Speaker 1: Today I'm talking to my co-worker, and somehow, Dolly Parton comes up. And she was like, "Yeah, we actually went to the same high school, not at the same time, but the same high school."
Katy Milkman: In 2022, a TikTok user named Cam shared a story from his co-worker who went to high school in Sevier County, Tennessee. It was the same school that Dolly Parton had attended many years earlier, and it would've been an interesting anecdote just for that fact. But the co-worker added that when she graduated, Dolly gave her $500.
Speaker 1: … the person you're paired with graduates like you're supposed to, you both get $500.
Katy Milkman: Dolly's gift was part of an initiative to increase graduation rates. It was called the Buddy Program, and it started in 1988 when Dolly promised every seventh- and eighth-grade student in her home county that she would personally give them $500 if they graduated. The catch? Students were paired up, and if one buddy didn't graduate, neither would receive the $500. According to the Dollywood Foundation's website, the program actually took the high school dropout rate in Sevier County from 35% to 6%, and it convinced the region to start more initiatives rewarding students to finish high school. In this episode, we look at the power of pursuing goals together in the classroom, at the gym, and on the water.
Speaker 3: The 2022 Champion pushing hard to try and beat the 2023 Champion Max Maeder.
Speaker 4: Max looks very calm.
Katy Milkman: I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Max Maeder: We hit speeds of up to 80 kilometers per hour, just being powered by the wind.
Katy Milkman: This is Max.
Max Maeder: Hello, I am Max Maeder. I am 17. I turn 18 this year and I'm competing in a sport called Formula Kite.
Katy Milkman: Max is being modest. He's not just a competitor in the sport of Formula Kite. He's a two-time world champion, Asian Games champion, and European Open champion. Formula Kite is a high-speed sailing sport where athletes are powered by a large steerable kite. They're tethered to the kite by long lines and they ride on a short board. Under that board is a long vertical keel or mast. At the bottom of that are two sets of underwater wings, a hydrofoil. This is why the sport is also known as kite foiling.
Max Maeder: What a hydrofoil is, is like a little underwater airplane that when you go fast enough allows you to glide above the water surface, making it really, really efficient and fast. The idea is that you start all together, all the athletes start together, and you go race around a racecourse. And that's how we decide winners, is by running races, and whoever has the least points by the end of it is the winner. So first place gets one point, second place gets two points and so on and so forth.
Katy Milkman: These days, Max represents Singapore on the international kite-foiling stage. But his journey to becoming a world champion started when he was just a kid. That's when his father introduced him to kite surfing, a similar sport but without the hydrofoil.
Max Maeder: My father did kite surfing recreationally, and he thought it would be fun. Just throw the little guy on the board and see how it turns out.
Katy Milkman: In kite surfing, you ride directly on the surface of the water plowing through and creating a splashing wake. But in kite foiling, the board rises out of the water and slices the surface like a knife.
Max Maeder: When I was encouraged to get out onto kite foiling by my father, I immediately fell in love with session number one. The first thing that I enjoyed about kite foiling was the freedom and the simple silence of going over the water's surface. It's a little bit surreal. You spend a lot of time with the waves and the water splashing and the wind blowing, and then suddenly you get on top of this board. Perhaps you don't go against the wind too hard, and suddenly everything turns silent, and it's a little bit surreal.
Katy Milkman: Max says there are four basic principles to mastering kite foiling.
Max Maeder: There's the start, of course, which is very, very important. It decides your options for the rest of the race. Since we all start together on the same start line, that becomes a very critical aspect. And foiling actually, actually foiling, just getting up out of the water and then efficiently riding on top of the hydrofoil. Then there's transitions. Since the foil only goes in one direction, anytime you turn above a certain amount, you're going to have to change your feet on top of the board while still trying to stay above the water and not crashing your board into the water. And then there's of course your capability to overtake and how you can use all these skills together to try and pull certain maneuvers or simply position yourself correctly with tactics or strategy to try and overtake someone or defend your position.
Katy Milkman: For all of these complex skills to come together, Max has identified one really critical training strategy: having a training partner.
