March 11, 2024 • 35 mins
We often think adding more things to our lives will make us happier - more trips, more activities, more possessions. Sadly our minds find it hard to comprehend that having less and doing less is usually a better option.
Dr Laurie Santos teams up with economist Tim Harford (host of Cautionary Tales) to examine why we find subtraction so very hard, and share tips for finding happiness by cutting down on our commitments.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I'm doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Tim Harford, and this.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Is another crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And my podcast Cautionary Tales. Laurie, last time I took
the lead, I told you a story about the tensions
between everyone taking a vacation at the same time and
an idea from Stalin's Soviet union, where it was decreed
that workers had to stagger their days off, no matter
what that meant for missing leisure time with their friends
and families. So this time it's the return match, as
(00:47):
it were. So, what cautionary tale of happiness have you
got install for me?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh, it's a good one.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
It's a story of how we're all biased towards action
and how we sometimes struggle to do less, especially when
it involves doing nothing at all. It's a tale that
will take us to where the blue skies start turning
to inky black, because today we're going to go to
the very edge of space. My story today involves one
(01:32):
of my favorite American heroes, Major Charles E. Jaeger, as
a young fighter pilot in World War Two, Chuck not
only shot down a huge number of enemy aircraft but
also successfully evaded the Nazis when he was shot down
over occupied France. During his time on the run, Chuck
helped the French resistance attack German troops and even won
(01:53):
a medal for helping an American pilot cross the snowy
Pyrenees to reach safety in Spain. Chuck was just that
kind of hero, and he didn't chill out during peacetime either.
He kept flying, securing his place in history by traveling
faster than the speed of sound in a rocket powered
aircraft he named Glamorous Glennis in honor of his wife.
(02:16):
Other pilots had perished in their pursuit of this speed record,
but Chuck broke the sound barrier with characteristic nonchalance. He
even failed to tell his team that he'd fallen from
a horse and broke in several ribs just before his
test flight. He probably figured that they wouldn't want to
trust a guy who could barely raise his arms to
fly their expensive experimental aircraft. But none of these stories
(02:37):
explained why Chuck Yeager is a hero to happiness experts
like me. That stems from an incident that took place
later a couple of weeks before Christmas in nineteen fifty three,
Chuck was now piloting an upgraded version of the glamorous Glennis,
the new X one A. The X one A was
built to travel more than twice the speed of sound.
(02:58):
Chuck was excited to try out the new aircraft, especially
since a pilot from the US Navy had recently beaten
his record. Chuck was pretty eager to reclaim his crown
as the fastest man alive. Back then, no one really
knew what would happen to an airplane or a human
body when it reached that velocity in height. The forces
Chuck was about to face were as unprecedented as they
(03:19):
were dangerous. So cut to December twelfth, nineteen fifty three,
Jaeger's tenth flight and the X one A began routinely enough.
Chuck and the X one A got carried high into
the sky by a big bomber plane. The X and
A was then dropped from the belly of the bomber
and Chuck ignited the experimental rocket enter. The X and
(03:39):
A flew upwards fast, but soon started kind of freaking out.
It was pitching and rolling and tumbling. Chuck grappled with
the controls inside the cockpit but nothing the pilot did
seemed to stop the plane's violent descent, and so the
X one A was now plummeting out of the sky
while tossing its poor test pilot around like a rag doll.
(04:03):
At some point, Yaeger was thrown violently into the cockpit's canopy.
He even cracked the plastic with his flight helmet. All
this goes to say this was not a good situation.
In a matter of seconds, the experimental aircraft dropped more
than six miles. Even if Jeger had known how to
stop the X one a's rapid descent, he was two
dazed to operate the controls. Was the plane rolling or spinning?
(04:27):
Chuck had no idea. There was nothing he could do
but surrender to the g forces jostling him in his
seat as the aircraft fell towards the barren Mojave desert below.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Laurie. This is the kind of cliff hangout opening that
my cautionary tails listeners will be familiar with. A doomed
plane and an equally doomed pilot hurtling towards Earth. So
what did Chuck Yeger do?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Nothing?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Nothing, well, mostly nothing, which is why happiness experts like
me loved what happened next. Chuck was known for his
nerves as steel, but this situation had him totally spooked.
He later said that if the X one A had
been fitted with an ejection seat, he would have used it,
but most experts say if he'd done that, there'd be
no way he would have survived. In the parlance of
test pilots, he would have been committing suicide to save
(05:15):
himself from dying. So without any way to escape, Yeager
had two options. Option one, he could do everything in
his power to write his tumbling rocket ship to be fair.
This was what Truck tried to do at the beginning,
but his attempts to use the controls didn't work. At best,
they did nothing, and they also may have made a
bad situation even worse. So once the plane's descent became
(05:36):
too violent, he was forced into option number two. Just
do nothing, just write it out, and that is exactly
what saved him. When the X one A hit about
twenty five thousand feet if finally steady, the aircraft was
still spinning, but it was the kind of spin that
Yeager was familiarate. Once all the nightmarish bucking and tumbling
(05:58):
was over, the veteran test pilot was finally able to
pull up the nose of his craft down to twenty
five that I would want to get back to bank.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
If you listen to Yegger's cockpit recordings, his fear is
very obvious and his relief is palpable. I can't do much.
Before I got it, he knew he was in trouble,
but in the end he was going to make it
home all right. I don't know a thing up or not.
(06:29):
The wild Ride wasn't a total disaster. The X one
A had topped out at mock two point four to four,
and that record was finally enough for Chuck Boy. He
told his team, I'm not going to do that anymore. Well,
Jaeger walked away safely from the X one A and
(06:49):
never flew a wocketplane again.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I love the story, Laurie, and it's definitely a cautionary tale.
But what's the happiness moral of this anecdote?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Well, I first heard this story from one of my
favorite meditation teachers, the psychologist Tara Brack. She shares it
as a cautionary tale. But our usual need to constantly
be in control of every facet of our lives. When
Rafe's with a problem, most of us instinctively want to
take action. We feel the need to do something, even
in cases when we kind of know our actions will
be ineffective or even make stuff worse. Tera says that
(07:22):
in times like this we need to copy the great
Chuck Yeger. We need to pause, take our hands off
the controls, and just let things be. This pause, Tera writes,
gives us a possibility of a new choice.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Now, sitting back isn't something that comes naturally to many
of us, so let's have a think about the ways
in which it could actually be the key to performing
better and feeling happier. When I'm struck by some of
the caution detales that we've had over the years where
doing nothing is in fact precisely the right thing to do,
(07:55):
there's one on the subject of masterly inactivity, which features
Helena Bottom Krter as the formidable Lady Sale. In the
disastrous British Army operations in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century,
this idea of masterly inactivity was raised, and it applied
not just to maybe the British should never have invaded Afghanistan,
(08:16):
which I think, with hindsight is obvious, but also parenting,
maybe we should do less parenting or medicine, maybe doctors
should be doing less, prescribing fewer tests, prescribing fewer treatments.
Even soccer goalkeepers are too committed to being active when
faced with a penalty was in fact they'd be better
off if they stayed Still.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Wait, wait, Tim, as you know I'm an American on
behalf of my fellow Americans, can you just explain what
this penalty kick example is in a little bit more detail.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Sure, I mean, I understand that the joys of soccer
are finding American shaws these days, but maybe not this
particular study. So some I think there were economists who
started that actually looked at what goalkeepers do when faced
with a penalty kick. And basically, in the penalty kick,
the striker gets to try and put the ball in
(09:08):
the net, and they can boot it to the left,
or they can boot it to the right, or they
can bout it straight down the middle, and the goalkeeper
doesn't have much time to react. And so the standard
procedure for a goalkeeper is just to guess it's fifty
to fifty. Just dive to the right or dive to
the left, and you got a fifty percent chance a
going the right way. Even if you do go the
right way, you might not save it. I mean, actually,
(09:30):
most penalties turn into goals. Usually the keeper isn't able
to save it, but there's a lot of pressure on
the keeper to try. So the goalkeeper will usually leap
off to the left or the right. If they leap
in the wrong direction, well, you know, no one blames
them for that. But actually quite a lot of penalty
kicks go fairly close to where the goalkeeper originally was standing.
