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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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When we do invest ourselves in making things, we do come to value them more highly.
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And I think a similar logic happens with rituals as well, which is it s not that things that are built for us aren t great.
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They can be fantastic.
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I don t know how to build a car, so I need to buy a car that s already made.
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But we can also do things ourselves on the fly.
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And those rituals I think are interesting also when we put ourselves into them, literally invest ourselves into them, they can have a different special meaning for us that can be really valuable.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passionstruck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 440 of Passionstruck, consistently ranked as the number one alternative health podcast.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, be better, and to make a meaningful impact in the world.
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I have a special invitation for you.
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I m excited to introduce our new Passionstruck quiz.
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It s a unique opportunity for you to discover where you stand on the Passionstruck continuum.
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Are you an orchestrator who masterfully balances various aspects of life with passion and purpose?
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Or are you a vanquisher, conquering challenges and turning obstacles into opportunities?
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Take the quiz on PassionStruck.com and find out which one resonates more with your journey to living a passion-struck life.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs or Spotify to get started.
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And in case you missed my episode from earlier in the week, I interviewed Dr. Stephanie Estima, the renowned expert in metabolism and neurology.
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Dr. Stephanie is known for her groundbreaking work in optimizing human potential
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she shares her insights on how to harness the power of your body s biology to achieve peak health and performance.
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And if you liked that previous episode or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a 5-star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the Passion Star community where we can help more people to create an intentional life.
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I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today, we re thrilled to have Dr. Michael Norton, a trailblazer in behavior science and a professor at Harvard Business School as our distinguished guest.
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Dr. Norton s groundbreaking work explores the intricate dance between human behavior and happiness, leading to his latest book, The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.
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In this enlightening conversation, we will uncover the essence of rituals,
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their importance in our daily lives, and how they differ from mere habits and traditions.
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Dr. Norton will share insights into the emotional power of rituals in their role in shaping identities, aiding transitions, and fostering community bonds.
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We ll delve into the nuances of ritual signatures and the sensory, repetitive, and communal elements that amplify their impact.
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Expect to explore the fascinating intersection of rituals with performance health relationships and even workplace dynamics.
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We ll also go into how rituals can support healing, enhance romantic bonds, and adapt to the evolving nature of work in today s world.
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Lastly, Dr. Norton will also touch on the delicate balance between rituals that unite and those that may divide, especially as we re facing this political election in 2024.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now.
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Let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled and honored today to have Dr. Michael Norton.
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Welcome, Mike, to the show.
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Thanks so much for having me on.
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Mike, I thought the best starting place since I was introduced to you by Katie Milkman would be to ask you about the behavior change for good initiative.
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How did you get involved with it?
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And what difference do you think it s making?
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I ve known Katie for many years, actually, since she was a doctoral student at HBS a very long time ago, cause she s now senior in her career.
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And she was always interested, I think, in research that could make a difference in people s lives.
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I think even from her very early research, it always had that element of how could people use this to improve their habits, to improve their well-being, to improve their relationships.
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Not surprising when years later,
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She and Angela Duckworth developed this initiative in this group, which I m involved with as well.
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Really, I think trying to take the things that behavioral scientists have learned, I don t know if there s a million of them, but there s a few of them anyway that we ve learned over time, and see if we can roll them out and try to help people make changes that they re looking to make.
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Yeah, I love it because it s allowing you guys to do mega studies, which benefits everyone who s involved.
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So you don t get to see that very much in academia.
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So I m really excited on many of the pioneering results that they re achieving.
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I think it s fantastic.
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And the ability to scale up like that is, is not easy.
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And it s another thing that s impressive about what they ve been able to do.
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Today, we re discussing your new book, The Ritual Effect.
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However, it s interesting because you started out as a ritual skeptic.
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Your initial skepticism about rituals evolved notably, if I have it correctly, after your daughter s birth, which led to nightly bedtime rituals.
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From that point, what drove you to study rituals and how did that personal experience shape your research?
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It s interesting because technically I m a Harvard Business School professor, which means that I study the humans and see what they re up to in almost a detached way, where I m trying to look at what people are doing in their lives.
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And I was interested in rituals from that standpoint, which was
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People seem to be doing these in so many domains of life that we can chat about and what s going on with them.
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What are they doing for us?
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Why do we do them so often?
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But it really was from a place of, I m not that into these.
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It s not that I didn t do any of them, of course, weddings and things like that.
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Of course we ve all done, but it didn t really feel like something that was built into my everyday life until, and if anyone has ever had a kid, the feeling when you have a kid and you bring them home from the hospital.
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And suddenly you are responsible for a human.
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And one of the things you re supposed to do with a human is help them to sleep.
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And what I did and found in retrospect, what I was doing.
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and all parents, shouldn t say all, so many parents that I talk to say the same thing, is they develop some kind of ritual.
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They re not thinking in their head, hey, let s design a ritual and make sure that it works.
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What happens is they come to us.
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So you just suddenly say, hey, last night we read that book.
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Why don t we keep that book in also?
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And then maybe this stuffed animal.
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And then, okay, that went okay.
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So now let s add another stuffed animal and this song and then this.
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And you get these really elaborate sequences of behaviors in the service of helping
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babies to sleep.
