Why I'm tired of goals

Laetitia@Work #55

Happy New Year!

January always comes with goals and objectives for the new year. I understand why people like them. It can push you to do better. I remember with fondness the year I ran a half-marathon and how that particular goal pushed me to spend so much time running outdoors (definitely my personal peak-endorphin-year). I also understand how this January ritual can be valuable to take stock and set your priorities for the year.

It's the pressure of setting goals that I reject, their monomaniacal nature, the fact that they can make you feel like shit... Also, how can you make “I wish no one I love will die this year” or “I don’t want to get cancer” into a goal? You can’t really. Plus some goals can do more harm than good. They are often binary: either you’re a winner or you’re a loser, and there’s nothing in between. You know how people can enter a marathon (or one of those Ironman triathlons) and literally destroy their bodies just to cross the finishing line? Or climb the Everest past the point of no return just to reach the summit (to then die on the way down)? Yes, there are times when goals can literally kill you! 

In The Motion of the Body Through Space (such an amazing novel!), Lionel Shriver tells a compelling story about the potentially destructive nature of goals. Remington, forced into early retirement, becomes consumed by the goal of running a marathon and then an Ironman triathlon. Ignoring his wife and all his other interests, he does nothing but train, becomes enthralled by a young (and very irritating) personal trainer who pushes him to focus only on his fitness goal and harms his health abominably. He’s eventually saved from certain death during the race by his wife. (Schadenfreude: the young trainer ends up handicapped in middle age.)

Apparently setting goals the right way requires proper skills. It’s a science. I was very impressed by the book Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away by Annie Duke 📚 Here are some thoughts about the negative externalities of goals inspired by Duke’s analysis of the “myopia of goals” 👇💡

When goals are inflexible, they can kill you

When I started reading Duke’s chapter devoted to goals, I immediately thought about the (real) story of those Everest climbers who died in the late 1990s because they couldn’t give up their goal (summiting) in time to save their lives. I was not surprised to see that Duke devotes several pages of her book to that story. She also developed multiple examples of athletes who pushed through the pain of a broken leg or foot just to pass the finish line of a race.

Why do these runners disregard their pain to the point where continuing to push through means that some body part breaks? And again, after the injury, why do they continue on, putting their future ability to run another race at risk? Because there’s a finish line. Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don’t. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little. (...) goals have a dark side. [They] interfere with rational quitting behavior (...) grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. (Annie Duke)

The binary nature of pass-fail goals is dangerous. It can prevent you from ever getting started. Running 20 kilometers counts for nothing if your goal is to run a marathon. And yet 20 kilometers is so much more than running five or zero! For fear of not reaching a pass-fail goal, you may choose to do nothing instead.

The fear of falling short makes us not want to start (…) as soon as you set a goal or a target, you put yourself immediately in the loss, at least in relation to your distance from the goal. (…) Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There’s no partial credit given. (...) The shame is that those finish lines are often arbitrary. (Annie Duke)

Getting started and doing something (getting physically active, for example) is so much better than doing nothing. Goals are often framed in such a way as to make no room for progress, no room for “good enough”. If your goal is to quit smoking, you may see the one time you smoke a couple of cigarettes with a friend as a failure and then decide to abandon your binary goal and resume smoking like a chimney instead. But the world is not divided into neat categories of winners & losers, smokers & non smokers, drinkers & non drinkers. As with most things, it’s a continuum. If you “fail” your binary goal and end up giving up on any kind of progress, how is that useful?

Ants and the explore/exploit dilemma

The part I liked best in Annie Duke’s book was her pages about ants. (And now you know why I chose to illustrate my newsletter with a picture of ants! No, it wasn’t random.) Ants are a very disciplined species and all individuals serve the collective. If you’ve ever watched an anthill closely, you may have noticed that there are many ants following trails… and a few weird ones doing random things. 

Ants use pheromones to communicate. When there’s a strong food source, the first ants that notice it will leave pheromones to signal their fellow ants that there’s something worth pursuing. And pretty soon, a long line of ants will form to exploit a valuable food source. But a minority of pioneer ants will continue to wander around seemingly randomly to explore the environment in search of the next opportunities. They appear to be undisciplined. But they actually serve the collective in a different way by preparing the colony for plans B and C.

When it comes to finding a balance between exploring the environment for new food sources and exploiting known successful sources, they have it completely right. When it comes to addressing the explore/exploit dilemma, ants are the species we need to emulate!

The ants strike the right balance between exploiting and exploring. The strength of the pheromone trail determines the percentage of foragers that continue to explore, but no matter how strong that scent is, the number of ants exploring never drops to zero, which makes perfect sense. The planet that the ants inhabit always contains some uncertainty. Things change. (...) Ants have done extremely well for themselves. They have survived for more than one hundred million years. They’ve thrived in every kind of climate and territory. They’ve become so good at surviving, in part, because they’re always exploring. (Annie Duke)

We humans tend to address the explore/exploit dilemma as individuals (rather than as groups like the ants do). But most importantly we generally devote too few resources to exploring new things. It’s often only when we have to (when we lose a job / client / food source) that we may consider doing some exploring (learning new things and meeting new people). And fixed goals don’t help us become better at exploring. In fact, fixed goals in a changing world make us miss many valuable opportunities.

