Michael Norton
Appearances
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Yeah. And we use them in weapons, actually. So we threaten not to come home for the holidays as a way to show our family how mad we are at them. Whereas if we said, I'm not coming home next Tuesday, nobody cares. But if you say, I'm not coming home for New Year's or whatever it is your family cares about, we're actually using that to say, I'm really mad at you. You've done something really wrong.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I can't even be in the same room with you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And it's interesting because sometimes the reason we're doing a ritual isn't necessarily we're not getting the benefit we think we are. Sometimes it's doing something else for us that we're not quite aware of. And this example that I love is with so many cultures in human history have independently come up with the idea of some sort of ceremonial rain dance.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
As you'd imagine, it's mainly in regions where there's drought. Obviously, if it's raining all the time, we don't need a rain dance. Barry, no rain dance today. Exactly. But if there's drought, then maybe we need something. And of course, I think we could say it's unlikely that dancing will cause rain to come down, I think.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So the question is, why would all of these different cultures have come up with the idea of dancing in order to make it rain? And if you're skeptical and don't understand humans at all, you'd say they're wrong. You know, they're wasting their time. Why are they doing this? They should be doing something else.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But in fact, what happens when there's drought is communities start to fray because now things are scarce. So am I going to be nice to my neighbor? I'm not sure. I'm going to focus on my family and my needs right now. And you really see cultures start to fragment. So what these rain dances do is they bring everybody together again as a reminder that we're in this together.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And by the way, we've been doing this for hundreds of years, and those people got through this together as well. It's actual evidence that we can do this together because we know that others have done it before us. And so, yes, it's not actually going to make it rain, but is it going to help us get through the drought?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I think for sure it's going to help us get through the drought because it's going to bring us back together as a community and a culture.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So great to be here. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And yet, if you ask, I actually teach an undergraduate course and I ask these students who are, you know, 18 years old to ask their parents about their ritual that they had at bedtime. And Their parents, number one, remember it exactly. You know, like burned in your memory what you did with your toddler or, you know, whatever age you remember. And they get very emotional about it.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
It's an amazing, wonderful memory of that time. And it brings back that time in a way that you can look at pictures. You know, I mean, there's other ways to get back and get memories. But sometimes these rituals are really strong triggers to really bring you back. to the experience that you were having.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
What is so funny, I think, about these rituals, and by the way, my wife and I came up with them for our daughter too, so there's no judgment in the circle of parenting, for sure. I think maybe, as you said, it helps the kids sleep, but I think just for the parents, it's orderly.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
You know, it's this book and then that song, and then probably it helps us to sleep even more than it helps our baby to sleep.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I think one of the things about, like the older you get, the more you realize that we don't have control over anything. You know, we kind of knew it all along, but really life just tells us even the things we thought we had a little control, we really don't have any control. You know what I mean? So it is, as you said, it's like existential. I have no control over anything.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So what are we supposed to do with that? I mean, technically, we could just say, well, that's cool. But of course, that's not how we, right? We want to get control. We do all kinds of things to try to get control. And one of the things that we turn to, again, are rituals. And this is amazing. And I can say it's not my research, so I can just say it's amazing research by B.F.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Skinner, who's a famous psychologist, who studied things like reinforcement learning. So how can I get a pigeon to peck something every so often by giving them rewards at the right rate? So it's very kind of measured and very specific. And how do we train pigeons to learn things?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But one time he did this thing where so the way it worked is it's called a Skinner box and it's like a thing with levers and buttons and stuff like that. And he trains pigeons like you have to press the lever twice and then you get a treat and then they can learn that because they're pretty smart. But one time he did this thing where the food just comes no matter what the pigeon does.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So it doesn't matter what they pack or whatever they do. It's just going to come at random times.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And on the one hand, you could say, well, they should just sit back. I mean, if nothing you do can help the food come, you may as well just relax till it comes. And that is completely not what we do and also not what the pigeons do. They come up with their own superstitious ritual to try to get the food to come.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So if they happen to peck twice and then press the lever once, they keep doing that to try to get the food to come out, to feel the sense of control. But the pigeon in the box next to them is like seven pecks in one pull. So they're also, they're literally, each pigeon is coming up with their own idiosyncratic ritual to try to control something that we know they have no control over.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And I don't want to extrapolate too much from pigeons to, for example, me, but I really think we're often doing the exact same thing, which is we're trying through these practices to feel some sense of control because it's such an important feeling for us to feel like we're thriving is to have some sense of control. I think maybe we do it a lot in our everyday lives.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Can I do that by asking you a kind of ridiculous question? Yes. So in the morning when you're getting ready or a night when you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth and then take a shower or do you take a shower and then brush your teeth?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I had a student who told me, who was a gifted athlete herself, and she said, I mean, if you want to waste an entire day of your life, put in any athlete's name and the word ritual. Yes. And you're going to get any performer of any kind, actually. You could spend the rest of your life just so, so fascinating. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But this student that I had did this very clever and funny thing, which was she would deliberately do one of the steps wrong.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