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It s not clear that they d always work for the baby, but they definitely work for us in the sense that at least we have some feeling of control over what s happening in our lives as new parents.
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But that was the experience for me where I said, wow, this actually is a part of my everyday life because they sleep every day and every day you do this kind of long elaborate ritual to try to help them.
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And that kind of changed the way I was studying it from let s understand what people are doing to also let me understand even what I m doing.
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I like that backstory because I have two kids and my son was a lot easier in getting into bed, but my daughter could be a terror.
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And so we started establishing a ritual.
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And then when we didn t follow the ritual, she would turn right back into that terror again.
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So it is interesting how well they work from that perspective.
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And it s funny too, because we bring them to bear the more stress we have.
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So you could have had an elaborate ritual with your son if you felt like it, but it wasn t needed there.
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So you didn t develop one there.
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It s almost like when the world gives us stress, that s when we re more likely to say, let s bring a little ritual and see if it can help us out.
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Yeah.
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And I m not sure about you, but I have my own sleep ritual now.
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And, uh, over the weekend, given it was St.
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Patty s day weekend, everything else I was up later than I m used to.
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And when, when you get out of your ritual, it throws the whole next day completely out of whack.
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The Monday morning after St.
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Patrick s day is a tough, it s a tough scheduling thing for many of us, I think.
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Yeah.
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Speaking of rituals, I was hoping that for the audience, you could define what a ritual means in your own words and explain to them how it differs from a habit or a compulsion.
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I think it s important to think about because there s for sure overlap among these different terms, habits and rituals.
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Some habits look like rituals.
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Some rituals look like habits, for example.
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For me, the biggest difference is if you think of a habit, it s behaviors that you need to get done.
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So you want to exercise every day.
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You want to eat healthy.
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You want to brush your teeth and floss every day.
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day, things like this.
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And good habits are really good for us.
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They re a little dry.
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They re a little bit, I need to do these things.
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They re good for me.
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I m going to finish doing them.
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Rituals tend to be sometimes the same actions, but they re imbued with a little bit more emotion or a little bit more meaning.
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So I often ask people when you re getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning for work, do you brush your teeth and then shower or do you shower and then brush your teeth?
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And about half of people do one and half of people do the other one.
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That s their habit.
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I gotta brush my teeth.
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I gotta wash my body before I leave the house.
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It s just a thing we need to get done.
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But then I ll ask people, do you mind switching the order tomorrow?
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If you brush your teeth first and then shower, how do you feel about tomorrow showering first and then after that only brushing your teeth?
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And about half of people say, I couldn t care less.
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And about half of people say, I don t want to.
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And I say, why not?
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And they say, I don t know.
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I don t have a good reason, but I would feel off.
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I would feel weird.
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I wouldn t feel ready for the day.
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And I think if you re someone who does these things and the order doesn t matter, they are more like habits.
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They re sort of actions that you need to get done because they re good for you.
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But rituals, if you re someone who says, I don t know why, but I d really like to brush my teeth and then take a shower, because that s the way I do it.
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And I feel good about doing it that way.
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It s gotten closer to a ritual.
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It s not a ritual like people in robes with candles.
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That s further down from what I m talking about.
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But as soon as things have more meaning and more emotion in them, I think they re moving from dry habit to something a little richer and something I think a little more ritualistic.
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Well, I love that background for the audience.
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As I was reading the book.
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and especially the beginning of the book, it got me thinking about The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.
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You were talking about the evolution of religion and how back in the 1990s, the vast majority of people identified with a religion, most of them Christian,
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But that has really changed over time.
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This notion of a disjointed modern world, the same thing that Joseph Campbell was also talking about as he was seeing the demise of religions happening,
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Why do you think we are replacing these long-term rituals and customs with technological systems and bureaucracy?
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I wanted to add an interesting piece to this.
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I am really interested in the science of unmattering, which I think is impacting a lot of people.
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If you could address this through that lens and what role you see this demise and ritual
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potentially having on people s sense of significance.
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If you look at the kind of 20th century in particular, Max Weber was someone sociologist who was sort of tracking our cultural traditions and our religious traditions and seeing what the trend was in a sense in the United States, but also all over the world.
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And there was a sense that many of the cultural, traditional religious traditions were declining, meaning that fewer people were saying, this is important to me.
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This is something that I make sure to do.
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And one view of that is of course, as life gets more fragmented and we have technology and all of these other things, we do start to lose touch with some of those institutions.
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And I think that was my view going into the research was that s what was happening.
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But once we started to do the research, what we found, and you use the word actually replaced, I think you could imagine that we lose some of those rituals and never replace them.
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But instead, what we see people doing is they actually replace them with new rituals.
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So not the best example, because not everybody goes to this, but Burning Man, for example, it s not religious.
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There s no faith associated with it.
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It doesn t have a book that s hundreds or thousands of years old, and yet
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It is a place where like minded people come together, have a communal experience, literally burn a figure at the end of it, almost like in a religious fashion.
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And so it s interesting for me it s true or lose some of us are losing touch with the older traditions.
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But humans seem to like to recreate them.
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And I think for me, that s what s so interesting about ritual is we could just abandon it altogether and just say, all I m going to do is check email from now on.
