I’d like to tell you about one of the biggest and most effortful studies on behavior change ever conducted and its strange findings (that may not even be obvious if you read the paper – I only realized its implications on my 2nd reading!)
Let’s begin: The study had 61,000 participants, all with gym memberships. 30 scientists worked in small teams to develop interventions, each aiming to increase gym attendance over 4-weeks. This resulted in 53 interventions to test. A promising setup to figu...
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habit formation
Intersecting advice from highly successful people
It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...
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