Quit. Do It Now.

This article appeared originally in the Wall Street Journal Online (www.wsj.com)

A few years ago I was - like some of you reading this - overextended, overworked, and deeply unhappy about it. I was a young psychology professor desperately seeking tenure, with two toddlers at home and a husband whose work kept him away for days at a time. I exercised once a week on a good week, rarely saw my friends or extended family, and couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book that wasn't about statistics.

It was just too much. Something had to give. And it did. I left my job, not knowing exactly what I was going to do next. It was the toughest decision I've ever made, but it was also one of the best.

As a psychologist who studies motivation, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why people give up too soon when trying to reach a goal. But the truth is, a lot of us suffer from the opposite problem: not knowing when, or how, to quit. We take on too many projects and commitments, and end up turning in 10 mediocre jobs instead of one or two stellar performances.

To be sure, quitting a job may not be an option for many, but most of us surround ourselves with plenty of unofficial projects that may not be worth pursuing.

So, why is it so hard to throw in the towel, even when on some level you know you should? For one thing, it's embarrassing to admit to others that you've bitten off more than you can chew, or that you've made an error of judgment. No one likes to be thought of as a "quitter." For another, quitting means contemplating the sunk costs - all the time and energy that you've already put into reaching your goal that you can never get back.

Of course, once you realize that you probably won't succeed, or that success isn't worth the unhappiness your project is causing you, it shouldn't matter what the sunk costs are. If your job, your advanced degree, or your unfinished novel has taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn't make sense to give them even more years. That will only make you miserable.

But that doesn't make walking away any easier. So here's a simple game plan for cutting your losses.

At the outset:

- Figure out which goal has to go. It might be obvious, but most of the time it won't be, so you'll need to really give some serious thought to your priorities. What matters most to you? And, just as important, what makes you feel effective and fulfilled? Anything that doesn't, might need to get the boot.

- Be confident. You'll want to know that you are giving up your goal for the right reasons, so ask yourself these two questions:

(a) What do I need to reach this goal, and can I get what I need? Look at the whole picture. If successfully reaching this goal means more time and effort than you can spare without sacrificing other important goals, you may need to walk away. (Maybe you can't work 50 hours a week, spend time with your kids, and write that screenplay, and that's OK.)

(b)Will reaching this goal cost me too much? Will it make me unhappy? Sometimes the problem isn't limited time and energy, it's that you really don't like what you're doing as much as you thought you would. You find the process of reaching the goal boring, frustrating, or unrewarding. Circumstances change, and it's OK for your goals to change too.

Once you've made up your mind that quitting is right move:

- Stop dwelling on the past. When regrets about sunk costs creep into your thinking, have a replacement thought ready, one that focuses on everything you gain from walking away and moving on. (Example: If I feel guilty about giving up on my unfinished novel, then I'll remember how good it feels to have more time on the weekends with my kids.)

-       Replace the goal with one that does work for you. To keep yourself moving forward and feeling satisfied with your choice, give some thought to what you will do instead. If you just don't have the time to write a 600-page novel, is there some other way you could express your thoughts and creativity that you do have time for, like blogging?

-        

Learning to know when to fold 'em is essential for your well-being, and ultimately for your personal and professional success, too. When you can give up on a goal that isn't working, you'll be freeing up the valuable resources you need to make the most of the goals you do pursue - the ones really worth pursuing.

Use Motivational Fit to Market Products and Ideas

by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. & Jonathan Halvorson, Ph.D.

Every marketer knows that people want more good things – good products, experiences, and ideas – and want to avoid bad ones.  What they may not realize, however, is something that research psychologists have known (and kept mostly to themselves) for over two decades: there are two fundamentally different kinds of good.  Tailor your message to match the kind of “good” you are selling, and you can increase consumer trust, message believability, engagement, and perceived value.  Mismatch, and your message falls flat.  So, what kinds of “good” do people want?

Some people tend to see their goals as opportunities for gain or advancement.  In other words, they are focused on all the great things that will happen for them when they succeed – the benefits and rewards. Psychologists call this promotion motivation, and research shows that promotion-minded people are more energized by optimism and praise, more likely to embrace risk, seize opportunities, and excel at creativity and innovation.

Others tend to see their goals as opportunities to avoid loss and to stay safe.  They don’t want to lose what they have worked hard to achieve, and they worry about all the terrible things that might happen if they make a mistake. Psychologists call this prevention motivation, and the prevention-minded are more driven by criticism and the looming possibility of failure than they are by applause and a sunny outlook. Prevention-focused people are more risk-averse, but their work is also more thorough, accurate, and carefully planned. 

It’s not just people who have different motivational focuses – products, activities, and ideas can have them too. Some are obvious: seat belts, home security systems, and mammograms are essentially about avoiding loss (prevention), while vacation homes, lottery tickets, and facelifts are about potential gains (promotion).  Others can be either promotion or prevention-focused, depending on how you talk about them.  When toothpaste is about a “whiter smile,” it’s a promotion product.  But when it’s about “avoiding cavities,” it’s all prevention.

You can more effectively market a product if you tailor your message to fit the motivational focus of the product or the audience you are aiming for.  There are several ways to achieve a motivational fit, but the one that has been most frequently studied is the use of gain versus loss framing.

Promotion motivation makes us more sensitive to, and influenced by, information about gains.  Studies show that people with a promotion focus (or people considering a promotion product or idea) are more deeply engaged when a product is described in terms of benefits.  The same holds true for prevention motivation when descriptions emphasize avoiding loss.

Engaged customers reliably ascribe more value to the product in question, as demonstrated by changes in attitude, behavior, product enjoyment, and spending.  In other words, people will pay more for a product - sometimes much more - if you describe their choice in a way that fits with their motivation.

The nuances in description can be subtle. If you are selling cars, you can choose to talk about “better mileage” (promotion) or “lower fuel costs” (prevention).  You can emphasize the “bonus” features customers get if they buy the Limited Edition, or what they’d be missing out on if they didn’t buy it.  If you are offering a loyalty program at your coffee shop, should you offer 10% off each cup, or tell them that after buying nine cups they get one free? What the customer gets in the end may be the same, but how they get there – through the promotion-focused strategy of seizing opportunities to gain (e.g., better mileage, bonus features, a free cup of coffee) or the prevention-focused strategy of avoiding losses (e.g., high fuel costs, an inferior product, having to pay full price for their morning joe), can be the difference between psychological night and day. 

Knowing which version will be more effective for your audience, for your particular message or product, is the key to finding fit. For example, when Welch’s Grape Juice was described in an advertisement as energy-enhancing (a promotion product), potential buyers rated the brand more positively when the ad was gain-framed (“Get Energized!”) than when it was loss-framed (“Don’t Miss Out On Getting Energized!”).  But when the juice was instead described as a source of antioxidants that prevent cancer and heart disease (a prevention product), the loss-framing (“Don’t Miss Out on Preventing Clogged Arteries!”) was more effective than gain-framing (“Prevent Clogged Arteries!”)

Similar results have been found for other products, including sunscreen, vitamin supplements, toothpaste, and gym memberships. Teen anti-smoking ads and messages advocating social policy issues (e.g, funding after-school programs) were more effective when they were designed with motivational fit.   In one study, people ate 20% more fruits and vegetables after reading about their benefits in messages framed to fit their dominant motivation. In another, promotion- and prevention-focused participants paid 50-70% more for a mug that was gain or loss-framed, respectively.

To create motivational fit, you always want to keep both the qualities of the product andthe motivation of your audience in mind, particularly when you are trying to position a particular product to a target population.  Age is one indicator of how someone is generally motivated (along with culture, occupation, and a number of other demographic variables.) Younger people are, on average, more promotion-minded, and are drawn to opportunity. They are more likely to value the possibility for growth, advancement, and creative expression.  They are also more comfortable with risk, and more likely to engage with a product or idea when it is gain-framed.

Older adults, on the other hand, tend to be more prevention-minded – they are looking for a safe bet.  They want reliability and security.  They want to protect what they’ve earned.  They are, on average, less comfortable with risk, and more likely to engage when you use loss-framing.

Motivational fit is a powerful, and largely overlooked, tool of influence.  When you tailor your message with promotion and prevention motivations in mind, your audience will like it more, and trust it more.  They will find your arguments more convincing, or your story more compelling.  And if you are selling something, they will value it more, and be willing to pay more for it.   Best of all, they will be more satisfied with their decision to endorse your idea or purchase your product – which makes motivational fit a tool you can feel genuinely good about using.

The Trouble With Bright Kids

It’s not easy to live up to your fullest potential.  There are so many obstacles that can get in the way:  bosses that don’t appreciate what you have to offer, tedious projects that take up too much of your time, economies where job opportunities are scarce, the difficulty of juggling career, family, and personal goals.  But smart, talented people rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they’ll have to overcome to be as successful as they might be lies within.   