They go right down the center or near enough to
(09:51):
the center, and you can prove that if the goalkeeper
had not dived either way, they probably would have had
a better chance of saving the penalty kick. They would
also have looked ridiculous if the kick had gone far
to the left or fart of the right, because they
would have looked like they weren't even And so there's
that pressure to act, even when just waiting and standing
(10:14):
still would have been a better thing to do.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah, but I think it's something that's really hard for
our mind. I mean, take the medical case you mentioned.
I've seen the importance of doing nothing in cases where
friends of mine who've had cancer have been advised, well,
rather than do some surgery, rather than do some chemo,
let's just watch and wait. I think this is what
doctors often call nonoperative management or active surveillance, which I
(10:37):
think is a funny term, this idea of active surveillance,
because it feels like there's nothing active about it. It's
complete inaction. You're just kind of sitting there waiting, and
I think people don't like that. I mean, some studies,
especially for some cancer show that this can be really
helpful for dealing with a cancer.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Sometimes you go through chemo and surgery, but there's a
tumor that's going to grow back anyway, and so it
was just like silly to take the risk of doing
all that surgery and chemo. But the idea of just
sitting there and like seeing what your tumor does, it's
just an incredibly scary situation for people who are facing it.
People just want to do something, even if if it's futile,
to feel like they're taking some kind of action rather
(11:12):
than doing nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Which I suppose is why that word active is so important.
Active surveillance, so the idea that you are doing something,
the challenge of course is to know whether active surveillance,
whatever it is, masterly and activity, to know whether doing
nothing is the right thing, And for that you would
need some kind of statistical evidence base, you'd need some
(11:33):
kind of rigorous experiment. But I know doctors are quite
convinced that they are over prescribing too many tests, too
many treatments that are not necessary. And so the question
there is, well, why do they feel that that's the
right thing to do, or or maybe they don't feel
it's the right thing to do, why do they do it?
And it is often a fear of being sued by
a patient, or simply just trying to get rid of
(11:55):
a patient who is pestering them and saying I want
you to do something, like okay, fine, you want me
to do something even though I shouldn't do anything. I'll
give you this drug or I'll prescribe this test and
that'll help you to go away.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
So it seems like we'd all be much happier, maybe
even healthier, if we could figure out the importance of
sometimes doing nothing. But tim sometimes the best decision isn't
just to pause and do nothing. Sometimes the best thing
we can do is to actively take something away but
it turns out this subtracting stuff seems to be even
harder for our lying minds to deal with. It's something
(12:27):
that we're very, very bad at.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
We are, indeed, and we'll learn more about that when
this Caution Retail's Happiness Lab crossover episode returns after the break.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Welcome back to the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
And welcome back to Caution Retales.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Wait, Tim, remind me do you usually introduce a second
historic story after the break in your episodes, Because if
you do, I have yet another fun tale, one that's
not about the advantage of doing nothing but about the
power of taking stuff away.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
I'm going to stop you, Laurie, go for it. Go ahead,
How could I resist?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Well?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Story number two doesn't take us as far back as
the nineteen fifties, but it does involve a clever strategy
for operating yet another hard to deal with vehicle.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Oh, let me guess, hard to deal with vehicles combine harvesters,
no giant robots that you get to settle or I
don't know. Tell me.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Actually the story involves a bike, like just a regular
kids bike.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh okay, well, hopefully it's a good story.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Well, the story begins with a guy by the name
of Ryan McFarland. Ryan came from a long line of
motorsports junkies. His grandfather was a race car engineer, and
Daddy McFarland ran a motorcycle shop. All this meant that
Ryan spent his childhood having fun with all kinds of
dangerous wheeled vehicles. He rode dirt bikes and played in
go karts and race stock cars. Ryan was eventually able
(13:49):
to translate his love for all things wheels into a
profitable engineering career. He made a name for himself patenting
both a better bike seat and a new wheelchair suspension system.
So you could imagine Ryan's delight when he finally became
a dad himself. Pretty much as soon as his son
Body was out of the womb, Ryan was ready to
pass on the farl In family love of wheels. Body
(14:11):
was two when he got his first cycle, but riding
a bike Ryan quickly realized is kind of hard for
a toddler. Ryan was passionate about getting Body on two
wheels as soon as possible, so he spent thousands of
dollars buying Body the usual learner vehicles, toddler tricycles, trainer bikes,
even a training wheel equipped motorcycle.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Oh wait, a training wheel equipped motorcycle. You're trying to
convince me that that is a typical learner vehicle. I'm
not buying it. That seemed like a terrible idea for
a two year old.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Well, I think it was tim Basically, nothing Ryan bought worked,
Plus none of them were all that good at teaching
a little kid the most important part of riding a bike,
which is the art of balancing it. You can't learn
to equalize your weight on a bike with training wheels
because the wheels wind up doing all the balancing work.
And so Ryan decided to engineer a new kind of bike,
one that even a toddler like body could learn to balance.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
And how did you do that?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Well, his solution was.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
To start with a typical bike, but rather than adding
something new to the bike's design, he chose to take
something away. He got rid of the pedals. Ryan was
the first to design what's now known as a strider
or balance bike. Kids can easily get the bike moving
just by pushing their feet on the ground, kind of
like Fred Flintstone style, and without pedals to worry about,
(15:26):
even a two year old could ride it. On the strider,
Body was able to learn to steer and balance, all
the stuff he'd need when he graduated to a real
bike or I guess a motorcycle. Ryan was able to
turn his idea not just into a tory for body,
his balance bike turned into a global company which has
now sold millions of pedalist bikes in less than a decade.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I love this, Laurie, and as somebody who's written about
the history of technology, I feel obliged to point out
that this is what bikes were originally like. They were
sometimes called the hobby horses. Oh, the Germans had, I
think the Louf machine. I forget exactly what it was.
The dandy horse was another thing they were called. The
bikes originally didn't have pedals because the whole idea of
(16:09):
pedaling you needed gears. He needed a chain. It was
too difficult. And so we had bikes like this all along,
and then somehow we forgot them, and then Ryan reinvented
them for toddlers, which is brilliant. But I'm curious, why
did you want to tell me the story? What's going
to do with happiness?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Well, the real reason I wanted to mention Ryan's story
is it involves a practice that's super good for our happiness,
but also one that's really hard for our minds to do.
To get his design right, Ryan had to take something away.
He had to subtract the pedals, and the research has
shown that subtracting stuff is much harder than we think.
I first learned about Ryan's project in this book by
Lydie Klotz. He's a professor of engineering at the University
(16:47):
of Virginia. He's written this awesome book called Subtract The
Untapped Science of Less. But he does all these experiments
where he shows just how hard it is for adults
to figure out how to solve a problem that requires
taking something away. He does these fun studies with his
college students where he shows them this kind of lego
bridge type thing that's sort of uneven. It's kind of
about to collapse because it's got one leg in the
(17:09):
wrong spot, and he asks subjects do something to make
this structure a little bit more stable.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
And so subjects have two choices.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
They could add a bunch of new blocks so that
this structure becomes more stable, or they could just take
away the one stupid block that's extra on one side.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
And so then all of a sudden, the thing would
balance better.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
And what he finds is that even if you suggest
to subjects like hey, it's also possible to take stuff away,
subjects have a really hard time with this. They're much
more likely to add a bunch of stuff, which takes
them more time than just to take one thing away.
Lidy found that subjects even still do this when you
charge for the amount of blocks they're going to use,
So subjects now have to pay ten cents for every
(17:48):
extra block they put on, and it's still really hard
for them to figure out that they have to take
some stuff away to make this work best.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I had the privilege of interviewing Lidi for the Financial Times.
I read his book and I found it really fascinating.
