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Copyright © 2022 by Ayelet Fishbach Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Little, Brown Spark Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 littlebrownspark.com twitter.com/littlebrown facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany First Edition: January 2022 Little, Brown Spark is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown Spark name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. ISBN 9780316538350 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941894 E3-20211210-DA-NF-ORI
Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Part I: Choose Your Goal 1: Goals Aren’t Chores 2: Put a Number on It 3: Incentives Matter 4: Intrinsic Motivation (and why you should have more fun) Part II: Keep Pulling 5: Progress Increases Motivation 6: The Glass Half Full and Half Empty 7: The Middle Problem 8: “You’re Wrong!”: Learning from Negative Feedback Part III: Competing Goals 9: Goal Juggling 10: Self-Control 11: Patience Part IV: Social Support 12: Pursuing Goals in the Presence of Others 13: Pursuing Goals with Others 14: Goals Make a Happy Relationship Acknowledgments Discover More Notes About the Author
To Alon, Maya, Shira, and Tomer
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Introduction
In Rudolf Raspe’s 1785 stories, The Adventures of Baron Münch-hausen, the fictional baron tells many imaginative tales of his extreme resourcefulness. In one story, he accidentally tosses his hatchet all the way to the moon and uses quick-growing beans to grow a stalk tall enough that he can climb to the moon and retrieve it. In another, he fights a crocodile and a lion, surviving because he ducks just in time for the lion to lunge into the crocodile’s mouth. And in yet another tale, he sticks his arm down a wolf’s throat, grabs onto the animal’s tail, and turns it inside out like a glove. In perhaps the best-known story, Baron Munchausen is riding his horse when he finds himself stuck in a large swamp. As the horse sinks deeper into the bog, the baron glances around, trying to figure out how to get out of this latest precarious situation. He comes up with a somewhat peculiar solution. The baron grabs himself by his pigtail, a long braid and a common hairstyle for men at the time, and pulls himself and the horse out of the swamp by his own hair. Pulling yourself up by your own hair, even if only metaphorically, seems impossible. But, with exception to the laws of physics the baron breaks, we’ve all found ourselves in similar situations. You may have pulled yourself out of bed this morning or calmed yourself down during a heated debate. Maybe you pulled yourself out of a party when you knew you’d had one drink too many. You surely had to pull yourself through major life changes, as when you moved to a new town, when you launched your career, and when you started or ended a relationship. The baron’s story about pulling himself out of
the muck has become an allegory for many of the moments when we have to motivate ourselves. Like yours, my life has involved a fair amount of pulling. I grew up in an Israeli kibbutz—a communal society where private property was frowned upon and money was considered dirty…and not only because it touched many hands. As part of the ideology, I shared my property, which included my room, toys, and clothes, with the other children my age, even though we weren’t family. Now I’m a professor in the business school at the University of Chicago, which prides itself on embracing a capitalist ideology, including the fundamental value assigned to personal property. During my first week at the university, a colleague politely declined my request to borrow his book, kindly suggesting that professors should own books rather than borrow them. That was a shocking moment for me. I realized I’d need to do a good amount of pulling to switch so drastically from the mind-set I grew up with to the mind-set my new country and my new coworkers valued. Yet I had already pulled myself to get there. My community cherished agriculture and manual work more than education. A college degree was considered the right move mainly if you were a bright man seeking to learn something useful. I’m not a man and didn’t think I was particularly bright. I also wanted to study psychology, which wouldn’t be considered useful to my kibbutz. People in my community encouraged me to learn to drive a tractor (which I stubbornly resisted) and suggested I study engineering or architecture. Usually, the kibbutz would pay for your education if you spent one year working in the community. I had no interest in the type of work they encouraged me to do, so I moved to the big city. I worked in a bakery, cleaned houses, and saved money to study psychology at Tel Aviv University. I had to pull myself to move out on my own, to work long and arduous hours, and to do well in school. Fast forward, and here I am. My husband and I pulled ourselves when we moved to the US. We pulled ourselves when we applied to be citizens. We pulled ourselves through raising three wonderful children. And we continue to pull ourselves toward other, smaller goals every day: keeping the kitchen clean, walking our dog, helping
our young son study, and so on. Getting anywhere, as well as sustaining the things you cherish in life, requires a great deal of pulling. If you weren’t pulling, you would barely be moving at all. I write this book in the midst of the 2020 pandemic. Like most people, I worry, get distracted, and struggle to stay motivated. Over the past several months, I’ve learned to take nothing for granted, be it my health, my job, my children’s education, or meeting a friend for coffee. And even though I love my job, I find it harder to stay motivated. To write about self-motivation, I start by motivating myself to write. So how do you motivate yourself? The short answer is by changing your circumstances. If you ever put a psychologist, a sociologist, and an economist in one room, that basic principle—changing behavior by modifying the situation in which it occurs—might be the one truth they’ll agree on (and you should expect heated arguments on just about everything else). This principle is