Interview by Doug Brod

First, you have to know what motivation science is. “It’s a relatively new science,” explains behavioral-science professor Ayelet Fishbach. “More people got involved in studying motivation in the ’90s. It happened in psychology and economics. In economics, it was with the rise of behavioral economics and understanding how people might respond to incentives in unexpected ways—why incentives often backfire. For our modern lifestyle, lack of motivation is often the barrier to achieving what we want to in life. We have more opportunities than previous generations—although clearly opportunities are not equal. And the reason we don’t live up to our potential is often motivational. So a lot of the work in social psychology is understanding how to fix that and help people.”

And there are four essential ingredients to getting things done.

“The first thing you need to do is set a goal. Where is it that you are going? What is it that you’re trying to achieve? There are many ways to set goals that work. For example, many people know that if you have a number on a goal, that is more motivating than if it’s just ‘do your best.’ Or if the goal is intrinsic—if it’s the thing that you want to achieve, other than a means to the thing that you want to achieve—then it’s more motivating.

“The second ingredient is sustaining motivation, going from here to there. Learning from feedback, looking back, looking ahead.

“The third element is everything else going on in your life, the multiple goals we constantly aspire to. Sometimes it’s about balancing: I don’t want to give up on my family because I care about my career. Sometimes it’s about prioritizing: It’s more important for me to eat healthily than satisfy my craving for junk food.

“The fourth element is social support. Working with others, collaborating, being inspired by others. It’s impossible to save money if you are married to someone who is not on board with that goal. We need to work with other people. Which [element] is the most important? It’s the one that you are currently missing.”

You can motivate yourself to eat healthier. 

“The most important thing is to find healthy food you like, to find a diet that works for you, because you’ll enjoy food while maintaining that diet. Certain foods may need to be taken off the table quite literally. Other foods need to be introduced. When we ask people to set New Year’s resolutions, many [resolve] to eat healthily. If they decide to eat food they like, three months later they’d still be eating that food. If they tell us they’ll eat certain foods because it’s important for them but they don’t like them, they won’t eat them for more than a month.”

There’s a big difference between a goal and the means to achieve it.

“We don’t like to invest in means: We don’t like to pay for parking, we don’t like to pay for shipping, and we don’t like to talk to the person who will introduce us to the person that we really want to talk to. When we think that something is not the thing itself, our motivation declines.”

As motivational tools go, fantasies don’t work nearly as well as expectations.

“One way to think about goals is to fantasize about fulfilling them. Envision yourself already there on the podium winning the medal. It turns out, when you run the experiments, that fantasizing doesn’t do anything. There were studies with people who were trying to lose weight. Those who were fantasizing about themselves, being attractive in their own mind, were actually doing less work than those who were not fantasizing. Planning—that is, setting expectations—on the other hand, works. Thinking about what you need to do, and how you get from here to there, works. Imagining how wonderful it will be to be there, unfortunately, doesn’t.”

Know the difference between avoidance goals and approach goals.

“An avoidance goal is the goal to not do something—‘Don’t eat that’—as opposed to an approach goal, which is ‘Eat something else.’ An avoidance goal often takes the form of ‘Don’t think about something. Don’t think about your ex. Don’t think about something that makes you afraid.’ Avoidance goals are not completely wrong. They have the advantage that they seem urgent, so they get our attention. But they also seem like a chore, and we don’t stick with chores for long. So avoidance goals tend to be short-lived. And when it [comes] to trying not to think about something, we keep reminding ourselves of that. ‘Don’t think about your ex . . . don’t think about your ex.’ The more you try not to, the more you think about that person. There are many reasons why avoidance goals are not inspiring and very hard to follow. Unless you need to act immediately, try to think about what needs to be approached instead of avoided.”

Emotions can be powerful motivators.

“Emotions are a feedback system. How do you know that you’re doing well? You feel good. How do you know that you are falling behind? You don’t feel very good. Often by consulting our emotions, we know how we are doing. If a relationship makes me feel bad, then I know this relationship is not going well.

“Another way emotions [help us] is that it’s another reward or punishment. I wanted to write a book because I wanted to have a book, but it also made me feel good the days that I was writing a lot, and I made progress. This is some extra reward. You might want to get in shape because it’s good for your health, but going to the gym also makes you feel good on that day. You did what you were supposed to do, and that’s an extra reward.

“The third path is that there are specific emotions for specific goals. If you feel happy, that’s different from feeling proud. Pride is often something that we feel by pursuing the long-term goals, by overcoming some temptation, by doing something that takes a while. Happiness is when the weather is great, I’m with people I like, I just read a good book.”

