Do You Know Where You Are Going?
THE FIRST STEP TO GETTING ANYWHERE IS TO DECIDE WHERE YOU want to go. That seems so obvious that you may be wondering why I bothered to say it. Well, for one thing, despite its obviousness, you’d be surprised to learn just how often we completely forget to do it. Oh sure, you feel like you’ve set a lot of goals for yourself, but have you really? Or have you just thought about how you’d like to be happier, healthier, or more successful, without actually deciding what specifically you were going to do about it? You have desires, lots and lots of things that you want to happen, but how many of those wishes have you turned into real goals? Without being translated into goals, our desires remain just that—things we wish would happen. Imagine you want to take a nice vacation. If your planning never gets any further than “I’d like to go someplace warm,” you’re probably not going anywhere, are you?
So setting goals is important, and in this chapter I’ll describe some research that shows us why. But that’s not the whole story. Because how you set your goals—the way you think about whatever it is you want to do, and how you will get there—is every bit as important. Success is more likely when you focus on the right details, in the right way.
Don’t Do Your Best
Telling someone to “do your best” is a great way to motivate them, right? Most of us have said or heard this expression countless times. It’s always meant well—do your best is supposed to inspire you without putting on too much pressure. It’s supposed to bring out the best in you. Only it doesn’t. It’s a really lousy motivator.
And that’s primarily because do your best is very, very vague. What is my best, exactly? Imagine you are a manager, and you’ve given your employee an assignment to investigate a possibly lucrative sales opportunity for your company. It’s something that requires a lot of work. And it’s really important. So you tell your employee, “Bob, do your best on this one.” But what is Bob’s best? How would you know it if you saw it? And for that matter, how would Bob? Does Bob even really know what his best looks like? Does anyone?
The reality is that no one hears do your best and thinks, “I will work on this until I can’t possibly make it even the tiniest bit better.” That would be silly and probably far too time-consuming to be of benefit to you or to Bob. Instead, we hear do your best and think, “I will do a good enough job so that my boss will believe this is my best and be happy with it.” Not exactly inspiring stuff. In the absence of a specific goal, do your best somewhat ironically tends to produce work that is far from the best—it’s a recipe for mediocrity.
So what’s the alternative? The alternative is to set
specific, difficult goals. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two eminent organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the extraordinary effectiveness of setting specific and difficult goals.
1 In more than one thousand studies conducted by researchers across the globe, they’ve found that goals that spell out
exactly what needs to be accomplished, and that set the bar for achievement
high, result in far superior performance than goals that are vague or that set the bar too low. And this is true regardless of whether the goal is something you adopt on your own, something you are assigned to complete, or something that you develop jointly with your parent, teacher, boss, or coworkers.
Why are specific, difficult goals more motivating than do your best? The specific part is relatively straightforward. Letting people know exactly what is expected of them (or deciding for yourself exactly what you want to achieve) removes the possibility of settling for less—of telling yourself that what you’ve done is “good enough.” When what you’re striving for is vague, it’s too tempting to take the easy way out when you’ve gotten tired, discouraged, or bored. But there’s just no fooling yourself if you’ve set a specific goal. You’ve either reached it or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, you’ve got little choice but to keep on trying if you want to succeed.
What about the difficult part? Isn’t it dangerous to set difficult goals—aren’t I asking for trouble if I set the bar high? Aren’t I inviting disappointment and failure? Absolutely not! (And haven’t you ever seen Stand and Deliver? If Mr. Escalante could teach calculus to remedial math students, imagine what you could achieve if you dared to try!) Of course, you shouldn’t set goals that are not realistic or are impossible to reach. Difficult but possible is the key. That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus, and commitment to the goal; persist longer; and make better use of the most effective strategies.
Locke and Latham have shown this to be true in groups of people as diverse in their day-to-day goals as scientists, businessmen, truck drivers, unionized workers, and loggers. In one study conducted in the early 1970s, Latham found that log haulers were carrying loads to the mill that were 60 percent of the legal weight limit, on average—a situation that was wasting both time and company resources. But the log haulers did not have any specific goals about what they should be carrying for each load. So he assigned them the goal of carrying loads that were 94 percent of the legal limit instead. He returned after nine months and found that they were now averaging above 90 percent, saving the company what would be many millions in today’s dollars.