If there were no uncertainty and the world didn’t change, that wouldn’t be a problem, because whatever North Star you were striving for would not only be the exact right North Star for you but also would remain as such. Of course, the world is uncertain and the world does change. That means that our goals ought to change in response. But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information. (Annie Duke)

If you don’t yet know this super famous selective attention test, try it 👇It’s a great illustration of how goals can make you blind to your environment (bad at exploring).

Goals are “balancing acts” supposed to help us maximise our expected value. For example, if you want to become more physically active and spend more time outside, you may choose to make “running a half-marathon” your goal. It’s more motivating (and potentially fun) than just “running regularly”. But thus your goal that was a proxy for something else (getting fit, for example) becomes fixed and turns into a pass-fail thing. Thus it can become a stupidly fixed object that will no longer serve its original purpose (health or fun), like when you run with a broken leg to the finish line and end up handicapped for months/years. (Apparently so many people push through the pain to pass the finish line, you wouldn’t believe)

👉 Also read The Uncertainty Mindset & the Future of Work. Laetitia@Work #26 about Vaughn Tan’s idea that to pursue innovation, a team must be given open-ended goals (rather than fixed ones).

The power of unless and maybe not

To avoid escalation of commitment and to mitigate the dangerousness of fixed pass-fail goals, you need safeguards, kill criteria decided in advance to make sure your goals will not go against your own long-term interests. (If I’m not at point P by time T, then I’ll abandon the goal and turn back). It will help avoid harmful outcomes, but also create openings to reassess and make sure there aren’t better opportunities (food sources) along the way that you may want to pursue instead of the original goal.

An “unless” is a powerful thing. Adding a few well-thought-out unlesses to our goals will help us achieve the flexibility that we’re seeking, be more responsive to the changing landscape, and reduce escalation of commitment to losing causes. (...) When you set a goal, creating a list of kill criteria gives you the unlesses that you need to be more rational about when it’s the right time to walk away. (Annie Duke)

It also means you need to regularly make a cost-benefit analysis along the way. Is what I’m pursuing still worth it? Do I still want it? Have I changed? Remember that knowing when to abandon a goal is a more valuable skill in life than cultivating grit for grit’s sake in the pursuit of useless or harmful goals. Remember the exploit/explore dilemma and choose to err on the side of exploration.

Last but not least, we should stop measuring our success by how far we are from the finish line, and instead focus on how far we are from where we started. If the goal you picked makes it impossible to see and value progress, then perhaps it’s not a good one.

🎤 I recorded a podcast episode (in English) with Carolyn Childers & Lindsay Kapla. Is Pursuing Productivity a Mistake? 🎧 is part of the 3rd season of the New Rules of Business by Chief: “Productivity is tanking, and executives are scrambling for solutions to boost output. But what if continually cranking up the dial isn’t actually getting us anywhere? Is it finally time to replace this 250-year-old metric of ‘success’?”

💡Check out the last three articles I wrote for Welcome to the Jungle:

• Travailler plus… pour travailler plus : merci, mais non merci (in French)

• What a dash of laziness can do for you (in English)

• 10 événements qui ont marqué le travail en 2022… et feront 2023 (in French)

📺 My next “Café Freelance” event (with Freelance.com) is about the possible conflicts & disagreements between freelancers & their clients and how to address them. 🇫🇷 C'est pas ma faute, c'est l'autre 👉👈 My panel will feature Alexis Minchella and Lilas Louise Maréchaud. Stéphanie Joncart will be there too. Join us January 20 at 9:30 CET!

🎓 I’ll do a webinar with HEC Alumni on February 2 👉 Conférence HEC Life Project: “EN FINIR AVEC LA PRODUCTIVITE ! Comment repenser la création de valeur au travail ?” (in 🇫🇷) Join us at 6:30pm CET!

🎙️ Nouveau Départ will resume for a new season in just a few weeks. 🎧 Subscribe to receive our future podcasts directly in your inbox! (in 🇫🇷)

Miscellaneous

🧑‍🍳 Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors, Julia Moskin, The New York Times, January 2023: “The decision comes as Noma and many other elite restaurants are facing scrutiny of their treatment of the workers, many of them paid poorly or not at all, who produce and serve these exquisite dishes. The style of fine dining that Noma helped create and promote around the globe — wildly innovative, labor-intensive and vastly expensive — may be undergoing a sustainability crisis.”

🧓🏽 As Asian Societies Age, ‘Retirement’ Just Means More Work, Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida, The New York Times, January 2023: “Japan isn’t the only country in East Asia where older people feel they have no choice but to keep working. In South Korea, with a poverty rate among older people close to 40 percent, a similar proportion of those 65 and older are still working. In Hong Kong, one in eight older residents works. The ratio is more than a quarter in Japan — compared to 18 percent in the United States.”

💥 Mutually Assured Engagement: Why Social Media Conflicts Are Disguised Collaborations, The Ruffian, Ian Leslie, January 2023: “When I watch an idiotic debate unfold in my feed and successfully suppress my instinct to join in if only to point out how silly it is (…) I sometimes experience an absurd twinge of indignation: Why can’t people see I’m not taking part? The bitter truth is that there are no incentives to abstain from the game. You don’t get any likes or retweets for the posts you don’t make. You receive no external validation for silence. I fantasise about a system in which people, under certain circumstances, are somehow rewarded with status points for not engaging.”

Happy New Year to you all, with or without goals! If you do have goals for 2023, I hope you chose them mindfully 🤗 In any case, be flexible with them!