#99: Harvard Business School Professor on Lucky Underwear and Everyday Romance | Michael Norton

Harvard Business School professor and behavioral scientist Mike Norton breaks down why rituals—small, often “irrational” actions—carry outsized emotional weight. From his own black binder “totem” for teaching, to sports routines and workplace team practices, Mike explains how rituals can reduce anxiety, create belonging, and add meaning to relationships and family life. 

Mike and Sri also explore the line between habits (get it done) and rituals (it matters how it’s done).

Some of the examples Mike cites will shock you. Others will melt your heart. 

Michael Norton is author of the book The Ritual Effect (highly recommended). 

Visit michaelnorton.com to take the fun and insightful quiz on your own rituals. 

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Key takeaways

• Anything can become a “totem.” Objects (a binder, a pen, a mug) can anchor confidence and readiness.  
• Rituals are a belonging engine: doing something in sync (even a made-up stomp/clap) bonds groups fast.  
• Top-down rituals can backfire—but even shared “eye-roll unity” can create camaraderie (sometimes against the boss 😅).  
• Rituals help manage performance anxiety, but they’re not magic; sometimes anxiety is simply too high for rituals alone.  
• In relationships, rituals are often tiny and adorable, and they correlate with satisfaction—especially when both partners experience them as meaningful.  
• Family rituals don’t need to be elaborate: simple, values-based practices beat “perfect dinner every night.”  
• Habits vs. rituals: same action, different meaning—what matters is whether it’s “check the box” or emotionally loaded/presence-driven.  
• Watch the danger zone: rituals can become the thing you do in order to do the thing, and then start interfering with life (OCD as the extreme case).  

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Transcript

Sri (04:25.727)
Mike, tell me about the black binder that you use to this day.

Mike Norton (04:31.837)
Do you remember it? Probably not. I didn't make that big of an impact.

Sri (04:34.965)
vaguely, vaguely, although I, you do mention it a lot in your book, so I might be like, fake remembering the binder itself.

Mike Norton (04:43.245)
huh. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I realize I had been studying rituals for a while. I'm sure we'll get into it, but kind of in a way where I didn't think I had any, you know, like other people do this stuff, but I'm a scientist, something I don't even know what. And then I realized one day that I've used the same exact black binder every time I've taught at Harvard Business School, which is like a lot.

because I've been here for 20 years, you know what I mean? And if I didn't have it, I'd be very uncomfortable. My dad gave it to me 20, 25 years ago, so it's got like meaning in it. And I realized it's basically like a lucky magical object to me that I have to take with me. And I thought, my God, I'm sure I'm rituals all over the place. And I just wasn't coding them as that.

Sri (05:13.715)
Hahaha

Sri (05:35.329)
Yeah, yeah. My brothers and I, after Inception and for years after, using the word totem a lot. It feels like a totem. I'm curious... Go ahead.

Mike Norton (05:47.762)
And what's amazing is anything can become a totem. Anything. That's what's so fascinating about it, right? Like a black binder. Probably nobody else in the world has that as their special totem, but people have a pen or a mug or, you know, all these little things that become so important to us.

Sri (06:06.901)
Right. And you use, went, go through your whole ritual of pre-teaching ritual. I just said that twice, but you get it.

What is amazing in retrospect and when, you know, I just saw you at our, class's reunion there a couple months ago. It's just amazing what a great performance you all deliver on a regular basis. And it's crazy. And I do public speaking and the maybe well-kept secret of public speaking is no matter who you're talking to, you try and give the same speech every time, but you all are forced to

not only do a performance that's different every time, different content, but it's kind of this weird, like, choose your own adventure performance involving a bunch of cats that you're, like, trying to herd. Like, I don't know, how do you do it? And how does everybody else do it?

Mike Norton (07:13.605)
I think I was terrible when I started, that's for sure. Each class has 90 to 95 students, stadium seating. As you know, every class starts with you do a case on some company and you say, if you were the CEO, if you were the CMO, what would you do? And you call on a student and you're right, they can say whatever they want and you have to be prepared.

to go with it, you know what I mean? So really, unlike public speaking where you're running the show, meaning, you know, I have my slides or I have these four jokes that I'm gonna tell, all that kind of stuff, you have no idea what anybody's gonna say. So you structure it, but it's just an incredibly different experience than most public speaking and most teaching, I think, because it's entirely a conversation with 95 people. It's incredibly fun. If you can teach at HBS any other kind of public speaking,

Sri (07:42.093)
You

Mike Norton (08:11.364)
is so easy because this is such a like every day is a new company that you're supposed to be an expert about, know, which we're not, but you have to be enough of an expert, you know, to do the thing. And yeah, it's a very, very interesting thing that happens here. And some people here are just extraordinary. I mean, really just I watch them and I'm I know what they're going to do and I'm still blind. It's like Bruce Springsteen.

Sri (08:13.312)
Mmm.

Sri (08:19.213)
Hahaha

Mike Norton (08:38.526)
playing Born to Run, you know what mean? You know it's coming, but it's still just incredible when it happens, you know?

