What the pandemic taught me about goal setting
Setting goals always leaves you with a sense of hope and wonder.
“I can do anything I want. All I need to do is do these 4 things for the next year and I’ll accomplish whatever I want”.
Fast forward 3 days. You slacked a little on a few of them and you think to yourself,
“I really don’t want to do this everyday. I’ll just do a and b when I have the time. I really don’t want to get up early and do a, b, c, and d.”
Fast forward 6 months. You dust off the piece of paper with your goals on it that lay crumpled up at the bottom of your desk drawer and read your goals with the swooshed y’s and a’s of a formerly eager and motivated self and you feel disappointment. You only really started on the first goal and you didn’t get anywhere near to achieving it. You looked back on 6 months fondly: you took some cool trips with some friends to the west coast, reconnected with some old colleagues, got a promotion at work, and learned more about European history. But you didn’t achieve any of those life-changing goals. So you go back to the drawing board and think,
“this time for real. I’m going to write down 4 goals and I WILL do it by the end of the year.”
i++. Rinse and repeat. Back in the loop. However you want to put it, it feels like you’re in an endless cycle of setting huge goals and not really getting anything done.
One morning I looked through all my journals from the past 6 years and was horrified to discover that every 2–4 months, I had an entry where I listed 10–15 massive life goals, diluted them into actionable steps, and made a promise to myself to stick with it. I’m currently not a comedian, I’m not in possession of an Oscar, and I haven’t started my biotech company if you were wondering.
The same thing happened again when I look back at my March 2020 goals, right before the pandemic hit:
(1) Start a youtube channel
(2) Get a job in a tech company
(3) Lift more weights
(4) Read 1 book/week
(5) Workout in the mornings
(6) Write everyday
(7) Meditate 3x a week
By September, I had half-achieved goal (2) (I got a job working for Congress and I develop for a startup part-time) and that’s it. This was shocking. The pandemic was time away from friends and distractions. It gave me the time to think about what I wanted and really develop in some key areas and yet, I still couldn’t get my wheels to turn on my long-term goals. I talked to everyone in my network and put my thoughts down in this article. Here’s what I found.
If I can’t keep my goals, should I just give up and not make goals then?
No, the science is pretty clear on this. Goal setting is one of the clearest and most effective motivators. If you have big ambitions and don’t know how to find the time or motivation to achieve them, setting concrete goals with appropriately spaced milestones is the very first thing you should do. Read this post from positive psychology and read literature from Edwin A. Locke if you’re not convinced.
So how do I make goals and stick to them?
Glad you asked. Here are 6 things I learned from 9 months of open-field, free-fall thinking:
(1) Make a MightDo list
Borrowing from a fantastic book by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, Make Time, the MightDo list gets rid of the could do’s and what-ifs that so commonly plague the hyper ambitious and squirrel-attentioned. Here’s why.
Goal setting is an open field. There’s so much we could accomplish with discipline and a can-do attitude that we develop a grass-is-greener mentality. We can’t do one thing for a month or even a week because we’re so overwhelmed by all the things we could be doing instead of what’s in front of us.
Enter: the MightDo list. If there’s anything you might want to do, write it down. Make it as long as you want. As time passes, you’ll find that there are certain things on the list that you are automatically drawn to and that you do more consistently than other things on the list. Make one of those items the highlight for a day and do only that one thing.
The reason it works is because instead of worrying about not writing enough short stories while building your customer pipeline for your business, you can find solace in the idea that eventually, be it a few weeks or even a few years from now, you’ll get around to writing the short stories because it’s in your MightDo list. Keep the MightDo list handy and every few months or when you feel the currents of desire shifting within yourself, you can cross off or add to the list.
(2) Track Your Fricking Metrics, Just Not Everyday
Track. Metrics. There’s just no way around it. Alongside your might-do list, track what you did and pick the right measurements. For example, if you’re trying to write more, it’s better to measure how many stories you write every week instead of how many hours you spend writing.