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But we don t.
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We come up with new ways of connecting with other people via ritual.
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And we see that not only in kind of the communal ones where groups are creating their own rituals.
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If you even think of sports teams doing rituals before games, they re clapping and stomping and yelling together.
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We do it in all sorts of domains of life.
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We also do them for ourselves as individuals too.
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We say, even if I don t particularly identify with religious rituals or cultural rituals, when we ask people, they say, well, I have my own practices that I do for myself that make me feel different emotions ready for the day or whatever it might be.
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And so it was almost like they re happening under the surface.
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in a different way than they used to happen, even though for many people, of course, their religious traditions are still very strong and very meaningful for them.
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For other people, they re building new ones that have meaning for them and emotion for them as well.
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Well, I appreciate that answer, and I m very glad I wasn t at the festival this past year where it rained and it seemed like it was a total disaster.
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Exactly.
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There s risk.
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There s always risk.
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So as you were studying rituals, you started applying scientific methods to your understanding of them.
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And this led you to explore individualistic decision-making and rituals.
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How has this specific approach influenced your research?
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If you think of a ritual that we re all very familiar with, let s say in a romantic context, in most places in the world still, if you love somebody very much, you might have something like a wedding or some kind of ceremony.
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Could be at a courthouse, could be somewhere, but people gather together, you sign papers, you throw things, you eat different food, family is there.
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Most cultures have decided that when two people decide that this is the person for me, there s a wedding.
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And you can document them all over the world and they have similarities and they have differences.
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And when we started asking people about the role of rituals in their romantic relationships, of course, people said, well, we had a wedding and then every year on our anniversary, we celebrate our anniversary as well.
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But then they would tell us other things that they did.
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So those are the big official ceremonies.
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It s this, we got married on that date.
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And now every year on that date, we re going to do something.
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But couples would say, but we also do these other funny little things.
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And my favorite couple ever, very brief thing, but they said, before we eat, we always clink forks three times.
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Now that s definitely not in a thousand-year-old text anywhere, the clinking fork kind of thing.
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But this couple just decided every time before they ate, they would look at each other and take their forks and just clink them together three times and then start eating as their own little ritual that they had for themselves.
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And they did it every day with every meal.
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Now clinking forks three times is not the same level of sophistication as a giant wedding with 1000 guests.
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But that is what we see actually so we saw that for sure people were doing these at the group level or the communal level, these big rituals.
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But also, as you were saying, at the individual level, people and couples were making up their own little ones under the surface and doing them themselves.
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And that got me really interested because that kind of opens up, for me, a different way of looking at rituals, which isn t only looking at the big communal ones, which are totally fascinating as well, but also looking at the level of the individual.
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What are people themselves generating, devising, coming up with, do-it-yourselfing in order to have these little rituals in their lives as well?
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Mike, I think a good follow-on question to that would be the different elements that potentially enhance the effectiveness of rituals.
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So how do things like effort, senses, repetition, action, community, impact rituals?
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We did research a few years ago on something that we
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maybe regrettably called the IKEA effect, but it s too late now, that s what it s called.
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But the idea in the IKEA effect was that when you make things yourself, you value them more highly.
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Very simple idea.
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But if I build something and you build the same thing, I want to keep mine and you want to keep yours because I built mine and I put myself into it.
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It has more meaning to me.
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It has more emotion to me.
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Yours looks terrible to me.
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But to you, yours looks fantastic because you put yourself into it.
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And of course, mine looks terrible to you.
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And we could show this with research that when we do invest ourselves in making things, we do come to value them more highly.
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And I think a similar logic happens with rituals as well.
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It s not that things that are built for us aren t great.
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They can be fantastic.
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I don t know how to build a car, so I need to buy a car that s already made, but we can also do things ourselves on the fly.
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And those rituals I think are interesting also when we put ourselves into them, literally invest ourselves into them.
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they can have a different special meaning for us that can be really valuable.
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to let you talk about IKEA and not talk about the story that came before IKEA.
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So I m going to ask you about the small stone sculpture that you made and what it has to do with the research from Kahneman and Thaler on endowment effect and how the personal effort that you showed in creating that stone sculpture amplified your attachment to it as you were just discussing with IKEA.
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It s funny.
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Some ideas have to come from somewhere.
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whenever you have an idea.
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And for me, they very often come from my own life.
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I m doing something and I look at myself and say, I m being ridiculous.
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And then I say, I wonder if other people are doing the same ridiculous thing.
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And then there we have a project to see what s going on.
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And it was the case for me that I was in a stone carving class with some friends who were extremely talented, who made just extraordinarily beautiful sculptures in this class.
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And I made something, I have no artistic talent whatsoever.
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It just looked
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Terrible.
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And I even know it looks terrible.
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I m not even deluded.
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I don t think it s amazing.
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I know it s terrible.
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And yet I made it 25 years ago and I still have it.
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I could never bring myself to throw it away.
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Every time I move, I pack it up and I make sure I bring it with me and I put it on a shelf in my new place.
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And the question was, why?
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I don t think it s good, but I love it.
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It matters to me that I made it.
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And that was where the initial idea came from, which is why are so many people, they have a terrible watercolor that they painted or a crooked bookshelf that they built in some class a long time ago.