Sri (08:40.189)
Mm-hmm. I'm thinking of... I think it's Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. And apparently I'm blanking on his name, the real life person that Leonardo DiCaprio...

Caprio's characters based on con artists and he does all these crazy things like fly, you know, he's an airline pilot and like all these crazy things and one was like he taught some college level class in something that he didn't know and they were like bewildered by it and the cops ask him like at the end like how did you do it? He's like I just had to be one chapter ahead of the students.

Mike Norton (09:28.606)
Completely. I mean, that's not what we do here. Just to be clear, we're experts in everything, publicly stated.

Sri (09:32.01)
Right.

There you go, there you go. That's right, that's right. So I was reminded at reunion when you did the session on your work on rituals about a case discussion that we did with you in marketing first year, RC year, required curriculum, maybe that's what that stands for.

And it was a case on chicken contact lenses as this entrepreneurial idea, it's kind of the nexus of that and marketing. I'll say his first name, Sukesh in our section just was like at one point after everyone goes through this process of...

really over analyzing the whole thing. He just is like exasperated and he's just like, what are you guys thinking? This idea is crazy. Like not crazy good, like it's crazy terrible. And just like through the rest of the year, that was like pretty early in the year, through the rest of the year, was everyone remember that moment, probably still does to this day. I kind of was having that reaction when you did your session at Reunion talking about...

I was some bedtime ritual about maybe it was brushing teeth or maybe it was something and everyone was like giving their answers about why they were right and I'm just like this question is just like I feel like you all are don't realize you're in on a joke right now. And so I'm curious about like can you talk about why people feel so strongly about these?

Mike Norton (10:59.57)
Yeah, yeah.

Sri (11:09.913)
the sequence of things, the way they do things in just daily life, and things that we all do, whereas you talk about very meaningful rituals that are bespoke to certain people.

Mike Norton (11:21.244)
Yeah, but by the way, the chicken contact lens case, the teaching plan is to overanalyze things with students until somebody says, this is an insane business. And then we say, well, why do we spend all this time analyzing all this stuff? You know, cause you can't, you're never going to be able to sell it and all this stuff. So we're actually waiting for someone. Cause many people are thinking it. said you were too. Someone finally is so exasperated. They're like, wait a minute, we're talking about chicken con like, what are we talking about?

Sri (11:34.273)
I love it.

Sri (11:50.96)
Hahaha!

Mike Norton (11:50.973)
And it's a good, you know, getting lost in the weeds and not thinking about the actual selling process, right? Which is, you can do Excel all day long, you know, it's something to get by at, so. But to your actual question, I think, yeah, I often ask people, do you, in the morning, do you brush your teeth first and then shower? Or do you shower and then brush your teeth? And it's about 50-50, all over the world, actually, which is just interesting to me anyway. But then I ask people, if you switch the order,

Sri (11:56.951)
Yeah.

Sri (12:00.874)
You

Mike Norton (12:20.67)
Does it bother you or do you not care? And that's 50, 50, half of people are like, I could do it. What are you talking about? I'll brush my teeth whenever I feel like it. And half of people say, no, I don't, I don't know why, but I don't like it I don't want to switch. And those people are the ones who, if you say why, they say my way is good. My way is right. You know, this order is the correct order. But of course people that are the other way say, no, no, my way is right. And they're really dug in on it. And just the idea that these little tiny rituals,

Sri (12:40.043)
Hahaha!

Mike Norton (12:50.214)
in the morning, you know, they're very mundane, already provoke a huge amount of emotion in us. For me, as a signal of, imagine rituals that aren't just silly things in the morning, how big of an impact they can have on us emotionally.

Sri (13:05.525)
Yeah, it reminds me of, I don't know if you'd call it a ritual, but a similar reaction people have if you, at a company for a while and you go to new company and people are doing things a different way. It's just like, the new way is clearly the wrong way. And just how dug in we get with the grooves, I think Robert Cialdini calls it in the record of our brain.

Mike Norton (13:33.257)
Yeah. I mean, research on mergers between companies, it's, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why that's hard, but one of them is just these people don't, you we always did a three o'clock on Thursday. We always did this thing and we don't do it anymore here. They don't do it. Can you believe they don't do it over here? And those kinds of things make you feel that you don't belong. You know, that it's us and them still, and we didn't really merge. even the little signals like that.

Sri (13:49.406)
You

Sri (13:56.897)
Hmm.

Mike Norton (14:01.724)
you're right can actually be really, really meaningful to us.

Sri (14:05.601)
Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk about belonging. Something I'm super passionate about from my time in the SEAL teams. Like there was a really intense feeling of belonging likely by 99 % of the guys there. I can't read their minds, but I know them well. not that want to, not that mimicking everything the SEAL teams.

do is going to necessarily create a sense of belonging or be good for other places. But when companies talk to you and ask you about these sorts of things, what's the recipe, what's the playbook for how to use rituals to make people feel belonging?

Mike Norton (14:52.444)
Yeah, you know, it's, I forget if I did this when in the session that you were in, but I sometimes have people stand up and stomp and clap at the beginning. I do that? And so the idea is I just put on the screen, you know, clap once, stomp once, clap three times, stomp three times, just a long list of behaviors that people start doing it. And then everybody syncs up at some point.