fundamental to behavioral science. It also underlies many of the discoveries in the science of motivation. Motivation science is relatively young. It was born just a few decades ago. But it has been growing exponentially, as has public interest in how circumstances enable personal growth. We most often use insights from motivation science to motivate others. Companies set organizational goals to motivate employees to work harder, teachers give students feedback on their progress to motivate them to keep going, health care workers send messages that motivate people to follow medical advice, and energy companies that care about the environment share information about others’ low energy use to increase energy conservation. We’ve developed valuable insights into the processes of motivating others, be it our students, coworkers, clients, or fellow citizens. But we can also use these insights to motivate ourselves. You modify your own behavior by modifying the situation in which it occurs. You might, for example, know that you’ll eat whatever is in sight when you’re hungry. So if you want to start eating better, a good solution would be to fill up your fridge with fresh fruits and veggies. Another way would be to tell your family that you want to
eat healthily so they hold you accountable next time you reach for a doughnut. You could also mentally change the meaning of a creamy doughnut from “delicious” to “detrimental.” These very different strategies (more about them later) have one thing in common: they change your circumstances. Filling your fridge with veggies changes the options you have when you’re reaching for a snack. Telling your family you want to eat better changes who you’re accountable to. And telling yourself that doughnuts are “detrimental” changes your mental image of that fluffy fried dough. In this book, I’ll make the scientific case for how you can use insights from motivation science to guide and own your desires, rather than be subject to them. I’ll share with you the four essential ingredients in successful behavior change. First, you need to choose a goal. Whether you set your mind to finding romance or doing a handstand, and whether you’re an expert or a novice, you start by marking a destination. Second, you need to sustain your motivation as you move from here to there. You monitor your progress by soliciting feedback on your performance, both positive and negative, and by looking back at what you’ve achieved as well as forward at what is still left to do. Third, you must learn to juggle multiple goals. Other goals and desires will pull you in opposite directions. You need to learn to manage these goals, set priorities, and find the right balance. Finally, you’ll learn to leverage social support. It’s hard to reach your goals by yourself and even harder when certain people stand in your way. On the other hand, when you let others help you, pursuing your goal gets easier. Knowing these ingredients is just one step. You also have to figure out which ingredient is missing from your recipe for success. You don’t need to add salt to a dish that’s missing pepper, so, for example, gathering social support (which I discuss in Part IV) when you already feel supported won’t increase your motivation. Your problem might instead be that you’re feeling unenthusiastic about your goal. You’ll want to find a path to success that maximizes your intrinsic motivation (which we’ll talk about in Chapter 4). The four parts of this book each grapple with one ingredient in the recipe. Part I focuses on how to set a goal that’s powerful and
specific enough (but not too specific) to pull you toward the finish line. Part II will teach you how to keep your momentum going, through the right way to monitor your progress and avoiding the “middle problem.” Part III explains how to best juggle multiple goals, describing which to prioritize and when. Finally, Part IV teaches you how to both use and help the people in your life as you all try to reach your goals. Bearing in mind that our problems are diverse and can’t be solved with a single strategy, this book invites you to design your own journey of behavior change and choose the strategies that are right for you under your unique circumstances. At the end of each chapter, I’ve listed questions to guide you as you create your own path to change. As you answer these questions for yourself, think about the goals you wish to achieve, but also keep in mind your specific circumstances, including both opportunities and obstacles. This book is an invitation to apply the principles of motivation science to yourself. You’ll learn about the goal systems we mentally create, about how different types of goals affect the way you approach them, and about where and when people commonly get stuck. But most critically, you’ll learn how to pull yourself out of the muck by your own hair.
Part I Choose Your Goal
On May 10, 1996, twenty-three climbers arrived at the summit of Mount Everest. They must have felt on top of the world, literally and figuratively, as they looked out and saw a hundred miles in any direction. Their elation, however, didn’t last long. The guides running the expedition grew increasingly worried as their party took too long to get to the top. Though they knew they’d have to start climbing back down by 2 p.m. to ensure a safe return, by the time everyone made it to the summit and was able to enjoy the view, it was four o’clock. Still, the guides thought, maybe it’d be okay. But soon after they started their descent, the weather took a turn. The skies went dark, the wind picked up, and the snow began to fall. The climbers were now facing an extremely risky journey. Not only were they likely to be stuck on the mountain in subzero temperatures overnight, they were running out of supplemental oxygen. It’s extremely difficult to breathe at the high altitude of Mount Everest’s summit, nearly nine thousand meters above sea level. As the blizzard became a whiteout, at 9 p.m. a group of climbers decided to stop for the night and huddle together to wait for a break in the storm. The wind chill registered 100 degrees below zero and the climbers felt as if their eyelids were frozen together. Many lost hope that they’d make it back to camp alive. When the weather cleared and rescue missions were able to
