Set and Achieve your Goals using Science
Almost everyone has experienced New Year’s resolutions that haven’t panned out. The feeling of disappointment and frustration that can arise when learning a new skill or when pursuing a fitness goal often leads to distraction-seeking, whether it be watching TV or engaging in other mindless pursuits that don’t help us grow. But if you are someone who wants to get better, what can you do to increase your chances of success? Several scientific studies have examined this question. The following is an actionable guide on how to use that knowledge to set and achieve your goals. Let’s begin.
Setting your goal
Notice that I named this section “Setting your goal” and not “Setting your goals”. One of the simplest things you can do to help you follow through on your goal is to just select one goal. If there are many things you want to pursue, write them all down and imagine what your life will look like in 12 weeks (more on this timeframe soon) if you pursued or didn’t pursue each of them. It’s often more useful to examine what your life would be like if you were not to do something. This will bring about feelings of potential regret and will clarify how your new skills might help you in life.
You can maintain and improve upon other areas of your life during your main goal pursuit. If, for example, you choose to write a book, it doesn’t mean you should use that as moral licencing to start eating badly or reduce the quality of your sleep, exercise or relationships.
After you’ve chosen a worthwhile goal, stick to that one goal for 12 weeks. The reason for this duration can be looked at from two different angles.
Articulate a lofty goal
Why 12 weeks? If you were to choose a goal that was too simple, 12 weeks would be more than enough time to achieve it. But it turns out that if you were to go for a goal that was too easy, you would be less likely to achieve it. This might sound counterintuitive but the reason for this is that when a goal is too easy, it doesn’t hit the sweet spot at which something new is challenging (and a little frustrating) and therefore engaging when attempting it and rewarding when completing it. You will also quit if you choose a goal that is too difficult or impossible. The frustration of pursuing a goal without any in-between victories would end up being too demotivating.
On the other hand, if you choose a goal that is at an appropriate level of difficulty, you will hit that sweet spot of frustration/learning, and even if your goal requires more than 12 weeks to complete, you still give ourself 12 weeks initially to achieve it because any longer would short-circuit with our natural short-sightedness. At the end of the 12 weeks, if you are not done, simply give yourself more time if you choose to do so.
The way a goal is articulated also plays a huge role in whether it is achieved. Specifically, you must make your goal as specific as possible. Common goals such as “exercise more” or “read” are too vague and lack quantifiability. There are two broad categories of goals: measurable and “unmeasurable”. Let’s look at an example of how you can make a goal in each category more specific.
Measurable goal example — running
It’s all well and good that you want to improve your Zone 2 cardio with some running and you have decided to make it your main goal next quarter. However, if your goal is simply “running”, it can lead to a lack of motivation because it’s too broad a goal and it’s hard to quantify (measure) how you’re doing. Instead, you ought to make your goal more specific. For example “In 12 weeks I will have established a habit of running a 5k, 3 times a week at the gym before work” — be as specific as possible. For many people, it can be helpful to sign up for a race in the future. The danger with that is that people can sometimes identify with the achievement of the goal itself rather than with the learning and development process. But competition can be a very useful means of creating a different version of yourself. Just keep in mind that if something were to happen and you didn’t get the time you expected at that 10k at the end of 12 weeks, you shouldn’t ignore the fact that you were someone who never ran, and now you are someone who runs 4 times a week.
“Unmeasurable” goal example — writing poetry
This type of, usually, creative goal is in a way trickier because it seems more influenced by the nebulous creative process and it seems hard to qualify. You don’t want your goal to be “Enter a poetry competition in 12 weeks and win it”. You wouldn’t want your estimation of your creative work to come from the opinion of critics. A lot of people believe that when it comes to writing poetry you need to wait for inspiration from a Muse. But this is largely outdated thinking. It’s typical for novelists to complain of writer’s block whereas journalists are too busy for such luxuries given their deadlines. For the goal of writing poetry, I would put down something like “Write poetry for 20 minutes every morning, keep an anthology of poetry on your person to read at free moments and end the day with reading a poet who writes in a particular style to find my voice. Send some of my work to a friend or family member who can give me constructive criticism and comments.” This example might be badly thought out because I know nothing of the process of writing poetry but what I’m trying to point out is that a goal needs to be hyper-specific. This way you have a measurable quality even to “unmeasurable” goals plus you have a framework that you can modify along your journey — the articulation of a goal isn’t set in stone.
