situational hacks that way. So for me, from the trivial to, you know, the most important things in my life, I am trying to use my situation as my ally.

• 31:48Katy Milkman?

  I love that. If you could offer one final piece of advice to our listeners about how they can do the most with the self-control genes they've got, what would your advice to them be?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  For a lot of my life, when things weren't going well, I would say, you know, what is wrong with me? You know, and when Americans do this, by the way, because the American Psychological Association actually polled people and they asked them about New Year's resolutions. And as you and I both know, you know, many, many, many of them don't work out. And what Americans say is some version of what I'd say is like, they blame themselves for a lack of willpower, right? Lack of this kind of like inner fortitude to do the hard thing. And I used to say to myself, as Young woman, like, what's wrong with me? Right? Like, I'm not getting this work done. What's wrong with me? And now I say, what's wrong with my situation? Right? Like, this isn't getting done. Like, I keep procrastinating. What's wrong with my situation? Is the task undefined? Do I need more advice?

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Am I not sleeping enough? Like, what's wrong with my situation? And I feel like it is a much more productive question to ask because it leads you to solutions. Right? Whereas what's wrong with me tends to lead you with just a lot of self-hatred and a lot of, I'll use more willpower next time. And that, of course, as we both know, doesn't work.

• 33:10Katy Milkman?

  I love that as a place to wrap. I just want to thank you for taking the time to do this. As always, it's such a pleasure to talk.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yay.

• 33:17Katy Milkman?

  There's no one I enjoy talking with about science more. Angela, I really appreciate you spending the time with me today.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Thank you. I love this conversation. Let's do it again.

• 33:25Katy Milkman?

  I look forward to it.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/choicology.