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and they just can t bring themselves to get rid of it, or a scarf they knitted that s all crooked, but they still want to keep the scarf.
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And that was the initial idea, which is that when we invest ourselves into things, maybe we start to value them more highly, perhaps than we should, or perhaps than other people do.
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And the endowment effect that you mentioned is an amazingly wonderful study, is that when we re given things, we start to value them already.
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Even if I didn t make it myself, as soon as it becomes mine, I attach value and meaning to it.
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And then what we could show is that not only do I have it, but I made it even more value gets attached to it.
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So we start to have really ridiculous things where we had people build little sets of Legos that were meant for children.
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And grownups will pay us money to take them home because they put the Lego set together themselves.
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So we can really see this effect where this effort translates into
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value.
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And on the one hand, you could say it s a mistake, because my sculpture does look terrible.
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So maybe I shouldn t value it that highly.
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But on the other hand, it s given me a lot of meaning and joy over the years.
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And so it s not a mistake to imbue things that we made with value.
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It s actually a source of meaning.
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Thank you for sharing that, Mike.
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I m going to shamelessly name drop here, but I was happy to see that you had a friend of mine, Ethan Cross, in your book.
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You were talking about Ethan in this section where you describe rituals as emotion generators and his work on emotion as tools.
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I think a lot of people know him from his book, Chatter.
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But can you explain why the ability of rituals to generate a broad range of emotions, a phenomenon that you call, which I love is emo diversity, is crucial for our psychological wellbeing?
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Ethan s work is so interesting to me because we all know what emotions are, and we know that we have them.
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And we know that sometimes we re trying to change them.
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If I feel sad, I might be trying to feel happier.
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And his view is that emotions are kind of tools that we use to solve problems, that we re looking around for emotions to help us.
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If I m nervous, I might look around to see if I can find something that will help me be calm.
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In the same way, if I were hungry, I d look around for food.
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If I m nervous, I m looking around for calm.
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It s very simple, and I mean that as a compliment, very powerful idea.
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But the question is, how do we get those emotions?
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How do we generate them in ourselves?
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And what is very unfortunate for humans is that we can t just tell ourselves how to feel.
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It would be great if we could, but it doesn t always work.
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So if you re incredibly anxious about a speech or a meeting or something, you can t just say to yourself, calm down and snap your fingers.
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And now you re calm.
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If anything, telling yourself to calm down, it makes you even more stressed because not only did you not calm down, but now you re nervous that you couldn t calm yourself down.
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So we can t just often say, feel this way and have it happen magically.
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And I think one thing that rituals do for us is we use them almost as their own set of tools in order to generate different kinds of emotions, like awe and wonder and calm and connectedness to other people.
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These are things that people use rituals for to generate.
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And I think that s so important because in our other research on emo diversity, as you mentioned, we do show that it s a rich psychological life.
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that kind of leads you to have an interesting, meaningful life.
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And I think that s important because sometimes it s, we should all be happy all the time.
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And I mean, I want to be happy and I want everybody to be happy, but if you have a life where the only emotion you ever felt was happiness,
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You never had any sadness.
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You never had any nervousness.
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You never had any of the rich array of emotions.
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It s not as rich a life as if you have this really diverse set of experiences and emotions in life.
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And I think rituals are related exactly to that, that we use them in so many domains of life for so many different types of emotions that they can help us really have this rich emotional life.
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And I love that.
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And I love how they do impact emotions.
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And I thought that that was a really fascinating piece that you brought out.
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I want to go into how we ensure that rituals work for us rather than against us.
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And growing up as a kid, I was a huge tennis player and
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So I remember 10, 15 years ago when Raphael Nadal came on the scene, just how unique a player he was, but he had these interesting quirks about him, including his pregame rituals.
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How do you think these ritualistic behaviors like he shows in so many professional athletes show they might seem arbitrary on the surface, but they tend to be meticulously followed.
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And in this same chapter, you bring up BF Skinner s research on operant conditioning as well.
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So what are the parallels between these?
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I m thinking of your experience with your son and daughter again.
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So your son was easy.
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So you didn t have very elaborate rituals.
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Your daughter was harder, more stressful probably for these reasons of not sleeping as well.
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So you brought ritual more to bear with her.
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And we see that in a very different context, but we see the same thing if you think about professional athletes.
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If I m playing tennis, I m not that good.
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So I don t really need to get that psyched up to serve because no matter what, I m going to double fault.
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It s just, there s no point in me doing the elaborate ritual because it s not going to help me at all.
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But as the stress increases and increases, for example, serving at the French Open,
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then people start to bring more and more ritual to bear.
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So we see these professional athletes or professional singers or these people on these really high stress performers, very often start to resort to more and more complicated rituals.
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The study I love where they coded baseball players, the average number of movements they engaged in before they re at bat.
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And it was 83.
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the swiping and the tapping and the gloves and the whole thing with baseball.
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But I mean, 83, that s like a lot of emotions.
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But of course, they re going to try to hit a baseball that s thrown at 95 miles an hour.
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It s a pretty stressful occupation.
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And so I think we do see, in fact, that these athletes in these extreme conditions decide to bring ritual to bear.
