Stop Dangling Carrots

What I read: Why we should all give up on goals already by Amanda Ruggeri. Published by BBC November 19, 2017.

Confession time. I’m a lifelong goal creation addict. I know. It sounds like goal creation should be a good thing. That’s what I was taught. From my father’s productivity-focused upbringing to my years of formal schooling to the consumption of countless self-help books and workshops, the creation of goals has been deified throughout my life. But what if all of that was misguided from the start?

Perhaps setting goals isn’t the holy grail of living a good and successful life. Or, perhaps how we function around goals is misguided.

My allegiance to goal setting has been on rocky ground for years. By the age of eight or nine I was creating lists of long-term goals, breaking them down into 10-, 5-, and 1-year goals. From there I’d dissect them down further to monthly, weekly, and daily goals. I’d stand back from that long list and smile with a sense of accomplishment. I’ve got goals!

Then like a house of cards, inevitably the entire enterprise came crashing down because one or two variables changed, upsetting the entire plan.

My brain would say “It must be that your plan wasn’t the best plan” and I’d go about reworking the goals and sub-goals list again. And again. And again. For years. For decades. Habits are tricky to break, especially habits that have been pummeled into your mindset so thoroughly that breaking them feels like it’s tantamount to personal betrayal.

It’s not like I haven’t accomplished things throughout the years. I’ve done a lot. I feel good about that. But when I step back from what I’ve done I realize that few of the accomplishments to which I can point to and be proud of or feel deeply fulfilled by came about with a goal or plan in mind.

Increasingly I’m reading articles that counter the prevailing notion that specific, rigid goals are always helpful. The pervasive self-help narrative about setting goals and how to achieve them is crumbling around the reality that it simply doesn’t work for many people. Life’s not a linear path. Life is lived via twists and turns, not straight-line trajectories to the goals we set.

“Goals in themselves aren’t bad,” says Lisa Ordonez, vice dean at University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. “It’s how we treat them.”

One of the biggest problems with goals is that we often choose the wrong ones. We parrot the goals we’re taught to want by family, friends, and society. We also set the groundwork for our goals when quite young, a time when we probably know little about what we’re going to want to do or be as adults.

One of the first problems is the targets people choose, experts say. Many aren’t necessarily our own ambitions, but what we think we should do.

Setting highly specific goals also cement us to outcomes. It’s the outcomes we focus on rather than the process which is where the joy and satisfaction live.

That focus on outcome alone feeds into a hamster-wheel mentality. The Bhagavad Gita, the fundamental Hindu text, communicated the downside of this perpetual motion 2,200 years ago: “Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”

In fact, research suggests that focusing on goals too much can have opposite the intended effect. People who visualize their goals are less likely to achieve them. Rather than focus on goals (outcomes, specific targets), it’s typically best to focus on the process.

Famed blogger Seth Godin wrote about the necessity of process which he calls The Practice. I reviewed Godin’s book having found the book quite inspiring.

The main thing I got out of The Practice is validation, one more respected thought leader’s voice reiterating that great work comes from one’s own practice of consistently doing the work, whatever that work might be, and letting outcomes manifest as a result.

Godin focuses on “creative” work, but the truth is all work if done amid a service or gift mentality can be creative. Whether you’re an artist, designer, or retail clerk, if you undertake your work with a problem solving and improvement focus you inevitably engage your creative abilities.

What constitutes a “creative” is also expanded to a real-world view in the book when Godin points out that virtually all our endeavors in life have creative aspects. We are all, in essence, creatives.

Goals also limit us. They constrain the playing field, and we end up navigating toward our goals only within the confines of that mental space. Even in corporate settings goals can have unintended effects.

In her research on goal-setting, Ordonez found that corporate incentives may boost performance, but employees also become more likely to cheat, act selfishly, feel demotivated and even be less likely to learn what they’re supposed to. What she and her co-researchers have found is so compelling that, they wrote in one recent paper, “We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.”

“The first couple of times I presented this to executives, I was waiting for them to say, ‘Go jump off a bridge, this is crazy academic stuff’,” Ordonez says. “Instead, they were like ‘Oh, yeah – this happens all the time’.”

One example was a call centre that set a goal for its employees: keep the average call time under two minutes. The result? Employees would call a number and, when the person answered, immediately hang up. They met their goal.

Let me be clear. Some form of goal setting can be good, at least for some people. Unfortunately, the word goal has a connotation of a specific destination, a well-defined, final result, and that’s not how life works most of the time.

Lately, I’ve been using the concept of “directions” to guide my day-to-day pursuits. I don’t think of my destinations as goals, just simply directions. I’m moving in a certain direction, and I build into my expectations that I’m going to meander down different paths, try unexpected things, and learn new information that informs the adjustment to my path in that direction. Or, and equally valid, what I encounter along the way might send me a clear message that the direction in which I was headed isn’t best for me and an about face turnaround and rethink is in order. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Move in a desired direction. Act. Learn. Adjust the direction or abandon it entirely and focus on a new direction.

Ruggeri writes about using goals as a compass, a concept similar to directions. The main point is to not expect a direct path to any specific goal and to expect the goals to sometimes shift altogether.

“Use goals as a compass, and not as a GPS,” says Ordonez, echoing a metaphor preferred by Robbins, Shapiro and others. “If you allow goals to guide your general direction as a compass, then when things change, you can realign much easier because you know that goal. Or if the weather changes, and now there’s somewhere else you want to be, you don’t have to miss those things.”

Metaphors being the powerful mental organization tools they are, I searched for one that might best convey my thinking on this subject. Most of us have heard of the “dangling carrot” imagery, the carrot dangled just out of reach so that it serves as a constant incentive to reach for it. Sounds good in theory. But it turns out that dangling the wrong carrots or dangling them at all can be counterproductive.

Closely associated with the dangling carrot concept is that of carrots and sticks, a metaphor for using reward and punishment to induce desired behaviors.

As I was thinking about the dangling carrot metaphor as it relates to the article that inspired this post, the idea of a farm field full of carrots came to mind. Rather than dangling a single carrot in front of us, perhaps the wiser approach is to move toward a carrot but a carrot that’s just one of many planted in the field. As you walk through the field on your way to the carrot, you encounter other interesting carrots. Some might be brighter, bigger, or a more pleasant shape than the one you were targeting. Maybe one of them will be an even better carrot for you. You get the idea. Walk through the field of carrots in the direction of your target carrot but pay attention to all the carrots along the way that could end up being a better fit for your desires and needs.

Despite how it sounds, it turns out that living with fewer goals, and with purpose, direction and openness instead, may be an even bigger challenge than sticking to a plan. But it can be more freeing and fulfilling.

Perhaps we should all try living with fewer goals, or at least more loosely held goals, and instead focus on the process, the practice, the day-to-day work that produces great outcomes even when those outcomes might not look exactly like our original goal.

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