Sri (15:02.785)
We did it. We did it, yes.

Mike Norton (15:21.17)
They all start clapping at the same time and they all start stomping at the same time. And by the end, usually groups are really in unison, even a big group. And if you ask people about it, they say, that was awesome. It felt really good for all of us to be doing that at the same time. And I say, you know, I invented that ritual. doesn't, it's not a real one, but it doesn't matter, right? Cause you had this collective experience where we're all doing the thing together. And we know that because when people do it differently,

you if we're all clapping at the same time and then I stomp and you clap, people look over at the person like they want to murder them, you know, like you're, and they say you're doing it wrong, even though they've never done it before in their lives. And so the, know, again, if that thing that I just made up with often rooms of strangers can bring people together, you can see how rituals play such a big role in belonging. And I think I use that one to kind of make that point. When I go to

Sri (15:58.265)
Ha!

Mike Norton (16:19.625)
companies, the biggest thing that people want is like a cookie cutter. You know, like, can you tell us everybody gets together, you know, Tuesday morning and we all do this clapping and something. And I say, no, there's not. That's not how they work really in the real world. And when companies try to mandate rituals, people can react extremely negatively because I roll. mean, you know what? Yeah. So what we do is instead we give teams time to think about what they do as a team.

Sri (16:43.083)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (16:49.651)
What are your idiosyncrasies? You know, what do you do at lunch? What do you do Friday afternoon? And we have them build a ritual around things that they care about, that they brought to it. And then those can be incredibly meaningful. It's not that the top down kind don't matter, but the bottom up kind are really, really important. And I don't know your experience, I just say I'm an idiot, but I can imagine some came from the top, from history, and some came from the specific group of people that you were with, where you developed your own.

practices that were specific to your group.

Sri (17:22.919)
Yes, yes. I wasn't there at the inception of the SEAL teams in the 1960s, or even their precursors in the 1940s. But there are a lot from history, like based on the things we do, the way we talk, like I have to believe that most of them came from the ground up. Even the ones that were history, you know, which I know you're lumping in as top down. Like very rarely was there anything top down that was of a ritualistic nature.

And even though it's the military, like people get this idea of command and control, but the overall military is very much not actually as much like that as people believe. And the SEAL teams are even less like that. So yeah, very ground up. And then I love your distinction between there's the overall, but then there's the specifics of, for instance, a SEAL platoon or a SEAL troop or even lower level units than that. Yeah, there's just all this.

You spend so much time with these people, they tend to be big personalities. And so there's just all this colorful, I don't know, culture, lore, stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Mike Norton (18:34.707)
develop your own language. mean, you know, if you spend that much time with people, literally, you can speak and other people have no idea what you're talking about. That's when you really see that you really, as a collective, got some practices that are really unique to your specific team.

Sri (18:42.069)
Right, right.

Sri (18:50.347)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you reminded me, not that we wanna make this all about HBS, but you reminded me of a case that might have been in our leadership class first year, which it had to do with a certain company in Japan and the way the teams operated there and...

one of the things was like all these chants they would do in the morning before they would go. like, I mean, I love Japanese culture, but they sounded so cheesy, right? They sounded so cheesy, but everyone was super into it. you know, supposedly, the gist, if I remember, this is ages ago now, but like, seem to be like, hey, some of these things actually work. And I guess like, how do we, it seems like other cultures,

are very willing to accept like, cool, like this is the ritual, boom, let's do it. I'm in, whereas other cultures, notably I feel like America, like we're just like, seriously, like just want to sit in the back of the bus and like be cool.

Mike Norton (19:52.062)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (19:59.079)
Yeah, completely. Yeah, I think definitely when there are collectives that everybody appears to be 100 % on board, if you drill down and ask people, there's always people who say, I got it. Everybody else is doing this. I got to do it or I'll be fired. You know, for them, it's not a thing that matters. And sometimes you see a funny thing where if you mandate something like that, the employees hate it and hate you.

Sri (20:16.693)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Mike Norton (20:27.741)
but they hate it and hate you in unison. Do know what I mean? So you've given them, yes, so every time they're clapping and stomping, they're hating it and hating you, but they're doing it all together. And you do get a strange kind of camaraderie around rejecting the authority. And then, know what, once we're done with this, let's go to our team and, you know, this is how we have coffee every morning, you know, behind the scenes of like, once we're done with this idiot boss, let's do it our way.

Sri (20:31.819)
Yeah, yeah. With exuberance.

Sri (20:53.025)
Yeah, yeah.

Right, I love it. But before we leave this topic, I have to say, when you did the exercise, the ritual you made up, I had walked in 30 seconds late. And I walk into the people I was meeting there and I look at Amanda and I'm like, what is going on? She's like, just go with it, just look at the screen. Just do what we're doing. So yeah, I had no idea what was going on.

Mike Norton (21:20.863)
Well.

