Transcriber: Nguyễn Mai Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
Hi, everyone.
My name is Zofia, and today I’m going to be talking about failure.
It’s a fun topic.
Now, before I start, I’d like to ask you all a question.
With a show of hands,
how many of you made New Year’s resolutions this year?
A couple of people. It’s good.
How many of you were successful?
(Laughs)
Yeah, me neither.
I have this list of resolutions I try to stick to each year.
You know, the usual: eating healthy, sleeping more,
spending less money, exercising more.
But by the third of January,
I just sit back on my couch
after a shopping spree to every mall in Belgium,
stuffing chips down my throat and watching a rom-com.
I’ll probably fall asleep too.
And I think to myself,
it’s not like I don’t want to change these habits.
It’s not like I’m unaware
that they’re having a negative impact on my health, on my life.
I want to become a better person.
I want to be happy with my health, with my life, with my choices.
I want to become this sort of utopian version of myself.
A superhuman.
You know, I bet if I became her,
I’d have the answer to everything.
I’d be unstoppable.
But unfortunately, motivated people like you and I,
we fail time and time again to meet our goals.
And year after year of failures and disappointments,
I just want to know:
What are we doing wrong?
Why can't we change our habits?
Why can't we reinvent ourselves
and become this near perfect version of ourselves?
Let’s start at the beginning.
I mean, there must be some reason for why we want to change ourselves
in the first place.
Maybe we’re finally feeling the effect of a bad diet.
Maybe we’re trying to compensate for a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy.
Maybe we just want something different.
But I think there’s one factor that outshines all of them -
wanting a fresh start,
a clean slate,
a new chance to live the life that you think you deserve.
It’s exciting starting new things:
a new year, a new chapter in your life,
a new day even.
Well, maybe not Mondays, but you get the picture.
We can prove that the so-called fresh start effect exists
by looking at some data.
These are statistics from Google Trends.
They basically describe the popularity of a given search term
over a period of time.
They’re also used in professional work by psychologist Katherine Milkman
when researching this effect.
Here you can see the popularity of the term “diet”
over the New Year’s period.
As you can see, there’s a big spike in the middle.
That’s January.
Let’s take a more striking example.
Here you can see the popularity of the search term “gym membership”
over the past five years.
And these few intervals here and there,
that’s January.
Three quarters of all gym memberships are taken out in January.
And companies know this.
This is why there’s an increase in advertisements targeted towards us.
It’s about healthy food alternatives
or that new fitness studio
that just happened to open around your block.
Because they want to take advantage of that early January motivation
because they know that most likely you won’t make it to February.
So why don't we make it to February?
Well, in my opinion, it is a matter of incentives.
We do not have the proper tools, the proper incentives to motivate us.
We can use a very famous metaphor to visualize this.
Imagine a farmer who owns a donkey.
He wants this donkey to move around
and spin a wheel that grinds grain into wheat that he can then sell.
But the donkey is lazy.
The donkey doesn’t want to move.
The farmer needs to incentivize the donkey to move.
For this, he has the stick, and he has the carrot.
The stick represents the fear of being punished
for acting against the goals you’re supposed to be working towards.
Imagine bad grades, detention
or a very scary, passive-aggressive email from your teacher
and how that impacts your work at school.
Then the carrot -
that’s the rewards you get for all of your hard work.
Think of studying and then getting a good grade.
We get motivated through the plausibility of both scenarios.
We want to avoid the threat and gain the reward.
But with personal goals like New Year’s resolutions, for example,
the threat is not credible, and the reward is too small
and too far away.
Take wanting to exercise more as an example.
The threat would be that the prospect of illness,
bad health,
bad posture when you get older.
The reward would be good health
and maybe some muscles that you can show off to your friends.
But the issue is that you will only see
the result of your action or inaction in the long run.
And besides, if you're both the donkey and the farmer all at once,
then you’re more likely to call it a day after just one squat.
There’s no third-party motivation.
But still, you will walk to the mirror,
lift up your shirt a little, see if those abs are coming in.
They’re not.
You put so much work into this,
and you gain nothing out of it in the short term.
And this is frustrating to you,
and you completely ignore
that it will probably pay off in the long run.
We face similar difficulties
with any other resolutions that we tried to make.
Like trying to eat healthier, drink less,
get more organized, smoke less, spent less.
And it’s a bit difficult to understand why we have this difficulty.
I mean, they’re called bad habits for a reason, right?
They’re bad.
It's in our best interest to try to break them.
And don’t we also feel good when we eat a salad,
or when we exercise more?
Well, besides the obvious addicting factor of smoking or drinking,
we are also anchored to other people’s expectations of us.
When you are labeled as a fun, outgoing person
that you can have a drink or two with,
you’re more likely to subconsciously tweak your behavior to fit this narrative.
A label, a rumor translates into behavior which translates into actions -
going to parties -
which translates into the fulfillment of the original label or rumor.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And the pressure to conform to this label is immense,
especially if it comes from your close friends.
