In this episode, Michael Norton, Harvard Business School social psychologist and author of The Ritual Effect, explains how everyday habits become meaningful rituals. From sharing one thing you’re grateful for at dinner to the little traditions only a couple understands, Michael explores how repeated actions can make ordinary moments feel more meaningful and bring us closer to the people we love. He also discusses how to tell when a ritual is helping and when it’s starting to feel like something you have to do.
Free Guide: Outsmart the Hidden Saboteurs of Self-Control. What’s been holding you back lately? In this free guide, Eric shares the six common saboteurs that quietly derail our best intentions—like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, and emotional escapism—and offers practical strategies to help you regain control and move forward. Download your free copy at oneyoufeed.net/ebook.
Key Takeaways:
- What makes the same action feel like a habit one day and a ritual the next
- What 30 years of perfect habits might still leave you wanting
- How a simple dinner ritual can help a family practice gratitude
- Why athletes give so much meaning to small actions before they compete
- How private rituals help couples feel closer
- How to recognize when a helpful ritual starts to feel compulsory
Michael Norton is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Dr. Norton’s research on topics ranging from the hazards of humble-bragging to the rewards of matchmaking and volunteering has been published in top academic journals as well as popular media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and the New York Times. He co-authored Happy Money with Elizabeth Dunn, which was named by the Washington Post as a “Book Every Leader Should Read.” His new book is The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions
Connect with Michael Norton: Website | X
If you enjoyed this conversation with Michael Norton, check out these other episodes:
How Rituals Help Us Find Meaning in Times of Change | Bruce Feiler
Science and the Sacred with Sasha Sagan
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Episode Transcript:
Michael Norton 00:00:00 This book is not to say that more rituals is better. It’s not like the ten secret rituals that you can do every day to be a happy person. That’s not what it is. And the word compulsion is so important because we do see that rituals can go too far, that you’re trying to use them to improve your life, but they can get Ahold of you instead.
Chris Forbes 00:00:25 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:10 Michael Norton has a thought experiment. Imagine that starting today, you kept perfect habits for 30 years. Every single day. At the end, you might be very healthy or productive, but you might also look back and wonder whether you spent too much time counting your steps. Michael is a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, and his book, The Ritual Effect, is about the other kind of repeated action. A habit is something you get done. A ritual is the same act with meaning attached, and the meaning grows with repetition instead of wearing out. We talk about tennis players, pigeons, birthday cake and the small things couples do that no one else would understand. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Mike, welcome to the show.
Michael Norton 00:02:07 Thanks so much for having me on.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:09 I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your book, The Ritual Effect From Habit to Ritual Harness the surprising power of everyday actions. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do with the parable.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:23 In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Michael Norton 00:02:57 The first thing that I thought of was actually something that we started to do a few years ago with our daughter, who was eight years old when we started dinner. Every night we go around and everyone has to say something that happened that day that they’re grateful for. We actually tried to do other things, but she kept refusing to do them. So eventually, eventually, we got to gratitude and she’s willing to do that one.
Michael Norton 00:03:18 As I was thinking about the parable, I was thinking, why that? Because we could do anything at the beginning of dinner. But we’ve chosen to do that. And for my wife and I, I think the idea of behaving in a way where people would be grateful for how you treat them, and also being very grateful for other people and and how lucky many of us are in life is really one of the core. Not just like a moral thing, but a core reason for happiness for our daughter. So I was thinking about what are we trying to feed when we have that little practice that we do at the beginning of every dinner. And it really is this idea of make sure you feed the other oriented part of yourself, not just the part that’s for you only.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:03 Yeah. When I was growing up, dinner was with the nightly news on every night. So I can suspect that had we done gratitude every evening instead of the nightly news, I might be a different person.
Michael Norton 00:04:16 I had four siblings, so dinner for me was trying to eat as quickly as possible so that you could get more of the food.
Michael Norton 00:04:23 So I don’t know what’s worse.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:24 Yeah, yeah, I had two others. Let’s jump in and start talking about the book. I guess to start, what made you interested in rituals as something to write a book about?
Michael Norton 00:04:35 So for quite a few years, I’m a social psychologist by training, and I was working on happiness, which is, I guess, a pretty large and nebulous topic. But I was particularly interested in finding things that people could do to increase their happiness today, meaning not so much huge life decisions. Getting married and all this sort of stuff. But small things like if you had 30 minutes right now, do I have any advice for you on what to do to make yourself feel good? And the initial research was about using money for that. So how should we spend our money to get more happiness out of it? And speaking of gratitude, one of the things we showed is, is spending on other people is much better for happiness than spending on yourself. But from that research, I think I got this idea of what are the small practices we can do every single day of our lives that might have an impact on the quality of our lives.
Michael Norton 00:05:33 And I got from that to outside the domain of money, but to ritual, which is I kept seeing in so many places in life and big events as well, like marriage and funerals. Rituals come into play, but also just in people’s everyday lives, these small little practices that people have in the morning, or with their kids, or with their spouse, or with their teams at work that seem to be really important for them and their daily lives. That I think we didn’t know a ton about as researchers, at least in my field. And I was hooked. Again, I really wanted to understand these smaller little rituals that people often come up with themselves from scratch. And what role are they playing in our lives?
Eric Zimmer 00:06:15 So when we think about ritual, there are some other words that are close to it, right? You can also think of a routine. You could think of, a habit you could think of, perhaps something that’s even stronger than that, like a compulsion. What differentiates a ritual from those things?
Michael Norton 00:06:34 I think it’s important question, in part because the point of the research on this book is not to say that more rituals is better.
Michael Norton 00:06:44 It’s not like the ten secret rituals that you can do every day to be a happy person. That’s not what it is. And the word compulsion is so important because we do see that rituals could go too far. You’re trying to use them to improve your life, but they can get Ahold of you instead. So one thing we always think about with rituals is it’s not just more is better, but use them in the places where they might help you the most so that they’re not compulsions, but they’re helpful. And then for habit, there’s some rituals that are close to habits and others that are. So we usually don’t make a habit out of getting married, for example. I guess some people might. But we’re not we’re not trying to do it every day and get better at getting married. Maybe I’ve got a.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:23 Couple more under my belt than I might like, but I wouldn’t call it habitual.