search, five of the group members were found either dead or so badly injured that they wouldn’t make it back to the base of the mountain. Other expeditions also lost people—in total, eight climbers who were at or near Everest’s summit when the storm started died. The night of May 10, 1996, continues to mark one of the biggest tragedies to happen on Everest. This night also illustrates the power, at times detrimental, of holding a goal. Reaching Mount Everest’s peak was these mountaineers’ ultimate goal. Even when they felt so exhausted they could barely move, two of the 1996 climbers continued toward Everest’s summit instead of turning around. What made the idea of summiting Mount Everest so powerful that they were willing to pay for it with their lives? The goal to reach Everest’s summit encapsulates all elements of setting a powerfully motivating goal. First, climbing Mount Everest is not a proxy or a means to another goal. Because mountain climbers want only to reach that summit, not to reach the summit to be qualified for another challenge, they frame their goal as an end and not a means to an end, thus making it feel less like a chore. Second, reaching the summit is a specific goal with uncertain success. That is, you know whether or not you’ve achieved it, just not whether or not you will achieve it. There’s a decent chance you’ll fail, and unless you try, you won’t know. This makes the goal more attractive. Third, there are great incentives for making it to the top. If you live to tell the tale, it’s a story just about anyone would want to hear. Fourth, it’s an intrinsic goal—even if no one else cared that you’d topped Everest, you’d feel endlessly proud of yourself. We can implement these principles in setting powerful goals for ourselves, while not neglecting the other lesson Mount Everest has taught us: we need to choose our goals wisely. Certain goals put our lives at risk. These goals are set without regard to our circumstances and abilities. They pull us in the wrong direction. Rather than advancing our emotional and physical well-being, such goals blind us to dangers in their path. Take extreme diets, injury-causing sport, or sticking with an unhealthy relationship. Goals are powerful tools and, as such, they should be handled with care. We want to set powerful goals, but only after carefully considering whether they’re
right for us. Powerful goals have the ability to pull us toward our ultimate desires, energizing us to put in the work we need to do to get there. Part I of this book will unpack the features of a powerful goal: that it feels exciting and not like a chore (Chapter 1), that it’s specific and quantifiable (“how much” or “how fast,” Chapter 2), that it includes incentives that will keep you interested along the way (Chapter 3), and that it harnesses the power of intrinsic motivation (Chapter 4).
1 Goals Aren’t Chores
When Alice asked, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” the Cheshire Cat replied, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” This quote from Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reminds me of a popular exercise in my management class. Each year, I ask teams of business students to imagine that they’re passengers on a floatplane that has just crashed. Each team must decide which items to salvage from the plane to ensure that they’ll survive in the wild. There are two approaches my students could take: they could either choose items, like matches and an ax, that will allow them to set up camp and wait until help arrives; or they could choose items, like a compass and a navigation book, that would allow them to leave and search for help. Too often, teams jump into the task of sorting and selecting items without first deciding on their objective: take off or stay put. Not knowing their goal, they make decisions that contradict each other, resulting in an eclectic array of items that serve opposite purposes. In the end, they don’t get anywhere. While the missteps of Alice and my students may seem obvious from a distance, many of us make their same mistake. If you don’t select a goal to point you in a specific direction, you’re likely to move in circles. You’ll do whatever is at the forefront of your mind, even if it
contradicts other actions you might have taken just moments ago. You might decide to go on a diet the same day you sign up for a macaron-making class, or you’ll open a savings account while also taking out a loan for a new car. The goals we set are powerful motivational tools. A goal doesn’t just point you in a specific direction, it also pulls you in that direction. Once you set a goal, it mobilizes your resources toward achieving it. You’ll spend mental and physical effort, money, time, and your social capital. Consider deciding to become a parent or to change your career. These goals require continuous effort invested over a long period of time. Other goals, like trying to eat more healthily or exercise more, require willpower and self-control. Even goals that seem straightforward—wouldn’t it be fun to adopt a puppy?—might over time prove to be costly. And yet, despite the cost, once a goal is set, you’re willing to expend resources and pay the price. Powerful goals feel worth the price tag—they pull you toward your greatest wish. And in order to pull you, a goal has to feel more like an aspiration and less like a chore. For example, reaching the summit of Mount Everest is an aspiration, but training for it seems like a chore. Similarly, studying law describes an aspiration, but studying for the bar exam might seem like a chore. And while becoming a parent is an aspiration, doing so because you fear regretting a decision to remain childless makes it seem more like a chore. These examples illustrate three traps in setting and framing a goal: framing it as a means to another goal instead of the end goal itself, setting a goal that is too specific or concrete instead of an abstract goal, and setting a goal in terms of something you wish to avoid rather than something you wish to approach. Falling into any of these three traps will diminish the power of your goals.
