For the first 20 years of my career, I was a goals acolyte. I set them, recited them, printed them, reviewed them, and shared them. I turned my long-term goals into medium-term goals into short-term goals into today’s tasks. I even made sure my goals were S.M.A.R.T.
No longer.
After 39 revolutions around the sun (I just turned 39), I now believe two things...
- Goals are massively over-applied to areas where they shouldn’t be
- Goals have serious downsides, which few people talk about
What caused me to have this huge shift?
Here’s what I realized...
Goal setting is based on false and dangerous premises that few people actually consider.
The Fundamental Goal Assumption is that one of the best ways to lead a better life is to choose and pursue a long-term future you find the most desirable and attainable right now. In so doing, the core assumptions are…
- Today’s preference will be tomorrow’s
- The future is predictable
In If you want to be massively successful, do NOT set ambitious goals, according to studies, I list out the surprising downsides of goals and share fascinating research from the field of artificial intelligence on an alternative approach which has been proven to work better in many cases.
In this article, I want to take on the Fundamental Goal Assumption directly point-by-point...
1. Goals assume that today’s preference will be tomorrow’s. This is wrong.
“Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
Our preferences, personality, and values change way more than we predict up into our 50s. This is known as the End Of History Illusion, because we erroneously assume that who we are now is who we will be...
The field of adult development has come to a similar finding. Rather than plateauing when we reach adulthood…
...we keep growing the sequential stages…
These stages come approximately every five years or so for people who are open to it. This is known as the 5-Year Rule.
Another fascinating research finding is that we are terrible at predicting how achieving goals will make us feel. According Harvard researcher, Daniel Gilbert, people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events. As a result of this bias, we overestimate the impact that many goals will have on our life. Below is the fundamental point he makes in his must-read book, Stumbling On Happiness…
We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.
Now that we understand how difficult it is to predict the future internally, it’s important to consider how difficult it is to predict externally...
2. Goals assume that the future is predictable. It isn’t.
Goals assume that the world that exists will be the one that exists tomorrow. It assumes that the best opportunities we have today will be the ones we have tomorrow.
The reality is that the opportunities we have today will be vastly different than the ones we have tomorrow. We’ll have different relationships, monetary resources, skills, and mindset. There will be surprises, which create new opportunities for us. In addition, the world will be vastly different. As a result, we should keep our goals open and fluid so that we can stay focused on the best opportunities in each moment.
Below are some of the examples that show the difficulty of long-term goal setting...
Let’s say you set a 15-year goal when you’re 20. Even if you’re single at that point, it isn’t out of the picture that in the following 10 years, you will be married and have kids and be in a completely different stage of life with new opinions on what is most important and who you are. Furthermore, you will likely be in a different job, company, and potentially a different sector. Finally, it is hard to predict the impact that starting a business could have. It could lead to failure or completely remake your life.
Let’s say you set a 15-year goal when you’re 35. When your 35 and just beginning a family, there is a non-zero probability that you will be unexpectedly divorced in the next 15 years. Or that one of your parents might become sick and require extra care. Or that you will enter a mid-life crisis. Aging is more complicated and brutal than most people take into account.
Let's say you set a 15-year goal when you 're 50. While you are still be processing a mid-life crisis, it would be hard to predict how much your happiness will likely rise in the future. Most people under-estimate how much life satisfaction increases in older age.
These examples only show the unpredictability of our own life. It is even harder to predict world events. Literally no one in the world predicted that 2020 would be what it was on so many levels. Think about that.
What’s surprising about the randomness of the world is that we continue to believe that the world is so predictable and ordered despite the contrary evidence. There are a few reasons for this according to research…
- We are fooled by the predictability of the past. This is known as the problem of induction. Observations of past events don’t mean they will happen in the future, but we often think they do. The most famous example of this is the chicken dilemma illustrated by philosopher Bertrand Russell, “Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”
- We rewrite history to make it seem like it was bound to happen. This is known as the narrative fallacy. Popularized by Nassim Taleb in the Black Swan, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to simplify and summarize past events into stories that create causation between these events and give us the impression of understanding without actual understanding.
- We blind ourselves to anomalies. This is known as theory-induced blindness. Theory-induced blindness is our tendency to dismiss or not see data that doesn't fit into our theories of the world. As a result of it, we quickly write-off large random events as “aberrations” before things go back to “normal.” But, as Nassim Taleb aptly points out, extremely large unpredictable events (what he calls Black Swans) are bound to happen, and they can be so big that they essentially “wipe out” gains from decades of past predictability. So, we shouldn’t just think of black swans as small aberrations, but as fundamental parts of the map.
- We have fundamental and unconscious beliefs about the world that are pollyannaish. I came across this idea via the fascinating work of researcher Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, author of Shattered Assumptions. Based on her research of trauma, she found that we all develop models of reality, which shape our expectations about ourselves and the world. Furthermore, some of our most fundamental assumptions are actually unconscious. Finally, she makes the case that our fundamental assumptions are (1) The world is benevolent. (2) The world is meaningful. (3) The self is worthy. While these beliefs can be very functional most of the time, they also create a distorted sense of reality that doesn’t take into account the world’s randomness. She states in her book, “The distributional principles of justice and control imply a sense of order and comprehensibility. Randomness essentially denies the meaningfulness of events. There is no way to make sense of why particular events happen to particular people; it is a matter of chance alone. In recognizing randomness, an individual must accept that ultimately there is nothing one can do or be that will serve as a protection from misfortune or a guarantor of good fortune; the person is not involved ‘in shaping one’s own destiny as well as one’s daily experience.’” This statement particularly rings true right now. I write this on the eve of renowned entrepreneur Tony Hsieh's tragic death at the age of 46 as a result of a house fire during Thanksgiving week.
So where do we go from here?
Here are my personal takeaways...
First, goals are a tool that have their time and place
The goal of this article isn't to say that all goal setting is bad. On the contrary, it is to propose that medium-term and long-term goals in areas with high uncertainty can backfire. But, short-term goals in areas with more certainty can be quite effective.
Second, embrace the randomness of the human condition
"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour." Willa Cather (1902)
The world is more random and unpredictable than we like to admit. It took me a long time to internalize this. But once I did, it actually became a positive.
It led me to focus less on predicting the future and more on situational awareness and preparedness. As self-made billionaire investor Howard Marks says, "You can't predict, but you can prepare."
Furthermore, rather than resisting randomness, I started to create as much of it as I could through relationship serendipity, experimentation, and learning.
Instead of worrying how randomness might take me off my long-term plans, I focused on how the pleasant surprises it delivered.
Third, be open to a new alternative to goal setting
For this, I recommend reading my deeply researched article, If you want to be massively successful, do NOT set ambitious goals, according to studies.