That's great. That's so great. You thought everybody had lost their minds. I mean, basically, my God, everybody, yeah, is screaming. Yeah.

Sri (21:27.091)
Sri (21:30.571)
Basically, yeah, yeah, right, right. And I just read the curse to be disliked and the phrase that came into mind was community feeling. Which could be good or it could be fascist. I wasn't sure what I was walking into right there.

Mike Norton (21:43.809)
Yep, completely, completely. And that's a really important distinction because with some rituals, either our own or in groups, we like them, we think they're good. And that's actually usually great. You know, I like the way I do my morning thing. I like the way my team does this at work. Let's not get too macro, but I like the way my culture does things. The problem is when you say, just mine's not just good, it's right.

Sri (22:13.344)
Mmm.

Mike Norton (22:13.864)
And that, they feel very similar, but in fact the consequences are incredibly different. Cause if mine's good, yours can be good. If mine's right, everything else is wrong and I probably need to correct you. And that's when you start to get rituals, actually dividing people rather than being a source of community.

Sri (22:34.977)
Yeah, yeah. On the topic of belonging, you talk about rites of passage. Can you tell us about the bullet ants?

Mike Norton (22:48.234)
Yeah, it is. one thing that was so, I will answer that, but one thing that was so fun about studying rituals is of course, humans have been documenting them since humans were documenting anything. So we have, you know, Gilgamesh, he's making sacrifices to the gods, offerings to the gods. So, so the first thing we have already has rituals in it. And so we have this incredible record.

Sri (23:03.543)
Mmm.

Sri (23:13.387)
Mmm.

Mike Norton (23:15.904)
across time of all of these rituals that humans do. And you can see across time, sometimes there's amazing commonalities among cultures that are a thousand years apart and opposite sides of the world. And yet when boys get to be 12 or 13 or 14 years old, they do something. And after they do something, now they're independently of the other culture a thousand years ago. And so you see this kind of

I can't say it's innate, but you see this kind of emerge from humans that at certain points in life, we need to do a thing before we get to the next phase of life. Weddings is one. No, no, we have to do this thing before we're officially a couple. No, you don't. Of course you don't. And you're going to turn 14 whether you do a ritual or not. So it doesn't matter. And yet they're so, so meaningful. And so some are very innocuous and then some are very

not innocuous and one ritual is wearing gloves filled with bullet ant. Bullet ant, think is the most painful sting on the planet. Correct me, of course, anybody, but, and you've got, you know, like gloves filled with them and boys have to be able to take that not just once, but several times in order to be, now you're not a boy, now you're a man. Other cultures, you know, if you think of a bar mitzvah, for example,

you know, the chore is memorizing a very long thing and then having to recite it in public. Of course, it's different from bullet ants, but the principle sometimes underlying, you can see some commonalities, right? Which is you've got to go through something in order to come out on the other side and be changed.

Sri (25:02.113)
Yeah, when you told that story in the book, I was just astounded. It sounds horrible.

Mike Norton (25:13.48)
And know, hazing is a version of that. If you think of what hazing is, it's you can't be in our group until you've suffered. And we see that can get out of hand very quickly because you can keep going to extremes in order to prove that you belong in our group.

Sri (25:15.679)
Right. Yeah.

Sri (25:30.476)
Right, right. One way we use rituals is to control our anxiety or other emotions that you can educate us on. Immediately before even walking into your room at the reunion session, like I was already thinking about baseball. And so...

What is the Yerkes-Dodson law and what can we learn about control or the illusion thereof?

Mike Norton (26:07.892)
Yeah, I grew up outside Boston and I'm at the perfect age where Nomar Garcia-Para was an incredible player right at my peak interest in baseball. And he's just famous for an insanely long ritual before every single pitch, not every single, every single pitch, he would step away and do gloves and tapping and it's very long thing. And the question is, does that help you? Does it get in the way? know, when, when do they help and when do they not?

And this Yerkes-Dodson law is kind of intuitive, but it's important, which is a little bit of arousal is good for us.

And then you can start to get out to the other side. And sometimes a lot can be good, but there's places where the arousal is going to get in our way. And you see with rituals that some athletes, they become so elaborate that they start to mess with their performance rather than help them feel ready for their performance. And then sports psychologists have to come in and say, let's undo some of the bounces you do with the ball before you serve.

in order to help you have a ritual that you feel more ready to serve.

Sri (27:21.301)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not sure if you feel comfortable talking about this, but I trust you. What about when anxiety gets out of hand and it's kind of maybe just it's gone through the ceiling of anything a ritual can control, like since we're talking baseball, the yips. Just like, what have you seen work?

Because I think it's applicable to all sorts of things, whether you're a salesperson or an entrepreneur or whatever. We all can be on our own heads. And how do we get out, Mike? How do we do this?

Mike Norton (27:59.778)
Yeah, if we ask people what they do before they have to perform if they're nervous, which could be, you know, singing on stage, but also be leading an important meeting at work. An insane percent of, I say insane affectionately, a very large percent of people say they do something when they feel nervous. At work, often people say, you know, I go into the bathroom and I check under the stalls to make sure nobody else is in the bathroom. And then I talk to myself in the mirror.