So if you give log haulers the goal of carrying a lot more trees, it turns out they carry a lot more trees. People pretty much do what is asked of them, and rarely more. Ask for a great performance from someone, and as long as you’re specific about what great is, you are much more likely to actually get it. Set yourself difficult goals, and your performance will rise to the challenge. In one study of nearly three thousand federal employees, those who agreed with statements like “my job is challenging” and “people in my work group are expected to work hard” were the ones that had the highest ratings on their annual performance reviews.
But they were miserable, right? Wrong. Setting and achieving challenging goals has other added benefits besides great performance. Think about a time in your life when you accomplished something really difficult, and compare that to how you felt when you pulled off something relatively easy. Which feels better? Succeeding at something hard is more pleasurable, gives greater satisfaction and happiness, and increases your overall sense of well-being. Succeeding at something easy is barely worth mentioning. A recent study in Germany showed that only those employees who felt their work was difficult reported increases in job satisfaction, happiness, and feelings of achievement over time.
You might be wondering if being satisfied at work leads to better performance, or if it’s that better work performance creates satisfaction. The answer is that actually both are true—job satisfaction increases people’s commitment to their organization and confidence in themselves, which leads them to challenge themselves more, which leads to better performance and more satisfaction, and so on and so on ... setting specific, challenging goals creates a cycle of success and happiness that can repeat itself over and over again, creating what Locke and Latham call the “high performance cycle.”
2
You too can start this cycle in your own life—the first step is to set yourself some very specific and reasonably difficult goals. And you can further enhance your chances for success by thinking about those goals in the most motivating ways.
The Big Picture versus the Nitty-Gritty
Any action you take or goal you adopt can be described or thought about in a number of different ways. Using a vacuum can be called “keeping things clean” or “sucking up crumbs from the floor.” Wanting to get an A on a math test can be thought of as wanting to “get almost all of the answers correct” or “master algebra.” Working out regularly can be about “trying to lose 10 pounds” or “trying to become more fit.”
How Do You Think about the Things You Do?
Before you read on, answer the questions below to see how
you typically think about the things you do. Jot down your answers in a notebook or on a piece of paper. There are no
right,
wrong, or even
better answers. Choose the description that best describes the behavior for
you—the one that sounds right to your ears.
1. Making a list is
a. getting organized
b. writing things down
2. Cleaning the house is
a. showing one’s cleanliness
b. vacuuming the floor
3. Paying the rent is
a. maintaining a place to live
b. writing a check
4. Locking a door is
a. putting a key in the lock
b. securing the house
5. Greeting someone is
a. saying hello
b. showing friendliness
To score, add up your choices to create a total score using the following numerical values:
1a = 2, 1b = 1, 2a = 2, 2b = 1, 3a = 2, 3b = 1, 4a = 1, 4b = 2, 5a = 1, 5b = 2
3
If you scored 6 or higher, you are probably someone who tends to think about their own behavior in more abstract terms—when you think about the things you do each day, you describe them by focusing on why you are doing them. So pushing a vacuum around the house is about “keeping things clean”—wanting the house to be clean is the reason you are vacuuming, so that’s how you think of it. If you scored a 5 or lower, you are probably someone who tends to think in more concrete terms. You think about your behavior in terms of what you are doing. So pushing the vacuum is about “sucking up crumbs”—it’s what is actually happening, so that’s how you think of it.
Both descriptions of vacuuming are accurate, so it’s not as if one kind of description is right and the other is wrong. But they are different, and importantly so. Because it turns out that the abstract why and concrete what ways of thinking about your behavior have motivational pros and cons. Each mode of thinking, under different circumstances, can lead to greater achievement. The trick is to adjust your thinking according to your circumstances, and the good news is that it’s not at all hard to do. You just need to learn when to think why and when to think what.