Michael Norton 00:07:28 At least not publicly. Maybe it would be fair to say. Yeah, yeah. So some of the rituals that we do don’t have the property of habit, but some for sure do our morning routine.
Michael Norton 00:07:37 And what people do before they exercise, they tie their shoes in a particular way. And those things I think are closer to habits. For me, the big difference between rituals and habits is that habits tend to be kind of dry and unemotional. There are sort of things we do to get them done. I got to go for a run today because it’s good for me to go for a run, and when I finish the run, I check it off. And rituals. Often it could be the exact same thing, but it’s not dry. There’s something more emotional or meaningful about it. And so you see athletes who say, I always tie my shoes and I put this shoe on and I tie it like this, and then I put this shoe on and I tie it like this. And then I do this, and then I do this. There are these very elaborate rituals that they do. And they’re turning, running from just something to get done into something more for them. And I think our rituals, the little ones that we do every day, they often take us from kind of going through the motions of life and add sometimes to those motions a little bit more emotion, meaning other things, I think, that are helpful for us.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:41 Yeah. You say rituals are emotional catalysts that energize, inspire and elevate us. And you also go on to say that habit automates and ritual animates.
Michael Norton 00:08:54 By the way, let me just say good habits are good. Sure. Yeah. I never mean to say don’t have good habits. They’re not there. Waste of time. I wish I had better habits. I should exercise more too. But I think if you had a life of perfect habits, imagine starting today. You always had perfect habits for the next 30 years. Every single day. Perfect habits. I think at the end of the 30 years you’d probably be very, very healthy. But would you look back and say what an interesting and rich life I lived? Or would you say, maybe I spent too much time counting my steps? And that really was where it came for me, was to say, of course we need to have these better habits. But life is not all about executing on our good habits. There’s much, much more to it.
Michael Norton 00:09:38 And I think for many people, rituals play a role, kind of making life more interesting and more emotional. I mean, holidays that we have in part. We have like 1 or 2 a month. Most faiths and most cultures have a couple a month. And I think it’s partly because life gets kind of boring. And so we insert these reminders to gather with family, for example, or celebrate something that’s important to us. I think they serve this really important role in enriching our lives.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:08 You tell a story in the book about how even as you were paying attention to ritual, you were a little like, I don’t know, do I really have rituals or do I need rituals? And then you discuss. When your daughter was born, you say, I instantly and unthinkingly transformed into a shamanic madman. Tell me more.
Michael Norton 00:10:31 I think anybody who’s had a kid resonates. When you have a kid, you go to the hospital, or you can have a kid at home and maybe somebody is there for a little while, and then they basically say, why don’t you take this thing and take care of it for the next 20 years with no guidance.
Michael Norton 00:10:45 You know, nobody with you often. And the number one thing with new parents. It’s all they talk about. And I did too, is sleep. Are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping? How is the sleep? How’s the nap? And so it’s like, the most central thing in your life is to get this little creature to sleep. Because you know that it’s good for them. Yeah. And what do you do when you’re left to your own devices with this thing that you really want to sleep? What do people turn to? And what we found is that and us, as well as people very often turn to ritual. Now they don’t say, hey, let’s sit down and make a ritual and write it out. I don’t mean it like that, but what happens is you start to have specific books that you read, specific songs that you sing like you do the bath at this time, and then the book and then the song. My daughter, for some reason she was a little bit older, started saying good night to the stairs as I walked up the stairs with her, and if we skipped it, we’d have to go back and say good night to the stairs.
Michael Norton 00:11:40 So I’m, you know, I’m a scientist saying goodnight to the stairs. But at some point I realized, why are we doing all of this? And of course it was. We were trying to help her transition from awake self to a sleep self. And one of the things we thought we might do, just like we do with ourselves at night sometimes, is have a little bedtime routine or ritual that we go through to try to get us from being awake to being sleep. I will say later. I realize it’s completely unclear if it helped her sleep at all. We never really tested it, but I know that it helped us feel like we had some control over a situation that was really, really stressful and something we really cared a lot about. So even if it didn’t quite do the sleep thing that we were hoping, I think it had benefits for us. And Rich will sometimes do that. They have an unusual benefit. That isn’t exactly what we thought they were going to do for us.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:32 Yeah, I think it’s interesting you talk about rituals as a response to uncertainty and stress. And so obviously for you, there was some uncertainty and stress in getting a child to go to sleep. As I was thinking about that, I was also wondering, with children, I was one, but I don’t know what it’s like to be your first couple years of life or I can’t. I have no recollection of that, but it seems like it might be uncertain. And maybe children are drawn to this repetition, this ritual, for the same reason certain adults might be. That’s just a theory, right?
Michael Norton 00:13:03 Completely. Everything must be a complete surprise and shock to them all the time. I mean, for one thing, they don’t even know that when objects disappear, they still exist. So you know, right? If you put something in their field of view and then not, it’s like you’re a magic person having this thing reappear. And so, yeah, they’re really struggling to understand the physical world.
Michael Norton 00:13:22 And I do think the same sounds and the same words and the same people and the same smells do probably help them feel a sense of regularity so that they can actually regulate themselves down enough to maybe take a nap.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:36 Let’s stay on this topic of rituals helping with uncertainty. You tell a story of B.F. Skinner, who’s known for lots of behavioral things, but you tell a story about him in pigeons. And I was curious if you could share what these pigeons started doing and why.
Michael Norton 00:13:54 This is in the 1950s. A guy who most of his research was about. People sometimes know these words like operant conditioning, classical conditioning. He worked with pigeons and rats, and he would do things like have a machine with a bunch of buttons and levers on it. And if you pecked this one button three times, if you were a pigeon, you got a piece of food. And what he wanted to see is how quickly pigeons could learn that. So he was looking really at how do you reinforce behaviors and things like this.