And when I first saw the work on Legos, originally
the whole idea was sparked because he noticed that his
son just naturally pulled away the extra block. So his
son didn't seem to have a problem subtracting, but it
(18:14):
didn't occur to him to subtract. And when I first thought,
I thought, yeah, well, I mean no, I like Lego,
that's great, but is this really of practical significance? But
then some of the other experiments that Lady had been
doing with his coauthors were I think much more obviously
relevant to day to day life. For example, one of
(18:34):
the ones he did was he got people to suggest
improvements to a recipe for soup. Here's a recipe for soup.
How do you make it better? And people would always suggest, oh, well,
you could add some cream or garlic or salt or whatever.
They're suggest adding steps or adding ingredients, and very few
people said, no, you need to take away this ingredient
because it's going to swamp everything else. There seem to
(18:56):
be this inbuilt bias, and even when he suggested cases
where it was absolutely obvious that you should take something away,
people didn't. So for example, in one experiment, they showed
people itinery for a day in Washington, d C. I
used to live in DC. It's a lovely city. There's
loads to do, but this itinery was crazy. I think
(19:17):
they had twenty four different stops and they would basically
be going to a Library of Congress, twenty minutes there,
get back in the coach, down the mall to a museum.
Twenty minutes in the museum, get back in the coach,
take you somewhere else, and you just go all over
DC and try and see everything. And it was clearly insane.
And they were given this itinery and told, okay, how
do you make it better? And the obvious answer is
(19:39):
take out some of the stops, give everything some room
to breathe, less time driving from one place to another,
more time actually enjoying what you're seeing. And people just
didn't do it. They would rearrange the order of engagements,
they'd maybe try to make things a bit more efficient
or more logical, but they did not remove stuff, even
when it was clear that everything was just too much
(20:00):
and subtraction was the only answer. So this seems to
be really quite a deep bias in the way we.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Think, and the travel example, I think shows just how
much it can affect our when we have too much stuff,
when we don't realize the power of taking things away.
I've been on those vacations where it's like just too
many things, Just like wait, if I just took out
one or two of these and I could just sleep
in an extra hour, I could just take a moment
to rest, I'd feel so much better. But it's not
just like ephemberal things like travel plans where we mess
(20:27):
this up, we also mess this up with the literal
stuff that's inside our houses. And Tim, I know this
is something that you've actually written a book on the
kind of striking way that our materialism is problematic for us,
and sometimes we don't subtract enough of our own stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I got involved in this by accident. So I
wrote a book a few years ago called Messy, and
it's kind of a messy book. It's about improvisation and
jazz and filing cabinets and conversations and all kinds of things.
It's sort of a messy book, and in many ways
it's the book I'm most proud of. But when I
(21:00):
published this book around about the same time, Marry Condo's book,
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying was also out. It
was a huge bestseller, and so people were always asking
me to talk about, you know, the contrast between my
book and Marry Condo's book, because I'm for mess and
she's for tidy, and you know, and actually I kept saying,
I don't think I mean, I loved her book. Actually,
(21:22):
I don't think there's as much of a difference as
you might think, because really the point that she made
in the life changing Magic of Tidying is you can't
organize your way out of too much. You could only
subtract your way out of too much. You have to
get rid of stuff. So in fact, her book is
not really about tidying. Her book is about minimalism. Her
(21:43):
book is about subtraction. And I've got absolutely no problem
with that. Sometimes you need that space. And I was
similarly skeptical about organizational systems. I don't think organizational systems
solve the fundamental problem of too much stuff going on.
But yet we fool ourselves into thinking that, you know,
if only we did have the right hacks, if only
we had the file of facts, or if only we
(22:04):
had the right software, then we could solve all the
problems in our lives by just getting organized. And sometimes, no,
there's twenty four hours in a day, there's only so
many rooms in your house, that there's only so much time,
there's only so much space. And I think a really
fundamental insight of economics, and people don't think of economics
as offering wisdom for day to day life, but I
(22:26):
think it does really fundamental insight and economics is everything
has an opportunity cost and what that means is everything
you do, everything you buy, every hour you spend is
getting in the way of something else. It's something else
you can't do, It's some other way you can't spend
that hour, it's some other thing that you can't afford
to buy because you bought that first thing. And when
(22:46):
you see everything as potentially getting in the way of
everything else, you start to realize, as Ldiklott says, not
only should you be subtracting the bad stuff, sometimes you
have to subtract the good stuff as well, because subtracting
the good stuff makes space for more good stuff and
to enjoy the good stuff that you have.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
I think this is so important for myself in so
many different way. But this is also something that I've
seen in my students. Right. They have these college students
today have these such like over subscribed schedules, like they
just never have time to do anything. And I think
that's because they grew up in generation where parents gave
them so much to do that they got used to
not ever having time to do stuff. I know you've
(23:28):
talked a little bit about helicopter parenting. This is something
that we talk a lot about on the show But
one way to describe helicopter parenting is the problem of
not subtracting enough. Right, you want your kids to, you know,
learn how to play soccer, and you want your kids
to get piano lessons, and you definitely need them to
get a math tutor and an SAT tutor and all
these things, and so you pack as kids' schedule to
(23:49):
the point that they have no time for rest, no
time for play, no time for being social with kids
their age. And the right solution isn't to give them
more tutoring, it's to just subtract stuff. I think what
happens is that parents have kids' schedules that are just
really oversubscribed, and then they get worried of like, oh, well,
he doesn't have time for play, he doesn't have time
for friends, So I'll just add in a play. No,
(24:09):
I'll squeeze that into all the other stuff that kids
have to do. But this over scheduling, the research shows,
makes kids like way more anxious. Anxiety disorders are going up.
Kids will sometimes report sometimes like you know, we very
busy adults do, that they have no time, that they
feel overwhelmed by their schedule, when it also feels like
everyone would just be much happier and probably everybody would
(24:29):
perform more successfully if we could just take a bunch
of stuff out of kids' schedules.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, and I think an important thing to underline we
kind of already said it, but let's say it again
because we're adding, not subtracting as I always do, is
there's nothing wrong with any of this stuff. There's nothing
wrong with having a masth tutel, there's nothing wrong with
learning an instrument, there's nothing wrong with with learning a sport.
It's all good. It's just there's a limit. And sometimes
(24:55):
we like to tell ourselves, oh, well, if we just
get rid of all the wasted time, we get rid
of all the bad stuff, then we'll have time to
focus on what really matters. But actually know, sometimes you
have to get rid of stuff that you really do
want to do, that stuff that is worth doing, because
you can't do everything, and it's painful to face up
to that.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
So the question is why don't we follow this idea
of less is more? Why is it something that's so
hard for our minds. We'll learn some ways that we
can all do this better. When the Cautionary Tales Happiness
Lab crossover it gets.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Back from the break.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Welcome back to the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover. So, Tim,
before we left, we were talking about ways that we
can make subtraction a little bit more obvious for our
lying minds. And one of the ways that occurs is
when sadly there's nothing we can do but subtract. I
know these are cases that you've talked about on Cautionary
Tales before. So maybe share one of these stories where
(25:51):
people can actually subtract, but only when they're kind of
forced into a corner and they have to.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yes. The example that has haunted me ever since I
heard it was Keith Jarrett, the great jazz pianist, and
his attempt to play a solo piano concert in the
great German city of Cologne. And that particular concert, it
was the largest concert that Jarrett had ever played solo.
(26:17):
He was still quite a young man, I think he
was still in his twenties. There was a mix up
at the opera house. The promoter was very young, she
was a teenage girl called Vera Brands, and she or
the opera house between them had not got a good
piano on stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular piano
Bozendorf for Imperial. He's a real perfectionist. And instead they
(26:38):
looked around for a bozen door for piano, and they'd
found this beaten up rehearsal model, not a proper grand piano.
It's not big enough, but also in really bad condition,
out of tune, pedal sticking, all kinds of problems. And
Jarrett basically said, look, I can't play this. If you
can't get a new piano, I won't play, and he left.
But it turned out they couldn't get a new piano.
(26:59):
There wasn't enough time, and Jarrett eventually realized that if
he didn't play, then this poor girl who was promoting
basically her first concert was going to be torn apart
by this crowd of angry German jazz fans who would
show up for it was a late night concert at
eleven thirty. He probably had a few beers. They're going
to show up at this concert and there'll be no concert.
