The Psychology Of Human Motivation - Ayelet Fishbach - #447

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ayelet Fishbach. She's a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago and an author. The ability to motivate ourselves to do the things we want to do and stop doing the things we don't would be a superpower. Sadly, motivation tends to be fleeting if it's not outright elusive, and relying on YouTube motivational speeches can only help so much. Today, expect to learn why your goal setting is probably all wrong, why plans to not do something are much less likely to succeed, how to overcome motivation dips, how to deal with negative feedback, why you shouldn't rely on willpower and self-control, the solution to juggling multiple goals at once, and much more. This is one of the fundamental modern human problems, as far as I can see it. We want ourselves to do a thing tomorrow, and yet, when we wake up, we find ourselves not doing it, despite the fact that we know that we want to. So having somebody that understands the psychology, the actual mechanisms that are going on that underpin how we're motivated, is incredibly useful. So if you listen and take the notes from this, hopefully you will be able to stick to your New Year's resolutions and continue to do whatever it is that you're trying to do. Ayelet's insights are a little bit counter to some of the things I'd probably predicted in advance, but also very, very robustly research. So yeah, apply these things and hopefully life will get a bit better tomorrow. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Ground News. The world is incredibly difficult to navigate and work out what's going on at the moment. News sources are basically impossible to trust. Have they got an agenda? Have they got a bias? Working out what's going on is incredibly difficult. And Ground News helps you to cut through the noise and actually find some signal. For every breaking news story, they'll show you which media outlets are reporting on the issue and where they fall on the political spectrum. So you can instantly spot media bias, you discover stories outside of your echo chamber, and get some clarity in an increasingly chaotic online world. The Ground News website and app helps you to compare headlines from left, center and right sources with a single swipe. And their blind spot feed will show you stories that are not being reported on by one side of the political spectrum. So if you just want to make your sense making and news consumption easier, Ground News is a fantastic place to start. You can get it from as little as $9.99 per year. It will give you 50,000 local, national and international news sources. It's got detailed bias comparison engine. And the favorite thing that I've got is that you can track your bias over time. They've got this MyBias feature thing that tells you where your news consumption is coming from. I have no idea how they do it, but it's really interesting to look at what your feed is telling you. You think that you've got this perfectly neutral consumption of news and you realize that no, you don't at all. And the Ground News websites just hit you in the face with it. To get all of your news in one place, go to ground.news.modernwisdom to download the Ground News app or install the browser extension to make sure that you're seeing the full picture online. That's ground.news.modernwisdom.
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