Let’s start with the abstract, why kind of thinking. Thinking more abstractly about behavior can be very energizing because you are linking one particular, often small action to a greater meaning or purpose. Something that may not seem important or valuable on its own can be cast in a whole new light. For example, when staying that extra hour at work is thought of as “helping my career” rather than “typing for sixty more minutes,” I’m much more likely to want to stay put and work hard. The why of what you do is incredibly motivating, so it’s not surprising that many of us often prefer to think of our own actions in those terms.
And if you want to motivate someone else to do something, describing it in why terms will also help persuade them to give it a try. If you want your son to study for his chemistry test, telling him that he should try to do well in chemistry because it will help him get into college is probably more inspiring than telling him he should open up his textbook and start memorizing all the elements on the periodic table. Either way he has to learn that H stands for hydrogen, but describing what he should do probably won’t light a fire under him, and describing why he should do it just might.
So is it ever helpful to think about the things we do in nitty-gritty, what-am-I-literally-doing ways? Yes. For one thing, it turns out that thinking this way is really useful when you need to do something that is difficult, unfamiliar, complex, or just takes a lot of time to learn. If you’ve never operated a vacuum cleaner before, you’re actually better off thinking “sucking up crumbs” (what) than “keeping things clean” (why).
For example, psychologists Dan Wegner and Robin Vallacher asked experienced coffee drinkers to drink a cup of coffee and then rate how well each of thirty different descriptions fit with what they had just done. (I’ll bet you didn’t think there even were thirty ways to describe drinking a cup of coffee. I know I didn’t.) Their choices included relatively abstract, why-based descriptions like “promoting my caffeine habit” and “getting energized,” along with more concrete, literal, what-based descriptions like “drinking a liquid” and “swallowing.”
Half of the people who participated in the study got to drink out of a normal, everyday coffee mug. The other half were given a much more unwieldy mug weighing nearly half a pound. (Some of you are probably thinking that’s not really very heavy. So I should point out that this was 1983, and nobody was drinking enormous Starbucks coffees out of containers the size of an oxygen tank back then. A half-pound mug was a
really heavy mug in 1983.) When they were asked to choose the best descriptions for what they had just done, the people who got to drink out of a typical coffee mug tended to prefer the
why descriptions over the
what descriptions. In other words, under normal conditions, people who are used to drinking coffee preferred thinking about drinking coffee in terms of the reason why they were drinking it.
4
But the heavy-mug drinkers strongly preferred the more concrete what descriptions. They were thinking about the specific actions they were taking, like “raising a cup to my lips.” You see, in order to actually manage to drink out of a cup that was much heavier than anything they normally used without spilling, these people needed to think about the real mechanics of coffee drinking. They needed to concentrate on the what of what they were doing (i.e., grasping the handle firmly, raising the cups to their lips, swallowing), rather than the why. By focusing on the concrete what, they were able to successfully drink from the odd and unfamiliar cup without making a mistake. If they had thought only in abstract why terms, “getting energized” might have easily become “getting scalded and wet.”
Wegner and Vallacher found the same results in a study where students were asked to eat Cheerios either with their hands or with chopsticks. Those who had to use chopsticks preferred to think of their actions as “putting food in my mouth” and “moving my hands” (what) rather than as “reducing hunger” or “getting nutrition” (why). Again and again, we find that when actions are difficult to accomplish, it is easier and much more helpful to think about what we are doing in simple, concrete what terms rather than lofty, more abstract why ones. (At this point, you may be wondering if social psychologists get a particular pleasure out of asking people to do really odd things, like eating Cheerios with chopsticks, or eating raw radishes, or not laughing at Robin Williams. The short answer is yes, we do. It makes up for all those hours spent learning statistics.)
As we gain more experience doing something and it becomes easier for us, we often start to see it in a more abstract why way—more in terms of its meaning or purpose. For example, in one study, more inexperienced, underage drinkers tended to describe drinking an alcoholic beverage as “swallowing” or “lifting a glass,” while inpatients in an alcoholism treatment program preferred thinking of it as “relieving tension” or “overcoming boredom.” The ones who were relatively new to drinking alcohol were, presumably, less personally familiar with the reasons why you drink. The alcoholics, on the other hand, knew the reasons all too well.