so that if she did poorly in the game, she could blame it on the fact that she had done the ritual wrong instead of blame it on herself or on the teammates or on whatever else. It was a genius. The psychology of that is so complex and so fascinating, and yet it kind of makes perfect sense to me to do that.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And it's as though something is keeping track of us too. If I do my ritual correctly, the good thing will happen. Who's monitoring if we're doing the ritual correct? You know, there's nobody looking. It was superstition as well. Something is monitoring whether I walk under a ladder and then the next day making sure something bad happens to me.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Again, the psychology is very unusual and yet it completely resonates and I do the same thing myself.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So let's start on do you bathe ever? Yeah. If that's yet.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And had I only done my candle, this would have been amazing.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I completely agree. And in fact, there's other amazing research, which again is not mine, so I'll say it's amazing, that one of the things rituals do is they help us deal with failure. when things go wrong, they actually can serve as kind of a buffer against really feeling terrible about it. And I think that also is coming to, if your day is going badly,
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
which happens, of course, a lot to all of us. How do you keep yourself from really spiraling down? I think sometimes ritual, as your experience suggests, they buffer us a little bit and thinking about them can keep us from going maybe quite so dark as we might otherwise go.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Because the magical being, by the way, is monitoring 24-hour cycles. Of course. So as soon as it turns to midnight, the whole thing starts over and then you have a new 24 hours with the magical being who's keeping track of the whole thing.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I will say, though, the magical being, there is a version which is the bad version, which is I walk under a ladder and it's going to make sure I get punished. But one of the reasons we have that belief is there's a good version, too. You mentioned karma, which is that if I do a good thing, something good will happen as a result. And that's a really lovely feeling that we have, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And not even to me necessarily, just that if I do good things, good things happen. That still requires the magical being to be tracking all the goodness. That's right. But that is actually, you can see why we would want to have a force like that in the universe because that can be really uplifting. But it comes with the other thing where they're monitoring to see if you messed up also.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So good. So obviously we'd rather be happy than sad in general. But if you think about, imagine that some scale from one to 10, where 10 is amazingly perfectly happy. if you think about doing that for a little while, it's kind of awesome.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But if you were always a perfect 10 happy for your entire life, it starts to feel a little, I don't know what the word is, but kind of horrifying in a sense, you know, that I don't think I want to be the same thing all the time, even though I want to be happy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I have to say when you gave different answers, the looks on your faces, it was disgust. It was like, what kind of a person could ever do it in that way? And that, I think, is really important, actually. So if you think about, for some people, if I said do it differently tomorrow, for some people, they say, sure, I don't care, like teeth, shower, whatever, coffee. But other people care.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
They say, I don't want to do it differently. And I say, why? And they say... I don't know exactly, but I would feel weird. I would feel off. I wouldn't feel ready. But if I do it my way, I feel amazing. I'm ready to tackle the day, ready to get out the door. And that, I think, is kind of what... It's the basic element of a ritual, which is the actions themselves are pretty boring.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I mean, brushing your teeth is probably one of those boring things we do. But... Even that simple action can get imbued with more emotion, with more meaning, and actually really affect how we feel about big things like our entire day based on these little actions. So habits are kind of like automatic things that we do that are pretty dry.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So, you know, it's a process.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But we're trying. I think trying them out and keeping them if they matter. And of course, not keeping them if they're not landing is one way to go about it.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Ritual brings more into it, more emotion, because we care how we get it done. When we start to care how, that's when all kinds of interesting things can happen.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
They're going to try to make their kids do them. And then you can feel good about it. You can say, now you know how I felt.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
It's a wonderful circle of life that we all go through.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
The silverware industry will be thrilled. That's a co-brand right there.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
There are lots of people who are extremely skeptical of rituals. I think I was probably one of them at some point in my life, but you really can't escape them. So, I mean, if you think about, have you ever had a cake where before you ate the cake, you put wax candles in it and lit them on fire?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So the wax dripped all over the cake and then put it in front of like a seven-year-old with a cold and they blow all over it. Of course, we've all done it's a birthday cake, but they're so, so ubiquitous rituals. Even if you're not thinking of yourself as that kind of person, we really can't escape them. We really use them to pattern our years. So how do we know to celebrate our friendships?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Well, a nice thing is that people have birthdays. And so once a year, it's almost like we're required to say or Valentine's Day or Mother's Day or Father's Day. Culture gives us these moments in order to remind us of the close relationships in our lives. That's one reason I think they're so important. But the other one is the little ones like, again, the brushing your teeth or those silly ones.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
I think they help us on a day-to-day basis as well. So we're trying to get through the whole year and have relationships and things like that. But every day when we get up, we're trying to get through the day as best as we can. We need to get motivated. We want to connect with people at work. We want to connect with our family. And we use little rituals in those places as well.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
So it's almost like when we're faced with some issue or problem, we can do all kinds of things to solve those. But one of the things that humans almost always turn to, Is little or big rituals as one solution?