Michael Norton 00:14:21 It was very practical in a sense. You know, if I want something or someone to do a behavior, how do I encourage them to do that behavior? Except he did this one funny piece of research where he decided to same thing like a big box with buttons and levers and stuff, pigeons pecking at it. And he decided that he would just have the food come out completely randomly. So no matter what they pulled or pushed or pecked or anything like that, at random intervals, food would come out. So what pigeons should do is nothing. They should realize that it’s random and just sit back and wait for the food, right? That’s not what they do. They start to peck and pull the levers and things like that. And what was so fascinating was they developed rituals like one pigeon would be like, I know what it is. It’s three taps over there and then pull the lever. But a different pigeon would say it’s four levers and then two pecks over there. So they actually pigeons we’re talking about very quickly developed little superstitious rituals and the effort to control what we know to be a completely random process.
Michael Norton 00:15:25 And I think humans are a little more sophisticated than pigeons, but I think we sometimes do the exact same thing, which is the older you get, the more you realize very few things are in our control, unfortunately. And so how do we feel? At least a sense of control. I think just like pigeons, one of the things that we do is use rituals to try to have that sense of control.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:45 You also talk about, along those lines that fishermen who fish in choppy and more dangerous waters. Those cultures are known to have more ritual than cultures who are fishing in safer waters.
Michael Norton 00:16:00 So anthropologists, of course, have been studying rituals for long, long before I started studying this topic. And they identified this idea that in the face of uncertainty, there seems to be this natural correlation where the more uncertain something is, the more rituals are brought to bear. One of the things they show is that if you do kind of risky occupations like fishing in uncertain, scary places, you’re more likely to have these rituals than if you fish on a calm surface where there’s no uncertainty whatsoever.
Michael Norton 00:16:32 and across many domains. Actually, they were able to show that there is this natural relationship between uncertainty and ritual. For example, rain dance rituals, which have emerged many times in human history. On the one hand, you could say, I think we know that something we do on the ground here is not going to cause it to rain. So why would they emerge? And of course, where they emerge, as in cultures where there’s unpredictable drought. So you can easily see why in this face of this uncertainty, I mean, this is life or death uncertainty, why some cultures would be more likely than others to develop practices, to have them feel, at least that they have some control over this very risky and upsetting event.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:33 So there’s two ways to think about that. I think one is to think, well, that’s just ridiculous superstition and we should do away with it. Like, why dance if it doesn’t do any good? I think you’re making a deeper point, though, which is not that the rituals that we do necessarily cause the thing to happen that we want.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:54 They help us psychologically deal with the uncertainty that is there in a way that truly just staring down the uncertainty might not do.
Michael Norton 00:18:06 That’s right. And if we were feeling a lack of control and we were incredibly stressed and anxious, if research showed that if we snapped our fingers, it would go away, and then people still did kind of like rain dances. I would say, you don’t need to do those anymore, because I don’t know if you knew this, but you could magically snap your fingers and all your anxiety goes away. But that’s not how we’re built. I wish we were that. We could just decide not to be anxious and worried, but we can’t. We need to do something often to change how we’re feeling. And one of the things that we do to change how we’re feeling is we turn to ritual to help us go from one state to another state. If you think of rain rituals in particular, it’s true that they probably don’t make rain come down. But what they do is if you think of a time of drought, what happens is conflict starts to develop in groups because of a scarce resource.
Michael Norton 00:18:55 We start to. You know, I’m not going to share anything with you now because I have to keep it for me. And what these rain rituals do is they bring us all together as a community and remind us that we’re a community and remind us that we have a shared history. And by the way, people were doing this 300 years ago and they got through this drought. So by doing this practice now, we’re actually providing real evidence that we can together get through this. So a skeptic, as you said, could say, stop doing those things. You know, it’s not making it rain. Anyone who understands humans would say. I think it actually is very, very valuable use of time in terms of helping people through these really difficult times.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:34 I’ve got a question. I can’t quite compose it here, but it’s something along the lines of is a ritual still valuable in times of uncertainty, even if you know that it doesn’t impact the outcome. So we know why rituals make sense for people doing a rain dance.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:51 Now we can look back anthropologically and we go, oh, what did all these things for the culture, etc. they didn’t know that at the time, right? We do. So if I know that whatever the thing is I’m about to do isn’t going to affect the outcome. Are there still ways for it to be valuable for me?
Michael Norton 00:20:08 It’s interesting because the nature of rituals of course, change over time, but think of something like a rally cap at a baseball game, which is you take your baseball hat and turn it inside out and put it back on because you’re rooting for your team. Yeah, and every fan can do it. You got 30,000 people, all with a hat on, inside out or whatever it might be. On some level, you’re aware that turning the hat inside out does not guarantee victory. Of course, we’re not completely clueless. So why do we do that, for example? And I think, again, it’s we really want our team to win. And we have this shared thing now.
Michael Norton 00:20:47 We’re all doing this to root for them together. So we’re getting this feeling of solidarity that I think is a really useful, powerful feeling to get that we can’t really get unless we’re doing something ritualistic together. The wave is, of course, is another amazing example. We’re literally working together with this thing to feel more connected to each other. So yeah, it’s true. It’s not going to affect the performance of the players, but it’s going to affect our experience and sometimes in a very big way to make us feel more connected and a little less worried.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:17 Yeah, my brain is like the hitter is going to glance up here to right field just for a second, and he’s going to see that I do not have my hat turned inside out. Exactly. And he’s gonna inside feel sad.
Michael Norton 00:21:29 And exactly.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:31 Oh, as much as I know it has, it doesn’t affect it. And yet we’re always trying to just grasp for like it just seems natively wrong that, like, the way we do something just doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:44 And yet we know that rationally be true.