And here's what I say. And they say, I've never told anybody that because it's so weird. And I say, guess who else does that? Half the people in the room. So it's incredibly common actually that we engage in these practices before we have to perform. And the bigger the anxiety, tends to be the bigger the ritual gets. So famous people who go on stage in front of 50,000 people often have more elaborate rituals than I do before I go teach in front of 90 people.

Sri (28:57.261)
Mmm.

Mike Norton (29:00.225)
because the stakes are so much higher. But there's a case where anxiety before is good because it'll make you prepare. You know, if you have a test next week and you're anxious about it, the good version is the anxiety makes you study, so you do well when it's time for the test. The bad version is that everything starts to get messed up along the way. And there are for sure so many problems that we face that rituals, they're not enough. know, they, I wish,

I wish so much that they were magical, be honest. You know what I mean? I wish that if you clap three times and spun four times, you know, the anxiety would go away. I really do wish it. the data just, that's not how they work. know, they, we use them to try to get different emotions or tamp down different emotions, but they're not by themselves a cure all by any means.

Sri (29:31.373)
Yeah.

Sri (29:52.108)
Yeah, yeah, you said it there at the end. I was thinking that we use emotion, like we use rituals to de-emote and maybe re-emote certain things. And so far we've been talking, at least I think primarily about the de-emote. You don't have to use that term. But I'd love to talk about where we're trying to cultivate emotion.

maybe the obvious place to start is in relationships and you've studied that for your book pretty extensively. What can we learn from how rituals can help us there?

Mike Norton (30:32.491)
They're fun. They're really fun. think...

Same way if we ask people if you're nervous before you do something, do you do anything like a ritual? If we ask people in couples, hey, do you and your partner have something? We don't say do you have a ritual because they think of, you know, like people in robes with candles or whatever, you know? But we say do you have something that you and your spouse, you and your partner make sure to do? It's very specific to you. You do it regularly, every day, every week or every month, and it has a lot of meaning for you. And about...

you know, it varies, 60 to 80 % of couples say yes. And they're the most adorable things you've ever heard of in your life. These little things that couples do, just very, very tiny things that are very, very meaningful to them. And it's correlated with relationship satisfaction. We can't do the thing where we randomly assign you to a relationship and randomly assign you to a ritual and look at the causal effect. Those are hard to do, you know what mean?

Sri (31:24.96)
Mmm.

Sri (31:30.221)
That was my next question, yeah.

Mike Norton (31:35.678)
Yeah, exactly. But the correlation is a signal is very much there that if you have one of these. And my favorite one, which I think we wrote about because I love it so much, but it's this couple said, before we eat, we clink our silverware together, which is just nothing is more boring than a fork. You know, I mean, it literally exists to just put stuff in our face, but they turn silverware into something you can feel.

the two of them each time they do it, know, this little clink means a lot to them. If they stop doing it, it would matter. And the best part is if we ask people, you know, think of a relationship where somebody broke up with you. If they start dating, how do you feel? And you say, you know, not great. If they get married, how do you feel? You know, like, well, you know, a little whatever. But if we say if they reuse your ritual with their new partner, how do you feel? Rage.

I mean, people are outraged. So they can have a life, you know, they can date and marry and I might not like it, but it's fine. But the idea that you would, I would look over and see you clinking silverware with your new partner. It really gets people like right in the gut reaction of what kind of a person could do that. And it shows you how meaningful these little actions are in couples because we imbue them with all sorts of emotion as a signal about who we are as a pair.

Sri (33:04.459)
Yeah, what's the difference between those who create those rituals in the first place and those who don't? So if it's correlated with relations of satisfaction, I think you said, or longevity, or both maybe, you're nodding your head for people listening. Some people are just less creative and less, this is the wrong word, but less fun.

Mike Norton (33:18.325)
Yep. Yep.

Sri (33:34.136)
But like they still are into their relationship and the other person, again, you said it's not causal, like I hear you, but it could be, yeah. Sorry, I misworded that. Yeah, like have you noticed any patterns between the types of couples, well, we could just stay with couples or you can go wherever you want, who create rituals and those who don't?

Mike Norton (33:43.297)
And maybe we just don't know. Yeah.

Mike Norton (34:02.348)
You know, it's funny because you're absolutely right that the level of creativity and novelty vary a lot. Like the clinking silverware is quite, that never emerged in any other couple that we interviewed, for example. There may be couples that do it, you know, of course, but it's not a go-to. But a lot of the couple's rituals are, for example, about the number of times you kiss. So you say, we always kiss twice. And another couple says, we always kiss three times.

Sri (34:18.253)
.

Sri (34:25.133)
Mmm.

Mike Norton (34:31.114)
And another couple says, we always kiss on both cheek. You know, it's also culturally driven, of course, but they're not like inventing a new elaborate thing that they do before. You know what I mean? They're using the tools they have around them already and kind of change. A lot of people have a morning thing where one or the other person makes coffee or tea for the other person. That's very, very common. But for the couple that's doing it, it doesn't take away from it that other people are drinking coffee because we're doing

Sri (34:34.059)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Norton (35:01.032)
our way of doing it every morning. you luckily, I think, don't have to be incredibly creative because you can use things that are lying around basically as tools that are available, like a fork is just lying there. Let's just use that. We talked about totems earlier. I could use a black binder and just grab it. You know, I don't need to invent some new product that doesn't exist. We're able to imbue things with more meaning.