When people think about what they are doing in why terms, they are guided by the big picture—their smaller, everyday actions become a part of something larger and more important. They are more connected to long-term goals. As a result, when people think why rather than what, they are less impulsive, less vulnerable to temptation, and more likely to plan their actions in advance. (Okay, maybe not when the why thinkers in question are alcoholics, but you get my point.) Thinking why, they feel more certain of who they are and what they want. And they are much less likely to feel that forces outside of them (like other people, luck, or fate) are controlling what happens to them.
When people think about what they are doing in what terms, they are focused on the nitty-gritty—the actual mechanics of getting from Point A to Point B. And while they are sometimes less motivated, and more in danger of not seeing the forest for the trees, they are particularly adept at navigating a rocky road. When what you need to do is particularly difficult to get done, it pays to forget about the bigger picture and focus on the task at hand.
So, since both the “big picture” why and “nitty-gritty” what modes of thinking have their advantages and disadvantages, the best strategy is to shift your thinking style to match the goal you want to achieve. Sometimes this happens automatically, but not always. It’s important to make sure you are using the optimal style, and if not, to shift accordingly. To get motivated and enhance your self-control (or to help someone else do the same), think why. Consider the larger meaning or purpose behind what you are doing. If you want to stick to your diet when faced with the allure of the dessert tray, remember why you are trying to lose weight. When your employees are doing a lackluster job, remind them of why their performance matters—for the company and for themselves.
To tackle a particularly complicated, difficult, or unfamiliar goal, on the other hand, it’s best to think what. When faced with learning a new routine, break it down into specific steps. Skiing for the first time? Focus on keeping your knees bent and your ski tips together. Forget about impressing everyone with your speed and grace—that’s a great way for a novice skier to end up wrapped around a tree.
Complete the exercise below to see how you can do this with goals you already have. (A quick note: Throughout the book, I’ll be giving you written exercises to help you learn how to use new strategies to improve your achievement. When you’re learning something new, writing it down step by step is an excellent way to help make it a habit. Consider keeping a notebook just for practicing the exercises in this book. Eventually, with practice, your brain will embrace the new strategy and begin to use it automatically, so you won’t need to go to the trouble of written exercises. But for the time being, taking the trouble to actually write it all down is really worth your while.)
How to Think “Why”
1. Write down an action you’ve had trouble taking recently because you haven’t felt motivated or you’ve given in too much to temptation. It can be anything from not ordering dessert to answering all your important e-mails each day.
2. Now, write down why you want to take that action. What is the purpose of the action for you? What goal does it help you to achieve? How will you benefit from it?
The next time you attempt this action, stop and think about the why you just identified. Repeat this over and over again, until it becomes a habit (and it will—with repetition, any relatively simple act will become automatic and effortless. You just have to keep at it.)
How to Think “What”
1. Write down something you want to accomplish that is really complicated, highly difficult, or very unfamiliar or new to you. Maybe you want to create your own website but aren’t ever seen Stand and Deliver? If Mr. Escalante could teach calculus to remedial math students, imagine what you could achieve if you dared to try!) Of course, you shouldn’t set goals that are not realistic or are impossible to reach. Difficult but possible is the key. That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus, and commitment to the goal; persist longer; and make better use of the most effective strategies.
Locke and Latham have shown this to be true in groups of people as diverse in their day-to-day goals as scientists, businessmen, truck drivers, unionized workers, and loggers. In one study conducted in the early 1970s, Latham found that log haulers were carrying loads to the mill that were 60 percent of the legal weight limit, on average—a situation that was wasting both time and company resources. But the log haulers did not have any specific goals about what they should be carrying for each load. So he assigned them the goal of carrying loads that were 94 percent of the legal limit instead. He returned after nine months and found that they were now averaging above 90 percent, saving the company what would be many millions in today’s dollars.