Michael Norton 00:21:47 That’s right. Even people at home will turn their hat inside out who are watching on TV. And they can’t see you then. Yeah, but they’re we’re thinking some kind of karma or something is watching me right now to see if I turn my hat inside out, and somehow that will get into the batter’s head and in the one hand. What a weird thing we do. On the other hand, it’s actually perfectly sensible. And we do stuff like this all the time.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:11 Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I think about when I think about ritual, particularly the types of rituals that you do regularly, so there’s rituals that you do ideally once in a while, like being married. I assume you don’t do it often enough that that ritual is boring, but a lot of things that become rituals, we do them regularly. And if the goal of a ritual is to sort of catalyze emotion to some degree, is there anything that you’ve learned about how we can keep those rituals that we do very regularly filled with emotion? Because repetition often drains emotion out of something, which then renders the ritual effect of it less useful.
Michael Norton 00:22:55 Yes. That’s right. I mean many, many things that we do in life, the more we do them, the sicker we are to them in a sense. You know, if you eat chocolate cake, the first bites. Amazing. And by the 10th bite, you’re still going to eat it because it’s chocolate cake, but it’s getting a little bit worse and worse over time. Yeah. And so there is this sense that for lots of things in life, repetition leads to less enjoyment or less good, good feelings. But there’s something about rituals, actually, where the more we do them, the more they get imbued with meaning. So it isn’t quite enjoyment in the sense of I’m happy that I’m eating cake. Sometimes rituals do fill us with joy. But the idea of meaning actually is a little bit more elusive. And one of the things that does produce meaning for us is, in fact, repeating things. Over time. They can become imbued with more and more meaning, even if they’re not as exciting as chocolate cake.
Michael Norton 00:23:48 More and more meaning over time. And so the fact that I’m doing this, I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s if it’s a religious practice, for example, I know that my parents and grandparents did this, and I know in some faiths people have been doing this for thousands of years. That means that every time I do it, it’s an enormously meaningful act. It’s connecting me to my ancestry, to my parents, to my family. And so when I do it again, it’s not actually getting worse. It’s getting more, more meaning because its being even more built into something that’s really important to me.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:23 It seems to me that we need to cultivate that though, right? Because I can think of certain things that I’ve done again and again in life that could have meaning and also could not. I’ll just give a couple examples. I’m a recovering addict and alcoholic, and I went to more meetings in my early years of recovery than you could shake a stick at, and they read the same thing at the beginning of every meeting.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:47 Hundreds of times. Thousands of times of hearing the 12 steps read. There is a way in which that could become progressively more meaningful. There are ways in which it can make me insane. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time practicing Zen Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism is a very ritualized thing. You do certain things in a certain way every time and again, that can be something that has meaning, and it can also be something where the phrase going through the motions. So it seems that there is something we’re bringing to it that is allowing it to remain meaningful and not become habitual.
Michael Norton 00:25:27 I think that’s right. And I think we didn’t discover in the research, for example, that there are some rituals that work on everyone. In other words, imagine we discovered that if you clap six times and stop 12 times, it works on every single human. It does something, and that really isn’t what we see. It’s much more idiosyncratic than that. So the same behaviors could mean nothing to you and be part of a very important ritual to me.
Michael Norton 00:25:52 And we see people who in one domain say these rituals are doing nothing for me. Might in another domain really get a lot of benefit out of rituals. If the 12 steps being read doesn’t do anything for you, it may be that there are other things in life that are ritualistic that do something for you. And so partly I think what people do over time is they try to not necessarily consciously, but they try to figure out in what domains of life are these kinds of practices helpful for me, and which ones just. I see that they land for other people, but for me, they just they don’t really do anything, so I’m not going to keep doing them. And that is actually, for me, very interesting about rituals, because it means it isn’t just that there’s a cookie cutter ritual that we know works for all humans. It’s much more complex than that. It’s really a very individual thing, what works for me. And of course, then people also make up their own completely from scratch, and those can become very meaningful to us as well.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:48 Yeah, I was going to say by being part of those groups, I inherited those rituals. Right. And your ritual for putting your daughter to sleep was one that you made up. And throughout the book you sort of make this distinction. Yeah. There are some rituals that are tradition based, but a ritual doesn’t have to be tradition based. It can be completely made up, as you said.
Michael Norton 00:27:10 And often we use both kinds in different situations in life When we’ve asked people about grief, for example, think of someone you love, who who passed away, and we ask people, what did you do? We don’t say, which rituals did you do? We say, what did you do? And people will say there was a funeral, whatever their faith or culture is. They say, yeah, we did that. Everyone got together and we did that practice and it was incredibly helpful. These, these legacy rituals that are handed to us play an incredibly important role in our lives. So I’m never saying those aren’t useful because they really are useful.
Michael Norton 00:27:44 But then people would say, but I also did this other thing actually to honor that person. One woman said, I washed his car every weekend the way he used to do. There’s definitely no 2000 year old text that says wash a car. Number one, there weren’t any cars. Right. Right. But what is she doing? And of course, you can see what she’s doing. Obviously, her husband loved his car and took good care of it. Now he’s gone. She went to the funeral and got the social support. But she’s doing this private thing that she came up with entirely on her own. That’s very idiosyncratic and special to their relationship. And we see that in domain after domain, people get married and there’s a wedding, and then couples tell us about the little things that they do so that we always see this combination. People are sort of looking between the official ones that are handed down, and the ones that kind of are bottom up that we come up with ourselves. And most people use both in some different situations.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:40 Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. and I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide. Now. At once you feel and take the first step towards getting back on track. So I’d like to talk about a couple of those different situations. We’re going to get to relationship rituals a little bit later on. But first I’d like to talk about you’ve alluded to it a little bit, but the rituals of high performing people.
Michael Norton 00:29:43 If you want to waste, well, maybe not waste an afternoon, spend an afternoon type in an athlete’s name or musician’s name or a singer’s name and the word ritual.
