A simple signal to stick to your goals
And avoid downward drift
Hi all,
Welcome to the seventh edition of Signals & Stories, where we explore the signals that lead to better decisions—in life and business.
If you have 15 minutes during lunch this week, check out Martin Gutmann’s TED talk Are We Celebrating the Wrong Leaders?
He argues that we tend to celebrate leaders for their dramatic words and actions in times of crisis, but we often overlook truly great leaders who avoid the crisis to begin with.
Have a good week!
—Brendan
In the last issue of Signals & Stories, I wrote about the “drifting goals” signal.
It goes something like this:
You have a goal you would like to accomplish in the future.
A few weeks or months into working toward that goal, one or more obstacles appear, making the goal seem harder to achieve than you had planned.
“Wow”, you think. “This is harder than I thought.” You decide to lower your goal to one that is more “realistic”.
Lowering the bar does two things. One: it incentivizes you to ease up on the gas. Two: it grants you permission to lower the bar again in the future.
Now, when the next obstacle appears, you have a double whammy. You only strike it with 90% of your force, AND you feel more tempted to lower the bar again if you fail.
This is the pattern that leads to “drifting goals”. It’s the habit of setting the bar lower and lower until you are way off from what you had originally set out to accomplish.
I’ve experienced this pattern in almost every new positive habit I’ve tried to establish:
Writing
Calling a friend each week
Talking to strangers
Networking
I start out so optimistic, so eager to get better. And then 5 weeks later I find myself back where I was before. It’s so hard to observe myself drifting away from my original goal because the drift is so gradual. I start writing 5x per week for 2 weeks. Then one day I’m traveling, so it’s only 4x that next week. Then I drift down to 3x per week because I tell myself it’s more manageable, and so forth.
Gradual, drifting goals lead to:
A government gradually letting itself accumulate just a little more debt each year until it’s unsustainable
A business gradually drifting from its mission, commitment to quality, or whatever made it great in the first place
A consulting engagement gradually drifting from its original promises in the proposal
The way to avoid downward drift is like most advice: it’s simple, but not easy.
You “hold the line.”
In other words, you maintain absolute standards, irrespective of any new information you encounter or feelings you experience. You don’t shift the goalposts downward. This prevents the drift from even starting.
It’s that simple. And if you do that consistently, you can even get upward drift.
As a boy attending lacrosse camp, Paul Rabil listened to coach Tony Seaman share a “guaranteed formula” for a D1 lacrosse scholarship: shoot 100 shots per day from now until your senior year of high school. Rabil walked out of the camp and did just that for 20 straight years, never missing a day (even for family vacations). Rabil eventually earned a scholarship to play for Johns Hopkins and a 10-year career as one of the greatest professional lacrosse players of all time.
“It doesn’t matter how ambitious or speculative the goal,” Rabil writes in his new book, “You get there by taking one small step after one small step. Whatever the reps are in your sport, in your business, in your chosen field, you do them. And there is only one caveat: You can’t miss a day.”
In his lacrosse journey, Rabil never lowered the bar to make it easier on himself.
That’s “holding the line.”
When we improve in this way, it’s challenging to directly see progress because the improvements are so gradual. As long as you are sticking to your original goal, though, you can trust those gradual improvements are happening. Eventually, they’ll be hard to miss.
Paul Graham writes about how all dizzying achievements are the product of small, gradual improvements:
Gradualness is very powerful. […] [Y]ou can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?
Upward and downward drifting goals are surprising because they are so gradual. So focus on establishing the right process:
Avoid downward drifting goals by not loosening your standards.
Earn upward drifting success by anchoring yourself to high standards. Stay the course, don’t compromise and don’t miss a day.
Thanks for reading!
Signals & Stories is a newsletter that explores the recurring patterns we can recognize to make better decisions—in business and life.
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—Brendan