Set goals, not means When it comes to setting a goal that feels like an aspiration and not a chore, the old adage to “keep your eyes on the prize” holds true. A
powerful goal defines a desirable state, not the means to get there. Consider dining out. You might not hesitate to order a $12 cocktail at a restaurant, but you’d think twice, and even drive around the block a few times, before paying the same amount for valet parking. You don’t like paying for parking because parking is, by definition, a means—it gets you into the restaurant and in front of the dinner plate you’d set your sights on. Similarly, shipping and gift-wrapping fees are a means to the goal of getting your friend the perfect birthday present and, indeed, we dislike paying these fees. Many of us would rather pay a little extra for the gift and earn free delivery than pay a shipping fee. In general, we want to invest our resources in the goal, not in the means. And because companies know we dislike paying for means, many online stores will include shipping costs in the product price, giving the impression that shipping is free. This aversion to investing in means can have surprising effects, as Franklin Shaddy and I found. An experiment we conducted with our MBA students showed us that people are willing to spend more overall to avoid spending anything on a means (as many of us do to avoid shipping fees). In our experiment, we auctioned an autographed book by the prominent economist Richard Thaler, which is something our MBA students would treasure. The average bid for the book was $23. We next auctioned a tote bag, which contained the same autographed book, to another, similarly enthusiastic group of students. While these students were technically bidding on a bag, their deal was economically superior given that the highest bidder would win both a bag and a book. To our surprise, the average bidder was willing to pay only $12, significantly less than what bidders were willing to pay for the book alone. In economics terms, the value of the tote bag was negative, meaning that throwing it in decreased the value of the deal. The reason for this surprising result? It didn’t feel right to pay that much for a bag whose only function was to carry a free book. People don’t want to invest in means. When you’re setting goals, remember this lesson and choose to define the goal in terms of benefits rather than costs. It’s better to set your goal as “finding a job” rather than “applying for a job,” or as
“owning a house” instead of “saving for a down payment.” Finding a job and owning a house are desirable outcomes. Filling out applications and saving for a down payment are the costly means needed to achieve these outcomes. Achieving a goal is exciting; completing the means is a chore.
Set abstract goals Imagine you’re trying to find a new job. You could describe this goal as “exploring career opportunities” or as “reading job postings and submitting applications.” These are two different descriptions of the same goal. “Reading job postings” is a concrete description that explains how you explore career opportunities, and “exploring career opportunities” is an abstract description that explains why you read job postings. But while they describe the same goal, one description is more motivating than the other. The concrete description emphasizes actions, thus turning the goal into a chore. The abstract description, however, emphasizes the meaning behind those actions. More abstract goals capture the purpose behind an action, describing what you’re trying to achieve rather than the actions you’ll take to achieve it. And while an abstract goal identifies the purpose of a goal, a concrete goal only identifies the path to get there; it’s a means. Cultivating an abstract mind-set while pursuing a goal can make any goal seem less like a chore. If you think about your day-to-day life in the abstract—that is, you focus on the purpose and meaning of your actions—your orientation toward specific goals will also be more abstract. To test this principle, psychologist Kentaro Fujita and his colleagues assigned people to an abstract or concrete mind-set by having them answer a series of “why” (abstract) or “how” (concrete) questions. For example, they answered “Why do you maintain good physical health?” or “How do you maintain good physical health?” After answering several such questions, the research participants started to think about their goals either more
abstractly or more concretely, depending on the series of questions they’d answered. Those who answered a series of “why” questions were more motivated to channel resources to their goals. They worked harder. So, for instance, they exercised more physical effort when holding a handgrip. There is, of course, a downside. When you make a goal too abstract, it becomes vague. It may not be linked to a specific set of actions and is therefore difficult to actively pursue. “Explore new career opportunities,” for instance, is miles better than “be successful.” Similarly, “start going to church” is better than “be morally pure.” There are no clear or specific means by which we should pursue success or, if it’s your thing, moral purity, rendering these goals ineffective. When there’s no clear path to get from point A to point B, people revert to fantasizing about their goals instead of taking action toward achieving them. When we fantasize, we imagine what our lives will look like once we achieve our goal. We envision how great it will feel to wear that graduation gown, medal, or wedding dress. But fantasizing doesn’t generate action. Fantasizing about graduating with honors won’t necessarily make you study harder; fantasizing about coming first in a 5K won’t make you run more; and fantasizing about walking down the aisle won’t make you set up more dates. Indeed, in one study, the psychologists Gabriel Oettingen and Thomas Wadden had weight watchers rate their expectations (how likely they were to lose weight) and how much they fantasized about weight loss at the beginning of a weight loss program. A year later, those who had high expectations lost more weight than those with low expectations, but those who fantasized more didn’t. Those who fantasized actually lost less weight. Fantasies might feel good, but they’re largely ineffective as a motivational tool. And when abstract goals become too abstract, they’re at risk of turning into fantasies that substitute for action. Optimally abstract goals describe a purpose without losing sight of the actions you need to take to reach them (“improve my mental health” is better than “be happy”). You should immediately know what to do next (start therapy, for example). They allow you to
contrast your current state with where you want to be so that you can connect the dots from here to there by making an action plan.