Sri (35:13.462)
Right.

Sri (35:18.998)
Yeah.

Sri (35:25.613)
Yeah, yeah. People use the phrase thought technology and it took me forever to understand it. I still don't know if I understand what it means, but you're a professor, you probably do. But like, I feel like you've invented relationship technology basically here. So yeah. And it probably helps, I'm guessing, maybe if one intersects those tools and maybe creativity with the love languages sort of stuff, right?

Mike Norton (35:39.79)
that's interesting, yeah.

Sri (35:55.01)
The coffee ritual is great if you and or your partner are an active service person, but if you're not, then like you're using the wrong tool, I imagine. I'm not a relationship counselor.

Mike Norton (36:00.333)
Yeah, yes.

useless. And you know, in fact, there are couples where if we ask each person separately, do you have any thing that's special to the two of you that you make sure to do every, you know, most couples say yes, both of them say yes, a smaller percent, both people say no. But then there's these couples where one person says, my god, we have this amazing ritual where every morning it's coffee and the paper and then they tell me

And the other person says, no, we don't have any. And those couples, they're not actually less happy than couples with no rituals, but you don't get any benefit if only one of you feels like you're doing something meaningful in terms of your relationship satisfaction. And so you do get these cases where there are mismatches, where I think what we're doing is really meaningful to both of us. And for you, just doesn't track. It's just, yeah, I drink coffee every morning. For me, that's not about our relationship.

Sri (36:43.021)
You

Mike Norton (37:01.802)
It's just something that we have to get done.

Sri (37:05.121)
Yeah, yeah, that's cringy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Norton (37:06.86)
Heartbreaking, heartbreaking, know, I know, I know. Sometimes the things we find are just, yeah.

Sri (37:13.517)
Well, on the creativity front, you talk about family traditions and originating new ones. I think you guys have, mean, I don't know if every family has, I hope every family has them, but like you said, some of them are things that you just make up along the way and you don't even realize they are.

I'd love some examples of things that are meaningful that you've come across family-wise or ways to generate them. Because it almost, I don't know, to me as a dad, it almost sounds overwhelming. When people are like, what traditions do you have? And it's like,

Mike Norton (37:58.947)
Another thing.

Sri (38:03.083)
Damn it, like I've been just slacking and not generating enough traditions and memories. I think we've done okay, I hope, knock on wood, but yeah. Right?

Mike Norton (38:03.362)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (38:10.701)
You're like, was actually feeding them and clothing them. I didn't realize I had to also come up with magical practices that we all, you know, yeah.

Sri (38:20.789)
Right, then there's like a little bit of a cheesiness factor. mean, Elf on the Shelf has been around forever, but I remember the first few years it was out, I was like, I think even the byline on it was a new holiday tradition. It's just like, we've invented a new holiday tradition out of whole cloth that you're gonna buy and adopt, and somehow it worked. So anyway, how do we do that in our own lives?

Mike Norton (38:34.402)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Norton (38:45.708)
We see with families that, well first off, think with couples and also with fam, so with couples if we say, think about rituals, the first thing they think of is a date night. Let's have a date night every week. And what families think of is let's have dinner together every night. And that's lovely. It's just completely unrealistic. It's so hard to do.

Sri (38:58.146)
Mmm.

Sri (39:12.049)
Ha!

Mike Norton (39:13.846)
something, know, the world happens to us. And so when I think of rituals for couples and for family, know, fort clinking does not take a super long, super long time and we, you know, we can do it whenever. And for family rituals as well, I it isn't like I have to have an elaborate meal and everybody talks for 30 minutes about, know, those are just, I'm sure they'd be lovely. It's just that we can't do them. And so families, often see them doing,

Sri (39:15.351)
Yeah.

Sri (39:25.453)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (39:41.292)
little things that often reflect their family values. So there was one family where everybody wrote something good that happened to them that day on a little piece of paper and they put it in a fishbowl and then all year and then at the end of the year they would pull them out and read them and that family really cared about gratitude. They really wanted to reflect back on

Sri (39:57.774)
Mm.

Mike Norton (40:10.647)
how grateful they should be for all, you know, you have a fishbowl full of wonderful things that happened to us. Maybe we should take some time to be grateful about that. So it takes two seconds to write, you know, whatever you're gonna write. You know, somebody said I had a nice hat or whatever it is, but the accumulation of those in the end can be something really meaningful. So there's, that's not in like an ancient text, I don't think, to put slips of paper in a fishbowl. It may be, but I don't know. But you see.

Sri (40:36.077)
You

Mike Norton (40:38.305)
right away what they're doing and how that might have emotional resonance.

Sri (40:43.317)
Yeah, yeah,

Sri (40:50.135)
How should we think about...