Don’t track it everyday unless you absolutely have to. Besides metrics like tracking calories for weight loss which you pretty much have to do everyday, I found that tracking daily goals is incredibly discouraging for 2 reasons:
- There’s no way you can make meaningful progress towards big goals in a day. Even after a week, you can risk minimizing your progress by comparing it to other people or your own standards. Be patient.
- If you miss tracking your metrics for a day, not only is it an added sense of disappointment, it can even discourage you from sticking with the original goal! Don’t make it another goal to track your goals. My advice is to make a mental note of what you did, maybe make a note or two about it in your journal, then at the end of each week, do an in-depth analysis of what you did well or not and how you can do better.
(3) Focus
Meaningful progress towards goals comes from deep, consistent work for extended periods of time. As soon as I stopped splitting my work into 3 chunks a day and started to do one chunk a day, I found more motivation and satisfaction from the work. The progress you made doing one thing is 3x greater than the progress you make doing 3 different things and the amount of progress you can make is the activation energy you need to keep doing that one activity. If you have trouble focusing, the MightDo list can help.
(4) Progress:”…the aggregation of marginal gains…”
A famous cycling coach, David Brailsford coined the phrase, “the aggregation of marginal gains”. It’s the idea that meaningful progress is the sum of several marginal improvements, not sudden change. And the little wins matter. Here’s why.
The general trend of motivation looks like the graph on the left and the sweet spot is right at the apex: where a milestone is difficult enough to engage you but not too difficult that you lose motivation entirely. As you get more medium-sized wins under your belt, your confidence increases and you gain momentum. Eventually you’ll be sprinting down the hill. The key here is to pick milestones at the apex.
Human behavior tends to follow this trend. Use it to your advantage! Pick milestones that are just beyond your imagination of immediately achievable and keep chugging.
(5) Stop Shoving Nigiri in Your Mouth if You Like California Rolls
This is going to sound like voodoo hippie shit for the hyper motivated, hyper energetic soul, but it is essential to keep open free time in your life, and not for the reason you might think.
Consider an all-you-can-eat sushi conveyor belt. If you eat every nigiri roll on the conveyor belt, eventually you’ll be too full for the california roll that you really wanted.
Scores of entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, and productivity masters have sworn that saying no to opportunities that you aren’t ecstatic to do have opened doors for them. Filling your time just because you can is natural but it’s not the most optimal way to achieve your goals.
Look at your MightDo list. If you aren’t extremely, 100% excited to do something, don’t do it. Even if you have the time, it’s best to fill that time with the things you’re already doing and wait for an opportunity that you’re ecstatic about. Of course, if you’re constrained by money and time, this rule can be bent a little but this is a good general guideline to follow.
(6) Surround Yourself with Energizing Things, in Every Sense of the Word, “Thing”
From people, posters, beautiful products, the books you read, down to the damn pillow you sleep on, surround yourself with things that will energize you. I’m materialistic and proud of it. I love Apple products, well-designed websites and books, and comfy pillows. I respond well to inspiring imagery and exciting people.
But everyone is different. If the motivational posters are kitsch and fake, don’t use them. Do what works for you but make sure you’re being energized. Why should I do this if it doesn’t directly help my goals? It does. Here’s why.
No matter how robotic a human can get, we are at the end of the day, social animals. We evolved to hunt, gather, and survive with other humans. That means we are extremely reflective. We learn by watching, listening, and then doing, and we absorb our environments like a dry sponge in water.
It’s subliminal but significant: negative environmental factors tip the scales of our optimism and motivation, little by little, towards pessimism and ennui and our performance deteriorates (reference).
I don’t like the advice, “most of all, find what works for you”, because I think it’s a cheap cop out of doing due diligence and finding out what really works for people. These 6 tips are research backed and should help people stick to their goals.
There are thousands of articles and books about achieving goals but the number one thing to remember is that people don’t start 90% of their goals (I’m exaggerating but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 90). The hardest and longest part about setting and achieving goals is the stuff in between. Where rubber hits the road is where you’ll find the most resistance and the most reward.
I hope you find these tips useful! Happy goal setting!