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And there s great quotes from Nadal, actually.
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His is very
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elaborate, including he always picks his wedgie before he serves.
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There s a quote from GQ that s like the most famous wedgie adjuster in history.
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There s a quote like that about Nadal.
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But he says, I know that I don t need to do it the same way every time, but he says, when I do it, I feel like I m ready to go.
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So we have this sense in ourselves that if in these very high stress moments,
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we bring Ritual to Bear on it so that it can help us have this feeling of not just, I m completely panicked, but you know what, maybe I can actually go ahead and try this out.
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I learned something also in this chapter that Keith Richard likes to eat shepherd s pie before he gets on stage.
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The first slice.
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If anybody eats it before him, he can t have it.
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He needs a new one.
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What an interesting thing to eat before you go out and perform.
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You would think that would be something heavy sitting on your stomach.
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And it s interesting because over the weekend we had rise up festival here and we were fortunate enough to go backstage with one of the bands.
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It was interesting seeing them get ready because none of them were drinking.
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The only thing they were really drinking was coconut water, sparkling water, things like that to be hydrated in case they got hot up there.
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But it was a completely different scene than what I had in my mind and expected.
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But I can t imagine any of these guys eating
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shepherd s pie.
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It is a strange, like an outdoor concert and the heat shepherd s pie.
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I like shepherd s pie, but you re right.
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I agree that it doesn t feel like the best thing to have at that moment.
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Yeah.
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On this same theme, rituals can help you and sometimes hinder you.
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What s an example when a ritual might hinder rather than help performance?
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There is research, if you think about these rituals that Nadal or Serena Williams, Keith Richards as well, that these folks do, they re doing them in order to feel a certain way to try to then do something else.
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So you re engaging in the wedgie pick in order to feel ready to serve.
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What can happen though is that we get so invested in the ritual itself that we lose the link between why we were doing the ritual and what it was we were trying to accomplish with the rituals.
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I mean, very exaggerated example, but if Nadal just kept picking his wedgie, he would just have time violations and he would lose every time.
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So there has to be a limit on how much ritual we do in the service of trying to get something else done.
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And there s a prospect in the Minnesota Twins organization, the scouts felt he d developed so many
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rituals before his ass.
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83 is the average, this person was way beyond 83, that they felt that it was now actually affecting him negatively.
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It was bleeding into the at-bat itself.
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So it wasn t helping him get ready to hit, it was actually interfering with his ability to get ready to hit.
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And we don t know for each person exactly what point it is at which it s too much instead of the right amount.
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That varies from person to person and context to context.
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But that is one way to think about it, which is as soon as these rituals start to interfere with the thing you are trying to accomplish, that s when we might say it might be time to pull back a little bit.
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Yes.
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I just wonder what it s like now for them now that they switched to the pitch clock, how many of them had to change their routines?
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Because I had thought going into it that the pitch clock was going to be harder on the pitchers, but I was reading articles where it was actually harder on the batters to change their routines and get prepared than it was for the pitchers, which is very interesting.
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Yeah.
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Very interesting.
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So in chapter six, you tackle self-control, which is a topic I love to talk about because I m constantly trying to explore the concept of intentionality, which I think has a lot of overlaps with self-control.
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And it s something, speaking of Katie and Angela, that Angela Duckworth studies quite significantly.
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In the book, you examine self-control in an interesting way because you look at otherworldly events like monks in Greece who were standing without food or drink for 24 hours.
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Why anyone would want to do that, I have no idea.
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Did you find as you were looking at these types of otherworldly rituals that it was religious rituals in particular that help people exert greater self-control?
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Or do you think people could have pulled them off with rituals that were less steeped in tradition?
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We do see, if you look almost correlationally, if you look at the extensiveness of a self-control activity and whether there s a ritual associated with it, you do often see that acts that require extreme self-control often have some element of ritual to it.
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It s almost as though humans decide that if we are going to do something that s so hard,
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Let s see if we can use ritual to support ourselves as we try to do that.
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I m Irish Catholic, but most religions have something in them where for a period of time, you give up some kind of food or some kind of drink or both.
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It s almost as though religion is helping us learn how to exercise self-control because they re saying, don t have that for a little while.
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See if you can not have that for a little while.
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And it s in the service of your faith that by giving that up, what you re doing is you re honoring your faith.
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And that s a way to give us.
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additional motivation to follow through.
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I m Catholic, so for Lent,
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Sometimes one of the person interviewed said that their kid kept trying to give up broccoli for Lent, which I think is pretty funny, pretty genius.
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And they said, yeah, you don t like broccoli anyway.
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But if I m going to try to give up chocolate, it s really hard to do.
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And doing it in the context of religion for many people can actually help them exercise that kind of self-control.
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And there is some research that suggests that when people are religious, they actually do develop better self-control as part of their religious practice.
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not for every person.
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And of course, many non-religious people also have excellent self-control, but I do think it does show the link between self-control and ritual that we seem to think as humans, that putting those two together can help one in the service of the other.
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In chapter seven, you discuss this concept of ritual signatures.
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Can you explain what this means and how it affects the power of a ritual?
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These two kinds of rituals that we were
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discussing a little bit earlier, the cultural religious ones that are very well established, that many people engage in.
