The Path To Focus: Leave Your Goals In The Valley Of Disappointment
Why do some people seem to easily motivate themselves, whilst others do not? Are you the sort of person that starts a new project with enthusiasm, only to see that initial burst of energy die away until you finally abandon the project?
We have spoken before in the Path To Focus about how motivated people are often the ones who have realised that manipulating their environment means they don't need to use willpower to keep going. Today we'll look at how goal-setting may well be ruining your ability to focus on a task long-term.
##The Plight Of The Goal
We are often told that the best way to success is to define your vision, then identify what you have to do or get, in order to achieve that vision. In other words, we are told to set goals.
If you want to lose weight then you start your exercise and diet program and each week you set yourself a target weight. As the pounds drop off you continue setting goals and doing your best to reach them.
The problem with this approach is that it can make you very unhappy, even if you end up achieving those goals. The reason being is that a goal is a temporary change in your life. So if your goal is to lose two pounds in weight, or to save $100, or make a sale, each one of those things comes and goes in a moment.
Even if you have a goal to have a million dollars in the bank, something that will change your life, the actual point of getting a million in the bank, is still just a moment in time. Especially seeing as your life will have changed if you get anywhere near that target anyway.
Reaching your goal can leave you in the dilemma of; what now? This feeling of what now will often translate into inaction, you don't know what to do once you reach your goal, so you lose focus and just continue in the same way you were before you had the goal.
For instance if you are trying to lose twenty pounds in weight, and you do so, you have lost the weight but you are still the same person. You are at your ideal weight, however if you slip back into your old eating habits you will put the weight back on.
This works the same for more complex goals like wanting to be a millionaire, because a goal like that has to be broken up into smaller goals, till eventually you are back to a daily or weekly target which you lose focus on.
Plus of course, just because you set a goal, does not mean that you will achieve it, so what happens when you fail?
You become depressed, missing your target is a painful experience that you'll want to avoid, so perhaps missing it once spurs you onto getting it the next time, but what if you miss again?
The chances are that if you miss two or three targets, rather than go through the mental anguish that this brings you will instead take the easier path and give up. You'll make all sorts of excuses as to why you shouldn't bother carry on trying to achieve the goals you were so enthusiastic about only a short time ago.
Sound familiar?
So contrary to popular belief, goal-setting is actually detrimental to long-term progress and can end up making you depressed.
The Valley Of Disappointment
In his excellent book Atomic Habits, James Clear writes of the valley of disappointment, this is a situation we all find ourselves in when we start off on an unfamiliar journey.
Let's say your ambition is to be the world's greatest up close magician. So everyday you practice card tricks and up close magic. You pick up a few tricks fairly quickly and are pleased that you can delight your friends with your newly found magic skills.
After a while though, you start to lose heart because you realise that you just don't seem to be improving. You have been practising everyday for nine months and you just felt that you would have been better by now, in fact you had set yourself a goal of doing your first paid gig after a year of practice.
Now that paid gig seems to be years off, you have still only mastered the tricks that you learned after the first few weeks, none of your material is good enough for the paying public. You carry on for another six months and still you don't see progress. You are further disheartened by watching other up-close magicians on Youtube who are all much better than you.
It gets to around eighteen months and your practice slips from every day to a few times a week, then to once a week and before long you have stopped completely.
This is because you had an expectation of how good you'd be by now, and you aren't, this is what James Clear calls the valley of disappointment.
As humans we tend to overestimate the good things that might happen to us, and underestimate the bad things. This means that when we start a new task all of us will have much higher expectations of how good we are going to get in a certain amount of time, than are realistic. So we all run the risk of finding ourselves in the valley of disappointment.
It is important to understand this phenomena, because if you don't, then you may end up giving up on something just before it starts paying dividends.
So how do we climb ourselves out of the valley of disappointment?
Our expected progress is linear, however our actual progress is curved.
Process Over Goals
Now let's imagine that you are still trying to be the world's greatest magician, however this time before you start your journey you don't focus on goals and landmarks. Instead you look at all of your magician heroes and find out through their biographies the sorts of things they worked on, and how hard they studied.
You say to yourself that you will maintain a four hour per day practice regime, which you split into three sections. You have an hour in the morning straight after waking up, two hours at lunch and then an hour before bedtime.
You make those practice sessions your only focus, in other words you become obsessed with the process and forget about setting any goals.
The difference is that unlike a goal that may or may not be reached, practice can always be achieved.
Then you start to focus on how to keep practice interesting, you scour Youtube for different skills to try, and you ignore how good you are at them, the only thing that matters is doing it.
Of course you still mark your progress by how many tricks you've learned, however that is not the be all and end all. Three years after taking up magic, you get your first paid gig, and you go on to become a great magician. The fact that it took three years did not disappoint you because you hadn't set any goals as to how long it would take, you merely focused on becoming a magician.
Identity Crisis
The reason focusing on process over results works so well, is because you are changing who you are, rather than what you do.
If you are trying to lose weight, then you are actually attempting to become a skinny person. If you are trying to make more money, you are trying to become a rich person.
These statements sound obvious when you say them, however when you say something like I really want to lose some weight, you are actually saying, I want to achieve the goal of losing weight. This is different from saying, I want to be a skinny, healthy person, because goals can be achieved and then lost again.
Whereas the ambition to be someone different is longer lasting and what's more requires constant attention.
Tidying your room is a goal, becoming a tidier person is a process.
Lifting weights is a goal, becoming an an athlete is a process.
Making a million dollars is a goal, becoming a successful business owner is a process.
The bonus is once you become the person you're trying to be, it doesn't stop there because in order to be that person, you have to behave like that person.
A tidy person doesn't leave mess lying around.
An athlete doesn't eat unhealthily.
A successful business owner doesn't have crippling personal debt.
We don't rise to the height of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.
- James Clear, Atomic Habits
Conclusion
Setting goals can lead to depression and frustration, whether you hit them or not.
A desire to act in a positive way, is actually a desire to become a different person.
There is often a 'valley of disappointment' we get stuck in when trying a new task. This can be avoided by paying less attention to goals and focusing on the process that gets you to those goals.
Becoming obsessed with the process will lead to a change in personality.
Falling in love with the process will enable you to stay happy whilst trying to achieve a difficult long-term ambition.
The Path To Focus So Far:
The Path To Focus: How To Start A New Habit
The Path To Focus: Stacking Your Way To Success
ARE YOU A GOAL ORIENTATED PERSON? DO YOU GET DOWN IF YOU MISS YOUR TARGETS? WILL YOU TRY AND FOCUS MORE ON THE PROCESS FROM NOW ON? OR PERHAPS YOU HAVE YOUR OWN TECHNIQUES FOR STAYING FOCUSED? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: Simon English on Unsplash
Valley of Disappointment graph - Creative Commons