March 15, 2024 • 35 mins
Chuck Yeager's plane pitched and rolled as it plummeted from the sky. He grappled with the controls inside the cockpit, but to no avail: he couldn't steady the aircraft. The test pilot was known for his nerves of steel but, as the barren Mojave Desert hurtled towards him, even he was afraid. What to do?
It's tempting to think that adding to our lives - more action, more work, more possessions - will lead to greater success and happiness. But sometimes doing less is the better option, as Chuck Yeager was to learn the hard way.
In their second crossover episode, Tim Harford teams up with Dr Laurie Santos (host of The Happiness Lab) to examine why subtraction can be so challenging and so helpful.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm Tim Harford, and this.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Is another crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Lab 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,
(00:47):
as it were. So, what cautionary tale of happiness have
you got in store for me?
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Chuck was excited to.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
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 were dangerous. So cut to
(03:21):
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 at The X and A flew upwards fast,
(03:42):
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. At some point,
(04:04):
Yaeger was thrown violently into the cockpit's canopy.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
He even cracked the.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
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 too dazed to operate the controls.
Was the plane rolling or spinning? Chuck had no idea.
(04:28):
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 1 (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 2 (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 a 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 ONEA hit about twenty
five thousand feet, it finally steady. The aircraft was still spinning,
but it was the kind of spin that Yeager was
familiar with. Once all the nightmarish bucking and tumbling was over,
(05:59):
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 play. Sure, huh.
If you listen to Yeager's cockpit recordings, his fear is
very obvious and his relief is palpable.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
I can't very much.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Before I got it, he knew he was in trouble,
but in the end he was going to make it
home all right.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I don't know a thing up or not. 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 Chef Boy. He told
his team, I'm not going to do that anymore. Jaeger
(06:46):
walked away safely from the X one A and never
flew a wocketplane again.
Speaker 1 (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 an ineffective or even make stuff worse. Tera says
(07:22):
that 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 1 (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. I mean, 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. There's one on the subject of masterly inactivity,
(07:58):
which features Helena bottom Krter as the formidable Lady Saale.
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 invade in Afghanistan, which I think with hindsight is obvious.
(08:19):
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 1 (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 of
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 far of the right, because they
would have looked like they weren't even try. And so
there's that pressure to act even when just waiting and
(10:13):
standing 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 or 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. Right. 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
(10:58):
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 it's futile, to feel
like they're taking some kind of action rather than doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (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, mastering 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 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 1 (12:29):
We are, indeed, and we'll learn more about that when
this Cause Retail's Happiness Lab crossover episode returns after the break.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Welcome back to the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (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 1 (12:59):
I'm going to stop you, Laurie, go for it. Go ahead,
how can I resist? 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 1 (13:11):
Ooh, let me guess. Hard to deal with vehicles combine harvesters,
no giant robots that you get to sit on or
I don't know, tell me.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Actually the story involves a bike, like just a regular
kids bike.
Speaker 1 (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 far In family.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Love of wheels.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Body 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 1 (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 1 (15:02):
And how did you do that?
Speaker 2 (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 the 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 1 (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 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 pedaling
(16:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It's kind of about to collapse because it's got.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
One leg in the wrong spot, and he asks subjects
do something to make this structure a little bit more stable.
And so subjects have two choices. 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 and so then all of
a sudden the thing would balance better. And what he
finds is that even if you suggest to subjects like hey,
(17:31):
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 extra block they
put on, and it's still really hard for them to
(17:51):
figure out that they have to take some stuff away
to make this work best.
Speaker 1 (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. When I first thought,
I thought, yeah, well, I mean, you know, 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 seems 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 and itinerary 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
(19:17):
think 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 think.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
And the travel example, I think shows just how much
it can affect our happy 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 ephemeral 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 1 (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, Mary Condo's book,
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying was also out and
was a huge bestseller, And so people were always asking
me to talk about, you know, the contrast between my
book and Mary 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 effacts, or if only we had
(22:04):
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 Ldi Klott 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.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
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 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
(23:34):
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 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
(23:54):
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 now, squeeze that into all the other
stuff that kids have to do. But this overscheduling, the
research shows, makes kids like way more anxious. Anxiety disorders
(24:17):
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 perform more successfully if we could just take
a bunch of stuff out of kids' schedules.
Speaker 1 (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 masthitude. 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, 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, the 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 gets back from the break, Welcome back to
the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover. So, Tim, before we left,
(25:35):
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 people can actually subtract,
but only when they're kind of forced into a corner
and they have to.
Speaker 1 (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 Branders, and she or
the opera house between them, had not got a good
piano on stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular piano
Bozendor 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, 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 no 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. The point
is he could have done that on any piano, and
yet he didn't because it never occurred to him. You know,
(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 Klatts 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 2 (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've got to take something away.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
What would be the one thing you take away? And
the experiment sage.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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 and was like, no,
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 realize like,
(29:50):
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 2 (29:56):
You can make that decision for yourself.
Speaker 1 (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,
(30:19):
long 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 Hirschfeld'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? And you feel kind of bad,
so you're like yes. Then weeks later that project or
that dinner party comes up, and that's where you say damn.
Speaker 2 (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 2 (31:52):
So how do we deal with this?
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah? I mean that's very familiar. I know that experience.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
It's not unique to me.
Speaker 1 (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 te 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. So let's kind
of play this out. Laurie, do you want to do
some project? You know, to do this date? 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,
(32:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Project to do. And then you have the experience of yay.
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,
and wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad.
I feel kind of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself
(33:13):
with 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 save 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 at the first time.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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, and flip that around.
(33:54):
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 just tell myself that.