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The United States Thanksgiving is a widely practiced ritual where we have the same food, the family gets together, we do these things on the one day every single year.
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But there s also these ones that we talked about a little bit, which is when we come up with them ourselves, the couple clinking the forks three times before eating each time, that s them
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really doing something that s unique to them.
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And that is what I mean a bit by ritual signature.
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It is true that we get some rituals that we receive from religion, from family, from culture, that can be unbelievably meaningful and important in our lives.
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But we also have this other kind where we re expressing our own individuality
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by making our own rituals under the surface, whether it s in our close relationships, our teams at work, our families, wherever they might be, we re using rituals sometimes to say who we are and what we value.
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And an example that I think is helpful is in my family,
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every evening at dinner, the first thing we do is we say, we do gratitude.
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We say, what are you grateful for today?
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And everyone has to do it.
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My daughter does not like to do it, but we say, you start too bad.
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You have to do it because we have to make kids do stuff.
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And I mean, what are we doing there?
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We could do gratitude once a week.
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We could do it once a year, but we said, we re going to do it every single night.
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It s our little ritual.
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Again, not ritual like people in robes with candles and stuff like that, but it is our own ritual that we do.
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And nobody told us to do it.
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It s just something that we decided to do.
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But what we re trying to say, to remind ourselves and also with our daughter, is that gratitude is important, that you should practice gratitude.
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And the way that we make sure we re practicing gratitude is by inserting a ritual at the beginning of every dinner, where we just make sure once a day, that s the thing that our family does.
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It s in a sense, our little ritual signature.
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We came up with it.
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Other families do it, of course, as well, and do similar things.
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But what are the things that you do in your relationships with your kids, with whoever it might be, that are really unique to you, practices that you engage in, that are really meaningful to you?
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And it s a little bit kind of your personal signature.
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It s different from anybody else s because a little bit is who you are.
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you re in more of a couple s relationship.
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Do you think that doing things like that strengthens bonds and makes it a more cohesive union, or do you think it doesn t impact it at all?
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If you ask couples, do you have a ritual that you do with your partner?
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Couples that say they have something like that report higher relationship satisfaction than couples who say they don t have something like that.
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Now that could be, of course, because couples who love each other are more likely to come up with rituals.
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So we don t know exactly the causal direction of rituals and happiness.
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But what we do see is that if someone tries to reuse your ritual with their next partner,
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we are outraged.
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So imagine the couple that clinks forks three times.
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Imagine that you found out that the guy was going with his next girlfriend and doing the fork clinking with her now.
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People are outraged.
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I mean, how could you do that?
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That s our thing.
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That s our relationship.
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So it does show, I think, how embedded these are in our closeness to each other.
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It s just clinking silverware together, but it means something much more than that to us.
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And it really is supposed to be only for us and not for anybody else.
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Thanks for going into that.
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It is interesting if you see someone that you know who s stealing a ritual that you and your loved one share, because it does feel like they re taking something personal away from you.
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And you can t really say why it s wrong.
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It just feels wrong, right?
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Yes, you re absolutely right.
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One of the other things you explore is rites of passage, and you highlight in the book how rituals guide major life transitions, even across cultures.
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How do these rituals contribute to forming and transitioning between different identities in our lives?
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If you look as far back in history as is recorded, humans have decided that rituals are something that we use at points of transition.
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in life, in particular, transitioning from being a kid to being an adult.
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Now, in different cultures and in different religions, the specific age varies a little bit, but it s typically between the ages of, let s say, 12 and 14 or 10 and 16.
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There s a limited range.
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And in that range, most cultures or religions have
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Some kind of ceremony that kids go through and after they ve gone through it, they re not a kid anymore.
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Now they re an adult member of the community and of the culture.
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Very variable what form that can take from country to country.
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It s often involves something that s effortful and a little bit difficult.
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Sometimes you have to memorize something.
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You might have to say that in front of a bunch of people.
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There s lots of different ways to think about what that ceremony will be.
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We have graduation ceremonies where one day.
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everyone gets a very strange robe and a weird square shaped hat and walks across the stage to get a piece of paper, then throws their hat in the air until they can t find it anymore.
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Why do we do those things?
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We don t need to walk across the stage in order to graduate from one thing to another, but we use these rituals to mark that yesterday is different from tomorrow because today we did this rite of passage and we use that to signal that you re now different from who you were before.
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This whole chapter got me thinking about Native Americans and the rituals as they re going from adolescence to becoming a man or a woman or from one stage to another.
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And sometimes they have to drink a potion or I ve had other friends who ve had to cut themselves in some way or potentially cut their hair or garments.
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It s just interesting how these rites of passage get passed down and the impact that they have.
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In some cultures, you re allowed to wear different clothing after the ceremony.
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You weren t allowed to wear it before.
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Now you re allowed to wear it after.
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So we have lots of different ways of marking the fact that a transition has taken place.
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Absolutely.
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And in the next chapter after this, you go into four lessons of relationship rituals, and we ve touched on a couple of these, how small acts of commitment within relationship rituals contribute to a deeper sense of connection, which we ve just explored, and also why the exclusivity of relationship rituals are unique for couples and how it strengthens that bonds.