People with above-average aptitudes – the ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished – often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do (particularly in Western cultures).   Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable, and less confident, even when they should be the most confident people in the room. Understanding why this happens is the first step to righting a tragic wrong.  And to do that, we need to take a step back in time.

Chances are good that if you are a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth-grader.  You did well in several subjects (maybe every subject), and were frequently praised by your teachers and parents when you excelled.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, my mentor Carol Dweck and another student, Claudia Mueller, conducted a study looking at the effects of different kinds of praise on fifth-graders.   Every student got a relatively easy first set of problems to solve and were praised for their performance.  Half of them were given praise that emphasized their high ability (“You did really well.  You must be really smart!”).  The other half were praised instead for their strong effort (“You did really well.  You must have worked really hard!”).

Next, each student was given a very difficult set of problems – so difficult, in fact, that few students got even one answer correct.     All were told that this time they had “done a lot worse.”  Finally, each student was given a third set of easy problems – as easy as the first set had been – in order to see how having a failure experience would affect their performance.

Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their “smartness” did roughly 25% worse on the final set of problems compared to the first.  They were more likely to blame their poor performance on the difficult problems to a lack of ability, and consequently they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.

Children praised for the effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25% betteron the final set of problems compared to the first.   They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough, persisted longer on the final set of problems, and enjoyed the experience more.

It’s important to remember that in Dweck and Mueller’s study, there were no mean differences in ability between the kids in the “smart” praise and “effort” praise groups, nor in past history of success – everyone did well on the first set, and everyone had difficulty on the second set.   The only difference was how the two groups interpreted difficulty – what it meant to them when the problems were hard to solve.  “Smart” praise kids were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence, and to become less effective performers as a result.

The kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities – including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice.  When we do well in school and are told that we are “so smart,” “so clever, “ or “ such a good student,”  this kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness, and goodness are qualities you either have or you don’t. The net result: when learning something new is truly difficult, smart-praise kids take it as sign that they aren’t “good” and “smart,” rather than as a sign to pay attention and try harder.

[Incidentally, this is particularly true for women.   As young girls, they learn to self-regulate (i.e., sit still and pay attention) more quickly than boys.  Consequently they are more likely to be praised for “being good,” and more likely to infer that “goodness” and “smartness” are innate qualities.  In a studyDweck conducted in the 1980’s, for instance, she found that bright girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up compared to bright boys – and the higher the girls’ IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel.  In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. ]

We continue to carry these beliefs, often unconsciously, around with us throughout our lives.  And because bright kids are particularly likely to see their abilities as innate and unchangeable, they grow up to be adults who are far too hard on themselves – adults who will prematurely conclude that they don’t have what it takes to succeed in a particular arena, and give up way too soon. 

Even if every external disadvantage to an individual’s rising to the top of an organization is removed – every inequality of opportunity, every unfair stereotype, all the challenges we face balancing work and family - we would still have to deal with the fact that through our mistaken beliefs about our abilities, we may be our own worst enemy.

How often have you found yourself avoiding challenges and playing it safe, sticking to goals you knew would be easy for you to reach?  Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at?  Skills you believed you would never possess?  If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the bright kids  – and your belief that you are “stuck” being exactly as you are has done more to determine the course of your life than you probably ever imagined.  Which would be fine, if your abilities were innate and unchangeable.  Only they’re not.

No matter the ability - whether it’s intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism - studies show them to be profoundly malleable.  When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot.    So if you were a bright kid, it’s time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve, and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago.

Can You Be Damned By Strong Praise? Understanding Innuendo

We all know how easy it is to damn someone with faint praise.  When you describe a coworker as “not completely useless,” or a potential blind date as “decent enough looking, I guess,” other people understand immediately what you are really saying.  Faint praise is generally used intentionally, to send a message.  And that message is:  steer clear of that one.

Why don’t we just come out and say what we really mean?  The short answer is that  there is an awful lot of social pressure to avoid directly criticizing other people.  Studies show that people who “bad mouth” others are viewed very negatively.  (Gossipers very much included – lots of people like to hear gossip, but they rarely like the person delivering it.) 

As the saying goes, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all.”  Faint praise is a great way to get around that particular problem – you get to technically say something nice, knowing that you are really saying something very different.

But what if you say something that isn’t just technically nice, but is actually nice – something genuinely positive?  New research by psychologists Nicolas Kervyn, Hilary Bergsieker, and Susan Fiske suggests that you can still inadvertently send a negative message, even when you say only unambiguously positive things – a kind of “accidental” innuendo.  The reason has everything to do with context.