Sri (40:54.551)
Habits versus rituals.

Mike Norton (40:57.795)
Tough one. Let me try. And you can tell me if you're a good man. The first very unsatisfying answer, but I'm going say it anyway, is there are many, many rituals that are clearly not habits. So for example, weddings, we don't make a habit of getting married and we make sure we do it once a week. Funerals tend to happen only once to us, for example.

Sri (41:03.083)
Hahaha!

Sri (41:14.061)
Hmm.

Sri (41:22.273)
Ha

Mike Norton (41:26.731)
many categories of ritual, they don't overlap really with what we think of as a habit, but some really do. You know, what you're getting done in the morning in order to get out the door for work. It's very fine line between what's a ritual and what's habit. You know, is drinking coffee a habit where you just do it every morning or is it a ritual where it has some meaning because you and your partner do it together? And what we have to actually ask people is it's not the action.

that tells us the specific action that tells us if it's a habit or ritual. And I'm going to say, unfortunately, because it would be easier if it was like, you know what, if you stomp twice, it's a habit. But if you do three or more, it becomes a ritual. Like that would be really scientifically lovely. But that's not what it is. It's if for you, what you're doing has meaning in it. It's moving more toward being a ritual. And if you're just doing it to get it done and check it off the list, it's more like.

a habit. There's nothing in it except getting it done and you just do the thing. Rituals kind of surround things with more emotion and that's good and bad. It doesn't necessarily help us, but that's when we start to say for this person, not ritual like again men in robes chanting, but it's more like a ritual because it matters to them how it's done instead of just that it gets done.

Sri (42:48.853)
Yeah, if we think about the meaning we associate with it, it seems that describes like one half, not half by volume probably, but just like one side of the ritual balance and the other side is not necessarily assigning meaning, but focus.

and presence and either way there's this presence about them but it's like I don't know if it's two sides of the same coin that's maybe just oversimplistic but how should we think about that?

Mike Norton (43:25.315)
I also think, you know, if you led a life of perfect habits, let's say you were capable of, you always brush your teeth, always go for an hour run, always eat healthy and everything, know, sleep hygiene, you always sleep well. If you did that for, let's say, 30 years, you would be incredibly physically healthy, but you would have had a really boring life. Do you know what I mean?

Sri (43:53.741)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (43:55.617)
So perfect habits, I mean, yes, I wish I had better habits, just to be clear, like good habits are good, but they're not the answer to life, right? And I do think that sometimes rituals are the thing that remind us not to just be mindless about everything we're doing to check it off, but think about having some meaning in it as well. know, culture gives us some of it where in the US, Thanksgiving is huge.

Sri (44:02.477)
We all do.

Sri (44:11.148)
Mmm.

Mike Norton (44:24.516)
That culture is basically telling us, for one day, it's about family. You get the other 364 days to do whatever you want, but on this one day, you're gonna make it about family, and we're gonna force you to do it. Everybody complains, everybody's grumpy, but without Thanksgiving, again, in the US, without it, sometimes people never see any of their relatives. So you don't even have a family. So they're a forcing function.

Sri (44:30.316)
Mm.

You

Sri (44:47.564)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (44:53.732)
to do things differently than just it's not every Thursday, it's a different kind of Thursday because this week it's Thanksgiving. And that I think is a very important part of what rituals do. We celebrate wedding anniversaries with our partner. One day a year, we have to be nice to each other and say, wow, we've been married for nine years, good for us. Otherwise we're just grumpy and they didn't take the trash out, whatever it might be.

We have these things in place, I think, sometimes to remind us to not just go through the motions, but have something more meaningful behind it.

Sri (45:30.606)
Yeah, yeah. To shift gears just a little bit, I think you even mentioned the book Ball Four about obsession and the phrase or a quote that I'm not going to quote correctly here with my notes, but being gripped by the ball versus the other way around. I think it's written by Jim Button, famous pitcher. And I think...

A lot of people have done things they love and then transitioned, such as going from the SEAL teams to the private sector. People can relate to that. We all go through lot of transitions and sometimes those things are from something we're obsessed to finding something new.

Mike Norton (46:08.526)
Mm-hmm.

Sri (46:18.527)
I'm curious like what your learnings are in thinking about all of this and how we think about rituals and how we think about habits and how we find meaning in our lives.

Mike Norton (46:31.758)
Yeah, I think something that's very important to remember with rituals is that they're not always good for us and they can get out of hand. yeah, he says, I thought I was gripping the ball and instead the ball was gripping me. And I think that resonates with so many people after the, you but if you think of some, and I am not a clinical psychologist, so.

