How To Change

How to Change — Katy Milkman

In 1994, Andre Agassi was falling apart in slow motion. His world ranking had skidded from seventh to twenty-second to thirty-first. His coach had walked. He was telling friends he hated tennis. Then, at a quiet restaurant in Porto Cervo, his manager set up a dinner with a journeyman named Brad Gilbert, a player who had peaked at fourth in the world and then written a book called Winning Ugly. Fifteen minutes into the meal, Gilbert had already named Agassi's flaw. You try to hit a winner on every ball, he said. You learned it from your father, the Olympic boxer who screamed "hit harder, hit earlier" across the court. Stop thinking about yourself. The guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Make him fail. Better yet, let him fail. Agassi turned to his manager and said, "That's our guy." Months later, Agassi entered the U.S. Open unseeded, scouted every opponent for tells, watched Michael Stich cramp in the final, and walked out the first unseeded champion in twenty-eight years. He went on to hold the world's number one ranking for one hundred and one weeks.

Katy Milkman opens her book with that story because she thinks most advice about change is the tennis version of "hit harder." Eat less. Save more. Try again. Try harder. A generic playbook works on average, the way a generic tennis playbook works on average. But the people who actually change are the ones who scout their own weaknesses first and then build a tactic against each one. Milkman is a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School, an engineer by training who fell into economics through a graduate microeconomics course and discovered that roughly forty percent of premature deaths in the United States trace back to changeable personal behaviors. Smoking. Diet. Drinking. Exercise. Sex. Driving. That single statistic became her career. She runs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative with Angela Duckworth, an effort that gathered more than a hundred researchers across economics, medicine, law, sociology, and computer science to study what actually moves human behavior. This book is her field guide. Each chapter takes one inner opponent — getting started, impulsivity, procrastination, forgetfulness, laziness, low confidence, conformity — and gives you the counterpunch.