“Do” versus “do not” goals When dining out, is it better to define your goal as eating healthily or as avoiding unhealthy food? When playing a sport, should you define your goal as winning or as not losing? “Do” goals, also known as “approach” goals because they identify a desirable state that we’re approaching, pull us toward eating healthily or playing well to win the game. “Do not” goals, also known as avoidance goals, push us away from a state we wish to avoid. These are essentially “anti-goals.” When we define our goals as approach goals, we move toward those goals (decreasing the gap between us and our desires). When we define them as avoidance goals, we move away from anti-goals (widening the gap between us and the outcomes we want to avoid). Just as framing your goal as a means or as too concrete is likely to make your goal feel like a chore, framing it as an anti-goal is likely to do the same. If you want to win your school’s championship basketball game, the “approach” frame of winning the game is more enticing than the “avoidance” frame of not losing the game. The strongest case against setting avoidance goals comes from research on thought suppression. Consider the goal to get something off your mind. You might try to repress an unpleasant argument at the office, stop obsessing about your ex, or get rid of an annoying tune that’s stuck in your head. Recently, my son has been practicing his violin day and night. His teacher has him playing Suzuki, a Japanese composer and teacher whose music is exceedingly upbeat. As wonderful as it is to hear my son’s musical skill grow, once the practice is over, I would be thrilled to get those happy songs out of my head. My struggle reminds me of a classic experiment by Daniel Wegner. Wegner’s experiment was quite simple: He gathered a group of participants and asked them “to not think about white
bears.” And, of course, once he’d put the idea of white bears in their heads, they couldn’t not think about them. (Can you not think about those bears?) Whether it’s your colleague, an ex, or a white bear you want to stop thinking about, your attempt to suppress your thoughts is an avoidance goal. You wish to move away from an anti-goal state of thinking about something unpleasant or forbidden. Suppression is notoriously hard to do. The more you’re determined to not think about something, the more you’ll find yourself obsessing over it. A deliberate attempt to suppress certain thoughts makes them more likely to surface. Part of the reason for this is that, to determine whether you’ve successfully suppressed a thought, you need to ask yourself whether you’re still thinking it. And each time you check, the mere act of checking brings the forbidden thought back to your mind. The irony of this phenomenon is why it came to be called “ironic mental control.” Suppression is also a challenge simply because it’s not much fun. Suppression is a chore. While avoidance goals are more like chores, and therefore tend to be less powerful, they aren’t always ineffective in motivating action. For certain people and in certain situations, avoidance goals are effective. Some people—let’s call them “approachers”—are particularly prone to responding more strongly to approach goals. When they play a game, they hope to win. In psychological terms, they have a strong Behavioral Approach System (BAS). Other people—let’s call them “avoiders”—can tolerate and be responsive to avoidance goals. When they play a game, they hope not to lose. Therefore, in psychological terms, they have a strong Behavioral Inhibition (or avoidance) System (BIS). To figure out whether you’re an approacher or an avoider, ask yourself whether you agree more with the statements “When I want something, I usually go all-out to get it” and “When I see an opportunity for something I like, I get excited right away” or the statements “I worry about making mistakes” and “Criticism or scolding hurts me quite a bit.” If you go all-out, you’re an approacher. If you fear mistakes and criticism, you’re an avoider. Sometimes, the situation determines whether people are focused on approach goals or avoidance goals. When people feel they’re in
power, they’re more motivated by approach goals. So if you’re the boss, you probably want people to like you. This is an approach goal. But when you’re the intern, you want to make sure you’re not disliked. This is an avoidance goal. For avoiders, or for those in situations that predispose us to avoid, avoidance goals work just fine at motivating action. Behaviorists who study motivation using rodents and birds claim that “negative reinforcement” (not to be confused with punishment) accounts for the appeal of moving away from an anti-goal; that is, taking actions that remove negative outcomes. In the 1940s, psychologist B. F. Skinner created a “Skinner Box” for the rats he was using to study avoidance. The floor of the box was covered in an electric grid that would shock the rats no matter where they stood. As they moved about the box, trying to get away from the electricity, the rats would accidentally knock into a lever that would shut the grid down. Over time, the rats learned they could go directly to the lever to stop the shock. And this kind of learning doesn’t just happen with rats. After a painful sunburn, we humans learn to use sunscreen next time we’re at the beach. The fear of injury has also taught us to buckle our seat belts in the car and wear a helmet when we ride our bikes, even if we were never involved in an accident. These activities are motivated by avoidance goals and are negatively reinforced. By pursuing them, you avoid negative outcomes. Avoidance goals are particularly powerful in the context of preventing harm and escaping danger. When motivating yourself to apply sunscreen, it feels right to set your goal as avoiding sunburn more than as approaching healthy skin. When motivating wearing a helmet, it feels right to set your goal as avoiding injury more than as keeping your skull intact. In determining how to frame your goals, you could think about the “fit” (a notion that suggests that certain goals match certain orientations). For instance, safety goals fit the orientation of moving away from danger. In contrast, when you decide to start dating, it’s more fitting to set your goal as moving toward romance than as avoiding rejection.
The psychologist Tory Higgins made a distinction between “ought” and “ideal” goals to explain when avoidance versus approach framing provides a better fit. Ought goals include everything you need to do, like being safe by locking your door and being responsible by taking care of your family. Ideal goals include everything you hope or aspire to do but don’t necessarily feel you must do. These include reading this book or getting a business degree. When pursuing an ought goal, it’s fitting to avoid losses. When pursuing an ideal goal, it is more fitting to approach gains. For example, when your goal is to keep yourself safe (an ought), you can motivate yourself by defining your goal as avoiding damage to yourself or your property. When pursuing a goal to join a choir (an ideal, for many), you can motivate yourself by defining your goal as mastering a certain vocal range. Also, while approach goals are generally more exciting, avoidance goals have the advantage of seeming more urgent. To illustrate, try completing these sentences: A. “I must prevent [enter your response].” B. “I want to achieve [enter your response].” Now compare A to B. The upper, avoidance goal likely seems more urgent but less pleasant. The lower goal seems more pleasant and easier to stick with in the long run. So if you set your goal as “not losing,” you might believe it’s more urgent than if you set it as “winning.” You’ll respond more quickly to the not-losing goal, but you’d have more endurance in the long run to stick with your goal to win. Finally, pursuing approach and avoidance goals feels different. Successfully pursuing an approach goal will make you feel happy, proud, and eager. Failing to pursue an approach goal will result in feeling sad and depressed. For example, when I got a promotion at work, I felt proud. In contrast, successfully pursuing an avoidance goal makes you feel relieved, calm, and relaxed. Failing to pursue an avoidance goal will result in anxiety, fear, and guilt. For example, when I went for my mammogram this year (an ought goal with avoidance framing to not get breast cancer), I was relieved to get my negative results.