Write it down
For some reason, even for young people who have only known a digital existence, grabbing an actual notebook and an actual pencil to write out your goals makes a world of difference. It makes you more honest and more likely to stick to a declaration made with your hand, in your handwriting.
Be specific and always ask “why?” when you make a statement. At one point I considered making YouTube content. But by committing my thoughts to paper I discovered that I didn’t have an interest in video editing, speaking in front of a camera or sharing a message in video form. I did find out however that I wanted to not have a boss (or colleagues) and to find a creative outlet. With those insights, I was able to define that my dream life consisted of being self-employed and I was thus able to direct my research towards skills required for people who work for themselves. What drives you?
Avoidance vs approach goals
Another important observation, when it comes to defining goals, has to do with whether you will choose an avoidance goal or an approach goal.
To give an example of an avoidance goal you would say “I want to stop eating sugar”. Avoidance goals tend to have words like “don’t”, “no” or “won’t”. These goals are typically harder to measure. In the sugar example, sure, you could say you’re going to avoid sugar 6 days a week, meaning that a day without sugar is a win, but it’s harder to measure the little wins you would have achieved throughout the day where you said “no” to temptation. Also, many avoidance goals have the subtext that you desire to do the thing you are avoiding, even though you know it’s bad for you. Our minds are more than capable of rationalising this way: “I can have a cookie today, I ran 5 miles”, or “This is the last time, I’ll start again tomorrow”. All this isn’t to say that avoidance goals should be… avoided. But approach goals typically have a sense of pride associated with them and they tend to be more motivating whereas avoidance goals are associated with feelings of relief. But some people are motivated more by a sense of fear than they are by a feeling of accomplishment. Know yourself and choose wisely.
Define your goal when at a low empathy gap
The time when you define your goal can also play a very important role in adherence. If, for example, you have decided to sit down and define a running goal, you are much more likely to stick to it if you articulate your goal after a hard workout rather than on a lazy Sunday morning when you’re watching TV and eating yesterday’s leftover pizza. This is what a low empathy gap means. You are looking for a time in which you feel similarly to how you will feel when you are pursuing or achieving your goal.
Build an emergency reserve
It is undesirable, and often impossible, to pursue your goal in such a fashion that you cannot miss a single bout of work over the entire 84-day period. The stress of “falling short” can be excruciatingly disappointing, especially to perfectionists. The solution is to give yourself 3 get-out-of-jail-free cards. Build it into the system. Give yourself 3 days in which you can take the day off, no questions asked. If you are a busy person, you already know full well that something will come up. This way you can take a guilt-free day off and increase the good feelings, or at any rate reduce the bad feelings, during the setbacks that inevitably come up during the bumpy ride of goal pursuit. There is no reason to quit just because you had a minor setback and you can’t achieve “pure perfection”.
The fresh start effect
This tip could easily fit into the next section below on “Pursuing your goal” but I’m putting it here because it might influence when you define your goal in the first place.
There is a feeling, called “The fresh start effect”, that we can make big changes during a period of “transition” in our lives. These times can be: moving to a new house or city, changing jobs, getting married, New Year’s Day, or even the start of the week. These periods are great times to start a new habit or start pursuing a big goal. They are naturally motivating events that can help us form our new and improved identities with an initial boost. They are also the times when it is OK to begin multiple new habits.
Pursuing your goal
You have defined your goal specifically and are ready to get to work. But you feel as though you’ve been here before and don’t always engage in bouts of work. To begin, you should also define specifically when you are to engage in a bout of work. “Do x on Tuesdays between 8:00 and 9:00” is better than “Do x a couple of times a week”. For those who have shift jobs be as specific as you can.