(27:21):
There'll be know Keith Jarrett. So Jarrett decided, okay, I
have to do it. I have to play this thing.
And so he walks out on stage in front of
this packed auditorium fourteen hundred people sits down to play
this piano that he knows is unplayable, and it is
the concert of a lifetime. It is his most successful
ever recording, and because of the manifest limitations of the piano,
(27:43):
he was forced into playing what was basically a much
simpler melody, a much simpler approach to improvised jazz than
he would normally use. He was using a restricted number
of keys, he was avoiding certain areas of the keyboard,
he was keeping it quite simple and rhythmic. And the
point is he could have done that on any piano,
and yet he didn't because it never occurred to him.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
He always wanted to use the full range of what
was available, and it was only when all of those
options were cut off and he was absolutely backed into
this corner that he discovered this simple style, which continues
to be his most loved work. And I think that's
just an insight into the way that we don't do
it unless we're forced to. We often need this disruption,
(28:27):
we need this problem to occur before we find a
new solution, a new way of solving our problems. And
that new solution, in this case and in many cases,
actually involves doing less than we've done before.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
And I think this is one of the strategies that
Lighty Klotz mentions in his book right, which is to
pretend that you're forced into this, like he suggests in
a business meeting, and when you're trying to figure out
some problem, to just have somebody on the team say, Okay,
what if we were forced to take something away? What
if we were unable to add something and we just
had to take something out?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
What would we take out?
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Right? That kind of thought exercise winds up putting you
in the simulated situation where maybe you can't add anything else,
you got to take something away.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
What would be the one thing you take away?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
And the experiment, while it doesn't come to our mind naturally,
when you kind of strong arm people and say no, no, no,
you have to pick something to take away, what would
that be, all of a sudden, the strategies can start
seeming a little bit more obvious. So that's kind of
one of my favorite ones, is to ask this question, Okay,
if I was forced to take one thing away, what
would that be. It's helped me in my schedule immensely
right where I'm looking at the month ahead and I'm like,
(29:29):
there are just too many trips, Like I just can't
fit all this travel in. Sometimes I ask myself, okay,
if I had to take one away, like if you know,
I don't know, some huge deity came down as like
no o, your's this kind of schedule monster, like you
have to take one thing out of there? What would
it be? Usually I have an obvious answer. I'm like, well,
I didn't want to do that trip. That's the one
that's kind of least interesting to me, or maybe the
least valuable, And that can kind of force you to
(29:50):
realize like, oh wait, maybe I can just take that
one out. You don't need the mean schedule monster to
show up to kind of force you to take something out.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
You can make that decision for yourself.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, I mean it reminds me we often see politicians saying, oh,
we're going to have a rule that if you introduce
some new regulation, you're not allowed to do that unless
you cancel an old regulation, a kind of one in
one out, or sometimes it's one in two out. You
have to cancel more regulations than you had, and to
some extent it's a bit silly. I used to long, long, long, long,
(30:19):
time ago, I used to work in regulatory reform at
the World Bank, and we used to try to measure
the burden of different business regulations around the world. Fascinating work,
and we try to be quite sophisticated and try to
produce all these comparisons. So one country could say, well,
this is the regulations for setting up a business in
this country. But if you're an entrepreneur in the neighboring country,
it doesn't take you a year to set up a business.
(30:42):
It takes you seven days. So why is that? What
are the stages that take so long in one country
and that don't exist in another country. That's really insightful,
I think, and informative. But sometimes just that simple rule
is hey, you've got to remove a regulation, figure out
what it is. Sometimes that's enough that'll do the job.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Another thing that does the job is really trying to
harness your inner economists and to really think about what
those active opportunity costs are like to really be mindful
of the other kinds of things you could be doing
if you were able to subtract something. And one of
my favorite strategies for that I first learned about in
Hal Hirschfeldt's great book about our time biases. He talks
about what economists and psychologists have referred to as the
(31:22):
yes damn effect and how to deal with it. And
so the yes damn effect is probably something that will
be familiar to many of our listeners. Somebody says, hey
do you want to do this presentation? Or Hey do
you want to go to this kind of not very
interesting dinner party, or hey do you want to sign
up something in your schedule?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
And you feel kind of bad, so you're like yes.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Then weeks later that project or that dinner party comes up,
and that's where you say damn.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And so that's the yes damn effect.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
You say yes to something, time passes and then you
see it in your calendar and you're like, damn.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
So how do we deal with this?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, I mean that's very familiar. I know that experience.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
It's not unique to me.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah. My general kind of heuristic is I should just
say no to more things than I think I should,
and over experience you learn it, but then you know
it's never entirely successful. So is there a tick that
you'd recommend to get more out of this yes?
Speaker 3 (32:11):
And the trick is what's known as the no yay effect,
or you kind of do the same thing, except you
start by saying no and then you experience the consequences
later on of what that feels like.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
So let's kind of play this out. Lauria, do you
want to do some project?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
You know?
Speaker 1 (32:27):
To do this date?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
I say no, definitely don't want to do that. But
I don't stop there. I record the fact that I
was asked to do this, and so I go to
that date in my calendar when that project I just
said no to would have been due, and I write in, Hey, Laura,
you didn't have to do the project this day. And
then you get to that date in the calendar and
you realize, oh, my gosh, my day would have been
so much worse if I had that huge project to do,
(32:49):
and then you have the experience of yay.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And so this is the no yea effect.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
And the reason I love it so much is it
gives you these kind of periodic reminders of the fact
that saying no had a reward, right, Like you are
training your brain to notice that no doesn't just kind
of feel yucky in the moment, because I hate saying
no to stuff. I don't like the feeling of like oh,
it's wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad.
I feel kind of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself
(33:13):
the opposite emotional reaction when that date of the thing
finally comes up, where you get the moment to remember,
oh my gosh, I just saved myself this time. I'm
so kind of proud of myself unhappy. And so the
no yay effect has been really powerful for me because
it's helped me like, remember how happy I am that
I didn't sign up for something.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
In the first I really like that, Laurie. It's very
it's very clever. I actually have an even simpler hack
that I use all the time. So this works if
there's someone else to whom you're accountable, if you have
a spouse, for example. And this just going back to
that original insight about opportunity cost, like everything you say
yes to is getting in the way of something else,
(33:52):
And flip that around. Everything you say no to every
time you're invited to some commitment, every time you say
no to that, you're saying yes to something else. So
the way I phrase it is if I say no
to some trip, some dinner, some commitment, if I say
no to that I'm also saying yeah, yes to my family.
I'm going to be at home. I'm going to be
spending time with my wife and kids. But I don't
(34:13):
just tell myself that. I tell my wife that, and
when I am replying to the email, because it's always
an email, when I'm replying to the email saying this
is really kind, but I'm afraid I can't do it.
I just blind copy my wife and it's like a
little note to her, look at what I just said
no to, because I'm saying yes to you, And it
just makes it much more positive to me. Slightly fills
(34:37):
my wife's inbox with my refused invitations, but I think
that overall she appreciates that visibility into the decisions I'm
having to make every day and saying I'm not going
to do this, I have something more important waiting for
me at home.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I bet that increases marital satisfaction in a bunch of
different ways. I might have to do this.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
My poor husband's inbox is going to implode with all
the things I'm saying no too. But the cool thing
is that there are these ways that we can kind
of bring subtraction to the forefront. It doesn't come naturally,
but like with a little bit of extra work, scribbling
things in the calendar and extra BCC on the email
kind of bring subtraction to light and maybe that will
make us a little bit happier.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the
Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie, thank you for joining
me on Cautionary Tales. Dr Laurie Santos, as you know,
is the host of the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
And Tim Harford, as you know, host Cautionary Tales. Both
podcasts are productions of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever
you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Now, this is the last of our planned crossover episodes,
but it isn't the final time that we're going to
be collaborating. On March the twentieth, Laurie and I are
going to be teaming up for a special show dedicated
to World Happiness Day.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yes, Tim will be joining me for a chat alongside
our fellow Pushkin podcast hosts Maya Schunker and Malcolm Gladwell.