Motivation science teaches us that our feelings and emotions are highly instrumental. They provide feedback on goals. They serve as the sensory system for motivation. When you feel good, you know you’re making progress on your goal, and when you feel bad, you know you’re falling behind. This feedback is immediate and easy to understand. Feelings also serve as an extra motivator, or a mini-goal, in the process of achieving your overall goal. When we feel happy or relieved, those emotions act as a reward. Similarly, negative emotions like anxiety or guilt serve as punishment. So you’re motivated to pursue a goal not only because you want to achieve it, but also because achieving it—or merely making progress—feels good and failing to do so feels bad. In this way, emotions are a powerful motivator. You even use your emotions to incentivize yourself. You decide to feel good only at the “right” time. If you learn you’re about to land a job offer, you suppress your happiness until the offer is official. You say you don’t want to jinx it, but in reality, you wait for the “right” time to feel good about it (more on incentives in Chapter 3). Overall, a nuanced understanding of the approach/avoidance distinction implies that, once you realize which goal type is more effective for you and your situation, you can best set your goal. Absent such personalization, the general rule is that, for many of us under most circumstances, defining our goals as approaching a state of success and good health is more motivating than avoiding failure and sickness. You should therefore always consider setting goals in terms of approach (“do it”) rather than avoidance (“don’t do it”) and adjust from there.
Questions to ask yourself Goals are powerful. Once they’re set, you’re eager to reach them. Your goals modify your behavior; they pull you. You should therefore not neglect to set your goals. But how you set your goals will
determine their power. Your goals become less effective when, rather than feeling excited by them, you see them as chores. To set goals that aren’t chores, you can start by asking yourself the following questions: 1. Have you set your goals and are these the right goals for you? Do your goals fit the person you are and are they the best for the person you hope to become? You want to get the content of your goals right. 2. How do you define your goals to yourself? Can you make them feel more exciting by focusing on what you’re trying to achieve, rather than on the means you take to get there? 3. Are your goals optimally abstract so that you don’t lose sight of where you’re going as well as exactly how you’ll get there? 4. Can you define your goals in terms of approaching a state of physical and mental comfort instead of avoiding an undesirable state of discomfort? You’ll likely be more motivated with an approach goal, though you might feel it’s more urgent to avoid an anti-goal.
2 Put a Number on It
Every time someone boots up a Fitbit, the device loads a 10,000-step daily goal. At this point, it’s commonly agreed that walking 10,000 steps per day is best for your health. But where did that number come from? Though we may think that decades of rigorous study went into finding the exact number of steps that would keep us fit, the truth is less scientific. Our daily step target originally came from ads for a Japanese pedometer. In the 1960s, Japan was preparing to host the 1964 Olympics. With excitement about athletes coming to Tokyo from all over the world, Japanese people started talking and thinking more about physical fitness. They realized that exercise was a good way to stave off diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and stroke, all of which were problems for the Japanese at that time. Given that walking was the easiest way to get exercise, since it required no special equipment and could easily be done with friends or family, the Japanese started forming popular walking groups. Around the same time, a Japanese professor of health science decided that 10,000 steps per day would be ideal and invented a pedometer to help people track their steps. He named it Manpo-kei, which translates in English to “10,000-step meter.” Ads for the pedometer happily exclaimed, “Let’s walk 10,000 steps a day!”
