How to Change by Katy Milkman

Author:Katy Milkman [Milkman, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

DAY IN AND DAY OUT

We all know Ben Franklin as a Founding Father, philosopher, scientist, writer, printer, and, perhaps most famously, as the man whose kite first harnessed electricity. I’m particularly enamored of him since he founded the University of Pennsylvania, where I work, and was a pretty savvy behavioral scientist on the side. (Who can disagree with “Haste makes waste” or “Well done is better than well said”?)

In his late teens, however, Franklin spent a couple of years as a philandering wastrel in London. He spent frivolously, overindulged at the local taverns, and generally engaged in debauchery. It wasn’t until his voyage home to Philadelphia, during which his ship hit some unlucky currents that lengthened the trip from a few weeks to more than two months, that he reportedly made a plan to turn himself around.

All that extra time for reflection apparently helped young Ben Franklin decide to make a fresh start. Famously, he developed a careful strategy for cultivating a set of virtues that he thought would lead to a productive and fulfilling life. With the goal of turning righteous behavior into a habit, Franklin created a system of charts to track his daily success or failure in exhibiting thirteen different virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He would penalize failures with a black mark and reward successes with a nice blank slate. As history shows, Franklin did manage to make something of himself, after all (to put it mildly). Perhaps his charts are partially responsible.

Roughly three hundred years later, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld swears by a similar philosophy. Because most jokes are mediocre, and it takes many tries to produce a good one, Seinfeld has committed himself to generating a new joke every day, and he charts his progress much as Franklin did. Seinfeld’s motto is “Don’t break the streak.”

Ben Franklin and Jerry Seinfeld are interesting case studies for many reasons. First, both recognized the power of habit and saw that to create new habits, they would have to repeat their actions again and again.

Second, both men religiously tracked their efforts. Research suggests that by tracking your exercise, your joke production, or even your virtuousness, you’ll increase your chances of changing your behavior. That’s in part because tracking a behavior helps you avoid forgetting to do it until it becomes second nature. It’s also a nice way to ensure you celebrate your successes and hold yourself accountable for failure. When your successes and failures are right there in your face, it’s difficult not to feel proud when you’ve done what you set out to do, and a little ashamed when you haven’t.

Both Ben Franklin and Jerry Seinfeld also worried a lot about lapses in their routines. Recent research suggests that anything more than a short lapse in a behavior we hope to make habitual (say, multiple missed visits to the gym rather than just one) can be costly. Seinfeld’s mantra “Don’t break the streak” is astute. It also helps explain the logic behind twenty-eight-pill packages of birth control.

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