Max Maeder: The community in kite foiling is relatively small. That means that pretty much the more you compete, the more you get to know everyone, and everyone knows everyone pretty much. And then I was invited to training by Martin.
Katy Milkman: Martin Dolenc is a Croatian Formula Kite athlete a few years older than Max who competes in many of the same competitions.
Speaker 6: After two days of racing, Martin Dolenc from Croatia was the one to watch. He won three out of the four elimination rounds to take control of the open division.
Max Maeder: It was supposed to be three weeks, and since I had nothing to do during 2021, it was still a little bit of a COVID period, and so I decided, why not? Let's go to Croatia. Let's train for three weeks. And then it turned into two months and then three months and then a long-time partnership. So it worked really well. We realized it did, and we just kept extending it, and now we're basically a team.
Katy Milkman: Max and Martin are a team in the training sense, but not in the competitive sense. They're actually rivals in that they race against each other in many events. But when it comes to training, they've realized that they can help each other become better by working together. They encourage each other. They have fun together, and they hold each other accountable despite the challenges of being competitors and coming from different countries, different cultures, and even speaking different native languages. And they're a good fit.
Max Maeder: He's a very strong rider. He's been finishing within the top 10 riders since I can't remember how long. He's won certain events, and he's finished on the podiums. He's just a very strong and consistent athlete, which makes him an ideal training partner.
Katy Milkman: During intensive training blocks, Max and Martin spend around two and a half hours together on the water every day, six days a week. They're coached by Martin's father, Johnny.
Max Maeder: During that period of two and a half hours on the water, you run practice races. Our coach sets a course, we race around it, we spar, we duel and see who can best each other in those, let's say, six or so races that we do.
Katy Milkman: Training as a pair is not always smooth sailing, pardon the pun. Max and Martin have to coordinate their schedules. They have to travel long distances to connect, and sometimes they have to compromise on how they train.
Max Maeder: You have to decide when, where, how you get set up, and once you're out on the water, you have to be careful of them because we're traveling at very high speeds and very close together. So you might not agree on a certain safety aspect, right? But it gives you a certain rigor that you have to keep to, and it gives you a certain discipline. And the benefits far outweigh these cons of having a training partner, at least in our sport.
If you have a training partner that's there to train with, you obviously will be more motivated out on the water for as much as you can for the whole period of time that you're out on the water. The accountability is a part of it. There's someone else who also wants to train and also wants to improve, so you don't really want to slack too much. And having that person right there in front of you, it makes you really want to try and work out some way to overtake them. And over time, that small little bit of motivation compounds and means that you get quite a bit better over time.
Katy Milkman: The benefits of this approach show up in different ways in all of Max's competitions, but having a training partner was especially consequential at a recent world-class formula sailing event.
Max Maeder: The Trofeo Princesa Sofia Palma Regatta is an annual event. It's big in the sailing community, where pretty much all Olympic sailing classes come together in one location. Of course, they race in different areas, but they all race at the same time. It's a big event because all the sailors are there.
Speaker 7: Here he comes, the last few seconds, and Max Maeder the reigning world champion from 2023 …
Katy Milkman: The regatta took place in April of 2024, and it was especially important for Max. He'd already qualified for the Summer Olympic Games in Paris, but this regatta was an opportunity to check out his potential rivals.
Max Maeder: I would like to do well in every event that I compete in and especially in an event that's as big as this in the Olympic year means that a lot of people will be giving their best. And that means that I get to see how strong my competitors are and how I stack up against them and how well I do in an environment under pressure.
Katy Milkman: The regatta happens in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. April in that part of Spain is typically pleasant. The winds are steady and warm enough for tourists to stroll along the beach. But on the first day of the regatta, the weather wasn't cooperating.
Max Maeder: It was extremely strong and gusty wind and very wavy. And I crashed while going in a straight line due to how gusty the wind was, and that was a surprise to me because it hasn't happened for a very long time. But you quickly learned from that, and it wasn't that bad of a day.
Katy Milkman: Max managed to regain his lead that day after the crash. But on the third day, he faced another challenge, an archrival from Slovenia.