Michael Norton 00:29:53 And it’s extraordinary how many of them have very elaborate rituals. And in fact, if there’s a celebrity that it doesn’t come up, it’s not necessarily that they don’t have one. It’s just nobody reported on it yet. I mean, they’re they’re really, really common for high performers that they have something that they do before they go on stage. Before the match, before the game. Tennis players, before every serve. You can conjure them up. Actually, I can show the steps of different tennis players rituals, and tennis fans can say, I know exactly who that is, so I can put up Rafael Nadal’s ritual. And by the third step, people say, That’s Rafa because it’s the headband. And then he picks his wedgie. He does all these specific things. Serena Williams has the same thing with bouncing the ball a specific number of times, these amazing performers. And it’s funny because, for example, Nadal will say, I know that it’s not like I don’t need to do it. It’s just that when I do it, I feel like I’m ready to go.
Michael Norton 00:30:49 And a lot of high performers explain it exactly that way. It’s almost like the rally cap. We know it’s not going to cause a victory, but when we engage in these practices, it does something for us and these high performers. If you think of the stress, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to play at Wimbledon. The stress that they are under is so profound that you see them very, very often. Just like the choppy water fishermen, they’re turning to these rituals to try to get a little bit of calm before they have to engage in this incredibly difficult behavior.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:48 Many of our guests have to engage in great amounts of ritual to feel confident enough to come on this show. So I’m really impressed with how you’ve just kind of showed, I don’t know what your pregame was for this. No, it’s really interesting that we know the ritual isn’t doing anything externally for SE Nadal or the basketball player who spins the ball x number of times, bounces it three times before a free throw. It’s not magic on the ball, right? And yet it is profoundly doing something internally for them that actually does affect their performance.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:23 So to say that it doesn’t do anything is not quite accurate. It doesn’t do anything externally.
Michael Norton 00:32:29 And we see there’s researchers have suggested that if you think about anxiety everyday anxiety. But if you think about clinical anxiety as well, one of the properties of anxiety is that it spirals. If you have a big meeting at work and you’re worried about it first, you’re worried about the meeting, but then anxiety has this property where it just keeps going and going. So you’re worried the meeting isn’t going to go well and probably going to get fired, probably gonna get a divorce, because I guess that’s what anxiety is. It really spirals out of control. And these researchers have suggested that one thing that rituals do for us is they occupy enough of our mental space that we can’t spiral as much. So it’s not as though if we do them, we’re not nervous anymore. We’re still nervous about the meeting. I bet Nadal is still nervous about serving. Yeah, it’s kind of contains the anxiety a little bit. For me, I think it’s not that these rituals make you perform better.
Michael Norton 00:33:19 I could do Nadal’s ritual, and I still stink at tennis, you know? Right, right. The ritual itself is not going to make me good at tennis, but I think it allows people to perform to their potential. It gets some things out of the way, at least, so that you can do what it is that you’re good at.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:34 So you’ve just described ritual as a way of working with anxiety. And we sort of started off by talking about compulsions. Right. And OCD appears to be that mechanism gone awry. I believe that if I do these things, that then I will feel settled or it will do something and I do them, but it doesn’t really work. So what did you learn about kind of where that goes awry or how to know when it’s gone awry. Just that relationship.
Michael Norton 00:34:04 If you think about what people are often doing with rituals, is they’re engaged in the ritual in order to then do something else. So Nadal is doing his wedgie picking in order to then serve, or musicians that are doing stuff backstage in order to then go on stage and perform, or even something like when you leave the house in the morning, if you double check if the door is locked, you’re doing that in order to feel okay about leaving the house, and you don’t have to worry about it all day.
Michael Norton 00:34:31 So there’s this the ritual in order to accomplish other goals in life. And what can happen with OCD is we lose the link between those two. So instead of checking the lock in order to leave the house and go to work or hang out with my friends, I’m checking the lock in order to check the lock instead of the link to another thing that we’re trying to do. It becomes a circular loop, and one of the ways to say that a ritual has gotten to compulsive is, in fact, is it interfering with other things in your life? And if it starts to interfere with other things in your life, we don’t know exactly the point at which, right? But you can see when it starts to interfere with other things in your life. That’s when clinically you might say, we need to pull that back. People who use them helpfully, in a sense, they leave enough time and space to do them, but they finish them. I mean, if Nadal picked his wedgie the entire match, he’d lose 606060, right? We have to perform them at a time and place and then accomplish the other things we wanted to accomplish.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:32 Right. If mid mid volley, he was like, hang on a second, I got to check this wedgie. He would. He would have a problem. Yep, yep.
Michael Norton 00:35:39 Be a good viral moment though I think. But yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:41 It’s interesting because as I was reading your book, I started thinking about rituals that I might have for for performance. And there’s one that I do before podcast interviews usually, which is it actually serves a real purpose. It’s called the announcer’s test. And it’s this very sort of complicated. One and two ducks, three squawking geese, four Olympic oysters, five corpulent porpoises. Six. I could go on. It goes on. So on one hand, it warms up my mouth, it connects my mouth and my brain. And I think it’s also slightly ritualistic in that I do it before I do that, when I sit down to do focused work, there’s a playlist that I put on that’s always kind of the same, and I just think it primes my brain in some way that this is now time for concentration.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:32 So I think if we all look, we have some of these things, and I’ve actually thought about after reading the book, would I actually do better with even more of them.
Michael Norton 00:36:44 Thinking about the discussion about compulsion as well? So one risk of rituals is that they can become compulsive, but another one is actually you. You have those things that you do pre-show, and if you do them, you feel more ready to go for the show. But there’s a risk as well, which is if you get interrupted and you can’t do it, you actually feel worse, then you feel even less ready to go than probably if you never had any ritual at all. So they’re funny in the sense that it’s not just that rituals are good, it’s that they provoke emotion in us. It’s a risk and reward. It can either make you feel great and ready to go, or you can feel like I’m not able to do this at all today, because I couldn’t say the whole corpus thing the way that I wanted to do.