We we'll all be considering ideas for making the world
a slightly happier place, and we hope to see you
back then.
Pushkin. I'm doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Tim Harford, and this.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Is another crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And my podcast Cautionary Tales. Laurie, last time I took
the lead, I told you a story about the tensions
between everyone taking a vacation at the same time and
an idea from Stalin's Soviet union, where it was decreed
that workers had to stagger their days off, no matter
what that meant for missing leisure time with their friends
and families. So this time it's the return match, as
(00:47):
it were. So, what cautionary tale of happiness have you
got install for me?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh, it's a good one.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
It's a story of how we're all biased towards action
and how we sometimes struggle to do less, especially when
it involves doing nothing at all. It's a tale that
will take us to where the blue skies start turning
to inky black, because today we're going to go to
the very edge of space. My story today involves one
(01:32):
of my favorite American heroes, Major Charles E. Jaeger, as
a young fighter pilot in World War Two, Chuck not
only shot down a huge number of enemy aircraft but
also successfully evaded the Nazis when he was shot down
over occupied France. During his time on the run, Chuck
helped the French resistance attack German troops and even won
(01:53):
a medal for helping an American pilot cross the snowy
Pyrenees to reach safety in Spain. Chuck was just that
kind of hero, and he didn't chill out during peacetime either.
He kept flying, securing his place in history by traveling
faster than the speed of sound in a rocket powered
aircraft he named Glamorous Glennis in honor of his wife.
(02:16):
Other pilots had perished in their pursuit of this speed record,
but Chuck broke the sound barrier with characteristic nonchalance. He
even failed to tell his team that he'd fallen from
a horse and broke in several ribs just before his
test flight. He probably figured that they wouldn't want to
trust a guy who could barely raise his arms to
fly their expensive experimental aircraft. But none of these stories
(02:37):
explained why Chuck Yeager is a hero to happiness experts
like me. That stems from an incident that took place
later a couple of weeks before Christmas in nineteen fifty three,
Chuck was now piloting an upgraded version of the glamorous Glennis,
the new X one A. The X one A was
built to travel more than twice the speed of sound.
(02:58):
Chuck was excited to try out the new aircraft, especially
since a pilot from the US Navy had recently beaten
his record. Chuck was pretty eager to reclaim his crown
as the fastest man alive. Back then, no one really
knew what would happen to an airplane or a human
body when it reached that velocity in height. The forces
Chuck was about to face were as unprecedented as they
(03:19):
were dangerous. So cut to December twelfth, nineteen fifty three,
Jaeger's tenth flight and the X one A began routinely enough.
Chuck and the X one A got carried high into
the sky by a big bomber plane. The X and
A was then dropped from the belly of the bomber
and Chuck ignited the experimental rocket enter. The X and
(03:39):
A flew upwards fast, but soon started kind of freaking out.
It was pitching and rolling and tumbling. Chuck grappled with
the controls inside the cockpit but nothing the pilot did
seemed to stop the plane's violent descent, and so the
X one A was now plummeting out of the sky
while tossing its poor test pilot around like a rag doll.
(04:03):
At some point, Yaeger was thrown violently into the cockpit's canopy.
He even cracked the plastic with his flight helmet. All
this goes to say this was not a good situation.
In a matter of seconds, the experimental aircraft dropped more
than six miles. Even if Jeger had known how to
stop the X one a's rapid descent, he was two
dazed to operate the controls. Was the plane rolling or spinning?
(04:27):
Chuck had no idea. There was nothing he could do
but surrender to the g forces jostling him in his
seat as the aircraft fell towards the barren Mojave desert below.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Laurie. This is the kind of cliff hangout opening that
my cautionary tails listeners will be familiar with. A doomed
plane and an equally doomed pilot hurtling towards Earth. So
what did Chuck Yeger do?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Nothing?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Nothing, well, mostly nothing, which is why happiness experts like
me loved what happened next. Chuck was known for his
nerves as steel, but this situation had him totally spooked.
He later said that if the X one A had
been fitted with an ejection seat, he would have used it,
but most experts say if he'd done that, there'd be
no way he would have survived. In the parlance of
test pilots, he would have been committing suicide to save
(05:15):
himself from dying. So without any way to escape, Yeager
had two options. Option one, he could do everything in
his power to write his tumbling rocket ship to be fair.
This was what Truck tried to do at the beginning,
but his attempts to use the controls didn't work. At best,
they did nothing, and they also may have made a
bad situation even worse. So once the plane's descent became
(05:36):
too violent, he was forced into option number two. Just
do nothing, just write it out, and that is exactly
what saved him. When the X one A hit about
twenty five thousand feet if finally steady, the aircraft was
still spinning, but it was the kind of spin that
Yeager was familiarate. Once all the nightmarish bucking and tumbling
(05:58):
was over, the veteran test pilot was finally able to
pull up the nose of his craft down to twenty
five that I would want to get back to bank.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
If you listen to Yegger's cockpit recordings, his fear is
very obvious and his relief is palpable. I can't do much.
Before I got it, he knew he was in trouble,
but in the end he was going to make it
home all right. I don't know a thing up or not.
(06:29):
The wild Ride wasn't a total disaster. The X one
A had topped out at mock two point four to four,
and that record was finally enough for Chuck Boy. He
told his team, I'm not going to do that anymore. Well,
Jaeger walked away safely from the X one A and
(06:49):
never flew a wocketplane again.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I love the story, Laurie, and it's definitely a cautionary tale.
But what's the happiness moral of this anecdote?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Well, I first heard this story from one of my
favorite meditation teachers, the psychologist Tara Brack. She shares it
as a cautionary tale. But our usual need to constantly
be in control of every facet of our lives. When
Rafe's with a problem, most of us instinctively want to
take action. We feel the need to do something, even
in cases when we kind of know our actions will
be ineffective or even make stuff worse. Tera says that
(07:22):
in times like this we need to copy the great
Chuck Yeger. We need to pause, take our hands off
the controls, and just let things be. This pause, Tera writes,
gives us a possibility of a new choice.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Now, sitting back isn't something that comes naturally to many
of us, so let's have a think about the ways
in which it could actually be the key to performing
better and feeling happier. When I'm struck by some of
the caution detales that we've had over the years where
doing nothing is in fact precisely the right thing to do,
(07:55):
there's one on the subject of masterly inactivity, which features
Helena Bottom Krter as the formidable Lady Sale. In the
disastrous British Army operations in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century,
this idea of masterly inactivity was raised, and it applied
not just to maybe the British should never have invaded Afghanistan,
(08:16):
which I think, with hindsight is obvious, but also parenting,
maybe we should do less parenting or medicine, maybe doctors
should be doing less, prescribing fewer tests, prescribing fewer treatments.
Even soccer goalkeepers are too committed to being active when
faced with a penalty was in fact they'd be better
off if they stayed Still.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Wait, wait, Tim, as you know I'm an American on
behalf of my fellow Americans, can you just explain what
this penalty kick example is in a little bit more detail.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Sure, I mean, I understand that the joys of soccer
are finding American shaws these days, but maybe not this
particular study. So some I think there were economists who
started that actually looked at what goalkeepers do when faced
with a penalty kick. And basically, in the penalty kick,
the striker gets to try and put the ball in
(09:08):
the net, and they can boot it to the left,
or they can boot it to the right, or they
can bout it straight down the middle, and the goalkeeper
doesn't have much time to react. And so the standard
procedure for a goalkeeper is just to guess it's fifty
to fifty. Just dive to the right or dive to
the left, and you got a fifty percent chance a
going the right way. Even if you do go the
right way, you might not save it. I mean, actually,
(09:30):
most penalties turn into goals. Usually the keeper isn't able
to save it, but there's a lot of pressure on
the keeper to try. So the goalkeeper will usually leap
off to the left or the right. If they leap
in the wrong direction, well, you know, no one blames
them for that. But actually quite a lot of penalty
kicks go fairly close to where the goalkeeper originally was standing.