Max Maeder: Toni Vodisek is the 2022 world champion. I was battling with him, and then I turned. So I went for a tack and tangled with someone else and ran into someone else basically, because I was so focused on battling with him and that I wanted to make a turn, and I didn't check for other riders.
Katy Milkman: This is a big mistake in kite foiling. Remember, each rider is tethered to a giant kite via several long lines. When those lines get tangled with other racers, it can be a huge mess.
Max Maeder: It's like making a turn with your car and not using the blinkers and then being surprised when someone rams into you, right? You didn't check, and you didn't look, and you just turned, and then bang, right? So that proved to be a fatal mistake because I couldn't compete that race after the tangle.
Katy Milkman: Max was out of the running to win that particular heat, but there were many more heats and races to come during the six-day regatta. With his backup gear ready to go, Max progressed through the races and secured himself one of the four places in the final heat. His training partner, Martin, narrowly missed the final, finishing in fifth place. It was a showdown between Max and his rival, Toni Vodisek.
Max Maeder: I just felt really good in anticipation of the final day because I was in a great position, but I was wondering if we were going to get racing at all because there wasn't a good forecast for the day. The forecast was almost no wind, and we didn't know if we were going to get wind, so we waited around for around four to five hours. Trying to keep yourself mentally ready is a little bit tiring. We didn't even go out on the water until later in the afternoon. I was riding in the final and in a relatively good position, and Toni and Riccardo, the Italian rider, were just in front of me.
Katy Milkman: All three riders were approaching the lay line, which is an imaginary line extending out from a racing buoy to indicate the point where a racer should turn into the wind in order to just clear the buoy on the correct side.
Max Maeder: So once we had reached the lay line, Riccardo began to initiate a turn, right? Toni, who's right behind him, had reacted incorrectly, and so he had made an inefficient tack, an inefficient turn, and then also a mistake afterwards.
Katy Milkman: This was a key moment.
Max Maeder: A strong competitor like Toni, you're not going to be able to overtake him all the time in every race. And that means that when you sit behind him, sometimes you simply have to be patient and say, "If it works out, if I can get him, it does." Then, "If it doesn't, I'm just going to be keeping my position as strong as possible waiting on a mistake." Toni had made a mistake and couldn't recover properly. Now, Riccardo comes towards me with right of way, and I make a relatively efficient turn because I had time to react, meaning that now it's just me against Riccardo where I was a little bit in front of him, just barely. And from then on, it was just a matter of trying to keep my position and staying stable, as stable as possible. I won the race. I won the regatta.
Katy Milkman: Max is clearly a talented athlete, but he attributes his success not to raw talent, but to his persistent training. How does he stay motivated to get out there consistently and give it his all so he can come through and shine in big moments like the finals of the 2024 Spanish regatta? He's realized that despite the hassles and the travel and the coordinating of schedules and even potential disagreements, what he gets out of training with a partner far outweighs the costs. Because the training is fun and because he's accountable to Martin, he stays at it and gets more out of each session than he would alone, and he feels that has made a big difference in his outcomes.
Max Maeder: Perhaps it might be the same case with your training partner where if you go to the gym together, as long as you both mutually benefit and both agree, then why not enjoy the good time you have training together and how it benefits you and the other person. I've been training with Martin for, what, a little over three years, and that's a lot. So I couldn't imagine how different it would be if I didn't have a training partner.
Katy Milkman: Max Maeder is the reigning Formula Kite world champion, Asian champion, and European champion. He's the youngest winner in any Olympic sailing class competition, achieving that distinction at the age of 16. And Max represented Singapore at the Paris Olympics, so you may have seen him there, winning the bronze medal. Congratulations to him. You can learn more about Max's career in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast. And special thanks to the International Kiteboarding Association for use of their audio. You can find more of their content across social media by searching @kiteclasses.
You've probably gathered by now that our focus in this episode is on the benefits of working on certain goals in tandem with other people. This might sound like a fairly intuitive idea. Of course, it's beneficial to work with other people, right? This is one of the many reasons it's common to get married and why so many entrepreneurs have a business partner.
