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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. I'm Tim Harford. And this is another crossover episode of my podcast, The Happiness 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
where it was decreed that workers had to stagger their days off no matter what that meant for missing leisure time with their friends and families. So this time, it's the return match, as it were. So what cautionary tale of happiness have you got in store for me? Oh, it's a good one. 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 of my favorite American heroes, Major Charles E. Yeager.
As a young fighter pilot in World War II, 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 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.
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 broken 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 explain 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 1953. Chuck was now piloting an upgraded version of the glamorous Glennis, the new X-1A. The X-1A was built to travel more than twice the speed of sound. Chuck was excited to try out the new aircraft.
especially since a pilot from the U.S. 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 and height. The forces Chuck was about to face were as unprecedented as they were dangerous. So cut to December 12th, 1953. Yeager's 10th flight in the X-1A began routinely enough. Chuck in the X-1A got carried high into the sky by a big bomber plane,
The X-1A was then dropped from the belly of the bomber, and Chuck ignited the experimental rocket engine. The X-1A flew upwards fast, but soon started kind of freaking out. It was pitching and rolling and tumbling. Chuck grappled with the controls inside the cockpit, but nothing the pilot did seemed to stop the plane's violent descent. And so the X-1A was now plummeting out of the sky while tossing its poor test pilot around like a ragdoll. At some point, Yeager was thrown violently into the cockpit's canopy.
He even cracked the plastic with his flight helmet. All this goes to say, this was not a good situation. In a matter of seconds, the experimental aircraft dropped more than six miles. Even if Yeager had known how to stop the X-1A's rapid descent, he was two days to operate the controls. Was the plane rolling or spinning? Chuck had no idea. There was nothing he could do but surrender to the G-forces jostling him in his seat as the aircraft fell towards the barren Mojave Desert below.
Laurie, this is the kind of cliffhanger opening that my Cautionary Tales listeners will be familiar with. A doomed plane and an equally doomed pilot hurtling towards Earth. So what did Chuck Yeager do? Nothing. Nothing? Well, mostly nothing. Which is why happiness experts like me loved What Happened Next.
Chuck was known for his nerves of steel. But this situation had him totally spooked. He later said that if the X-1A 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 himself from dying. So without any way to escape, Yeager had two options. Option one, he could do everything in his power to right 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 too violent, he was forced into option number two. Just do nothing. Just ride it out. And that is exactly what saved him. When the X-1A hit about 25,000 feet, it finally steadied. 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, the veteran test pilot was finally able to pull up the nose of his craft. If you listen to Yeager's cockpit recordings, his fear is very obvious, and his relief is palpable. He knew he was in trouble, but in the end, he was going to make it home. I can't catch it.
The wild ride wasn't a total disaster. The X-1A had topped out at Mach 2.44. And that record was finally enough for Chuck. Boy, he told his team, I'm not going to do that anymore. Yeager walked away safely from the X-1A and never flew a rocket plane again.
I love the story, Laurie, and it's definitely a cautionary tale, but what's the happiness moral of this anecdote? Well, I first heard this story from one of my favorite meditation teachers, the psychologist Tara Brack. She shares it as a cautionary tale about our usual need to constantly be in control of every facet of our lives. Well,
When we're faced with a problem, most of us instinctively want to take action. We feel the need to do something, even in cases when we kind of know our actions will be ineffective or even make stuff worse. Tara says that in times like this, we need to copy the great Chuck Yeager. We need to pause, take our hands off the controls, and just let things be.
This pause, Tara writes, gives us a possibility of a new choice. 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'm struck by some of the cautionary tales 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 which features Helena Bonham Carter as the formidable Lady Sale in the disastrous British Army operations in Afghanistan in the 19th century. This idea of masterly inactivity was raised
And it applied not just to maybe the British should never have invaded Afghanistan, which I think with hindsight is obvious, but also parenting. Maybe we should do less parenting or medicine. Maybe doctors should be doing less, prescribing fewer tests, prescribing fewer treatments. Even soccer goalkeepers are too committed to being active when faced with a penalty. In fact, they'd be better off if they stayed still. 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? Sure. I mean, I understand that the joys of soccer are finding American shores these days, but maybe not this particular study. So some, I think there were economists who studied that actually looked at what goalkeepers do when faced with a penalty kick. And basically, in the
In the penalty kick, the striker gets to try and put the ball in the net. And they can boot it to the left, or they can boot it to the right, or they can boot 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 50-50. Just dive to the right or dive to the left.
and you've got a 50 chance of going the right way even if you do go the right way you might not save it i mean actually most penalties turn into goals usually the keeper isn't able to save it but there's
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 centre or near enough to the centre. 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 to the right because they would have looked like they weren't even trying.