So if you give log haulers the goal of carrying a lot more trees, it turns out they carry a lot more trees. People pretty much do what is asked of them, and rarely more. Ask for a great performance from someone, and as long as you’re specific about what great is, you are much more likely to actually get it. Set yourself difficult goals, and your performance will rise to the challenge. In one study of nearly three thousand federal employees, those who agreed with statements like “my job is challenging” and “people in my work group are expected to work hard” were the ones that had the highest ratings on their annual performance reviews.
But they were miserable, right? Wrong. Setting and achieving challenging goals has other added benefits besides great performance. Think about a time in your life when you accomplished something really difficult, and compare that to how you felt when you pulled off something relatively easy. Which feels better? Succeeding at something hard is more pleasurable, gives greater satisfaction and happiness, and increases your overall sense of well-being. Succeeding at something easy is barely worth mentioning. A recent study in Germany showed that only those employees who felt their work was difficult reported increases in job satisfaction, happiness, and feelings of achievement over time.
You might be wondering if being satisfied at work leads to better performance, or if it’s that better work performance creates satisfaction. The answer is that actually both are true—job satisfaction increases people’s commitment to their organization and confidence in themselves, which leads them to challenge themselves more, which leads to better performance and more satisfaction, and so on and so on ... setting specific, challenging goals creates a cycle of success and happiness that can repeat itself over and over again, creating what Locke and Latham call the “high performance cycle.”
2
You too can start this cycle in your own life—the first step is to set yourself some very specific and reasonably difficult goals. And you can further enhance your chances for success by thinking about those goals in the most motivating ways.
The Big Picture versus the Nitty-Gritty
Any action you take or goal you adopt can be described or thought about in a number of different ways. Using a vacuum can be called “keeping things clean” or “sucking up crumbs from the floor.” Wanting to get an A on a math test can be thought of as wanting to “get almost all of the answers correct” or “master algebra.” Working out regularly can be about “trying to lose 10 pounds” or “trying to become more fit.”
How Do You Think about the Things You Do?
Before you read on, answer the questions below to see how
you typically think about the things you do. Jot down your answers in a notebook or on a piece of paper. There are no
right,
wrong, or even
better answers. Choose the description that best describes the behavior for
you—the one that sounds right to your ears.
1. Making a list is
a. getting organized
b. writing things down
2. Cleaning the house is
a. showing one’s cleanliness
b. vacuuming the floor
3. Paying the rent is
a. maintaining a place to live
b. writing a check
4. Locking a door is
a. putting a key in the lock
b. securing the house
5. Greeting someone is
a. saying hello
b. showing friendliness
To score, add up your choices to create a total score using the following numerical values:
1a = 2, 1b = 1, 2a = 2, 2b = 1, 3a = 2, 3b = 1, 4a = 1, 4b = 2, 5a = 1, 5b = 23
If you scored 6 or higher, you are probably someone who tends to think about their own behavior in more abstract terms—when you think about the things you do each day, you describe them by focusing on why you are doing them. So pushing a vacuum around the house is about “keeping things clean”—wanting the house to be clean is the reason you are vacuuming, so that’s how you think of it. If you scored a 5 or lower, you are probably someone who tends to think in more concrete terms. You think about your behavior in terms of what you are doing. So pushing the vacuum is about “sucking up crumbs”—it’s what is actually happening, so that’s how you think of it.
Both descriptions of vacuuming are accurate, so it’s not as if one kind of description is right and the other is wrong. But they are different, and importantly so. Because it turns out that the abstract why and concrete what ways of thinking about your behavior have motivational pros and cons. Each mode of thinking, under different circumstances, can lead to greater achievement. The trick is to adjust your thinking according to your circumstances, and the good news is that it’s not at all hard to do. You just need to learn when to think why and when to think what.
Let’s start with the abstract, why kind of thinking. Thinking more abstractly about behavior can be very energizing because you are linking one particular, often small action to a greater meaning or purpose. Something that may not seem important or valuable on its own can be cast in a whole new light. For example, when staying that extra hour at work is thought of as “helping my career” rather than “typing for sixty more minutes,” I’m much more likely to want to stay put and work hard. The why of what you do is incredibly motivating, so it’s not surprising that many of us often prefer to think of our own actions in those terms.