Don’t let people know
There are some potentially positive effects of making your goals and desires public. It’s inspiring to see a person who has documented their journey from the very beginning, beating the odds and accomplishing incredible things.
Unfortunately, for most of us, this is the wrong way to go. Declaring a goal to others can all by itself cause you to quit. What happens is when you tell others your goals, people tend to be nice and encouraging. Upon hearing others say that you are attempting something difficult and that you are certainly capable of achieving it, you get a dopamine spike satisfying enough, and addictive enough, to make you happy just by telling others what your goal is — without needing to pursue it. Dopamine is tricky. Telling someone very critical and unfriendly what your goals are and hearing their doubt can serve your purpose better sometimes — not that this is recommended either. For the most part, it’s better not to tell anyone about your goals beforehand.
Accountability buddies are very popular in extreme learning cycles these days but they only work if you know the right person. It’s great if you have someone in your life who will check your work at the requested times and who will also be constructively critical but those people are hard to come by.
Visualise
There are proponents of visualisation that are squarely on the positive visualisation side and those that are on the opposite side. In fact, according to science, they are both wrong. In the words of Obi-Wan: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”. So how can you use visualisation to your advantage?
Before you are about to engage in a bout of work, gauge your mood and decide whether you are on the motivated end of the spectrum or the demotivated end of the spectrum. If you are on the demotivated end, you should visualise how your life will be worse at the end of 12 weeks if you were to quit your goal pursuit. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the idea behind it is that when we are demotivated we often feel that our work is pointless and we look for distractions. We rationalise our inertia and can get into a rut. Visualising how your life will be worse if you quit shows you (and scares you) that quitting will leave you with lower self-esteem, fewer opportunities and a sense of wasted time. Visualisation can take anywhere between 1 and 5 minutes.
On the other hand, if you feel very motivated and ready to get to work, you can still take a minute or so to visualise how your life will be better at the end of 12 weeks, having achieved your goal and having become a better version of yourself. This short time meditating on your future will blow wind in your sails and will reduce the natural occurrence of feelings of distraction during the middle of a work session (more on this later).
Random intermittent rewards
Tempering the effects of dopamine is crucial in the pursuit of goals. For a more detailed explanation please refer to my article on leveraging dopamine here. In brief, dopamine is the molecule of motivation and to some extent, reward. Every time you do something you enjoy, like eating a chocolate chip cookie with milk 😋, you get a little release of dopamine. The problem is that with each dopamine hit you also create an expectation and desire for a future repeat of the dopamine-spiking experience. Not only that, but the amount of whatever you indulge in needs to be greater and greater in the following times to match the expectation. It’s part of the reason why recreational drug takers need to increase the dosage over time to experience the same effects. So how do we solve this problem? This is where random intermittent rewards come in.
Random intermittent rewards are just what they sound like. A goal pursuit is divided into several work bouts. At the end of a work bout which you deem to have been successful (you didn’t miss a rep or set, you ran the distance in the workout program, you wrote 1000 words) you delegate the decision as to whether you will “celebrate” that work bout to a coin. If you had a successful work bout you simply flip a coin. If the coin lands heads, you celebrate. If it lands tails, you don’t. And by “celebrate” I don’t mean cracking open the champagne one week into your goal pursuit. The reward can be something as simple as a delicious (and healthy) beverage, allowing yourself a TV series episode or even just a mental pat on the back. It may indeed be the case that you won’t be able to control yourself from having good thoughts when you flip tails (these thoughts are good in moderation) but do your best and don’t exaggerate. Random intermittent rewards ought to be applied even when it comes to the completion of the goal itself. This can be impossible to do for some goals but, if you can, you should sometimes not celebrate the completion of even an extremely challenging 12-week+ goal.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that when it comes to “unhealthy” stuff, like eating cookies, you can maintain the same level of satisfaction, without needing to outdo yourself in successive goes, by making it a rare occurrence.
