Should you raise your goals over time?

A listener who’s meeting his goals asks if he should set tougher ones

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.
Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to know when it's smart to make
your goals more challenging and when you're best off keeping
them simple. Both are sometimes wise, but in general I

(00:25):
think the latter is more often the case than the former.
I was thinking of this when I got a letter
from a Before Breakfast listener who had been setting daily
fitness goals on his phone recently. He wrote, my phone
asked me to change my daily fitness goals because I
had been meeting them fairly frequently. This got me thinking,

(00:47):
is it better for someone to set goals that are
right on the cusp of being attainable and being accepting
of falling a little short from time to time, or
to set goals that should be achievable and celebrate even
more are when you exceed those goals. It's a good question,
and there's no universal right answer. I think that the

(01:07):
answer varies depending on what you're trying to do. For instance,
many people pursue personal records or prs and races, and
the whole point of a PR is that once you
set a PR, you have to go faster to set
a new one. If you're recovering from an illness or injury,
it might make sense to raise your goals over time,
because something that was difficult at the beginning might be

(01:30):
really easy in a few weeks or months, and so
it might make sense to push yourself since you know
that the future will be so different from the present.
That said, I'm a much bigger fan of what I
call process goals than outcome goals. Outcome goals are things
like running a sub two hour half marathon, are getting
an A in a class, or signing up a certain

(01:52):
number of new clients for bank accounts. It's not that
there's anything wrong with these goals per se. It's that
some factor are out of your control, which can be discouraging,
and in certain situations, outcome goals can also skew people's incentives.
An A in a class is not a good in
its own right. It's just a letter on a piece

(02:15):
of paper. What matters is that it represents the accumulation
of knowledge. But when the A becomes a good in
its own right, people become tempted to cheat. Think of
school systems fudging test scores. Likewise, you can bring new
clients to a bank by offering a great product and
great customer service. Or you can invent new accounts out

(02:36):
of whole cloth and hope no one notices before the
bonus checks get cashed. I think we've all read the
headlines about that story. Process goals, on the other hand,
are goods in their own right. These are habits by
another name, and they do tend to lead to the
desired outcomes over time. But even if you don't meet
a specific outcome, you're probably better off than would be otherwise.

(03:01):
A process goal is something like my running streak, running
every day for at least a mile. Or if we
think of our academic example, rather than aiming to get
an A in a class, you set a goal to
study for at least five hours a week, And rather
than focus on how many new clients you land, you
set a goal to ask existing clients to refer people

(03:22):
to you every time you have a positive interaction. By
their nature, process goals tend not to benefit from raising
them over time. The point is to just keep doing
them again and again and again. By keeping them relatively simple,
we keep them in our lives, even when it would

(03:43):
be easier not to Most days I run a lot
more than one mile, and I'm always happy when I do.
But by keeping the mile as my goal, I don't
feel any resistance to it, and I don't feel like
a failure. On the days when I can't run much
more in a mile, I just keep going. So in general,

(04:05):
my thought is that unless you're really gunning for something
big and you're excited about a more challenging goal, it's
best to keep the goals simple and doable. Our listener
is probably better off aiming for five thousand steps a
day and exceeding this regularly, but still feeling good on
the days when he's tired or on a plane for
ten hours and he only hits five thousand steps, then

(04:27):
following his fitness apps directive to change his goals. Daily
success is motivational failure, generally, isn't. I prefer to celebrate
what goes right now. I know that goals are a
big deal in productivity circles, so I'm happy to get
notes from people telling me why I'm wrong and challenging

(04:47):
goals that involve a big risk of failure are the
way to go. You can let me know what you
think at before breakfast podcast at I hurt media dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening and
here's to making the most of our time. Hey, everybody,

(05:09):
I'd love to hear from you. You can send me
your tips, your questions, or anything else. Just connect with
me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Before Breakfast pod
that's B the number four, then Breakfast p o D.
You can also shoot me an email at Before Breakfast
podcast at I heeart media dot com. That Before Breakfast

(05:32):
is spelled out with all the letters. Thanks so much,
I look forward to staying in touch. Before Breakfast is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What Won't