Announcing your goals – a common commitment device – may actually make you less likely to accomplish them, according to a new TED talk from music entrepreneur Derek Sivers. “Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it,” says Sivers. “Ideally, you would not be satisfied until you had actually done the work, but when you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it’s called a social reality. The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it’s already done. And then, because you’ve felt that satisfaction, you’re less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary.” Readers, what’s your experience with blabbing about your goals? [%comments]
Got a Plan? Best to Keep it Quiet…
TAGS: psychology
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I think this really depends on who you tell and what the goal is. If you have friends / family that hold you accountable and actually make you feel like crap if you fail, then it does create accountability. Even if they don’t apply overt social pressure, there’s always the internalization if they know about the goal that they see you as weaker when they see you deviating from the path.
I suspect this isn’t cut and dried.
I think there might be something to it. I think that if you use your words not as an announcement but a commitment to a goal then it has a different impact.
But this is contradictory with commitment rule of manipulation described in “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini. This principle says that people who have made a public commitment to do do something find it much more difficult to retract from it.
I knew it!
I tried telling people my goals during my youthful Positive Thinking phase. Positive people are supposed to talk, act, and believe as if you’d already done what you set out to do in the future and it was a reality, because … believing it’s true will magically make it true. Seriously. (And if you disagree with that, you’re a Negative person and your cynicism will make you sick and die early. Seriously!)
The only result is that my college roommates think I was the sort of person who’s always saying “I’m going to the gym” but never does.
One roommate actually told me to stop telling her I’m gonna do stuff because “we both know you’ll never do anything”.
Positive Thinking: “Yes We Can!”
Reality: Oil spill.
These days i use the satisfaction I’d get from telling people i did something as the incentive to go do it, and i try not to tell it till I’m well on the way to doing it. Once I’ve invested so much time and effort in something that I know I wont’ turn back, that’s when I tell people.
My life experiences concur with this idea, especially when it comes to getting dates.
I’m generally in agreement about silence. However, I’ve found that telling about certain ambitious exercise goals (completing a certain marathon or a bike race, etc.) does have a positive effect of completing the task.
The more people that might ask, “how did the race go?” and I might have to say “I chickened out” the less likely that I chicken out.
This also marks the assumption that your plan is perfect, that it can not benefit from collaboration with peers.
I’ve done the 1/2 Iron Man twice. Both times, I told people I was doing it. But, it was mostly people who I was already running or riding with. So, they kept me motivated along the way.
And, as Craig above stated, people would ask me how I was doing all the time… it was motivational.