And if you want to motivate someone else to do something, describing it in why terms will also help persuade them to give it a try. If you want your son to study for his chemistry test, telling him that he should try to do well in chemistry because it will help him get into college is probably more inspiring than telling him he should open up his textbook and start memorizing all the elements on the periodic table. Either way he has to learn that H stands for hydrogen, but describing what he should do probably won’t light a fire under him, and describing why he should do it just might.
So is it ever helpful to think about the things we do in nitty-gritty, what-am-I-literally-doing ways? Yes. For one thing, it turns out that thinking this way is really useful when you need to do something that is difficult, unfamiliar, complex, or just takes a lot of time to learn. If you’ve never operated a vacuum cleaner before, you’re actually better off thinking “sucking up crumbs” (what) than “keeping things clean” (why).
For example, psychologists Dan Wegner and Robin Vallacher asked experienced coffee drinkers to drink a cup of coffee and then rate how well each of thirty different descriptions fit with what they had just done. (I’ll bet you didn’t think there even were thirty ways to describe drinking a cup of coffee. I know I didn’t.) Their choices included relatively abstract, why-based descriptions like “promoting my caffeine habit” and “getting energized,” along with more concrete, literal, what-based descriptions like “drinking a liquid” and “swallowing.”
Half of the people who participated in the study got to drink out of a normal, everyday coffee mug. The other half were given a much more unwieldy mug weighing nearly half a pound. (Some of you are probably thinking that’s not really very heavy. So I should point out that this was 1983, and nobody was drinking enormous Starbucks coffees out of containers the size of an oxygen tank back then. A half-pound mug was a
really heavy mug in 1983.) When they were asked to choose the best descriptions for what they had just done, the people who got to drink out of a typical coffee mug tended to prefer the
why descriptions over the
what descriptions. In other words, under normal conditions, people who are used to drinking coffee preferred thinking about drinking coffee in terms of the reason why they were drinking it.
4
But the heavy-mug drinkers strongly preferred the more concrete what descriptions. They were thinking about the specific actions they were taking, like “raising a cup to my lips.” You see, in order to actually manage to drink out of a cup that was much heavier than anything they normally used without spilling, these people needed to think about the real mechanics of coffee drinking. They needed to concentrate on the what of what they were doing (i.e., grasping the handle firmly, raising the cups to their lips, swallowing), rather than the why. By focusing on the concrete what, they were able to successfully drink from the odd and unfamiliar cup without making a mistake. If they had thought only in abstract why terms, “getting energized” might have easily become “getting scalded and wet.”
Wegner and Vallacher found the same results in a study where students were asked to eat Cheerios either with their hands or with chopsticks. Those who had to use chopsticks preferred to think of their actions as “putting food in my mouth” and “moving my hands” (what) rather than as “reducing hunger” or “getting nutrition” (why). Again and again, we find that when actions are difficult to accomplish, it is easier and much more helpful to think about what we are doing in simple, concrete what terms rather than lofty, more abstract why ones. (At this point, you may be wondering if social psychologists get a particular pleasure out of asking people to do really odd things, like eating Cheerios with chopsticks, or eating raw radishes, or not laughing at Robin Williams. The short answer is yes, we do. It makes up for all those hours spent learning statistics.)
As we gain more experience doing something and it becomes easier for us, we often start to see it in a more abstract why way—more in terms of its meaning or purpose. For example, in one study, more inexperienced, underage drinkers tended to describe drinking an alcoholic beverage as “swallowing” or “lifting a glass,” while inpatients in an alcoholism treatment program preferred thinking of it as “relieving tension” or “overcoming boredom.” The ones who were relatively new to drinking alcohol were, presumably, less personally familiar with the reasons why you drink. The alcoholics, on the other hand, knew the reasons all too well.
When people think about what they are doing in why terms, they are guided by the big picture—their smaller, everyday actions become a part of something larger and more important. They are more connected to long-term goals. As a result, when people think why rather than what, they are less impulsive, less vulnerable to temptation, and more likely to plan their actions in advance. (Okay, maybe not when the why thinkers in question are alcoholics, but you get my point.) Thinking why, they feel more certain of who they are and what they want. And they are much less likely to feel that forces outside of them (like other people, luck, or fate) are controlling what happens to them.