The middle problem
There is an issue called “the middle problem” (TMP) that occurs both in the middle of an individual work bout and in the middle of a goal pursuit period. TMP refers to a period where we feel discouraged, bored, demotivated, lose focus and are likely to quit. So what do we do about it?
The first step is to simply acknowledge that TMP exists. Simply knowing its existence can be enough all by itself to greatly mitigate its effects. But, there are strategies and tactics for each of the two times TMP occurs to give you an extra boost.
When TMP occurs in the middle of a work bout, even having acknowledged that your feelings are normal, you may still need an extra boost of concentration. How do you do that? Simply pick an object in your visual field that you can see clearly and look at it, and only it, for any time between 30–90 seconds (the longer the better, and it’s best to use a timer so you don’t have to think about the time). This act engages the mechanisms of alertness and attention. You can do this several times during a work bout as required. Another thing you can do is divide your work bout into several smaller time increments, especially during the middle section. This is called chunking. As an example, if you were doing a 45-minute run you could divide the middle 15 minutes into three 5-minute chunks during which you could increase your speed, listen to a couple of special songs (see temptation bundling below) or perform the focus enhancing exercise above.
When TMP occurs in the middle of a goal pursuit period you follow the same principle. The middle of 12 weeks is 2–4 weeks, during which you will likely need to divide your goal further into psychologically manageable subgoals (chunking). A reason why a goal pursuit period should last no longer than 12 weeks is so the middle is smaller — because it’s natural to have this lull in motivation at that time. Depending on the goal, you are more than welcome to reduce the time to completion, making the middle smaller still.
Conversely, same as “the fresh start effect”, there is a natural increase in motivation that occurs towards the end of goal pursuit. This is something to keep in mind and look forward to once you go over the middle hump.
Temptation bundling
There are many things we must do in our lives that we simply don’t enjoy: doing the laundry, washing the dishes and cardio are common drudgeries. This is where temptation bundling comes in.
Temptation bundling is the act of pairing an unpleasant experience with a pleasant experience. For example, you walk on the treadmill while you play video games, or you watch TV while you do the laundry.
The one rule of temptation bundling is that you ought to forgo engaging in the pleasureful experience elsewhere in life. You must only listen to that album or podcast when you wash the dishes and at no other time, otherwise it will lose its impact. That’s what the research seems to indicate, but I listen to my podcasts at night when I’m doing all sorts of housework and it’s worked well for me over the last few years. Having said that, the housework isn’t too awful and I do keep a few albums and songs in special reserve for the tough moments that occasionally come about.
Own it
Imagine you could get hold of the best nutritionist, the best physio and the best trainer who told you exactly what to do and when to do it to accomplish your marathon goal. Counterintuitive as this may sound, under that setup, you would be less likely to maintain motivation than if you were to go about it alone. Having the best nutritionist, the best physio and the best trainer are all well and good, but the critical tweak you’d need to make to maintain motivation, get more enjoyment out of the journey and feel a greater sense of accomplishment at the end, would be to have more agency in the decision-making process of your goal.
If you have the opportunity to receive expert advice during your goal pursuit, you’d be a fool not to take it. But remember to treat it as just that — advice. You are the one pursuing your goal and you are doing it for yourself. Self-experimentation and self-discovery is what it’s all about. If you were to robotically follow someone else’s instructions you would end up losing something very important — the sense of accomplishment that comes at the end of a rewarding journey. Put yourself in the driver’s seat.
Don’t ‘post-it’ note it
I will end with one more piece of practical advice. It’s popular for people to put up an inspirational quote or motivational reminder somewhere where they will regularly see it, like on the fridge, computer screen or doorway. Unfortunately, this has a fleeting effect. In reality, our brain simply ignores anything it sees regularly. Anything you see and experience many times throughout the day just gets filtered out.
The best thing you can do is to clearly define your goal, make a detailed plan for when you will engage in pursuing your goal, and create as much of a distraction-free environment as you can.
