One of the most dangerous and useful things about goal setting is that it feels good to achieve challenging goals even if they are meaningless, only five minutes old, or created by someone else.
Imagine throwing away a crumpled piece of paper in a waste bin. Now imagine doing it again, but assume this time that you set the goal of throwing it in from 6 feet away. As your tossed paper ball sails through the air, you may feel an edge of nervousness. When it falls into the bin, you may feel a small jolt of excitement. And if it lands short, some disappointment. In the end, it’s just a paper ball, but your goal imbued it with meaning for you.
The bright side of this psychological quirk is that we can hack it to make mundane things fun just by setting challenging goals all the time. Going for a bike ride to somewhere you bike often? Set the goal of noticing five interesting things along the way that you’ve never noticed before. Going to check out some coffee shops with friends? Set the goal of finding which one really truly has the best coffee. Doing some boring data entry? Set the goal of completing the most entries you can in 10 minutes, or finishing before a certain song ends.
Warning: there is a substantial dark side to goal setting.
Many of the video games people get addicted to are like the crack cocaine of goal achievement. In the real world, you don’t get to succeed at a seemingly-important goal every 5 to 30 minutes, but in video games you do, and we humans love it. Even worse, once you’re used to achieving goals so frequently, real-life can feel like garbage by comparison. Be very wary if the goals from your games (when you’re not currently playing) start seeming as important as the goals of real life.
While video games are an example of very rapid goal achievement, some goals can be extremely sticky, motivating us for years or decades to take action after action after action (e.g., people who set the goal of becoming a doctor when they are 15, and who may not end up finishing all their training until 14 years later).
What’s scary about this is that sometimes we are so focused on the goal that we forget why we set the goal in the first place. But, just as we don’t need a good reason to choose to throw a piece of paper in the trash from 6 feet away, and it’s still satisfying if we achieve it, our goals from years ago may not have been set for good reasons. Or maybe the reasons were good ones at the time, but not ones we currently endorse. Yet the goal doesn’t instantly disappear. Goals are independent entities, divorced from the causes that brought them into existence. And working toward a long-standing goal can easily become a default mode. Unless you force yourself to reevaluate the reasons behind it, a goal you’ve had for a long time will probably keep persisting even if it’s reasons no longer make sense to you.
Perhaps even worse, we buy into goals that others set for us, and then let these goals dictate our behavior. Sometimes these goals are broadcast to us by the culture we’re in (e.g. “popular=good”). In other cases, adults are still stuck chasing the goals that their parents gave them as children, even though these goals don’t align with their adult values.
Not having goals can also be a painful existential state. Goals are part of what makes life feel meaningful. So the solution is not to avoid them but to consciously create them.
Goals are powerful, useful, and dangerous. We should set small goals to give life more fun and meaning. In weightier areas, though, we have to set our goals very carefully, and not let others do it for us. We need to reevaluate the causes and value of our goals regularly. Otherwise, we may spend decades chasing goals long after we’ve forgotten their meaning.
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