When people think about what they are doing in what terms, they are focused on the nitty-gritty—the actual mechanics of getting from Point A to Point B. And while they are sometimes less motivated, and more in danger of not seeing the forest for the trees, they are particularly adept at navigating a rocky road. When what you need to do is particularly difficult to get done, it pays to forget about the bigger picture and focus on the task at hand.
So, since both the “big picture” why and “nitty-gritty” what modes of thinking have their advantages and disadvantages, the best strategy is to shift your thinking style to match the goal you want to achieve. Sometimes this happens automatically, but not always. It’s important to make sure you are using the optimal style, and if not, to shift accordingly. To get motivated and enhance your self-control (or to help someone else do the same), think why. Consider the larger meaning or purpose behind what you are doing. If you want to stick to your diet when faced with the allure of the dessert tray, remember why you are trying to lose weight. When your employees are doing a lackluster job, remind them of why their performance matters—for the company and for themselves.
To tackle a particularly complicated, difficult, or unfamiliar goal, on the other hand, it’s best to think what. When faced with learning a new routine, break it down into specific steps. Skiing for the first time? Focus on keeping your knees bent and your ski tips together. Forget about impressing everyone with your speed and grace—that’s a great way for a novice skier to end up wrapped around a tree.
Complete the exercise below to see how you can do this with goals you already have. (A quick note: Throughout the book, I’ll be giving you written exercises to help you learn how to use new strategies to improve your achievement. When you’re learning something new, writing it down step by step is an excellent way to help make it a habit. Consider keeping a notebook just for practicing the exercises in this book. Eventually, with practice, your brain will embrace the new strategy and begin to use it automatically, so you won’t need to go to the trouble of written exercises. But for the time being, taking the trouble to actually write it all down is really worth your while.)
How to Think “Why”
1. Write down an action you’ve had trouble taking recently because you haven’t felt motivated or you’ve given in too much to temptation. It can be anything from not ordering dessert to answering all your important e-mails each day.
2. Now, write down why you want to take that action. What is the purpose of the action for you? What goal does it help you to achieve? How will you benefit from it?
The next time you attempt this action, stop and think about the why you just identified. Repeat this over and over again, until it becomes a habit (and it will—with repetition, any relatively simple act will become automatic and effortless. You just have to keep at it.)
Setting Goals through Mental Contrasting
1. Grab your notebook or just a piece of paper, and write down a wish or concern you have currently. This can be something you are thinking of doing or something you are already involved with doing (like taking a vacation to the Caribbean, or moving to LA to become a screenwriter, or losing ten pounds).
2. Now, think about what a happy ending would look like for this wish or concern. Write down one positive aspect of this happy ending (for example, how great it would be to relax on the beach without checking your e-mail).
3. Next, think about the obstacles that stand in the way between you and your happy ending (for example, my overfondness for cheese tends to stand in the way between me and the thinner me who lives in my weight-loss happy ending).
4. Now list another positive aspect.
5. And another obstacle.
6. And another positive aspect.
7. And another obstacle.
Now, what do you think your chances for success are? Should you pursue this goal? By contrasting the things you have to gain with the obstacles standing in your way, you should now have a better sense of how likely you are to succeed, and how committed you are to that success.
In this chapter, we’ve talked about the importance of setting specific, difficult goals for increasing motivation. We’ve looked at how the ways in which we describe those goals, to ourselves or to others, can influence our chances for success. And we’ve learned how to direct and harness the benefits of positive thinking (and realistic thinking) about the goals we’re setting. For some of you, if you stopped reading this book now, you’d already be more successful in reaching your goals than you were when you started.
But don’t stop reading now. Instead, move on to the next chapter, and we’ll talk about the goals you are already pursuing in your own life. Where did they come from? How did you end up choosing them over other, equally attractive goals? The answers may surprise you. And if you want to choose goals wisely, in ways that will make you happier and more successful, then you need to start by getting a handle on what you’ve been doing right and what you may want to do differently.