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So I wanted to ask you about one of them though.
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So how can couples transform mundane routines into meaningful rituals that enhance their connections?
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So if you ask couples, what are the things that you do together regularly, they say things sometimes like, well, we have to go to the grocery store.
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Every week you have groceries, you got to have food.
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You got to go to the grocery store.
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And for some couples, if we ask them, well, is that like a chore?
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a routine or is that something a little bit more meaningful?
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Is that like a ritual?
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And what s interesting is some couples say it s a chore.
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We got to get in the car, drive to the thing, put the stuff in the car, get home, unpack it.
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Another couple say, we do, we go shopping every Saturday, but when we do it, we always stop for a coffee along the way.
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And when we re in the store, we always make sure to linger around the baked goods and discuss what might be great to have for dessert.
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In the end, both kinds of couples are getting the food they need for the week, but one couple is turning it into not just
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a mundane utilitarian thing that must be done, but into a ritual that they enact together.
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And if something as boring as shopping for food can become a little bit richer than that, I think that s really important for couples to think about, which is most things in life are tasks that you just need to get done, unfortunately.
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Can you imbue them with a little bit more than that so you enjoy them
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little bit more together.
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And we see some couples are quite good at it, and other couples it s a little bit harder for them.
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And again, couples that say things like that are more of a ritual report higher relationship satisfaction than couples who say everything s a chore.
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And I wanted to dive into chapter 11, which is how to find meaning at work, because I talked about mattering earlier on in the discussion, more from an individual perspective.
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But obviously, when you ve got so many people who are disengaged, and I ve listened to a number of your episodes on happiness, where you ve talked about this disengagement, people not being happy at work.
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Rituals definitely play a role in the workplace as well.
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In fact, it s a phenomenon that you cover called collective effervescence.
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What is that?
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It s funny because effervescence I think is such a great word because we have all had experiences where we re in a group.
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And the group is enacting something to get, I would call it a ritual, but your pregame routine, for example, and you feel somehow more than just a collection of individuals.
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You feel like a team or a group, and there s a strong, positive emotion with the effervescence, but.
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You could use other words as well, but they do allow us to connect with each other in a way that you can connect in other ways as well.
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But these ritualistic ways sometimes are things that really bond us together.
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When I lecture about rituals, I often put up on the screen a ritual that I made up, a group ritual, and it s something like clap once, stomp once.
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clap three times, stomp three times, clap five times, stomp five times, just series of actions like that.
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But I make everyone stand up and do it.
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And they look at me like I m crazy, but then they say, okay, I guess we should do this because this guy told us to do this.
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What happens is everybody syncs up.
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So you don t have to clap and stomp at the same time, but people say, let s get on board here, let s all do it at the same time.
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And by the end, they re really a lot of energy, a lot of emotion in the room.
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They re shouting in unison, they re stomping in unison.
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And it feels very different than if we don t do that before the session starts.
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We showed in our research that when we engage in activities like that, these synchronized activities with our teammates or just random people in the audience, they do change the way we feel about each other.
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There s lots of ways to get employees to think differently and feel differently about each other, but I do think we see often rituals are part of the equation.
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And for the listener in the book, Mike also goes into rituals at Walmart and Google.
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I remember when I was at Lowe s, if you were store employee, or if you were in the distribution center, they had a whole ritual of how they started a shift as well.
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Definitely carried symbolism and camaraderie into that day when you did something like that.
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So I wanted to cover a couple of last topics before we conclude.
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The first is we re all familiar with the handshake, which is a well-known ritual of goodwill.
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Can you go into its origins and perhaps the significance of other similar rituals like high fives or giving someone a hug?
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If you think about how humans greet each other, what s interesting is that we do it.
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So if you see a person, we don t just start talking.
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We usually do a greeting of some kind or another.
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But what that greeting is is incredibly different across cultures and across time, but it often involves some words and some motions that seems to be what we ve decided on the handshake.
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100% clear what the origin is.
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But my favorite theory anyway, because it s funniest, is that when you shook hands with someone, it meant that you had to have your sleeve up.
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And so if you had any hidden daggers, the dagger would fall out of the sleeve, and then you couldn t kill each other.
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I don t know if that s true or not, but this idea that by shaking hands, we re showing goodwill.
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In other words, that we re going to
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Behave with sensible people right now.
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We re not going to have conflict in order to do something else, but in different cultures, so many different ways.
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I mean, if you think about, do you kiss on one cheek or on two cheeks?
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varies from culture to culture for sure.
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You can do a fist bump.
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You can do a high five, as you said.
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We have different groups have different handshakes that they do to try to show this is, we literally have the phrase secret handshake.
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We re in this group together.
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Nobody else knows the handshake.
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So we re using these really simple greeting rituals for all kinds of different purposes in life in order to get past the initial
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I m face to face with a person, I m not sure what to do.
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Let s do the thing that we do, which could be a handshake or something or bow, whatever it might be.
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And now we re ready to start the interaction.
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And as a psychologist, it s just fascinating to me, the variety of things that we have come up with over the years, the many different ways in which we start interactions.
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And yet what s common is we do something to start them to get them kickstarted.
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Okay, Mike, and I have to ask this one.