They go right down the center or near enough to
(09:51):
the center, and you can prove that if the goalkeeper
had not dived either way, they probably would have had
a better chance of saving the penalty kick. They would
also have looked ridiculous if the kick had gone far
to the left or fart of the right, because they
would have looked like they weren't even And so there's
that pressure to act, even when just waiting and standing
(10:14):
still would have been a better thing to do.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah, but I think it's something that's really hard for
our mind. I mean, take the medical case you mentioned.
I've seen the importance of doing nothing in cases where
friends of mine who've had cancer have been advised, well,
rather than do some surgery, rather than do some chemo,
let's just watch and wait. I think this is what
doctors often call nonoperative management or active surveillance, which I
(10:37):
think is a funny term, this idea of active surveillance,
because it feels like there's nothing active about it. It's
complete inaction. You're just kind of sitting there waiting, and
I think people don't like that. I mean, some studies,
especially for some cancer show that this can be really
helpful for dealing with a cancer.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Sometimes you go through chemo and surgery, but there's a
tumor that's going to grow back anyway, and so it
was just like silly to take the risk of doing
all that surgery and chemo. But the idea of just
sitting there and like seeing what your tumor does, it's
just an incredibly scary situation for people who are facing it.
People just want to do something, even if if it's futile,
to feel like they're taking some kind of action rather
(11:12):
than doing nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Which I suppose is why that word active is so important.
Active surveillance, so the idea that you are doing something,
the challenge of course is to know whether active surveillance,
whatever it is, masterly and activity, to know whether doing
nothing is the right thing, And for that you would
need some kind of statistical evidence base, you'd need some
(11:33):
kind of rigorous experiment. But I know doctors are quite
convinced that they are over prescribing too many tests, too
many treatments that are not necessary. And so the question
there is, well, why do they feel that that's the
right thing to do, or or maybe they don't feel
it's the right thing to do, why do they do it?
And it is often a fear of being sued by
a patient, or simply just trying to get rid of
(11:55):
a patient who is pestering them and saying I want
you to do something, like okay, fine, you want me
to do something even though I shouldn't do anything. I'll
give you this drug or I'll prescribe this test and
that'll help you to go away.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
So it seems like we'd all be much happier, maybe
even healthier, if we could figure out the importance of
sometimes doing nothing. But tim sometimes the best decision isn't
just to pause and do nothing. Sometimes the best thing
we can do is to actively take something away but
it turns out this subtracting stuff seems to be even
harder for our lying minds to deal with. It's something
(12:27):
that we're very, very bad at.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
We are, indeed, and we'll learn more about that when
this Caution Retail's Happiness Lab crossover episode returns after the break.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Welcome back to the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
And welcome back to Caution Retales.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Wait, Tim, remind me do you usually introduce a second
historic story after the break in your episodes, Because if
you do, I have yet another fun tale, one that's
not about the advantage of doing nothing but about the
power of taking stuff away.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
I'm going to stop you, Laurie, go for it. Go ahead,
How could I resist?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Well?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Story number two doesn't take us as far back as
the nineteen fifties, but it does involve a clever strategy
for operating yet another hard to deal with vehicle.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Oh, let me guess, hard to deal with vehicles combine harvesters,
no giant robots that you get to settle or I
don't know. Tell me.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Actually the story involves a bike, like just a regular
kids bike.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh okay, well, hopefully it's a good story.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Well, the story begins with a guy by the name
of Ryan McFarland. Ryan came from a long line of
motorsports junkies. His grandfather was a race car engineer, and
Daddy McFarland ran a motorcycle shop. All this meant that
Ryan spent his childhood having fun with all kinds of
dangerous wheeled vehicles. He rode dirt bikes and played in
go karts and race stock cars. Ryan was eventually able
(13:49):
to translate his love for all things wheels into a
profitable engineering career. He made a name for himself patenting
both a better bike seat and a new wheelchair suspension system.
So you could imagine Ryan's delight when he finally became
a dad himself. Pretty much as soon as his son
Body was out of the womb, Ryan was ready to
pass on the farl In family love of wheels. Body
(14:11):
was two when he got his first cycle, but riding
a bike Ryan quickly realized is kind of hard for
a toddler. Ryan was passionate about getting Body on two
wheels as soon as possible, so he spent thousands of
dollars buying Body the usual learner vehicles, toddler tricycles, trainer bikes,
even a training wheel equipped motorcycle.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Oh wait, a training wheel equipped motorcycle. You're trying to
convince me that that is a typical learner vehicle. I'm
not buying it. That seemed like a terrible idea for
a two year old.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Well, I think it was tim Basically, nothing Ryan bought worked,
Plus none of them were all that good at teaching
a little kid the most important part of riding a bike,
which is the art of balancing it. You can't learn
to equalize your weight on a bike with training wheels
because the wheels wind up doing all the balancing work.
And so Ryan decided to engineer a new kind of bike,
one that even a toddler like body could learn to balance.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
And how did you do that?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Well, his solution was.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
To start with a typical bike, but rather than adding
something new to the bike's design, he chose to take
something away. He got rid of the pedals. Ryan was
the first to design what's now known as a strider
or balance bike. Kids can easily get the bike moving
just by pushing their feet on the ground, kind of
like Fred Flintstone style, and without pedals to worry about,
(15:26):
even a two year old could ride it. On the strider,
Body was able to learn to steer and balance, all
the stuff he'd need when he graduated to a real
bike or I guess a motorcycle. Ryan was able to
turn his idea not just into a tory for body,
his balance bike turned into a global company which has
now sold millions of pedalist bikes in less than a decade.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I love this, Laurie, and as somebody who's written about
the history of technology, I feel obliged to point out
that this is what bikes were originally like. They were
sometimes called the hobby horses. Oh, the Germans had, I
think the Louf machine. I forget exactly what it was.
The dandy horse was another thing they were called. The
bikes originally didn't have pedals because the whole idea of
(16:09):
pedaling you needed gears. He needed a chain. It was
too difficult. And so we had bikes like this all along,
and then somehow we forgot them, and then Ryan reinvented
them for toddlers, which is brilliant. But I'm curious, why
did you want to tell me the story? What's going
to do with happiness?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Well, the real reason I wanted to mention Ryan's story
is it involves a practice that's super good for our happiness,
but also one that's really hard for our minds to do.
To get his design right, Ryan had to take something away.
He had to subtract the pedals, and the research has
shown that subtracting stuff is much harder than we think.
I first learned about Ryan's project in this book by
Lydie Klotz. He's a professor of engineering at the University
(16:47):
of Virginia. He's written this awesome book called Subtract The
Untapped Science of Less. But he does all these experiments
where he shows just how hard it is for adults
to figure out how to solve a problem that requires
taking something away. He does these fun studies with his
college students where he shows them this kind of lego
bridge type thing that's sort of uneven. It's kind of
about to collapse because it's got one leg in the
(17:09):
wrong spot, and he asks subjects do something to make
this structure a little bit more stable.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
And so subjects have two choices.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
They could add a bunch of new blocks so that
this structure becomes more stable, or they could just take
away the one stupid block that's extra on one side.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
And so then all of a sudden, the thing would
balance better.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
And what he finds is that even if you suggest
to subjects like hey, it's also possible to take stuff away,
subjects have a really hard time with this. They're much
more likely to add a bunch of stuff, which takes
them more time than just to take one thing away.
Lidy found that subjects even still do this when you
charge for the amount of blocks they're going to use,
So subjects now have to pay ten cents for every
(17:48):
extra block they put on, and it's still really hard
for them to figure out that they have to take
some stuff away to make this work best.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I had the privilege of interviewing Lidi for the Financial Times.
I read his book and I found it really fascinating.
And when I first saw the work on Legos, originally
the whole idea was sparked because he noticed that his
son just naturally pulled away the extra block. So his
son didn't seem to have a problem subtracting, but it
(18:14):
didn't occur to him to subtract. And when I first thought,
I thought, yeah, well, I mean no, I like Lego,
that's great, but is this really of practical significance? But
then some of the other experiments that Lady had been
doing with his coauthors were I think much more obviously
relevant to day to day life. For example, one of
(18:34):
the ones he did was he got people to suggest
improvements to a recipe for soup. Here's a recipe for soup.