Michael Norton 00:37:25 Kids ruin every single ritual we’ve ever had because they always come in and interfere with everything. Yeah, so I think that’s important as well, that it isn’t that rituals, just you do them and it’s great. It’s you do them and they’re going to make you feel. But what you feel is very, very variable.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:41 Right? I want to change direction just a little bit here, which is something that you and a colleague found in your research that you call emo diversity. Share with me what emo diversity is.
Michael Norton 00:37:56 I mentioned earlier that for a few years I was studying happiness and how to help people be happier. And partly that’s because if you ask people, they say, I’d like to be happier. So we tried it and help them be happier. But I think just as the older you get, the more you realize nothing is in your control. The older you get. You realize that life is much more complicated emotionally than just trying to be happy, that there’s all kinds of emotions that we’re trying to get that aren’t necessarily happiness.
Michael Norton 00:38:22 They’re different things. So if you think of something like pride, for example, we’d like to feel proud of ourselves and we want to feel proud of our kids, but also something like sadness. I don’t hope that I’m sad today, but if I think of times that I’ve been sad in my life, I’ve learned a ton and I’ve grown through those times as well. So just trying to be happy doesn’t really capture the full richness of life. And this idea of emo diversity, which is a silly name and we wish we’d come up with a different name, to be honest. But the idea that it is to look at the whole universe of emotions that you have. Sadness and fear and happiness and joy and all of these emotions. And see if the mix of those emotions predicts your feeling that you’re having a good life. And that’s what we find in the research, actually, is that it isn’t. Just having positive emotions is good, although that’s nice. It’s actually this mix sometimes that makes us feel like our life is going the way we wanted it to go.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:18 Yeah, you say that it’s associated with measurable benefits in our well-being. What sort of benefits to overall well-being? Were you measuring that? That people who had more diversity of emotion. I agree. Emo diversity is like the worst name for a 90s band ever. Exactly, exactly. Out of Nebraska under on the Bright Eyes label or something?
Michael Norton 00:39:42 Yeah. No, not even signed to Bright Eyes. They didn’t do that. No, no.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:45 They they would never have been that good. You’re right, you’re right. Okay. That’s a niche joke right there for sure. But what were the well-being measurements that you were sort of seen in people who had more emotional diversity.
Michael Norton 00:39:55 People who study happiness. There’s many flavors of happiness, but but two that I think we sometimes conflate them, but they’re quite different from each other. One is happiness in the moment. From how do you feel right now? Do you feel happy right now? But another question is more your life overall? How happy are you with your life and the way it’s going? So I could be very unhappy all day today and still tell you no, no.
Michael Norton 00:40:19 My life overall, I still feel really good about. So they’re correlated with each other, but they’re actually quite different from each other.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:25 Yeah.
Michael Norton 00:40:25 And what we were looking at actually was the day to day kind of emotions, the happiness today, the sadness today. What is the mix of those add up to for that larger feeling of life satisfaction? So it isn’t so much that a variance of emotions helps you right now. It’s that when people tell us they experience more of these emotions in this mix, they also tell us that their life, they’re more satisfied with their life overall. And that feeling is a great, great feeling to have that on some scale from 1 to 10. If I’m a one and I feel like my life is going that badly. All kinds of things. Negative things are associated with that. And the higher I get on that scale, of course, the better off I’m feeling about my life.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:08 It’s funny, I had this conversation with the psychologist Paul Bloom recently, actually, and I was saying that as somebody who has a naturally more diverse emotional system, meaning prone to some lower moods, right? Me that maybe my way of measuring satisfaction, I should stick with this.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:29 Ask me about how my life is in general question, that that’s a better way for me to measure than moment to moment, because I have a tendency towards melancholy at times. And so we had a little lively discussion about like, well, there are certainly people that argue that you’re deceiving yourself, right? That the way you know, whether you’re happy is you just ask often enough, and for you to tell me later that you’re happy even when you weren’t happy is just deception. But I think there’s more to it than that. And he wasn’t arguing that point. He was just saying that’s the way some people view it.
Michael Norton 00:42:03 You know, we started a project years ago that I don’t remember why we didn’t follow through on it, but the idea was, so imagine we have this ten point scale of happiness with your life overall, this life satisfaction. And somebody says there are ten there. They’re having the best life in the world. The idea was to ask them every day for a month about all the different emotions they were feeling.
Michael Norton 00:42:24 And the point of that was to say, you might you might think that someone who says they’re a ten out of ten on life overall, that every minute of every day they’re saying it’s great, life is great. I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy. But that’s not what happens, right? So even people who are the happiest with their life overall have some days where they’re really sad or really afraid or really anxious. So sometimes we have this wrong theory, I think that in order to have that high life satisfaction, if I’m feeling sad today, it must mean that I’m not satisfied with my life because I’m feeling sad. But in fact, it’s all a distribution, right? So of course, the happiest people with their lives feel these negative emotions too. They might feel them less than some other people, but humans feel a range of emotions no matter how they’re doing in their life overall. So we thought maybe people had almost like an unrealistic expectation of what it would look like to feel really good about your life overall.
Michael Norton 00:43:20 And we wanted to help people see that. No no no no no no. Even people who have the very best life according to them, still a lot like you have these moments and days that are really tough.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:31 So people actually would rake their life again.
Michael Norton 00:43:34 Some people will. Yes. Yeah. I find them disturbing to be me.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:38 Me too. I mean, I just feel like this is, again, I think some of this is temperament. I think if you asked me how my life was in almost any time in my life, I would probably say about a seven and a half, regardless of what’s happening, which I don’t know really, even what that says about me, but I think it’s kind of true.