When you are describing someone, people (largely unconsciously) expect you to mention aspects of personality or character that are relevant to the situation you are in.  In other words, if you are describing Bob to a potential employer, she will expect you to talk about Bob’s competence – is he hard-working, reliable, innovative?  If, on the other hand, you want to bring Bob along to a party and you are describing him to the hostess, she will expect you to talk about Bob’s warmth – is he engaging, funny, easy to get along with?

When you violate those expectations – when you focus on Bob’s warmth in the context of work, or praise his competence in a more social setting, new studies show that people draw very negative conclusions (even though, technically, you had only good things to say).  They assume that since you aren’t addressing what you should be addressing, you must be doing it intentionally.  What you aren’t saying leaves the biggest impact.

For instance, in one study, “Pat” was described as either “nice, outgoing, and sociable,” or “smart, hard-working, and competent”  Participants were asked to evaluate Pat as either a potential employee or as a fourth member of their travel party across Europe. When Nice Pat was judged in the context of travel-buddy, the overall impression was highly positive.  But when Nice Pat was judged in the context of work, he/she was rated very negatively.  Participants assumed that since no one mentioned Pat’s most relevant attribute – competence – that Pat must be a very nice doofus.

The key to avoiding unintentional innuendo is to really think about context when you are weighing in on someone’s good and bad qualities.  You might think that your friend’s best quality is his terrific sense of humor, but if that’s what you focus on when speaking to a potential employer, you may cost your friend a job.  Take the perspective of the person you are speaking to – what do they want to know about Bob?   Focus on the most relevant attributes, and you are more likely to leave the impression you actually intended.

Check out my new HBR eSingle Nine Things Successful People Do Differently (an expanded version of HBR's all-time most viewed blog post)  (only $3.19 on Amazon!)

My New HBR eSingle "9 Things" Is Available Now!

HBR Singles is a new line of e-books created by Harvard Business Publishing, and I am so thrilled to have authored their very first Single!

It's based on my HBR blog post, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, which remains their most-viewed blog post of all time (over 1.5 million views and counting.)  The eSingle offers much more detail about each of the nine "things," including simple, easy-to-implement instructions for putting it all into practice.  It's available for download today (Nov 1st) for $3.19 over at Amazon.

Forget Willpower! Stop Mindless Eating (And Other Bad Habits) Through Disruption

Do you snack every night in front of the television?  Do you drink a little too much when you are out with your friends?  Do you ever find that you’ve smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, bitten off half your nails, or eaten an entire bag of Doritos without realizing you were doing it?

That’s the real problem when it comes to ridding yourself of bad habits – back in the beginning, when the behavior was new, it was something you did intentionally and probably consciously. But do anything enough times, and it becomes relatively automatic. In other words, you don’t even need to know that you are doing it. 

In fact, as new research shows, you don’t even need to want to do it. If you develop the habit of snacking in front of your TV at night, how hungry you are or how tasty the snack is will no longer determine whether or how much you eat. 

Many bad habits operate mindlessly, on autopilot.  They are triggered by the context (e.g., watching TV, socializing, feeling stressed), rather than by any particular desire to engage in the behavior. So the key to stopping a bad habit isn’t making a resolution – it’s figuring our how to turn off the autopilot.  It’s learning to disrupt the behavior, preferably before it starts.

Take for example a recent study of movie theater popcorn-eating.  Researchers invited a group of people to watch fifteen minutes of movie previews while seated in a real movie theater.  They gave the participants free bags of popcorn, and varied whether the popcorn was fresh or stale. (The stale popcorn was actually a week old. Yuck.)  Then they measured how much popcorn each person ate.

Not surprisingly, everyone who got the stale popcorn reported liking it less than those who got fresh.  And people with a weak popcorn habit (i.e., those who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies) ate significantly more fresh popcorn than stale.  But here’s the kicker – for people with a strong popcorn habit (i.e., those who always ordered popcorn at the movies) it didn’t matter how stale the popcorn was!  They ate the same amount, whether it was an hour old, or seven days old.

That’s worth thinking about for a moment – people with a strong habit were eating terrible popcorn, not because they didn’t notice it was terrible, but because it didn’t matter.  The behavior was automatic, not intentional.  So if tasting like Styrofoam won’t keep you from eating something, what will?

The researchers found that there were, in fact, two effective ways to disrupt the automatic popcorn-eating.