How do you make it better? And people would always suggest, oh, well,
you could add some cream or garlic or salt or whatever.
They're suggest adding steps or adding ingredients, and very few
people said, no, you need to take away this ingredient
because it's going to swamp everything else. There seem to
(18:56):
be this inbuilt bias, and even when he suggested cases
where it was absolutely obvious that you should take something away,
people didn't. So for example, in one experiment, they showed
people itinery for a day in Washington, d C. I
used to live in DC. It's a lovely city. There's
loads to do, but this itinery was crazy. I think
(19:17):
they had twenty four different stops and they would basically
be going to a Library of Congress, twenty minutes there,
get back in the coach, down the mall to a museum.
Twenty minutes in the museum, get back in the coach,
take you somewhere else, and you just go all over
DC and try and see everything. And it was clearly insane.
And they were given this itinery and told, okay, how
do you make it better? And the obvious answer is
(19:39):
take out some of the stops, give everything some room
to breathe, less time driving from one place to another,
more time actually enjoying what you're seeing. And people just
didn't do it. They would rearrange the order of engagements,
they'd maybe try to make things a bit more efficient
or more logical, but they did not remove stuff, even
when it was clear that everything was just too much
(20:00):
and subtraction was the only answer. So this seems to
be really quite a deep bias in the way we.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Think, and the travel example, I think shows just how
much it can affect our when we have too much stuff,
when we don't realize the power of taking things away.
I've been on those vacations where it's like just too
many things, Just like wait, if I just took out
one or two of these and I could just sleep
in an extra hour, I could just take a moment
to rest, I'd feel so much better. But it's not
just like ephemberal things like travel plans where we mess
(20:27):
this up, we also mess this up with the literal
stuff that's inside our houses. And Tim, I know this
is something that you've actually written a book on the
kind of striking way that our materialism is problematic for us,
and sometimes we don't subtract enough of our own stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I got involved in this by accident. So I
wrote a book a few years ago called Messy, and
it's kind of a messy book. It's about improvisation and
jazz and filing cabinets and conversations and all kinds of things.
It's sort of a messy book, and in many ways
it's the book I'm most proud of. But when I
(21:00):
published this book around about the same time, Marry Condo's book,
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying was also out. It
was a huge bestseller, and so people were always asking
me to talk about, you know, the contrast between my
book and Marry Condo's book, because I'm for mess and
she's for tidy, and you know, and actually I kept saying,
I don't think I mean, I loved her book. Actually,
(21:22):
I don't think there's as much of a difference as
you might think, because really the point that she made
in the life changing Magic of Tidying is you can't
organize your way out of too much. You could only
subtract your way out of too much. You have to
get rid of stuff. So in fact, her book is
not really about tidying. Her book is about minimalism. Her
(21:43):
book is about subtraction. And I've got absolutely no problem
with that. Sometimes you need that space. And I was
similarly skeptical about organizational systems. I don't think organizational systems
solve the fundamental problem of too much stuff going on.
But yet we fool ourselves into thinking that, you know,
if only we did have the right hacks, if only
we had the file of facts, or if only we
(22:04):
had the right software, then we could solve all the
problems in our lives by just getting organized. And sometimes, no,
there's twenty four hours in a day, there's only so
many rooms in your house, that there's only so much time,
there's only so much space. And I think a really
fundamental insight of economics, and people don't think of economics
as offering wisdom for day to day life, but I
(22:26):
think it does really fundamental insight and economics is everything
has an opportunity cost and what that means is everything
you do, everything you buy, every hour you spend is
getting in the way of something else. It's something else
you can't do, It's some other way you can't spend
that hour, it's some other thing that you can't afford
to buy because you bought that first thing. And when
(22:46):
you see everything as potentially getting in the way of
everything else, you start to realize, as Ldiklott says, not
only should you be subtracting the bad stuff, sometimes you
have to subtract the good stuff as well, because subtracting
the good stuff makes space for more good stuff and
to enjoy the good stuff that you have.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
I think this is so important for myself in so
many different way. But this is also something that I've
seen in my students. Right. They have these college students
today have these such like over subscribed schedules, like they
just never have time to do anything. And I think
that's because they grew up in generation where parents gave
them so much to do that they got used to
not ever having time to do stuff. I know you've
(23:28):
talked a little bit about helicopter parenting. This is something
that we talk a lot about on the show But
one way to describe helicopter parenting is the problem of
not subtracting enough. Right, you want your kids to, you know,
learn how to play soccer, and you want your kids
to get piano lessons, and you definitely need them to
get a math tutor and an SAT tutor and all
these things, and so you pack as kids' schedule to
(23:49):
the point that they have no time for rest, no
time for play, no time for being social with kids
their age. And the right solution isn't to give them
more tutoring, it's to just subtract stuff. I think what
happens is that parents have kids' schedules that are just
really oversubscribed, and then they get worried of like, oh, well,
he doesn't have time for play, he doesn't have time
for friends, So I'll just add in a play. No,
(24:09):
I'll squeeze that into all the other stuff that kids
have to do. But this over scheduling, the research shows,
makes kids like way more anxious. Anxiety disorders are going up.
Kids will sometimes report sometimes like you know, we very
busy adults do, that they have no time, that they
feel overwhelmed by their schedule, when it also feels like
everyone would just be much happier and probably everybody would
(24:29):
perform more successfully if we could just take a bunch
of stuff out of kids' schedules.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, and I think an important thing to underline we
kind of already said it, but let's say it again
because we're adding, not subtracting as I always do, is
there's nothing wrong with any of this stuff. There's nothing
wrong with having a masth tutel, there's nothing wrong with
learning an instrument, there's nothing wrong with with learning a sport.
It's all good. It's just there's a limit. And sometimes
(24:55):
we like to tell ourselves, oh, well, if we just
get rid of all the wasted time, we get rid
of all the bad stuff, then we'll have time to
focus on what really matters. But actually know, sometimes you
have to get rid of stuff that you really do
want to do, that stuff that is worth doing, because
you can't do everything, and it's painful to face up
to that.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
So the question is why don't we follow this idea
of less is more? Why is it something that's so
hard for our minds. We'll learn some ways that we
can all do this better. When the Cautionary Tales Happiness
Lab crossover it gets.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Back from the break.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
Welcome back to the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover. So, Tim,
before we left, we were talking about ways that we
can make subtraction a little bit more obvious for our
lying minds. And one of the ways that occurs is
when sadly there's nothing we can do but subtract. I
know these are cases that you've talked about on Cautionary
Tales before. So maybe share one of these stories where
(25:51):
people can actually subtract, but only when they're kind of
forced into a corner and they have to.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yes. The example that has haunted me ever since I
heard it was Keith Jarrett, the great jazz pianist, and
his attempt to play a solo piano concert in the
great German city of Cologne. And that particular concert, it
was the largest concert that Jarrett had ever played solo.
(26:17):
He was still quite a young man, I think he
was still in his twenties. There was a mix up
at the opera house. The promoter was very young, she
was a teenage girl called Vera Brands, and she or
the opera house between them had not got a good
piano on stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular piano
Bozendorf for Imperial. He's a real perfectionist. And instead they
(26:38):
looked around for a bozen door for piano, and they'd
found this beaten up rehearsal model, not a proper grand piano.
It's not big enough, but also in really bad condition,
out of tune, pedal sticking, all kinds of problems. And
Jarrett basically said, look, I can't play this. If you
can't get a new piano, I won't play, and he left.
But it turned out they couldn't get a new piano.
(26:59):
There wasn't enough time, and Jarrett eventually realized that if
he didn't play, then this poor girl who was promoting
basically her first concert was going to be torn apart
by this crowd of angry German jazz fans who would
show up for it was a late night concert at
eleven thirty. He probably had a few beers. They're going
to show up at this concert and there'll be no concert.
(27:21):
There'll be know Keith Jarrett. So Jarrett decided, okay, I
have to do it. I have to play this thing.