But if you think of something like obsessive compulsive disorder, one of the ways to diagnose that is that you're doing too many rituals. So many of us, for example, when we leave the house, we lock the door and then we check just one time to make sure the door is still locked. We don't need to. It just gives us a little, I feel a little better about leaving. And the reason we're doing the ritual is in order to do something else. So I'm double checking the lock in order to be able to leave and feel good.

that my house is safe and then can go to work or be with friends. What can happen with obsessive compulsive disorder is you lose the link between I'm doing it in order to do something else and you're doing it in order to do it. So now I'm checking the lock many times in order to check the lock many times. And that is one way to think about how they can start to take control of us rather than serve as things that help us to do something else that we'd like to do. And we don't know, you know, is it checking it?

six times is bad and you know that's not how it works of course but it is when it starts to interfere with other things in your life that's a pretty good signal that maybe the ritual has gone too far and maybe you should think about pulling it back this is such a stupid example but you know teams before games they do a team cheer almost always if they kept doing that for the entire game they would lose you know what i mean you have to stop before the game starts and then play the game

Sri (48:25.205)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (48:28.792)
So it's a dumb example, but you can see how, if the ritual gets out of hand, you're gonna miss the whole point of why you were doing the ritual to begin.

Sri (48:30.774)
Yeah.

Sri (48:37.035)
Yeah, well that gets into another area where I wanted to ask you, you talk about your methodology and it's in terms of your research, believe, asking people what their goals for ritual, see if they're achieving their goals through scientific measurement. And I think you may have said it earlier, like we don't always know the goals for ritual, do we?

Mike Norton (49:06.798)
Sometimes we don't. Yeah, sometimes. And in fact, sometimes we're doing a ritual for, we think, one reason, and it actually is doing something for a different reason. Even what we talked about earlier, where if our boss makes us do a ritual, the boss thinks that what's happening is everybody's bonding and the company's going to be really great. What's actually happening is that everybody hates the boss, but they're still bonding. So even when you think like, aha, this ritual is in service of this.

Sometimes we actually are off on what it really is doing for us and that's not common But you do see sometimes that you've got the theory wrong on what the ritual is actually for

Sri (49:46.254)
Okay, okay. I'm gonna throw you a curve ball to continue the baseball metaphor here. For some reason in thinking about your work and for people who have not read it yet, you should definitely check out Mike's book. We'll have a link in the show notes. Goes through a whole bunch of findings from brain scans and other neuroscience related topics, which I know we're all into these days.

One thing that kept coming back to me was a notion of self-control on the one hand and commitment on the other and commitment to just anything, not necessarily a romantic partner. And it's something I think about a lot. Like, when have we actually committed to something and why are some people seemingly able to commit to a goal and some seemingly aren't?

What are the differences and how does someone generate the commitment of all the heroes they've seen who are on arena stages performing or the Super Bowl or writing a book? How do they get there?

Mike Norton (51:05.572)
It is like one holy grail for me, I'm a behavioral scientist. One holy grail is to solve self-control problems because they're tough on us. And when we fail, it can have really disastrous consequences. Sometimes we fail and it's just, we had an extra piece of pizza or whatever. Sometimes we fail and we relapse, you know, so losing self-control.

Can have really really negative effects on us and we don't know honestly a Lot of ways to help people have better self-control It's just very very difficult to so that's why you know changing your eating habits is so so difficult Because you've got a every minute of every day make a decision that you're not gonna have the pizza that you want and That's exhausting. Yeah, it's gonna get exhausting at some point and your self-control, know, we could we're human

We're only going to be able to do so much. We do see that rituals are, through history actually, are really associated with self-control, giving things up. I'm Catholic, know, Lent, you give something up and then you come back to it. So many religions have that feature where the religion helps you to give something up for, and it might be a day, it might be a night, it might be a week, you know, it varies of course from faith to faith. But we don't have

Sri (52:17.281)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Norton (52:34.073)
fantastic ways where, and again, I wish I did, where I could say, you know what you need to do? Clap twice and stomp three times and you'll never ever have pizza again. It's just, it's so complicated, the self-control problem, because it's, as I said, it's continuous decisions. It's not one decision. So for example, we can, not my research, but research shows you can get people to save more for retirement. If you, instead of making them opt in, they have to opt out.

Sri (53:04.407)
Yeah.

Mike Norton (53:05.061)
And one reason that works is because I just make the decision once and then I never think about it again. But if you made me every single day decide whether I wanted to save money or spend it, there's going to be days where I'm like, actually, I'm going out tonight. I don't want to save the money. I want to get the money right now. So, so we can structure your environment to help you not face self-control problems. And there's lots of interesting research on that, but the

The really tough one is, but when you're in the moment, how do we truly help people exert self-control? And I really wish I had better answers,

Sri (53:42.701)
It's all good. That was super helpful. Mike, this has been amazing. Where can people find you, anything you want to leave the audience with?

Mike Norton (53:50.885)
I have the most boring website in the world. However, it's michaelnorton.com, which is very creative. But there is a link there to a rituals quiz, which you can take and it just kind of gives you some examples and tells you where you're doing them, where you might try different ones. And you can do it like with your partner, with your kids, you know, you can complain with it a little bit. It's not like heavy science survey kind of thing. It's just something fun to do, but it does help you think about.

different domains of life where these things are playing a role. So I think it's a useful thing just to play with.

Sri (54:25.742)
Awesome. Mike, this has been amazing. Thank you. Likewise.

Mike Norton (54:27.898)
Thank you so much. So great to chat.