First, you can disrupt the habit by changing the context.  When they conducted the same study in the context of a conference room, rather than a movie theater, people with strong popcorn habits at the movie theater stopped eating the stale popcorn.  The automatic popcorn-eating behavior wasn’t activated, because the situational cues were changed.

If you have a habit you’d like to break, spend some time thinking about the situations in which it most often occurs.  If you snack in front of the TV at night, consider doing something else in the evenings for a while – reading a good book, spending time with friends or family, even surfing the web.  Any alternative activity is less likely to trigger mindless eating.   If you just can’t give up your favorite shows, you might try rearranging the room, or sitting in a different chair – anything that alters the context can help.

Second, you can disrupt a habit by changing the method of performance.  In another study, the researchers found that asking strong-habit popcorn eaters who were in a movie theater to eat with their non-dominant hand stopped them from eating the stale popcorn, too. 

So if you can’t change the situation, you can change the way the habit gets executed.  If you mindlessly eat or smoke with your right hand, try only using your left.  If you mindlessly drink from the glass that the bartender keeps refilling, try sitting at a table instead of the bar so you’ll have to consciously get up and ask for a refill.  Making the behavior a little more difficult or awkward to perform can be a great way to throw a wrench in the works.

Too often, we blame our failures on the wrong things.  When it comes to ridding ourselves of bad habits, we usually chalk our difficulties up to a lack of commitment, or willpower.  But as I’ve argued in my new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, conquering your behavioral demons needs to start with understanding how they really work, and applying the most effective strategy.   In this case, success comes from not making it quite so easy for your autopilot to run the show.

My One Piece Of Paper

Inspired by Mike Figliuolo’s new book One Piece Of Paper – which challenges leaders to distill their philosophies to a single sheet, making it easy for them to live and others to follow – I’ve completed Mike’s worksheet for “Leading Yourself.”  See my answers below.  What are your leadership maxims?

Leading Yourself  (Heidi Grant Halvorson’s Leadership Maxims)

Why do you get out of bed every day?

My maxim is:  Don’t visualize success.  Visualize the steps you will take to succeed.

I wish I could make the universe deliver wonderful things to my doorstep just by imagining them.  I can’t – and neither can you, no matter what anyone tells you.   There is not a single piece of hard evidence that “visualizing success,” and doing nothing else, will do a damn thing for you.  In fact, you are less likely to achieve your goals when all you do is imagine yourself achieving them. People who think not only about their dreams, but about the obstacles that lie their way  - who visualize the steps they will take to make success happen – are able to stay motivated despite setbacks, dig deep, and turn their dreams into reality.  You have what it takes to succeed - stop waiting for it to happen to you, and make it happen for you.

What guidelines do you live by?

My maxim is:  I love it when a plan comes together.

The A-Team’s Colonel “Hannibal” had it right – it’s all about having the right plan.  If-then planning, in particular, is a really powerful way to help you achieve any goal.  Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific actions to reach your goal (e.g., “If it is 4pm, then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances for success.   

When you fall down, how do you pick yourself back up?

My maxim is:  It’s not about being good.  It’s about getting better.

Most people assume success has a lot to do with intelligence, but that’s surprisingly wrong.  No matter how high your IQ is, it says nothing about how you will deal with difficulty when it happens - whether you will be persistent and determined, or feel overwhelmed and helpless. What matters is whether your goals are about being good or getting better.  Where being good is about proving how smart, talented, and capable you already are, getting better is about developing those skills and abilities – about getting even smarter.  Studies show that people focused on getting better  - who see a less-than-perfect grade on a math test or awkwardly-given presentation as a sign to try harder next time, rather than as evidence of “not being good at math” or “not being a good public speaker,” find their work more interesting, and are less prone to anxiety and depression than their be-good colleagues. They are more motivated, persist longer when the going gets tough, and are much more likely to ultimately reach their goals.

How do you hold yourself accountable?

My maxim is:  Focus on the finish line.

Imagine you’re running a marathon, and you see the Mile 10 marker.  Is it more motivating to think about how far you’ve come (10 miles), or how far you have left to go (16.2 miles)?  The answer, which will seem a bit counter-intuitive to some, is that you should focus on the miles to-go.  Too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it.   Studies show that to-date thinking can lead to a premature sense of accomplishment, which makes us more likely to slack off.  We’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals.   We end up with lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat. If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened.   So don’t make the mistake of settling for a job only half done – always keep your eyes on the prize.