And so there's that pressure to act even when just waiting and standing still would have been a better thing to do. 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 non-operative management or active surveillance, which I 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 cancers, 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 and chemo. But the idea of just sitting there and like seeing what your tumor does is
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. Yeah, which I suppose is why that word active is so important. Active surveillance, the idea that you are doing something. The challenge, of course, is to know whether active surveillance, whatever it is, masterly inactivity, to know whether doing nothing matters.
is the right thing. And for that, you would need some kind of statistical evidence base. You'd need some 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 a patient who is pestering them and saying, I want you to do something. OK, 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. 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 that subtracting stuff seems to be even harder for our lying minds to deal with. It's something that we're very, very bad at. We are indeed. And we'll learn more about that when this Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover episode returns after the break.
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Welcome back to the Happiness Lab. And welcome back to Cautionary Tales. 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. I'm not going to stop you, Laurie. Go for it. Go ahead. How can I resist?
Well, story number two doesn't take us as far back as the 1950s, but it does involve a clever strategy for operating yet another hard-to-deal-with vehicle. Ooh, ooh, ooh. Let me guess. Hard-to-deal-with vehicles. Combine harvesters. No, giant robots that you get to sit on. I don't know. Tell me. Actually, the story involves a bike, like just a regular kid's bike. Oh, OK. Well, hopefully it's a good story. Well, the story begins with a guy by the name of Ryan McFarland. Ryan McFarland is a
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 raced stock cars. Ryan was eventually able 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 Bodhi was out of the womb, Ryan was ready to pass on the McFarlane family love of wheels. Bodhi 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 Bodhi on two wheels as soon as possible. So he spent thousands of dollars buying Bodhi the usual learner vehicles. Toddler tricycles, trainer bikes, even a training wheel-equipped motorcycle.
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 seems like a terrible idea for a two-year-old. 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 Bodhi could learn to balance. And how did he do that? Well, his solution was 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, even a two-year-old could ride it. On the strider, Bodhi was able to learn to steer and balance, all the stuff he'd need when he graduated to a real bike, or I guess a motorcycle. ♪
Ryan was able to turn his idea not just into a toy for Bodhi. His balance bike turned into a global company, which has now sold millions of pedal-less bikes in less than a decade.
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 or the Germans had, I think, the Laufmaschine. I forget exactly what it was. The dandy horse was another thing they were called. Bikes originally didn't have pedals because the whole idea of pedaling, you needed gears, you needed a chain. It was too difficult. And
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 it got to do with happiness? 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 Leidy Klotz. He's a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia. He's written this awesome book called Subtract, The Untapped Science of Less. But he does all these experiments where he shows just how hard it is for adults to figure out how to solve a problem
that requires taking something away. He does these fun studies with his college students where he shows them this kind of Lego bridge type thing that's sort of uneven. It's kind of about to collapse because it's got one Lego 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 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 leidy 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 10 cents for every extra block they put on. And it's still really hard for them to figure out that they have to take some stuff away to make this work best. I had the privilege of interviewing Leidy for the Financial Times. I read his book and I found it really fascinating. And when I first saw Leidy,
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 didn't occur to him to subtract. When I first saw it, 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 Leidy had been doing with his co-authors were, I think, much more obviously relevant to day-to-day life. For example, one of 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. That suggests adding steps or adding ingredients. And very few people said, no, you need to take
take away this ingredient because it's going to swamp everything else. There seemed to 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 an itinerary for a day in Washington, DC. I used to live in DC. It's a
crazy. I think they had 24 different stops and they would basically be going to, I don't know, Library of Congress, 20 minutes there, get back in the coach, down the mall to a museum, 20 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. It was clearly insane. And they were given this itinerary and told
Okay, how do you make it better? And the obvious answer is 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
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 and subtraction was the only answer. So this seems to be really quite a deep bias in the way we think. And the travel example, I think, shows just how much it can affect our happiness 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 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. 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 published this book, around about the same time, Marie Kondo'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 the contrast between my book and Marie Kondo's book, because I'm for mess and she's for tidy. And actually, I kept saying, I don't think... I mean, I loved her book, actually. 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 can 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 book is about subtraction. And I've got absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes you need that space. And I was similarly surprised.
sceptical about organisational systems. I don't think organisational systems solve the fundamental problem of too much stuff going on. But yet we fool ourselves into thinking that if only we did have the right hacks, if only we had the filofax, or if only we had the right software, then we could solve all the problems in our lives by just getting organised. And the
But sometimes, no. There's 24 hours in a day. There's only so many rooms in your house. 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 think it does. A really fundamental insight in 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 you see everything as potentially getting in the way of everything else, you start to realise, as Lydie Klotz 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.