You've probably heard the African proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together." But what if you have a personal goal and pursuing it in tandem with someone else means extra hassles and coordination costs? What lengths should you go to in order to ensure you can pursue that goal in tandem rather than, say, studying or budgeting or exercising at a time that's more convenient for you on your own?
Rachel Gershon was one of my collaborators along with Cindy Cryder on a recent paper where we looked at how the benefits of rewarding people only for pursuing goals in tandem with others compares to offering identical rewards to people for pursuing goals in whatever way they prefer. Rachel Gershon is an assistant professor of marketing at the Haas Business School at the University of California at Berkeley, where she studies consumer judgments and choice with an emphasis on social, prosocial, and health-related behaviors.
Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Rachel Gershon: Thanks so much for having me, Katy.
Katy Milkman: Well, as you know, I really love the topic we're going to discuss, but I was hoping we could just start with a simple definition or description. Could you just describe what tandem goal pursuit is?
Rachel Gershon: So tandem goal pursuit is simply people pursuing a goal such as exercise or an education goal, quitting smoking, they're pursuing some desired behavior with a friend.
Katy Milkman: So instead of doing it alone, I'm doing it with someone else. We both have the same goal for ourselves personally, and we do it together.
Rachel Gershon: Yes, exactly. Just pursue a goal in tandem together.
Katy Milkman: It sounds much better. And P.S., having pursued the goal of publishing a paper with you, Rachel, I will say that was much more fun and successful than it would've been had I tried to do it alone. I'm excited to talk about the research that you led on this topic. Could you describe that work and exactly what it was that you were testing about rewarding tandem goal pursuit, which seems to counterintuitively be a better way to supercharge achievement than rewarding people directly for success?
Rachel Gershon: Yeah, so generally we were interested in whether people are more motivated when pursuing their goals alone or when pursuing these goals with a friend. And we tested this by running a large experiment with about 800 undergraduates at UC San Diego. They signed up to participate for this experiment with a friend. We offered half of these people a standard incentive to exercise at the on-campus gym. So they got a dollar every time they went to the gym. And we offered the other half the exact same incentive with an additional hurdle. They only got the reward if they went to the gym with this friend. So we're just adding a hurdle to exercising in this other group, but we're giving people an incentive to pursue a goal with their friend.
Katy Milkman: And what happened?
Rachel Gershon: So what happened was in line with other work on incentives, we found that overall, the incentives appeared to work. People were going to the gym more often during this month when we incentivized exercise than they had in previous months. We also found that people exercised more often when they received a social reward for visiting the gym. They went to the gym about 35% more often than those who received an individual reward.
Katy Milkman: And did that surprise you, Rachel, or did you feel like you were sure that's what you would find all along?
Rachel Gershon: You know, I think that our group had all experienced some goal pursuit with friends, and we'd found it to be effective. But I think we still found this to be a really surprising finding. And the reason is that in the social reward condition, we're adding a hurdle, right? It's more costly to pursue a goal with a friend. You have to coordinate with them. You have to figure out each other's schedules. You have to compromise based on your individual preferences. So you have all these coordination costs. But we found that people overcame these costs and actually exercise more often when they had to go with their friend. And yeah, so we found that pretty surprising.
Katy Milkman: Can you talk a little bit about what you think drives the effectiveness of rewarding tandem goal pursuit instead of individual goal pursuit?
Rachel Gershon: Yeah. So we believe that we were able to overcome this costly coordination of going with a friend with two additional motivations. First of all, people just enjoy exercising with their friends. There's this increased enjoyment of pursuing the goal together. And then also they felt that their friend was holding them accountable, right? They didn't want to let their friend down by not showing up to the gym when they'd committed to going.
Katy Milkman: I think it's really interesting that there are these two components that seem to come out of the data when we asked people what was motivating them. And a lot of the biggest effects are multiply determined. There's multiple reasons why it's good to pursue goals with a friend.
Rachel Gershon: Absolutely.
Katy Milkman: So we studied this in the context of exercise, but could you talk a little bit about whether you think the finding is more broadly applicable and where else it might be relevant?
