They lied to you: Why Punishment DOESN’T WORK..

Summary

• Power is the ability to direct or influence events or people, and it's neither good nor bad—it's about how it's used.
• Leadership and power involve persuading people that doing what you want aligns with their best interests.
• Incentives, whether positive or negative, significantly drive behavior.
• Offering rewards (adding positives) can encourage desired behaviors, like giving a child a cookie for cleaning their room.
• Removing negatives can also motivate people, like not having to do dishes if another task is completed.
• Punishments tend to make people avoid the behavior but don't necessarily steer them towards the behavior you want.
• Consistent negative reinforcement can degrade performance over time.
• Positive reinforcement, on the other hand, tends to improve performance.
• It's more effective to direct behavior with positive incentives than negative ones.
• Break down desired outcomes into incremental steps and incentivize each step to reinforce good behavior.
• Incentives don't have to be monetary; status and positive feedback often suffice.
• Consistent positive reinforcement can lead to desired behaviors becoming habitual.
• This approach to incentives and behavior modification applies to various relationships, including those with spouses or employees.
• When managing people, focus on adding positives and subtracting negatives to guide behavior toward a shared goal.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing simple strategies to influence behavior through positive incentives first, and here's how:

• Break down the goal into small steps. For example, if you want to improve sales, start by rewarding each stage of success—like making a certain number of calls or closing a deal.
• Use positive feedback instead of money. This could be a simple praise or a shout-out in a team meeting to acknowledge good work.
• Subtract negatives as a reward. If an employee hits their target, give them an afternoon off or let them work on a project they love.
• Avoid using punishment. It might stop bad behavior, but it doesn't guide people toward what you want them to do.
• Make sure the incentives are meaningful. They should be something the person actually wants, like recognition or a desired task.

If you're leading a team or fostering personal growth:

• Always reinforce positive behavior consistently. This can turn good actions into habits.
• Focus on what you can measure, like specific actions and outcomes, not internal feelings.
• Direct behavior by adding positives like encouragement, and subtracting negatives like less desirable tasks, to move towards shared goals.

Remember, focus on what you can control and what is meaningful for the person or team you’re trying to influence. Direct behavior positively and make incremental changes for the best results.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"The definition of power is how to influence events or people"

– Alex Hormozi

"Incentives drive behavior"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you want someone to do something, it's much easier to incentivize that"

– Alex Hormozi

"We can direct people's behavior far more effectively with positive incentives than we do with negative stuff"

– Alex Hormozi

"Great people build great companies"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