I think this is so important for myself in so many different ways. But this is also something that I've seen in my students, right? They have these college students today have these such like oversubscribed schedules, like they just never have time to do anything. And I think that's
because they grew up in a 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 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 a kid's 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 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 date and I'll 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 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 outspoken.
everybody would perform more successfully if we could just take a bunch of stuff out of kids' schedules. 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 math tutor. There's nothing wrong with learning an instrument. There's nothing wrong with learning a sport. It's all good. It's just there's a limit.
And sometimes we like to tell ourselves, oh, well, if we just get rid of all the wasted time, if we get rid of all the bad stuff, then we'll have time to focus on what really matters. But actually, no, sometimes you have to get rid of stuff that you really do want to do, stuff that is worth doing, because you can't do everything. And it's painful to face up to that.
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.
I love cycling and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe. Which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble, with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it,
And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.
Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,
Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
Welcome back to the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover. So Tim, before we left, we were talking about ways that we can make subtraction a little bit more obvious for our lying minds. And one of the ways that occurs is
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. 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. 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 Brandes. And Jarrett,
She or the opera house between them had not got a good piano on stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular piano, a Bosendorfer Imperial. He's a real perfectionist. And instead, they'd looked around for a Bosendorfer piano and they'd found this beaten up rehearsal model. Not a proper grand piano, so 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 turns out they couldn't get a new piano. 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. It was a late night concert. It was 11.30. He probably had a few beers. They're going to show up at this concert and...
There'll be no concert. There'll be no Keith Jarrett. So Jarrett decided, OK, I have to do it. I have to play this thing. And so he walks out on stage in front of this packed auditorium, 1,400 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, 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
And yet he didn't because it never occurred to him. 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 inspiration
insight into the way that we don't do it unless we're forced to. We often need this disruption. 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. And I think this is one of the strategies that Leidy Klotz mentions in his book, right? Which is to pretend that you're forced into this. Like,
Like he suggests in a business meeting, you know, 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? What would we take out, right? That kind of thought exercise winds up putting us
up putting you in the simulated situation where maybe you can't add anything else. You've got to take something away. What would be the one thing you take away? And the experiment suggests, while it doesn't come to our mind naturally, when you kind of strong arm people and say, 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, there are just too many trips. Like I just can't fit all this travel in.
And sometimes I ask myself, OK, if I had to take one away, like if, you know, I don't know, some huge deity came down and was like, no, here'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, 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. You can make that decision for yourself. Yeah.
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. They're kind of one in, one out, or sometimes it's one in, two out. You have to cancel more regulations than you had.
And to some extent, it's a bit silly. I used to, long, long, long, long 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'd 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 neighbouring country...
It doesn't take you a year to set up a business. 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.
Another thing that does the job is really trying to harness your inner economist 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 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. And so that's the yes, damn effect. You say yes to something, time passes, and then you see it in your calendar and you're like, damn.
And so how do we deal with this? Yeah, I mean, that's very familiar. I know that experience. It's not unique to me. 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 trick that you recommend to get more out of this? Yes, and the trick is what's known as the no-yay effect.
where 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. Lori, do you want to do some project? You know, it's due 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. And so I go to that date in my calendar when that project I just said no to would have been due.
And I write in, hey, Laura, you didn't have to do the project this day. And then you get to that date in the calendar and you realize, oh, my gosh, my day would have been so much worse if I had that huge project to do. And then you have the experience of yay. And so this is the no yay effect. 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, this person wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad. I feel kind of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself the opposite emotional reaction when that date of the thing finally comes up where you get the moment to remember, oh, my gosh, I just saved myself this time. I'm so proud of myself and happy. 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 in the first place. I really like that, Laurie. 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, 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 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. 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 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. I bet that increases marital satisfaction in a bunch of different ways. I might have to do this. My poor husband's inbox is going to implode with all the things I'm saying no to.
But the cool thing is that there are these ways that we can kind of bring subtraction to the forefront. It doesn't come naturally, but like with a little bit of extra work, scribbling things in the calendar, an extra BCC on email, we can kind of bring subtraction to light and maybe that will make us a little bit happier.
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on The Happiness Lab. Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie. Thank you for joining me on Cautionary Tales. Dr. Laurie Santos, as you know, is the host of The Happiness Lab. And Tim Harford, as you know, hosts Cautionary Tales. Both podcasts are productions of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.
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 20th, Laurie and I are going to be teaming up for a special show dedicated to World Happiness Day. Yes, Tim will be joining me for a chat alongside our fellow Pushkin podcast hosts, Maya Shunker and Malcolm Gladwell, where we'll all be considering ideas for making the world a slightly happier place. And we hope to see you back then.