How to Change — Coming May 4, 2021

Hi Everyone, 

Apparently sometimes Milkman delivers minor goofs. There was one link to someone else's book in the newsletter I sent out this morning and that is now corrected below. Apologies and thanks to everyone who caught my mistake (and kudos to you for being such careful readers)!

Take Two

A few years ago, I was going about my morning ritual of brewing tea, making toast, and listening to my favorite podcast when an unfamiliar advertisement caught me off guard. “Turns out good habits come easy,” a pleasing feminine voice cooed. I stopped stirring my tea. Really?

For a few seconds, I held my breath. If someone was about to reveal the secret I’d been pursuing for my entire academic career in a single, pre-packaged sound bite, I didn’t want to miss it.

Unfortunately, as the ad continued, my spirits fell. The reassuring voice just wanted to deliver my meals in boxed kits.

Delightful as meal kits can be, they are not the key to lasting behavior change.

But recent scientific breakthroughs have revealed there are insights that can help anyone make big progress on their goals. And since 2018, I’ve been hard at work on a book that attempts to deliver on the promise of that tantalizing commercial, albeit in 60,000 words rather than 10. It’s called How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, and it will be released by Penguin Portfolio in May. I hope it will help many more people live healthier, happier, and more secure lives (no meal kits required!).

How to Change
 
How to Change distills everything important I’ve learned about changing behavior for good. Through stories and research, it breaks down the problems that keep us from achieving our goals — impulsivity, forgetting, confidence, inertia, and more — and shares proven ways to overcome what holds us back.

If you’re a manager, coach, or teacher aiming to help others change for the better or are struggling to kick-start change yourself, I hope How to Change will offer you an invaluable, science-based blueprint for achieving your goals. 
 
Please check out the book and help me spread the word far and wide. It’s coming on May 4, 2021 and you can pre-order it from Amazon, BN, BAM, Audible, Indiebound, or iBooks. And huge thanks to Angela Duckworth for writing a beautiful Foreword.
 
That’s all for now, but look out for your regularly-scheduled dose of behavioral science later this month.

Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton and host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab