Who you become.
What you choose.
What you end up doing.
All of it is shaped by incentives.
After finishing Mixed Signals: how incentives really work, I’m even more convinced of one thing: nothing changes sustainably until incentives change, both the obvious ones, and especially the hidden ones.
Do you see all of them?
There’s a story in the book about the Maasai tribes in Kenya killing lions. Bad news for conservation, but completely rational from their perspective.
They had 1 obvious and 1 hidden reason.
So what did researchers do?
They didn’t lecture.
They didn’t shame.
They didn’t rely on “awareness.”
They redesigned incentives.
They paid compensation for cows killed by lions (the economic incentive, why Maasai were killing lions for hundreds of years in the first place).
AND they created alternative ways for young warriors to prove their worth and status (the hidden incentive that really mattered).
Lion populations recovered. After hundreds of years of "habit", Maasai just quit it.
The lesson for me was obvious, once again, it’s never just one incentive, and it's all about the incentives, not people.
There’s always a stack of reasons - status, belonging, identity, pride, tradition - quietly running the system underneath. Miss those, and the system resists you. Align them, and change happens without force.
THE BUSINESS OF MAKING YOU
When I was a little girl, the way I got the most time, attention, and closeness with my parents was through learning, not playing.
So what do you think I enjoy more today?
Reading and studying.
On every assessment I’ve ever taken, learning shows up as a superpower. And it didn’t stop there. That same incentive structure gave me respect, better pay, better opportunities later in life, often despite a complete lack of marketing skill.
Sports worked the same way.
Time with my dad came through training and discipline. That’s how we bonded. And now, decades later, movement still feels like connection, not obligation.
None of this is accidental. As one might think. I was programmed to prioritize certain things.
This is exactly what I help clients uncover when they say,
“I don’t have time.”
“I can’t stay consistent.”
“I know what to do, I just don’t do it.”
We don’t start with discipline.
I start with incentives.
Not money.
Not rewards charts.
But the incentives that signal status, love, competence, contribution, connection.
Who do you become when you change?
Who benefits from the better version of you?
What example do you set without saying a word?
How does your energy ripple into the people you care about?
Who will respect you, love you, admire and cherish you more because of this?
Those are the incentives that truly move behavior. Even money is valued because of status and freedom, not more stuff.
Over to you dear reader,
What incentives have been shaping your life so far?
What do you “have time for” and what quietly gets deprioritized?
And are those incentives actually taking you where you want to go?
Because just like the Maasai changed a centuries-old tradition, you can change the story you've been living so far.
No willpower.
No persuasion. No change of self.
Just better incentives.
What might shift for you if you redesigned yours on purpose?