Michael Norton 00:43:57 Well, I’m Irish Catholic, so if I said I’m a nine out of ten, my family would say, what do you think? You’re better than us now? So I think we’ve got some caps for various reasons on our numbers.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:07 I think I’m in that. I’m in that category of I can always imagine better, and I can certainly imagine much worse.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:14 Yeah. Yeah. Right. So given that, I think I’m happy to be in the, in the upper realm, not the 40%. Yeah, yeah. Or for four out of ten. So let’s talk about another thing that contributes to a good life, which is the ability to actually appreciate the moments in life that are good. One term for this that has been used is savoring. What did you find out about rituals and savoring or the ability to appreciate the actual good moments of our lives.
Michael Norton 00:44:47 Actually, savoring is one of my favorite words because it’s typically completely free, and yet it has an enormous impact on our happiness and our enjoyment of life. Because if I’m eating chocolate, I can either just shove it down my throat or I can savor it a little bit as I eat it. In any case, the chocolate costs the same amount. It isn’t going to take me that much longer to savor it, but I’m going to take from the very same food way more enjoyment if I just take a beat one beat to savor it instead of just scarf it down.
Michael Norton 00:45:22 And I think that is something that rituals do for us, is they they bump us out of, let’s just eat. Let’s just move on. Let’s just quickly get to the next task. And they remind us to slow down a little bit and appreciate things. So. I mean, if you get a cake on a bad day, what I would do is just eat the cake by myself. You know what I mean? Yeah. I wouldn’t savor it. I would just say, I’m having cake. But then we do things like birthday cakes. It’s still just a cake. But what are we doing? We’re saying no, no, no, we’re not just gonna eat this cake. Everybody hold off. Nobody eat the cake yet. Kids are like, trying to get the frosting because they don’t touch the frosting until we put candles in the cake, sing a song, blow out the candles, make a wish. All of these things. Because we’re trying to help people savor this cake and make it more than just cake by inserting a ritual around it.
Michael Norton 00:46:10 Now it’s a celebration of a passage rite of passage for you. It’s a celebration that we all love you and support you. It’s just cake and a couple of candles, but by adding ritual, we savor it. We elongate the meaning that we can get out of these otherwise very simple experiences.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:28 I think about this often because I love to eat and read at the same time. And there’s a part of me, particularly the part of me that’s practicing a lot of Zen Buddhism that’s like, you should just eat. You should just give all your attention to your food. And yet, I think for me, the combination of those things is ritualistic in its way. It’s the two of them together to me, are better than not doing it. At least that’s my justification for quote unquote, not eating mindfully.
Michael Norton 00:46:59 And they’re not taking away from each other. It sounds like for you, right? Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:03 I mean, I probably might pay a little bit more attention to the food if I wasn’t reading.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:07 But again, it’s the whole thing is deeply satisfying to me.
Michael Norton 00:47:12 It’s almost as if if a ritual involves singing and dancing, you wouldn’t say, well, singing and dancing at the same time as ruining the ritual, you would say, no. Singing and dancing is the ritual, in fact, for this person. So these different elements can be additive rather than taking away from each other.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:29 What is conceptual consumption?
Michael Norton 00:47:32 This is an idea that we had a few years ago, which is of course, when we consume, we’re consuming actual Things like music or food or drink or whatever it is. But very often when we consume, we’re also consuming ideas and emotions at the same time. I think one of the examples that I, that I think about a lot is my daughter and I make a apple pie that my grandmother made who’s no longer with us. So I make this pie with my daughter, and we eat it, and it tastes exactly the same because we have her recipe. So what am I eating? What am I consuming really, when my daughter and I make this and eat it? Yes, it’s a pretty good apple pie.
Michael Norton 00:48:13 I bet it’s not the best apple pie in the world, but that’s not the point. I’m actually bringing back my grandmother all the way down to my daughter and sharing that with her. I don’t know the word for what it is that I’m consuming, but it’s nostalgia, it’s memory, it’s meaning. And if I don’t have the cake, the pie. I can think about my grandmother for sure. And I can tell my daughter about my grandmother. But there’s something about these rituals of consumption that bring us, I think, a little more close to it. They’re a little more present when we do these kinds of rituals from the past. I think it allows us to bring the past into the present, and I think really, really valuable ways. And we could buy an apple pie that’s way better from a store, I’m sure. Yeah, but we’d lose all of the other concepts that we got to consume by making this particular one ourselves.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:03 Well, I think the word conceptual is the interesting part of that.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:07 We hit on this a little bit earlier when we were saying that part of what keeps a ritual from becoming just something you do, you go through the motions, is you’re bringing something to it. You’re consciously conceptually imbuing it with something. And that’s kind of what you’re saying here, right? You could make your grandmother’s recipe apple pie, but if you weren’t conscious of what you were doing, it wouldn’t have the same thing, right? It’s not. It’s the fact that you are conscious of the fact that I am doing something that ties me back to my grandmother and all that. So. So again, I think it’s this thing that you’re bringing to.
Michael Norton 00:49:46 Yeah, I think that’s right, because I could have discovered the same recipe and not known the source. Then I might say this isn’t very good apple pie, you know. You know what I mean? But because of this link. Exactly as you’re saying, it’s not about the pie. It’s about all of this other emotion and meaning that we’re bringing to it.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:02 You also describe, like going to a pizza parlor that you and your family have gone to forever, and there being a link there. So when you’re there, sort of intentionally choosing to cultivate that relationship with the past.
Michael Norton 00:50:17 There’s a in the north end of Boston, which which used to be a very Italian neighborhood. So amazing Italian food there. There’s this kind of hole in the wall. It’s called Regina Pizzeria. It’s been there for a very long time. My parents went there when they were teenagers because they grew up in Dorchester, in Boston, And so I take my daughter there now and again. It’s the taste of the pizza. I went there with my parents as a kid, so I have that in me. But I also have this idea of them as teenagers going there. I wasn’t with them there, but it’s so interesting and it’s interesting for my daughter to think about, hey, your grandparents, when they were, you know, 17, sat right over there and the smell of the place and the pizza is important to get those memories out.