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
It does not. It absolutely does not sound insane at all. We're all looking for those feelings that you're describing, and there's lots of ways to get them out.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
For sure. So I'm a behavioral scientist. So one of the things we try to do is help people. If they say, I want to have better habits, we try to help them. Like if you said, I want to exercise every morning, we would try to figure out ways to help you exercise every morning. And one of the ways we do that actually is to try to make things a habit.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And in fact, we even try to make them a little bit automatic. So you don't even have to think about going for a run in the morning because it's just something that you do. With kids, we teach them to brush their teeth. They don't think every day, should I brush my teeth or not? We want it to be almost a mindless thing. I'm brushing my teeth. I should brush my teeth. And those are great.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But if you think about, I mean, imagine you had a life of completely perfect habits and
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
every minute of every day you were doing the thing that is the thing you're supposed to do i think after 50 years you'd be super healthy you know great smile really in shape but i'm not sure you would look back and say that was a great life that was a life filled with meaning and emotion one of the things i always think about is habits kind of automate us and that can be really good for us but i think rituals can animate us
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And we're all looking for something more than just doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing and checking stuff off our list. We're looking for other experiences that make us feel alive, animated, connected. And as you said, there's many different ways to get that feeling that humans have come up with over time.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But one of them I think that we always see coming up in different places is this idea of these little small practices that people do that turn the morning from just putting clothes on and getting out the door to taking a beat, taking a moment with a candle or with a book or with tea or whatever the thing is that you care about. And that can change the emotional tenor of your day.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
Which was... Yeah, so that's like nerddom beyond belief. I mean, that's peak, peak for me. Big time.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
One thing I always found so interesting. So first off, humans love fire with rituals. That goes as far back as you can see. Probably as soon as we got fire, we started saying, hey, how can we use this in our rituals? We use sound. We use scent. We use all of these things in our rituals.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And in fact, if you look to see what people use in their rituals, it's kind of obvious but kind of funny that, of course, we can only use the things that are around us. So for example, it used to be really hard to have the color blue. It was difficult to create. So there's no blue in rituals.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But as soon as humans figured out how to have blue, we're like, hey, let's have blue in all of our rituals. It's almost like we're looking around our environment for things that we can use to get these feelings. And it could be drugs and it could be colors and it could be candles. But we're casting around almost to try to find these things to bring them in and give them more meaning.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And it's just the two of us. Yeah. So, you know, we have weddings and anniversaries and Valentine's. You know, again, culture gives us some reminders. But those, like, it's just a couple days a year. And it turns out when you're married or with someone... you're with them kind of every day. You kind of need some things other than just the couple of days a year.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
And that's where I think people turn to these little small actions. You don't need a huge elaborate ceremony or a crazy date night once a week. These little actions like clinking the silverware together, they really can become very meaningful because in a relationship, It's how do you know you're in it for good with the person? You can like get a ring. You can get married. You can sign papers.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But you don't really know if you're in it for the long run.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
This is true. I think these little actions like clinking the silverware. So this couple, every time before dinner, they just clink their silverware together. It's something, if you think about it, imagine you've been doing that every night for 10 years. Ugh. The feeling of it is, I bet we're going to do this for the next 10 years also. You know, this is our thing. It's not from a book.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
It's not from some ancient text. It's we came up with this and it's our thing. And one of the reasons we know those are so important, because if you ask people, like when you break up, if you say, how would you feel if your ex dated someone else, married someone else, had kids with someone else? You don't love it, but it's like, okay, they're allowed to do that.
We Can Do Hard Things
The Rituals that Make a Magical Life with Michael Norton
But if you say, how would you feel if they reused your ritual? The rage, I mean, the moral outrage that people, if you saw, you know, your ex clinking forks from another person, that is inexcusable and unacceptable. And again, that shows it's just a fork and yet it means so much about who we are.