Intrinsic motivation can often make us very happy.

“When we are intrinsically motivated, we do something as its own end. It is often strange to ask, ‘Why do you do this?’ You do this because you want to do it. The extreme examples for intrinsically motivated activities are going on a vacation, or being with a loved one, or enjoying a meal. I can’t really answer the question of why do I do it. I do it because I want to.

“Then there are the activities that are not intrinsically motivated or are just extrinsically motivated, like undergoing a very unpleasant medical checkup. I do this because I want to be healthy.

“Then there is everything in between. When I go to work, I do it partially because I want to make money. I want to support my family, but I also like my job. I have intrinsic motivation to do it in the sense that I enjoy our conversation. I’m not doing it just to get something else. As it turns out, the more people can be intrinsically motivated, the more they can introduce this immediate benefit—doing something as its own goal—to their daily activities. The more that they are engaged, the more they are in the flow, the more they are motivated to do something. If you can make healthy food intrinsically motivating, you will eat it.”

Making progress can increase your commitment to a goal, but the lack of progress can be just as motivating. 

“You can monitor your progress—knowing where you are—in two ways. You can look back and say, ‘This is how much I’ve done since I’ve started.’ This is the glass half-full. Or you can look forward and say, ‘This is everything I still need to do.’ This is the glass half-empty. If you do this strategically, you can increase your motivation. If you’re still at the beginning of something, you’re unsure, so you may have some doubts about whether you can do it. Looking back at what you have done increases motivation. If you’re already beyond the halfway point and you are pretty sure that you can get there, then what will increase your motivation is looking ahead at what’s left.

“We ran a study more than 10 years ago with a charity campaign. We found that if you tell new donors about how much money the campaign has already collected, they are much more likely to give. If you tell regular donors how much money you are still missing to meet your goal, they are much more motivated to give. But if you reverse these messages, if you tell the new donors about how much money is missing or the regular donors how much money is already collected, that undermines the motivation.”

While you’re trying to achieve a goal, the middle is often a miserable place to be. 

“How we often refer to the middle problem is initially we were motivated to survive this pandemic, to do well, to keep our jobs until this is over. Toward the end, we see this increased motivation: We are almost there, we can feel the end is in sight. In the middle, when you look back, it looks like it has been forever. When you look forward, it looks like it’s so far away. So daily actions seem kind of pointless. We want to keep middles short.”

Though negative feedback can undermine motivation, you can also use it to your advantage.

“Negative feedback is tricky because it often undermines our motivation, so we often don’t learn from it. It is as if we did not get feedback at all. Even more so, we often learn the wrong message; that is, we’ve learned that it’s not for us. But negative feedback often has good information in it, often better information than positive feedback.

“I get teaching evaluations a few times a year. The positive evaluations tend to be very similar to each other. They tell me that I’m very enthusiastic about what I teach and I am decently organized. The negative feedback tends to be unique. Someone might point to a case that was hard to understand, a problem set that was confusing. But because I am very tempted to just read the ones that I like, I don’t learn from it.”

The support of others is crucial when you’re pursuing goals, but we’re more grateful for someone’s help before they help us, not after.

“We do very few great things by ourselves. So we need others. We’re social animals. We’re more grateful before, because we tend to form connections based on our goals. We connect to people who help us, and they connect with us because we help them. Social connection is about working together to complete goals. It could be at work—when we have a team that works together. It could be as a family—when we raise kids together. It could be when we exercise with people. We look for people that will help us. After the help has been delivered and we go in different ways, often that feeling of connection tends to not be so strong. In the book, I give the example of how much as a parent you feel connected to your kids’ teachers when you need them, when you’re trying to help your child with work. Then when you’re with colleagues, you kind of forget about these people. They were very much part of your life when you were thinking about your child, but not outside this context.”

Don’t be a social loafer. 

“We do very few great things on our own, but as soon as we connect to others, there is the possibility for social loafing, which is to put less of my work in because you are also in the room and you might pick up the slack. When we have a few people in a kayak, we work less hard than when it’s a one-person kayak, when our progress is only on us. Motivation scientists in particular are thinking about how to overcome social loafing, so that groups will be more efficient [and] work together in the best way.

“A few solutions involve identifying contributions. Anonymous contribution leads to more social loafing than identifiable contribution. If there was a way to measure the effort each person put in the kayak, there would be less loafing. If, as a group, my name is attached to my contribution, then I’m less likely to loaf. Another solution is to keep groups smaller, so there is less of a temptation to give it to someone else. The third [solution] is a more cohesive group. With more cohesive groups, there is less tendency to social-loaf. In the family unit, there is usually less social loafing than in a large company.”