Michael Norton 00:51:01 It brings them back into the present again. I have no idea if it’s the best pizza in the world. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to remove all these meanings and emotion from it, and actually just try to taste the pizza, because we got to and view it. And I think it’s a gift. It’s just pizza, but we can imbue it with all of these other things if we really, as you said, are mindful about it and thinking about what we’re doing when we consume.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:25 When you said that, it made me think of the fact that we just will claim like, this is the best pizza in the world, as if like we’ve had more than, like ten different kinds lately.
Michael Norton 00:51:36 And of course, the best pizza in the world is always a restaurant that’s within 30 minutes of where you live.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:40 Which is amazing. Amazingly, yes, yes. But you’re right. When we say best, we don’t mean best. We mean favorite. Yes, but it’s a funny word choice.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:49 So let’s talk in our remaining few minutes here about rituals in relationships. Talk to me about what you found about the value of relationships that have rituals in them.
Michael Norton 00:52:03 We can ask couples very simple questions about how satisfied they are with their relationship. How committed do you feel to your relationship? We get a sense of how well they’re doing as a couple, how they feel about each other, and then we can try to figure out, well, what are the things that predict whether they’re feeling good or bad about the relationship. And of course, you know, feeling listened to is an important element of feeling like you’re in a good relationship. So there’s many, many factors. But one of the things that we see is when we ask couples, hey, is there anything the two of you do that’s kind of unique to you and special, and you make sure to do it regularly every day, once a week, once a month, or anything like that, and varies from study to study. But two thirds to three quarters of couples say, you know what? Yes.
Michael Norton 00:52:48 And then we say, well, well, what is it? And they say, the cutest, most endearing things you’ve ever heard in your entire life. One couple that I love said, every time before we eat, we clink our silverware together. Another couple said we always kiss in threes. I don’t know when we started, but we’ve been doing it for 20 years. But another couple will say we always kiss in twos. The specifics of these little rituals vary widely from couple to couple, but what we see is couples who say they have one of those. It’s predictive of how they feel about their relationship overall. Now, it doesn’t mean that if you start clinking forks with your partner that you’re going to be amazingly happy instantly. That’s not really how they work, but this idea that these shared little practices are a signal of the broader relationship for us, is very interesting and very powerful.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:36 Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:51 And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at once. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One you feed net book. As I read that, I got to thinking, well, did Jenny and I have rituals and I thought of like one and I sort of mentioned it to her, and she then rattled off like eight others, which I was like, oh yeah. Those are like, I hadn’t been thinking of them, but there’s a lot there. The saddest part in the book is I’m not going from where I just was to this saying that this is us, right? Because I actually the minute she said it, I recognise indeed they are rituals and are meaningful. But the saddest part of the book was describing where one partner thought there was this really meaningful ritual and the other partner just thought it was just something they did, and that that was a really sad part of the book.
Michael Norton 00:55:00 It is, you know, if we get both members of a couple and interview them separately, independent reports of the relationship, most of the time both people say, yes, we have something. And yes, here’s what it is, which is what you did as well. You had one that you both identified. Yes, this is ours. There’s a small percent of couples where they both say, no, we don’t have anything. I don’t know what to make of them exactly. But as you said, for me, the saddest thing is where we interview one person and they say, oh my God, we have this wonderful thing. You know, we’ve kissed in threes forever and something, something. And then the other person says, we don’t have anything like that. And those couples, I think luckily they’re not less happy than couples who agree. They have none, but they’re no happier. Meaning it isn’t the thing where if one of you has it, you get halfway there. It’s unless you both share it together.
Michael Norton 00:55:50 There’s no benefit at all in the data, and I think that’s sad that people disagree about that, but also telling in terms of what it means really to have the relationship ritual and why they might actually be so predictive of our overall feelings.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:05 Yeah. And I found it helpful to think about some things that we do that could go either way. And when she mentioned one of them being a ritual and I thought, well, I mean, we do do that. But all of a sudden the next couple times I did it, it was imbued with something different. Right? I was able to go, oh, this could be something that I just do, or this could be something that I could put meaning behind. Evoke emotion by turning it into something that’s a little more ritualized, which I found a really helpful takeaway from the book.
Michael Norton 00:56:43 It’s funny, a lot of relationship rituals and involve coffee and tea in the morning. One person makes it to one person and brings it to the other person. And there was a couple chat of a while ago where they had been doing.
Michael Norton 00:56:54 I can’t remember actually if it was the husband or the wife who’d been bringing the coffee, but the bringer of the coffee didn’t see it as a ritual. They just saw it as like, well, this is something I do in the morning for them because I love them. But when their partner said, you know what, he always does this thing in the morning and it really means a lot to me. Just like you, it now it changes the meaning of the action. He’s doing it all along and it’s important to him. But now by owning it and recognizing it, it can have a little bit more rather than the next time we clink our silverware. There’s a little more to it now where we say, oh my gosh, this is actually our ritual that we’ve been doing forever.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:29 Yeah, well, it’s exactly that. It’s bringing of coffee. And I think it goes back to something we’ve said several different times, which is in certain cases, for rituals to work takes us bringing something to them.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:41 I mentioned Zen. There’s a thing we do at the end, right? There’s a certain way that you bow and do this stuff. And when I consciously think about what it means, it suddenly is something that has importance. When I, on the other hand, I’m just like, it’s the thing I do at the end of this, and now I can get out of here and go, it’s gone. And so it was the same thing with the coffee the minute I realized, like, oh, I am doing it out of care and love. Yeah, but let me own that. Like, let me consciously choose it again.
Michael Norton 00:58:13 And one thing I love about this is that, again, it’s not like add 30 rituals to your life tomorrow, right? Right. A lot of it is that, in fact, just seeing where they’re already operating and appreciating it a little bit more. And that in and of itself, actually people say, like you say, I’m getting more out of it now.
Michael Norton 00:58:30 I’m glad that I recognize it.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:32 Yeah. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Mike, for coming on. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the book and thank you.
Michael Norton 00:58:42 Thank you so much. It was really fun.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:43 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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