Rachel Gershon: Yeah, certainly. I think we would expect this to extend to other desirable behaviors, but probably particularly those that you pursue in tandem with others. In addition to our field experiment, we also ran a survey where we asked people to imagine trying to learn a language with a friend. And we found that even in this hypothetical scenario, people seemed more motivated. They felt more that they were held accountable to learning this new language when doing so with a friend. And you can imagine this extending to other skills that you might learn, productivity, writing with friends, and all sorts of other individual and workplace goals. And I think there's a lot of potential to make individual goals more social, but there are some that are more obviously social, such as exercising with friends. Other goals, like quitting smoking, these are more personal goals and could be a little bit harder to pursue in tandem. Doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities to make these social goals, but certainly goals that are pursued in tandem are likely easier to enjoy together.
Katy Milkman: So what recommendations do you have to help people use this insight so they can improve their own outcomes?
Rachel Gershon: I guess the simple advice would just be to find an accountability buddy. So someone who can help you pursue your goals. And not only can this be mutually beneficial for pursuing your goals, but one really nice additional finding that we had from our experiment is that people actually felt closer to their friend by the end of this study. So not only is it helping you pursue these health and wellness and personal goals, but also helping with social goals of staying close with your friends.
Katy Milkman: I love that. One question I get a lot when I talk about approaches we can use for encouraging goal pursuit: Is it sort of a one-size-fits-all, or are there certain subpopulations that particularly benefit or don't benefit from this tool? And can you say anything about this? Are there some groups that really get a lot out of this and others that don't? Or does it seem kind of universal in its helpfulness?
Rachel Gershon: That's a great question. So one nice thing that we found in this project is that this has the greatest benefit for the people that were exercising less at the start of the incentive month, but it actually also benefited the people who were exercising more than their buddies. So while it has the largest benefit for people who are exercising less, it doesn't backfire. It doesn't make the people who are exercising more, exercise less.
Katy Milkman: Rachel, is there anything you do differently in your life as a result of having conducted this research?
Rachel Gershon: I think that going into this research, I really enjoyed pursuing goals with friends. And COVID happened since we started this research, and it felt even more relevant during COVID when I wasn't spending as much time with the people in my life. So now even more so, I try to incorporate friends in my daily goal pursuit. So I have productivity groups where friends write together. Sometimes we do online workout videos. I really try to pursue these goals with friends to not only keep myself accountable, but also keep these friends in my life.
Katy Milkman: I love that. And just in closing, could you mention the name of this paper because it's very clever.
Rachel Gershon: It's called "Friends With Health Benefits: A Field Experiment."
Katy Milkman: I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, Rachel. I really appreciate it. And for the amazing work you led.
Rachel Gershon: Thank you, Katy.
Katy Milkman: Rachel Gershon is an assistant professor of marketing at the Haas Business School at the University of California at Berkeley. You can find a link to the paper we collaborated on with Cindy Cryder in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
If you're nearing retirement, a pre-retirement checklist can help reduce the stress of the transition. If done right, it can help you be more confident that you'll remember to fill out every form, hit every deadline, and register for every program that makes for a smoother retirement. To learn more about preparing to achieve your retirement goals, check out the Financial Decoder episode "How Can You Build Your Pre-Retirement Checklist," which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts or at schwab.com/FinancialDecoder. In fact, consider listening with a friend—and then hold each other accountable to follow through with your plans.
Most of us have something we're trying to improve. Whether you're trying to get better about putting together a monthly budget, learning a new language, exercising, reading, or becoming adept with a new technology, you might think the best way to get it done is to set aside time to work alone towards your objective. What the research we covered on today's episode shows definitively is that despite the extra hassle factors associated with pursuing our goals in tandem with someone else, the accountability and fun it creates to work towards those personal goals in tandem with a person you like often makes it worth it. This won't always be the case. Maybe a certain study buddy keeps you from staying focused on your work and undermines your performance in school. But when there's someone who shares your work ethic and focus, and you can inspire one another to keep at it and to enjoy the experience more, tandem goal pursuit is a great idea.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time I'll speak with a famous professor and social psychologist about the often-misunderstood Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 8: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
