Matt Cutts's 30-Day TED Talk, and How to Pick Your Own Challenge

“A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut.” That is the first line of Matt Cutts’s TED talk, delivered in March 2011, and it is followed by a plan so small it barely counts as one: think of something you have always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days.

Does it work? Cutts offers one man’s experience, not a trial. His claim is that 30 days is long enough to add or drop a habit, short enough to survive on enthusiasm, and that the month itself tends to be remembered. The sensible reading is to treat it as a good experimental design for one person and to be picky about what you test.

What did Matt Cutts actually say?

The talk runs 3 minutes 28 seconds. Cutts credits “the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock” for the idea, and then gives his own results.

His 30-day challenges included taking a picture every day, biking to work, giving up sugar, and writing a novel. For the novel he points out that “every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000 word novel from scratch in 30 days,” and that the arithmetic is gentle: 1,667 words a day. (1,667 times 30 is 50,010, so the numbers check out.) His method: do not go to sleep until the day’s words are written. The result, in his words: “It’s awful.” He still gets to call himself a novelist at parties.

Three claims sit under the jokes.

• Time got more memorable. “Instead of the months flying by, forgotten,” he says, the photo-a-day month stuck, and he remembers where he was on each day.
• Confidence grew. He went from “desk-dwelling computer nerd” to someone who bikes to work for fun and, later, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
• Small beats big. Small, sustainable changes were more likely to stick. Big crazy challenges are “a ton of fun” but “less likely to stick.” About giving up sugar: “day 31 looked like this,” and the audience laughed.

Why would a month feel more memorable?

The first claim has independent support from a different direction. Research on the holiday paradox, covered in this look at identical weeks vanishing from memory, says memory files time by distinct events, so a stretch full of new things leaves more landmarks. A daily photo is a landmark generator by construction. That is a reasonable mechanism, though Cutts did not test it and neither did anyone on his behalf.

What does the talk not show?

Quite a lot. There is no control group, no measure of his confidence beyond his own say-so, and a survivor problem: we hear about the challenges that became a story. His own sugar joke concedes that some challenges end on day 30 and then reverse. He is also telling the story of a person who already finishes 1,667-word days.

The 30-day length is a convenience, not a finding. What the talk does contain is an experimental frame: a start, an end, a daily unit, and permission to stop afterward. Those features make it easy to begin, and that probably matters more than the number.

How do you pick the something new?

Cutts’s own list suggests four tests, and they are the part worth borrowing.

1. It has a daily unit. A photo, a page, a commute. “Get fit” has no daily unit; “walk to the far station” does.
2. It is small enough to survive a bad day. His own line is that small, sustainable changes are the ones that stick.
3. It leaves evidence. A picture, a word count, a ride. Evidence makes day 30 a fact instead of a feeling.
4. A friend can see it. This is the addition, and it is mine, not his.

The fourth test is a judgment call, not a finding, but it follows from the first three. Evidence that already exists can be shared in ten seconds. A friend can run the same challenge or a different one; what matters is trading a daily photo or a weekly tally. The shared version also fixes the thing a solo month struggles with, which is that nobody notices on day 11.

Choosing together has a second use. If the something-new is chosen by the pair of you, it tends to be something a friend already thinks you would be good at, or would enjoy watching you try. Compare that with the more open-ended yes rule for friend invitations, where the other person sets the menu. A 30-day challenge flips it: you set the menu, they witness the results.

How do you score it afterward?

Decide before day one what counts as done, and what you will do on day 31. Cutts’s sugar joke is a reminder that this second question is the one most plans leave out. A short written plan, as in this fifteen-minute preregistration template, covers both in a few lines: the measure, the finish line, and whether you stop, continue or swap.

If your challenge needs a fixed morning start, such as a sunrise photo or a 6 a.m. page quota, DontSnooze asks for a 30-second video when the alarm goes off and sends a random photo from your camera roll to your friends if you don’t record one. That covers the starting line and nothing else; the photo itself you still have to take.

What would a first week look like?

If the new thing is a skill, learning to juggle is a well-studied example, though the brain-imaging evidence says nothing about enjoyment.

Cutts says he “would never have been that adventurous” before the challenges began, and he describes doing “more and harder” ones as he went. A first month that fits his own pattern might be a photo a day, shared with one friend, with a note on day 30 about which picture you remember best. That tests his first claim on a sample of two, and the worst outcome is a folder of mediocre photos.