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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. You can also watch it on 
Tell your wife your plan. In marriage, the greatest amount of couple interaction which consumes the most time and psychic energy is not sex, but BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
A nagging wife is the ultimate action plan. Everything will be done with a little– or a whole lot of nagging. Move over baseball, America’s favorite pastime begins with the phrase, ” Honey, I love you. You are perfect . BUT why don’t you……..”
I find that telling people I greatly respect and who care about me (my best friends, for example) helps add a social incentive to do the task I set out to do. However, I’ve also experienced extreme procrastination, as I tend to write down the things I have to do, and after doing half of them, I cross out everything else and write them on another sheet of paper, making me feel like I’ve accomplished those tasks as well. So, I see how for some people, who might not care much for the “social incentive” might develop the procrastination I got from crossing things I haven’t done off of my to-do list.
I wonder if this isn’t more true for some personalities than for others.
I’m definitely one of the social reality types, though. Even thinking about a plan, I start feeling like I’ve already accomplished it, and thus never actually do anything.
Hooray, what I’ve always known has now been confirmed. Now on to prove that nobody is going to do anything for you out of gratitude: another point where, as all my experience shows, Dr. Cialdini was wrong.
Sivers’ talk was too short and provided no detail at all, only conclusions. The closest to any “results” cited from the research on the subject was one study of 163 people with a goal that none of them finished. But the link was to a 3-minute clip…
I would think that the effect of announcing goals on the completion rate would depend on a number of factors:
WHO YOU TELL. If you tell those people who are a significant part of your life, you will build a commitment to achieving the goal, because their feelings about whether or not you accomplish your goal will be important to you. But it will be easy for you to keep your failure a secret unless..
THE GOAL IS AMBITIOUS ENOUGH FOR PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTED. If your goal small, no one will care. If the goal is ambitious enough to create a story that people can understand and be interested in, people will ask you about how it went. And if you succeed, they will be a little proud, and if you fail they will be a little disappointed. This reinforcement is made much easier if…
THE GOAL HAS INTERMEDIATE MILESTONES. This gives people (your support network) smaller goals to ask about to maintain their interest and yours.
I used this device most recently to keep me motivated to finish the training for my first full Ironman at age 40. I spent eight months of my free time training (as I had never done any triathlons before) to prepare, and I feared that if I kept the goal secret, then it would be easier to quit. After all, no one would know but me.
This makes me skeptical about how one would study the commitment rate to people’s secret goals. People work very hard (consciously as well as unconsciously) to forget their failures, let alone report them.
Having a clear vision is to be in a format as it had allready happened: “I?m healthy, happy, I have lot?s of friends, all my realtions are harmonious, I have passionate loving husband giving me everything, I?m happy at my work being surrounded of inspirating professional people giving me lots of nice enrgies” and so on.
The life is NOT yet so excellent as in my vision.
If I?m telling my Vision in the format it should be, as it has happened allready then all the people around me would be telling me: That?s not true or they would be jealous and think I?m trying to make them feel bad in their relations and in their jobb.
If You are formulating your visions in format :”I will go to Gym”. “I will be the director of this company in 3 years” and so on to others, The Vision won?t work. Partly because visions don?t work when you say: will/should and so on.
Visions work only when they are announced as they allready happened. And other people (who are not working with powerful visions) will only sabotate and not support you.
Tell Your visions only to people who understand visions:
“I?m wealthy, happy, all my relations are harmonous, I have a passionate loving husband, happy kids and a fantastic work”
How does it feel for You- listen to Your inner sound what feelings You get from the text above?
You want to be there also?
Or You think: “Stupid woman- You are unrealistic” ?
Derek Sivers? Are you kidding? He looks about as reliable as Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia, but not as funny.
I would certainly recognise the conclusions of this research in my own behaviour – at least the risk of it – and try to compensate accordingly. I avoid talking about things I want to achieve, not because I am frightened of being seen to fail, but more because I feel time and energy spent talking is wasted when it could have been used in making progress towards my goal.
I am not saying this is a smart thing to do. I now have over 100k carefully crafted words on how behavioral economics challenges the pre-suppositions that underpin strategy, marketing and management science and renders traditional approaches questionable, but not the ‘author platform’ to convince anyone to publish it. Self-awareness of bias and behavioral distortions (such as that out lined in the research) does not always lead to better decisions or better outcomes. I probably should have spent more time talking!