Speak little, do much. - Benjamin Franklin
Some time ago, I had a conversation with my friend who tends to share his plans and goals on social media. For him, this builds a sense of commitment and accountability. I'm different, I rarely share my goals and am very careful with whom I do. As it turns out, there are good reasons for operating in stealth mode.
Fake success and dopamine
Any time we set a goal, we have a certain motivation behind it. This motivation helps us build momentum, and pushes us on a way to achieving the destination. One of the hormones that control our motivation is dopamine, responsible for temporary pleasure. When we accomplish what we planned, our brain releases dopamine, rewarding us for our hard work.
When you communicate your goals, your brain is being tricked into believing that you have already accomplished it. It releases part of dopamine that was reserved for actual success and gives you a fake sense of accomplishment. This leads to lowered motivation, it doesn't necessary mean you won't accomplish your goal, but you just made your life harder.
I came across this effect while reading “The Art of Impossible” by Steven Kotler. It's a great book if you want to learn more about proper goal setting and motivation. Kotler's book set me on a course to dig deeper, and I came across an interesting paper, “When Intentions Go Public” from 2009. Let’s see what else can happen if you share your goal.
Misdirection
Let's imagine you know little math, and you want to learn addition because that's the skill you currently need. You start the process and at some point somebody asks you why are you doing it. You reply, “I want to learn math”. Which in itself isn't false, it's just slightly inaccurate because your original goal was to learn addition. You get back home, sit down at your desk and suddenly, you find yourself doing subtraction exercises instead of addition.
What happened? The moment you said that you want to learn math, this goal became part of observed social reality. At the same time, under the hood you realized that a new goal can be reached in the other way, usually a more comfortable one, and this got you off track. You have broadened your intention, and diluted your focus.
It's a dangerous aspect of sharing goals because we often oversimplify things in casual conversations. We want to make our goals easy to understand for our friends and family and end up generalizing, moving away from the core of our goal.
Blind support, indifference, and status quo
When I decided to switch careers to software engineering, I found that people's reactions fell into three main categories.
People who wished me well no matter what and offered blind support. Mostly my family and close friends, they didn't really understand what and why I'm doing but still they wanted to support me.
Majority of people were just indifferent and didn't really care, it would be part of our conversation and then be gone.
Some people simply viewed me as a madman. I could easily find a nice paying job in my career line, and yet I decided to press reset button to play on computer. Those people just love status quo and any see any change as a threat to it, you should be afraid of telling them anything. Interestingly, if everything works out well in the end, most people from this group will praise you, claiming they never doubted your plan.
This is highly personal, and your experience can be completely different, but in my case neither of those groups were very helpful when after 10 hours of day job I sat down to the computer to squeeze at least a bit of coding before bedtime. Solitude works best for me if I want to push things forward.
When to share?
That said, I personally believe there are times when it's worth sharing your goals. Here are some situation when I'll do this:
when achieving my goal might seriously affect the life of people I care about, e.g. if I plan to change a job I want to talk it through with my wife
when a person's input can provide valuable feedback or guidance, that's a crucial aspect of sharing goals and one that's hard to disregard
when you know that somebody needs to hear something like this from you, and it can help them with their journey
when attention is what your goal needs, e.g. you are releasing a new product and need beta testers, or you are running a crowdsourcing campaign.
I also believe that sharing goals can foster accountability, but only if you explicitly ask the person you're entrusting to help you with this aspect. It's not something I do, but this is a valid reason to share your goal.
Share or don't share?
Summing it all up. While I believe it's better to know who you share your goal with, most of the time it's even more important to know why you do this. Personally, I try to operate in stealth mode when it comes to serious goals in my life. I like sharing things with people, and do this a lot when it comes to common things, but I know I need to keep more significant stuff to myself to have the best shot at making them reality.
That said, this might not be the best approach for you, as usual - “know thyself” and act on it, seems to be the best policy.
Let me know what is your approach to goal sharing:
Until next time,
Tomek
From my library
Some time ago, I've bought
‘s book “Steal Like an Artist” as a gift for . This month I'm going through his two other pieces, “Show Your Work!”, and “Keep Going”.All three are very beautiful books, with great content targeted at anyone who has a creative urge and doesn't know how to funnel it, or struggles in their process.