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I mean, given that we re right in the middle of election season and the current political climate is what it is, how do rituals play a role in building trust or fostering division within communities in the political climate that we find ourselves in?
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One thing we see in our research is that couples report being closer, as we discussed, when they have rituals.
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Families that say they have rituals report being more likely to keep getting together
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There s a family, teams at work that have rituals report seeing more meaning in their work.
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So we see lots of positive effects of rituals and groups.
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They can bond us together, they do all sorts of positive things.
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And in a sense that is, it s you saying, this is us, this is the way we do things and it s important to us and we really value it.
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Rituals can go wrong though when we say not just we do this ritual, it s important to us, we value it, but that it s the right way to do it.
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And that can happen pretty quickly, actually.
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So you can go from just, this is how we do things, to this is how things should be done.
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And when you move from, this is how we do things, that s very positive, you can be bonded together, to this is how things should be done, well then people who do it differently are wrong.
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We re right and they re wrong.
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And so the very same ritual that might bring us closer together can drive us further apart from other people who aren t doing it in our mind the correct way,
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And then you get conflict because if you re doing it incorrectly, I need to change the way that you re doing it so that you re doing it correctly.
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And that can happen when organizations merge and two different cultures come together.
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And as you said, it can happen at a very broad national level or cultural level where the way those people are doing things is not the correct way to do things.
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We ll have to have conflict in order to make sure that our way ends up being the way that things are done.
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Well, thank you for exploring that.
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I know it s a difficult topic to get into these days.
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Mike, if a person wanted to learn more about you, where s the best place that they can go?
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Easiest place is michelnorton.com.
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And then most of my website s boring, but there s one part that s not, which is we have a rituals quiz.
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So if you go to the website, you ll see quiz there and you can click it.
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And we developed a quiz for all different domains of life, where you can see how many rituals you re doing right now and which domains of life you re not doing them in.
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And it helps you think a little bit more about the role of rituals in your lives.
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And it can be very fun to have your significant other
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do it as well and compare your results because sometimes we agree and sometimes we disagree, and that can be a fun conversation.
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Okay.
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And the last thing is, can you tell them a little bit about your other book?
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About a decade ago, my coauthor Liz Dunn and I wrote a book that we called Happy Money.
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And that was really an effort to think about what we should be doing with our money to get more happiness out of it.
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So there s lots of books about saving money and investing money more wisely.
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And of course we should do that.
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So I don t mean that is a bad thing to do.
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Of course we should do that.
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But our view was, you know what, but people are going to spend some money.
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What should they spend it on that would make them happy or at least happier?
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And some of the things we find is most of the money that we spend is on stuff for ourselves and stuff for ourselves.
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Doesn t make us that happy.
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It doesn t make us unhappy.
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It just doesn t do much for us.
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But in our own research, what we showed is in fact, that if you just, instead of spending on yourself, you spend on another person.
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that tends to be a more reliable source of happiness than always focusing on yourself.
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So we re really looking at very small, $5, what should you do with it to be happier and offer some guidance to ourselves and to others about how best to get the most happiness out of our money.
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Well, thanks for sharing that.
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It has a really interesting intersection between the work of Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley, where she has shown that awe is magnified by acts of service as well.
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Well, Mike, I enjoyed having you on the show so much.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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It was such an honor.
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And this is an amazing book.
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We cover just a tiny bit of it, but I highly encourage people who want to understand more about rituals, definitely purchase this book.
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You won t regret it.
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Thank you so much, John.
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Really appreciate it.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Michael Norton, and I want to thank Michael, Katie Milkman, and Simon & Schuster for the honor and privilege of appearing on today s show.
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Links to all things Michael will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and our Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.
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Go and join over 250,000 other subscribers who tune into our channel weekly.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles, where I post daily, and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter, Live Intentionally, at either johnrmiles.com or passionstruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview that I did with my friend, John Doolittle, a former Navy SEAL, as he shares insights from his illustrious career, as well as his philanthropic endeavors.
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Discover how John s experiences have fueled his commitment to the Navy SEAL Foundation, his participation in the Tampa Bay Frogman Swim, and his impressive feats like swimming the English Channel.
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You ll also gain insights on resilience and leadership and delve into the pioneering work that he s doing at Katsu.
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exploring the cutting-edge world of blood flow restricted training.
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I never even thought of doing the marathons, let alone across the English Channel, not the easiest of marathon swims.
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And he said, no, you ve been through bloods, I think you ve got the right mindset, you should be able to do it, but contact the family of one of your buddies, one of your fallen buddies.
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And immediately I thought of Neil Fifi, Neil Roberts, his nickname is Fifi.
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I called Patty, his wife, and I said, hey, Patty, I m thinking of doing something in memory of Neil.
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What do you think?
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And she said, well, what are you thinking of doing?
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And I told her.
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I could hear her slap the table on the other end of the phone.
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She said, oh my god, you got to do it.
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He would love that.
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He would love that.
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He would have done it with you.
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And I was like, oh, shit.
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I just screwed myself into this one.
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I can t get out.
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Now I m committed.
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I just told Patty that I m going to do it.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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So share this show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you found today s episode with Michael Norton useful, then definitely share it with your family and friends.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become Passion Strong.