And so he walks out on stage in front of
this packed auditorium fourteen hundred people sits down to play
this piano that he knows is unplayable, and it is
the concert of a lifetime. It is his most successful
ever recording, and because of the manifest limitations of the piano,
(27:43):
he was forced into playing what was basically a much
simpler melody, a much simpler approach to improvised jazz than
he would normally use. He was using a restricted number
of keys, he was avoiding certain areas of the keyboard,
he was keeping it quite simple and rhythmic. And the
point is he could have done that on any piano,
and yet he didn't because it never occurred to him.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
He always wanted to use the full range of what
was available, and it was only when all of those
options were cut off and he was absolutely backed into
this corner that he discovered this simple style, which continues
to be his most loved work. And I think that's
just an insight into the way that we don't do
it unless we're forced to. We often need this disruption,
(28:27):
we need this problem to occur before we find a
new solution, a new way of solving our problems. And
that new solution, in this case and in many cases,
actually involves doing less than we've done before.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
And I think this is one of the strategies that
Lighty Klotz mentions in his book right, which is to
pretend that you're forced into this, like he suggests in
a business meeting, and when you're trying to figure out
some problem, to just have somebody on the team say, Okay,
what if we were forced to take something away? What
if we were unable to add something and we just
had to take something out?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
What would we take out?
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Right? That kind of thought exercise winds up putting you
in the simulated situation where maybe you can't add anything else,
you got to take something away.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
What would be the one thing you take away?
Speaker 3 (29:08):
And the experiment, while it doesn't come to our mind naturally,
when you kind of strong arm people and say no, no, no,
you have to pick something to take away, what would
that be, all of a sudden, the strategies can start
seeming a little bit more obvious. So that's kind of
one of my favorite ones, is to ask this question, Okay,
if I was forced to take one thing away, what
would that be. It's helped me in my schedule immensely
right where I'm looking at the month ahead and I'm like,
(29:29):
there are just too many trips, Like I just can't
fit all this travel in. Sometimes I ask myself, okay,
if I had to take one away, like if you know,
I don't know, some huge deity came down as like
no o, your's this kind of schedule monster, like you
have to take one thing out of there? What would
it be? Usually I have an obvious answer. I'm like, well,
I didn't want to do that trip. That's the one
that's kind of least interesting to me, or maybe the
least valuable, And that can kind of force you to
(29:50):
realize like, oh wait, maybe I can just take that
one out. You don't need the mean schedule monster to
show up to kind of force you to take something out.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
You can make that decision for yourself.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, I mean it reminds me we often see politicians saying, oh,
we're going to have a rule that if you introduce
some new regulation, you're not allowed to do that unless
you cancel an old regulation, a kind of one in
one out, or sometimes it's one in two out. You
have to cancel more regulations than you had, and to
some extent it's a bit silly. I used to long, long, long, long,
(30:19):
time ago, I used to work in regulatory reform at
the World Bank, and we used to try to measure
the burden of different business regulations around the world. Fascinating work,
and we try to be quite sophisticated and try to
produce all these comparisons. So one country could say, well,
this is the regulations for setting up a business in
this country. But if you're an entrepreneur in the neighboring country,
it doesn't take you a year to set up a business.
(30:42):
It takes you seven days. So why is that? What
are the stages that take so long in one country
and that don't exist in another country. That's really insightful,
I think, and informative. But sometimes just that simple rule
is hey, you've got to remove a regulation, figure out
what it is. Sometimes that's enough that'll do the job.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Another thing that does the job is really trying to
harness your inner economists and to really think about what
those active opportunity costs are like to really be mindful
of the other kinds of things you could be doing
if you were able to subtract something. And one of
my favorite strategies for that I first learned about in
Hal Hirschfeldt's great book about our time biases. He talks
about what economists and psychologists have referred to as the
(31:22):
yes damn effect and how to deal with it. And
so the yes damn effect is probably something that will
be familiar to many of our listeners. Somebody says, hey
do you want to do this presentation? Or Hey do
you want to go to this kind of not very
interesting dinner party, or hey do you want to sign
up something in your schedule?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
And you feel kind of bad, so you're like yes.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Then weeks later that project or that dinner party comes up,
and that's where you say damn.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And so that's the yes damn effect.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
You say yes to something, time passes and then you
see it in your calendar and you're like, damn.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
So how do we deal with this?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, I mean that's very familiar. I know that experience.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
It's not unique to me.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah. My general kind of heuristic is I should just
say no to more things than I think I should,
and over experience you learn it, but then you know
it's never entirely successful. So is there a tick that
you'd recommend to get more out of this yes?
Speaker 3 (32:11):
And the trick is what's known as the no yay effect,
or you kind of do the same thing, except you
start by saying no and then you experience the consequences
later on of what that feels like.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
So let's kind of play this out. Lauria, do you
want to do some project?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
You know?
Speaker 1 (32:27):
To do this date?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
I say no, definitely don't want to do that. But
I don't stop there. I record the fact that I
was asked to do this, and so I go to
that date in my calendar when that project I just
said no to would have been due, and I write in, Hey, Laura,
you didn't have to do the project this day. And
then you get to that date in the calendar and
you realize, oh, my gosh, my day would have been
so much worse if I had that huge project to do,
(32:49):
and then you have the experience of yay.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And so this is the no yea effect.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
And the reason I love it so much is it
gives you these kind of periodic reminders of the fact
that saying no had a reward, right, Like you are
training your brain to notice that no doesn't just kind
of feel yucky in the moment, because I hate saying
no to stuff. I don't like the feeling of like oh,
it's wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad.
I feel kind of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself
(33:13):
the opposite emotional reaction when that date of the thing
finally comes up, where you get the moment to remember,
oh my gosh, I just saved myself this time. I'm
so kind of proud of myself unhappy. And so the
no yay effect has been really powerful for me because
it's helped me like, remember how happy I am that
I didn't sign up for something.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
In the first I really like that, Laurie. It's very
it's very clever. I actually have an even simpler hack
that I use all the time. So this works if
there's someone else to whom you're accountable, if you have
a spouse, for example. And this just going back to
that original insight about opportunity cost, like everything you say
yes to is getting in the way of something else,
(33:52):
And flip that around. Everything you say no to every
time you're invited to some commitment, every time you say
no to that, you're saying yes to something else. So
the way I phrase it is if I say no
to some trip, some dinner, some commitment, if I say
no to that I'm also saying yeah, yes to my family.
I'm going to be at home. I'm going to be
spending time with my wife and kids. But I don't
(34:13):
just tell myself that. I tell my wife that, and
when I am replying to the email, because it's always
an email, when I'm replying to the email saying this
is really kind, but I'm afraid I can't do it.
I just blind copy my wife and it's like a
little note to her, look at what I just said
no to, because I'm saying yes to you, And it
just makes it much more positive to me. Slightly fills
(34:37):
my wife's inbox with my refused invitations, but I think
that overall she appreciates that visibility into the decisions I'm
having to make every day and saying I'm not going
to do this, I have something more important waiting for
me at home.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I bet that increases marital satisfaction in a bunch of
different ways. I might have to do this.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
My poor husband's inbox is going to implode with all
the things I'm saying no too. But the cool thing
is that there are these ways that we can kind
of bring subtraction to the forefront. It doesn't come naturally,
but like with a little bit of extra work, scribbling
things in the calendar and extra BCC on the email
kind of bring subtraction to light and maybe that will
make us a little bit happier.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the
Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie, thank you for joining
me on Cautionary Tales. Dr Laurie Santos, as you know,
is the host of the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
And Tim Harford, as you know, host Cautionary Tales. Both
podcasts are productions of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever
you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Now, this is the last of our planned crossover episodes,
but it isn't the final time that we're going to
be collaborating. On March the twentieth, Laurie and I are
going to be teaming up for a special show dedicated
to World Happiness Day.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yes, Tim will be joining me for a chat alongside
our fellow Pushkin podcast hosts Maya Schunker and Malcolm Gladwell.
We we'll all be considering ideas for making the world
a slightly happier place, and we hope to see you
back then.
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