More than fifty years later, Japan has one of the healthiest populations in the world, and we still use 10,000 steps as a guide for daily movement. The goal to start walking was of course important, but perhaps most important both to Japan’s health and the sale of pedometers was the professor’s choice to put a number on that goal. As a rule, goals, like recipes, work best if you list the exact quantities. “Walk 10,000 steps a day” is better than “walk a lot.” And while your goal might be to start running, a better goal would set a target such as running the Chicago Marathon in under five hours. Numerical targets usually come in two forms: how much (save $10,000) and how soon (within one year). Not only do these targets have a long history in motivation science—we’ve been somewhat obsessed with studying their generally positive impact—but targets are also popular in everyday conversation about goals. You refer to them so often that you might not even realize when you’re setting a goal versus a target. You might say, for example, that your goal is to save $10,000. But really, your goal is to save money and $10,000 is merely your target. The reason targets are common is quite obvious: they work. Targets pull you toward a goal and make it easier to monitor progress. They even tell you when to quit or slow down. Targets motivate us because, once they’re set, we care deeply about meeting these exact numbers. If you set your target at saving $10,000, you’ll be disappointed if you “only” save $9,900. On the other hand, saving $10,100 won’t make you much happier than saving exactly $10,000. A hundred dollars matters immensely if you haven’t yet hit your target, and less so when you have. In general, once a target has been set, you see anything below it as a loss, which you care deeply to avoid. In contrast, anything above the set target is a gain, which is nice to have but not necessary for your peace of mind. This is a principle psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky termed “loss-aversion.” As humans, we’re greatly disappointed and sometimes even angry when we feel we’ve missed out on something, but we care less when we’ve gained a bit more
than we expected. By the loss-aversion principle, you’ll work harder to meet your target than to exceed it. Take marathon runners, for example. Ultimately, their goal is to finish the race as quickly as possible. Yet runners often like to set a specific time target—finishing the race in less than four hours is considered a real accomplishment. Analyzing data from about ten million runners, one study found that many more people finish the race just under their set target time than just over their target time (more people finish in 3:59 hours rather than 4:01 hours, for example). As they get closer and closer to the finish line, realizing they have a good chance of beating their target time, runners push harder and faster. So, many marathoners cross the line just under the time they’ve set for themselves, having run their hardest in the last minutes to ensure that they’ll make it. Understanding this psychology, clever marketers have devised awards programs to capitalize on our desire to hit a set target. A study examining how people behave when they’ve nearly earned elite status in a frequent flyer program, which awards points for each flight, found that people took more and more flights with the airline as they got closer to gaining the airline’s top status. Yet once they hit the 100,000 miles per year they needed to reach the program’s Tier 1 ranking, their frequency of flights slowed down. This happens because after we reach a target, we feel as if we’ve been partially “reset.” Earning airline miles seems more important if it helps you reach your target status, but less important if you’re only starting to accumulate miles toward achieving this status the following year. And once you’ve bested a four-hour marathon, you may relax your running regimen until your next marathon is in sight. Beyond pulling us toward them, targets also motivate us by helping us evaluate our progress. The earliest models of goal pursuit, developed in the 1960s, described pursuing a goal as a process of closing a discrepancy toward a numerical target. George Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, proposed a model he named “TOTE.” This somewhat mechanistic model of motivation assumes that once a target has been set, the person “Tests,” or evaluates, the distance to it. Next the person “Operates,”
that is, pursues the goal. Then another “Test” is performed to determine the distance to the target. This loop of Test-Operate-Test keeps going until the goal is achieved, and the person “Exits” pursuing it (hence “TOTE”). Years later, this model of goal pursuit is still popular (more about it in Chapter 5), and it makes a simple point: once we set a target, we have to determine how far we are from completing it and then mobilize efforts to eliminate the gap. Now that you understand the power of targets, you’ll want to set them wisely. Motivation science tells us that a good target is challenging, measurable, actionable, and self-set.
Challenging targets The first ingredient in setting an effective target is to make it somewhat optimistic. And when left to our own devices, we naturally tend to set optimistic targets. If you’re like most people, you’re currently working on something you were planning to finish yesterday (or last month). Your optimism planned to accomplish more by now. That’s not necessarily bad. There are two main reasons we’re optimistic, believing we’ll accomplish more and sooner than what’s realistically possible. One is that we’re imperfect planners. The “planning fallacy” is the tendency to underestimate the time and resources it’ll take to do just about anything. Whether you plan to file your tax return early this year or complete your home renovation within your budget, realistically, these plans probably won’t become reality. Even large construction projects, which you’d assume involve careful planning, are frequently subject to the planning fallacy. When Danish architect Jørn Utzon started working on the now-famous Sydney Opera House in 1959, he expected it to take no more than four years and cost $7 million. Instead, Utzon resigned in frustration in 1966 with the building already years late and so over budget that he couldn’t pay his workers. A new architect took charge, but still the opera house wasn’t finished until 1973, more than ten years over deadline and at