(34:15):
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 my wife's inbox with
(34:38):
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 3 (34:49):
I bet that increases marital satisfaction in a bunch of
different ways.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
But the cool thing is that there are these.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
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, an extra
BCC on the email can kind of bring subtraction to
light and maybe that will make us a little bit happier.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the
Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie, thank you for joining
me on Cautionary Tales. Dr Lourie Santos, as you know,
is the host of The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
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 1 (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 Shunker 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.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm Tim Harford, and this.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Is another crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Lab 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,
(00:47):
as it were. So, what cautionary tale of happiness have
you got in store for me?
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Chuck was excited to.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
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 were dangerous. So cut to
(03:21):
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 at The X and A flew upwards fast,
(03:42):
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. At some point,
(04:04):
Yaeger was thrown violently into the cockpit's canopy.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
He even cracked the.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
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 too dazed to operate the controls.
Was the plane rolling or spinning? Chuck had no idea.
(04:28):
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 1 (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 2 (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 a 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 ONEA hit about twenty
five thousand feet, it finally steady. The aircraft was still spinning,
but it was the kind of spin that Yeager was
familiar with. Once all the nightmarish bucking and tumbling was over,
(05:59):
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 play. Sure, huh.
If you listen to Yeager's cockpit recordings, his fear is
very obvious and his relief is palpable.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
I can't very much.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Before I got it, he knew he was in trouble,
but in the end he was going to make it
home all right.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I don't know a thing up or not. 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 Chef Boy. He told
his team, I'm not going to do that anymore. Jaeger
(06:46):
walked away safely from the X one A and never
flew a wocketplane again.
Speaker 1 (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 an ineffective or even make stuff worse. Tera says
(07:22):
that 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 1 (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. I mean, 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. There's one on the subject of masterly inactivity,
(07:58):
which features Helena bottom Krter as the formidable Lady Saale.
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 invade in Afghanistan, which I think with hindsight is obvious.
(08:19):
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 1 (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 of
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 far of the right, because they
would have looked like they weren't even try. And so
there's that pressure to act even when just waiting and
(10:13):
standing 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 or 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. Right. 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
(10:58):
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 it's futile, to feel
like they're taking some kind of action rather than doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (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, mastering 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 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 1 (12:29):
We are, indeed, and we'll learn more about that when
this Cause Retail's Happiness Lab crossover episode returns after the break.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Welcome back to the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (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 1 (12:59):
I'm going to stop you, Laurie, go for it. Go ahead,
how can I resist? 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 1 (13:11):
Ooh, let me guess. Hard to deal with vehicles combine harvesters,
no giant robots that you get to sit on or
I don't know, tell me.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Actually the story involves a bike, like just a regular
kids bike.
Speaker 1 (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 far In family.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Love of wheels.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Body 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 1 (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 1 (15:02):
And how did you do that?
Speaker 2 (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 the 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 1 (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 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 pedaling
(16:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
It's kind of about to collapse because it's got.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
One leg in the wrong spot, and he asks subjects
do something to make this structure a little bit more stable.
And so subjects have two choices. 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 and so then all of
a sudden the thing would balance better. And what he
finds is that even if you suggest to subjects like hey,
(17:31):
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 extra block they
put on, and it's still really hard for them to
(17:51):
figure out that they have to take some stuff away
to make this work best.
Speaker 1 (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. When I first thought,
I thought, yeah, well, I mean, you know, 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 seems 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 and itinerary 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
(19:17):
think 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 think.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
And the travel example, I think shows just how much
it can affect our happy 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 ephemeral 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 1 (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, Mary Condo's book,
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying was also out and
was a huge bestseller, And so people were always asking
me to talk about, you know, the contrast between my
book and Mary 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 effacts, or if only we had
(22:04):
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 Ldi Klott 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.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
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 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
(23:34):
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 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
(23:54):
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 now, squeeze that into all the other
stuff that kids have to do. But this overscheduling, the
research shows, makes kids like way more anxious. Anxiety disorders
(24:17):
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 perform more successfully if we could just take
a bunch of stuff out of kids' schedules.
Speaker 1 (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 masthitude. 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, 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, the 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 gets back from the break, Welcome back to
the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover. So, Tim, before we left,
(25:35):
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 people can actually subtract,
but only when they're kind of forced into a corner
and they have to.
Speaker 1 (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 Branders, and she or
the opera house between them, had not got a good
piano on stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular piano
Bozendor 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, 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 no 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. The point
is he could have done that on any piano, and
yet he didn't because it never occurred to him. You know,
(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 Klatts 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 2 (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've got to take something away.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
What would be the one thing you take away? And
the experiment sage.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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 and was like, no,
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 realize like,
(29:50):
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 2 (29:56):
You can make that decision for yourself.
Speaker 1 (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,
(30:19):
long 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 Hirschfeld'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? And you feel kind of bad,
so you're like yes. Then weeks later that project or
that dinner party comes up, and that's where you say damn.
Speaker 2 (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 2 (31:52):
So how do we deal with this?
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah? I mean that's very familiar. I know that experience.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
It's not unique to me.
Speaker 1 (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 te 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. So let's kind
of play this out. Laurie, do you want to do
some project? You know, to do this date? 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,
(32:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Project to do. And then you have the experience of yay.
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,
and wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad.
I feel kind of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself
(33:13):
with 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 save 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 at the first time.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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, and flip that around.
(33:54):
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 just tell myself that.
(34:15):
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 my wife's inbox with
(34:38):
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 3 (34:49):
I bet that increases marital satisfaction in a bunch of
different ways.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
But the cool thing is that there are these.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
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, an extra
BCC on the email can kind of bring subtraction to
light and maybe that will make us a little bit happier.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the
Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie, thank you for joining
me on Cautionary Tales. Dr Lourie Santos, as you know,
is the host of The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
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 1 (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 Shunker 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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