about incentives how to get people to do the things you want and if you don't know what the definition of power is by the way the definition of power is how to influence events or people all right so the ability to direct or influence events or people that is the definition of power and so most people hopefully if you're watching this you want to become more powerful and the thing is that word makes you feel queasy on the inside it's because you have a very poor definition of power power is neither good nor bad what you do with it can be good or bad right it's just it is just raw potential so in this video and if you don't know who i am by the way my name is alex romozzi on acquisition.com it's a portfolio of companies over 100 million dollars a year you want to make these videos because a lot of people are broke and i don't want you to be one of them all right i also have a lot of fun doing this and so that is why i make so you want people to do stuff right there's the component of persuasion in getting them to believe that it is in their best interest that is fundamentally what leadership is to get someone to believe that doing the thing that you want them to do is really just get them to want to do that right that is what it is and so a lot of leadership is power which and a lot of power if you sign the definition is selling but today i'm not talking about selling i'm talking about incentives right so this is like kind of the brass tax side there's the persuasion the soft side which is still very important the psychology side the other side is kind of the behavioral side and so this is adapted from a conversation that i had with my closest friend dr trevor cashy and we were talking about behavior and getting humans to comply and so what i want to talk to you about is the ways to do that and so a big part of that if my my little my little doodad will start working that's what she said um here we go and we're gonna make a little boxy do boxy do fantastic boxy do completed okay so it's not a perfect box deal with it you've got pluses and you've got minuses and you can add them or you could subtract them what this means is that we have a combination of both punishment and we have reward stuff that people don't want and stuff that people do want all right so for example and i'm going to give a simplistic reasoning to get someone to do something so we'll use a simple one which is how do you get your kid to clean their room this is a simple example that you can extrapolate to whatever it is that you want someone else to do you can add a good thing i can give you a cookie that is something that i can do i can if you do the chore i will give you a cookie simple you do the thing you get the reward awesome the next thing that we could do is we could subtract a negative you get no cookies all right so they don't get to have dessert anymore which would be impossible because you can never skip dessert right like not in this family right and so we could subtract something that they do have that they like right so if you don't do your chores i will remove video games or you don't get to eat dessert makes sense so those are two things that we can do with a positive or a reward on the reverse of this is that we can add a negative so we can say i will spank your ass i'm going to add a negative i'm going to spank your ass if you don't if you don't do your chores oh no that sucks right but i'm going to add something that wasn't currently in your life that you will not like all right as we add a negative the fourth thing that we can do and i'll get to how you can think through these in a second we can subtract a negative okay so i can uh i plan on speaking every day and i i can remove spanking or let's say there's something that you uh that you don't like doing which might be like you're expected to do the dishes right you don't have to do the dishes or let's say you don't like it you know you don't like riding the bus right so you're only riding the bus i'll drive to school that's kind of like taking away negative and adding a positive ah right and so we can do no dishes which would be subtracting a negative think about these in this way these are things that people want to avoid and these are people things that they want here's what's kind of interesting about all of this stuff incentives drive behavior there's tremendous amount of documentation on that hopefully you're not going to fight that point with me all right but here's what's interesting when you create punishments for people people do anything to avoid the punishment which may not mean doing the thing that you want them to do so for example if your child sneaks out at night and then you punish them for sneaking out the incentive is not necessarily stop sneaking out the incentives to stop getting caught right it encourages criminal behavior it encourages people to find new and ingenuitive ways to do the thing they want to do which is their incentive their plus side and figure out a ways to avoid the downside here's what is kind of interesting about this is that with punishments in general you get people to avoid the behavior but you don't get them necessarily to do what you want them to do so if you want someone to do something it's much easier to incentivize that if you do the thing right you get this right because incentives direct behavior punishments force people to avoid anything that will give them the punishment it's subtle but hopefully you're picking up what i'm putting down the reason this i think is very interesting is that when you look at so jim collins uh wrote a lot of the best management books that are out there and what's interesting if you if you if you follow his career it seems like he's he went from super super quantitative to more qualitative now he still did quantitative to arrive at his qualitative decisions but he talks about how leadership is such an important part of building great businesses and we know that great people build great companies okay and so we as entrepreneurs must be leaders and good people so we can attract good people so we can build good companies now a big part of that is figuring out how to get people to do stuff and so based on the research that he had that he had presented which i thought was really fascinating is that over time if you have negative reinforcement performance degrades right it's always critical feedback always critical feedback always negative only only talk to somebody when they do something wrong on the flip side if you have positive feedback by large majority of the time performance improves isn't that interesting and so i saw that through this lens which is we can we can direct people's behavior far more effectively with positive incentives than we do with negative stuff which has huge implications for like the jail system and the punitive system and all that stuff is like people just find ways to avoid punishment they don't necessarily do what people want them to do because it's much because punishment it just people can the the the activity sprays in any direction that's just away from the thing whereas incentives directs it towards what you want all right and so if we think about this this within the context of managing people and getting to do the things that we want them to do then it makes more sense for us to add to to think about an activity rather than a single outcome into as many many many many incremental steps as we possibly can and then incentivize those mini steps and the incentives don't necessarily need to be monetary in fact most times they don't need to be monetary they need to be things that people can perceive as positive outcomes which many times is just status and feedback which is just great job awesome stuff you did that thing yesterday and it was great you just reinforce the things that they are doing that are good and we reinforce and then now that they've realized i did this one thing not anything to avoid something but i did this one thing and i got this cookie well i want to do that one thing again and then get another cookie right and we reinforce behavior and so i like this this process of thinking and trev and i talk about this a lot because it gets around the hullabaloo of trying to figure out what's going on inside of people's heads right and what we have instead are circumstances and the outcomes right and then we have our incentives and all of these things we can measure we can say i saw that this person we were in this circumstance which you can measure we inserted uh this incentive and then they did this outcome yes or no right whether they felt inspired or whether they psychologically loved we don't know and we never will know because not everyone even knows how they're feeling and whether they answer questions is not necessarily even true we have no idea but if we can just measure the conditions then we can start directing behavior in the right ways and so i thought this was a fascinating topic for getting others and this applies to spouses how do you get your spouse to do the stuff that you want them to do it certainly doesn't come from nagging them all the time all they're going to do is try to avoid being nagged hmm interesting right and so this gives you four boxes to look at the the these two oh you can't really see them but it was this one this box over here this guy and this guy those are things that you can't really direct people's behavior as much whereas this guy and this guy you can direct people's behavior to the singular outcome that you're looking for and you continuously reinforce those behaviors such that they start doing them without even thinking about it because it has been so reinforced right and so instead of trying to think how do i how do i have an amazing marriage it's how can i condition this person to stay married to me kind of interesting little flip for you so anyways mossy nation this is the kind of stuff that i do out on and i think it's really interesting um i hope you enjoyed it as much as i enjoyed making this for you this is how you get people to do you can think about it in the sermons the soft side in terms of persuasion but you can also think about in terms of the hard side of what are the the reinforcements that we're going to use either positive or negative and we're going to add positives we're going to remove positives we're going to add negatives are going to remove negatives so that we can accomplish what we want together so lots of love buzzing nation let me know if you like this stuff in the comments and keeping awesome i'll see you guys next video bye