If you only see them in the smokers’ corner,
it seems unimaginable for you to tell them that you’re quitting smoking.
You’ve sunk costs into this, right?
You’ve built up these friendships.
And now you want to introduce conflict.
It seems as if you’re not the one in control over your own actions,
as if there’s an external force keeping you from changing yourself -
even though that's not true.
Attempting new things, meeting new people
and stepping outside of your comfort zone
is anxiety inducing.
And you would much rather avoid it
and stay in your nice and consistent routine.
Because we’re scared.
We’re scared that once we try something new,
we will regret it.
We will regret it because we won’t be successful,
because others will judge us, or because we just won’t like it.
And so to protect our own pride
and to avoid looking like a big, fat failure,
we tend to sabotage ourselves.
We say,
“Oh, I have so much work this week I couldn’t possibly exercise.”
And for this, it is not our own inability,
our own lack of willpower that fails us
but rather a circumstance beyond our control.
And if we do actually manage to achieve our goals -
Hurrah!
We did it despite the odds that we set ourselves.
Of course, there are also other reasons
why you would want to avoid a certain activity or habit.
Maybe you’ve been conditioned to avoid it.
Personally, I’ve always avoided anything to do with gym or exercise.
In school, I was never very athletic.
And as someone who always likes to, well, appear strong in front of others
or shoot for the moon in anything I did,
this reminded me of a weakness I had.
And even though actually practicing sports
would have probably lifted it,
I just couldn’t accept it.
And it’s still something that I struggle with.
There’s one more thing I would like to touch on,
and it has to do with how our modern societies operate.
I will be referring to the work
of psychologist Barry Schwartz for this one.
He defines the modern dogma of our societies as
“The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.”
And this makes sense, right?
We want to give every individual as many possibilities,
as many options as possible
from simple things like brands of pasta
to larger things like universities or job opportunities.
This way, everyone can make the choice that is right for them.
The issue arises:
In a society in which choice is maximized to this fullest extent
that we need a lot of energy to evaluate all of these possibilities,
what are the hypothetical trade-offs?
Right?
What is the option that will maximize my satisfaction?
I will not rest
until I get the best product with the best price to become the best.
This is an entire level above perfectionism.
This is maximization.
Perfectionists work tirelessly
to achieve a plausible form of perfection
within the constraints that are imposed on them.
Maximizers disregard those.
I would consider myself a maximizer in certain regards.
For example, I am completely incapable of online shopping.
I can go to a mall.
That’s no problem for me, right?
Because the choice is limited.
But online,
I have thousands upon thousands of websites and products
that I can choose from.
Consumer reviews and advertisements are just bombarded on to me.
And I can spend hours just reading through it all
and not come to a conclusion.
And if I do finally find something that I like,
I hover above the order button,
and I think,
“Ha, what if I have a really, really good idea tomorrow?
Let me just sleep on it, let’s just sleep on it, it’s fine.”
And in the end, I don’t buy anything,
and I’ve wasted all of this energy and time, and gained nothing.
Now, I understand that not everybody is like me,
but it is true
that even if you are looking for just “good enough”
and not “the best,”
you might still feel some sort of anxiety
when looking for all of these possibilities.
Yes.
From all of these possibilities,
it only becomes a problem
once all of the opportunity cost builds up,
and none of the alternatives seem attractive anymore.
So let’s sum up.
You want to conform with your friend group.
You want to avoid unfamiliar or anxiety inducing situations.
You have a lot of choice from brands to products to prices.
And in the end,
you will only see the result of all of this hard work in the long run.
I mean this seems tough.
I mean maybe I should just give up.
Honestly, I mean what’s the point, really?
It’s going to take so much effort.
Maybe not yet.
I would love to believe
that I can become this sort of superhuman version of myself
that knows exactly what to do in any given circumstance,
that is completely happy with her life.
But that’s just not going to happen.
I’m only human.
We are trapped on a treadmill
where once the passing thrill of a new activity
a new habit, a new lifestyle finally passes,
we end up right back where we started from -
unfulfilled and unhappy.
This is why consumerism exists,
why cosmetic surgery is a thing.
Because we cannot be happy with what we already have,
with who we already are.
But just sitting here not doing anything,
this seems almost worse than trying and failing.
At least with every try,
you do change something
about yourself, about your surroundings.
You become just a little bit happier, just a little bit closer to your goals.
Because let’s not forget that despite the odds,
people do achieve them.
But it takes a lot of hard work and just a little bit of luck.
And this is a question of the right incentives
and the right choices.
Don’t try to save the world directly.
You need smaller milestones.
Take a friend to motivate you, and go save a turtle.
Baby steps.
Try to have fun,
and keep in mind why you wanted to do this in the first place.
Maybe then you’ll have a bit more success in your life.
Thank you and good luck.