a cost of $102 million. Interestingly, the planning fallacy persists even when people are reminded that they’ve made similar mistakes in the past. Despite telling yourself that you’ve learned your lesson, you’ll likely still procrastinate on next year’s taxes or underestimate the cost of future home renovations. Optimism caused by the planning fallacy is a mistake you’d wish to correct. It happens because when budgeting time and money, people tend to focus on the task at hand while neglecting all other demands on their resources. Clearly, we’d all be able to file our taxes next February if that were the only thing we needed to do that month. But once we add up everything else that needs to happen—the birthday parties, soccer games, dance recitals, dinner parties, and doctors’ appointments—all that seemingly free time is no longer free. The second explanation for optimism points to the strategic reasons we set overly optimistic targets. You may set optimistic goal targets to impress someone, to land a contract with someone, or (most central to our discussion) to motivate yourself. People set optimistic predictions to pre-commit themselves to act. To the extent that many of us intuitively realize the power of numerical targets, we intentionally set them a bit too optimistically to challenge ourselves. This happened when Dan Ariely, at the time a business professor at MIT, offered his students an unusual freedom. While business students typically expect their teacher to give strict deadlines for papers written during the semester, students in Ariely’s course were offered the ability to set their own deadlines. To pass the class, they needed to write three short papers before the end of term. They could either set deadlines for each paper throughout the class or choose to have no deadlines and hand their papers in whenever they wanted. Most students chose to create deadlines, even though they knew that if they missed them they’d be penalized with grade deductions. But they were no fools. The early deadlines helped these students motivate themselves to start on their course work sooner for fear of missing the deadline, while students who didn’t set deadlines had no such motivation. We can learn from these students that if the deadline is approaching soon, you’ll
immediately start working on your task (more on pre-commitment in Chapter 10). That’s also the reason we often choose to challenge ourselves. You might plan to run a marathon in under four hours, knowing that, at this point, you cannot meet this time. Yet the promise of one day running a four-hour marathon motivates you to train harder. When you challenge yourself, you recognize that you’re overly optimistic, but you prefer to err on the side of expecting too much rather than too little. You choose to overshoot rather than undershoot to motivate yourself. Even if you don’t commit to a hard deadline, you may set optimistic expectations strategically to get yourself moving. Ying Zhang and I found that people do so in a study similar to that of the students who set their own deadlines. In our study, we asked students to set a soft deadline, merely estimating the time it would take them to complete an assignment rather than committing to finishing by that time. These deadlines were aspirational, as there was no penalty for failing to meet them. But we treated two groups of students differently. Some were told that they were getting a difficult assignment and others were told they were getting an easy one when, in fact, the assignments were the same. To test whether students set early deadlines to motivate themselves, we compared the deadlines set for the “difficult” homework versus the “easy” homework. We found that those who expected the assignment to be difficult said they would finish it earlier than those expecting it to be easy. This might seem surprising—why would you plan to finish something that’s harder sooner?—but it was just what we thought would happen. Those expecting a difficult assignment set early deadlines to motivate themselves to start working sooner. We also measured the time it actually took students to complete the homework assignment so we could test how expecting something to be more difficult influences both predictions and performance. We found that those who expected a difficult assignment and therefore set earlier deadlines finished the assignment earlier than those who expected an easy assignment. Notably, the planning fallacy prevailed: the average person missed
their deadline whether they had set it early or late. Yet merely expecting an assignment to be more difficult leads people to start and finish earlier. It’s actually beneficial to expect greater difficulty when it incentivizes you to do your best and start doing so immediately. Of course, there are times when meeting the deadline is more critical than doing your best, as when the consequences of failing to meet the deadline are worse than those of falling short in the quality of the work. In another study with students completing assignments, we emphasized that they had to be accurate in setting their deadline. These people set later deadlines when they expected the homework assignment to be more difficult. When we prioritize an accurate deadline over a deadline meant to motivate us, we allow more time to complete a difficult task. The conclusion is that, when setting deadlines and other targets, you have a better chance of motivating yourself to do your best if there are relatively minor consequences for failure to meet the targets. In this case, you set targets to challenge yourself and simply hope to make it. These challenging targets motivate you because when facing a difficult task, you recruit resources, or energize yourself, to meet the upcoming challenge. The expectation that the task you’re facing will be difficult—but not impossible—results in shifting more mental and physical energy to do it. At times, as you face a challenging task, you may feel slightly aroused or excited; you may even notice that your heart beats faster or louder. You feel ready to act. Other times, you get energized, preparing to act, yet all this is happening outside your awareness. Regardless of whether you’re conscious of your mental preparation, you’re mostly energized when expecting a difficult but not impossible task. Easy tasks don’t require preparation, and for impossible ones, you don’t bother. You give up. But when people prepare to meet a medium challenge, their motivational system gets geared up. They’re energized. That’s a good reason to be optimistic when setting targets.
Measurable targets The second ingredient in effective target setting is making sure your target is easy to measure. If a target is vague and missing a clear number, it becomes hard to measure and therefore less motivating. Consider the targets to excel at your new job, save enough for retirement, and get enough sleep. These targets are less motivating than completing a work project by the end of the week, saving $10,000 this year, or getting eight hours of sleep every night. A measurable target provides a meaningful number that’s easy to understand and monitor. You know if you’ve slept eight hours based on when you went to bed and when you woke up, but it’s not nearly as easy to tell if you’re getting enough sleep without any target number of sleeping hours per day. Yet in order to be motivating, a target can’t be just any number. Consider, for example, setting a daily reading goal. You could set your goal as reading twenty pages a day. Alternatively, you could set it at 6,000 words or 30,000 characters a day. These targets refer to a similar amount of reading, but while the page target is easy to measure, you’d have a difficult time counting 6,000 words to ensure you’ve read enough—counting would probably take more of your time and energy than reading would! Of course, you might still find it confusing to measure twenty pages, as it requires keeping track of exactly where you started. Consider using a twenty-minute daily reading target instead. When my eight-year-old’s teachers set a twenty-minute reading goal, I was thrilled at the target’s brilliance. Not only is a timed goal easy for children to understand, it’s also easiest for parents to monitor. When creating your own targets, first think through what type of number would serve you best. Is it an amount or a time? And if it is an amount, what’s the easiest unit of measurement to monitor?
Actionable targets