Yet, as Latham once told me, not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity, then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals.”10
Big goals. That’s the secret. But what, exactly, is a big goal?
THE IMPORTANCE OF HIGH, HARD GOALS
“High, hard goals” is the technical term for Latham and Locke’s big goals. These are different from the massively transformative purposes we’ve already discussed. MTPs are along the lines of “discover sustainable ways to end world hunger,” while a high, hard goal (HHG) is a major step along that path, such as “Get a degree in nutrition” or “Create a nonprofit that uses insect-based proteins to feed the world in a more sustainable fashion.”
On the way to impossible, you’re going to need both MTPs and HHGs, and we’ll start with the former. If you worked the steps of the passion recipe correctly, you most likely came out the other side of that exercise with two or three core passion/purpose combinations. This is the sketch outline for an MTP. Now all that’s required is to turn those ideas into core mission statements.
An example might be useful. In my own life, I have three MTPs: write books that have a deep impact, advance the science and training of flow, and make the world a better place for animals. That’s it. Those three goals function as the mission statement for my life.
This also means that these goals are my first filter. If a project comes my way, if it doesn’t advance these three missions, then it’s not for me. This is critical. It doesn’t do much good to do all this work to increase motivation, only to squander it on the frivolous. MTPs, utilized properly, aren’t aspirational, they’re filtrational: they weed out the work that doesn’t matter.
High, hard goals, then, are all the sub-steps that can help you accomplish these larger missions. These, too, are key. HHGs jack up both attention and persistence, which are two factors critical for sustained peak performance. And they’re critical because high, hard goals are as advertised: difficult mountains to climb. The grind is real. That’s another reason why that extra attention and persistence matter.
Yet, not so fast.
For high, hard goals to really work their magic, Locke and Latham discovered that certain moderators—the word psychologists use to describe “if-then” conditions—need to be in place. One of the most important of these is commitment. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” explains Latham. “Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.”
This is also why this primer started with passion and purpose. Big goals work best when we’re passionate about the subject of the goal (the idea that surrounds it) and its end result (the bigger purpose the goal serves). If you followed this book in order, then you added autonomy and mastery into your stack of drivers before you started setting HHGs. This sequence ensures that Locke and Latham’s if-then conditions are met, that values, needs, and dreams are aligned with the goals we’re setting, and that, as a result, we get the maximum boost in performance.
Equally important to this approach: keep your goals to yourself.
While Latham and Locke originally believed that making your goal public increased motivation, a series of additional studies by NYU psychologist Peter Gollwitzer showed that talking about a goal significantly lessens your chances of achieving it.11 By giving voice to an aim, you’re creating what’s called a “social reality,” and this has negative consequences for real reality. The act of telling someone about your goal gives you the feeling that the goal’s already been achieved. It releases the dopamine you’re supposed to get afterward, prematurely. And with that neurochemistry comes the feeling of satisfaction. This is the issue. Once you’ve already felt that high, it’s difficult to get back up for the hard fight required to actually earn it. As the saying goes, real bad boys move in silence.
Most important, momentum matters most. High, hard goals need to be challenging but attainable. If you’re always stressed out about how hard your goal is to achieve, then you’ll wear yourself out long before you can achieve it. Plus, the real aim is self-efficacy, that fundamental increase in capability and possibility, the new and improved version of yourself that you get to become after achieving your goals.
CLEAR GOALS
Clear goals is where goal setting gets even trickier. Turns out, there are significant differences between high, hard goals and clear goals, which are all the daily sub-steps required to accomplish those high, hard goals.
It comes down to timescale.
High, hard goals are our longer missions, the ones that can take years to achieve. They’re the big steps toward our big dreams. I want to write a book or become a doctor or start a company—these are all high, hard goals.
Clear goals are the inverse. They’re all the tiny, daily steps it takes to accomplish that mission. They exist over much smaller timescales. Becoming a great writer is a massively transformative purpose, or a goal to aim for over a lifetime. Writing a novel is the next level down, a high, hard goal that could take years to complete. Writing 500 words between 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M.—now, that’s a clear goal. Writing 500 words between 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. that produce a feeling of excitement in the reader—now, that’s an even clearer goal.
So what does this look like in the real world? Daily “to-do” lists.
A proper to-do list is just a set of clear goals for your day. At a very basic level, this is exactly what the road to impossible looks like—a well-crafted to-do list, executed daily. Each item on that list originated with your massively transformative purpose, was chunked down into a high, hard goal, then further reduced to what you can do today to advance that cause. A clear goal is a tiny mission. As Deci and Ryan first discovered, if this tiny mission is properly aligned with core values, it gives you the motivational burst needed to get after it. And once accomplished, you get the dopamine reward on the other side, which cements your desire to get after it tomorrow. Stacking little win atop little win atop little win is always the road toward victory.
Equally crucial, clear goals are an important flow trigger.12 The state requires focus, and clear goals tell us where and when to put our attention. When goals are clear, the mind doesn’t have to wonder about what to do or what to do next—it already knows. Thus, concentration tightens, motivation heightens, and extraneous information gets filtered out. In a sense, clear goals act as a priority list for the brain, lowering cognitive load and telling the system where to expend its energy.
Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-sized chunks and setting goals accordingly. Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again. A proper clear goal sits right inside your challenge-skill sweet spot, meaning it’s hard enough to stretch you to the edge of your abilities, but not hard enough to push you beyond, into that demotivating realm of anxiety and overwhelm.
Taken together, what all this means is that proper goal setting requires three sets of goals: massively transformative, high and hard, and clear—for three different timescales. MTPs last a lifetime; high, hard goals can take years; clear goals are accomplished one minute at a time. But it also means knowing which goal to focus on when. Across the shorter timescales of the moment, attention needs to be on the task at hand (the clear goal) and not the reason for doing the task (the high, hard goal or MTP). Getting this wrong can block flow—depriving goal setters of the very boost in performance they’ll need to achieve those goals.
When it comes to writing up your daily to-do lists, try to write the next day’s list at the end of the previous day. That way, you can get after it the moment you get to work. Personally, I limit the number of items
on my to-do lists to around eight—which is my maximum capacity for a good day’s work. In other words, on any given day, I have the energy to push myself into that challenge-skills sweet spot eight times. So I don’t try for nine or ten or eleven, because then I’m overloaded. Nor do I shirk the work, and try for six or seven.
But that’s me.
Figure out what works best for you. Conduct your own experiment. Track how many things you can do in a day and still be your best at all of them. Do this every day for a few weeks and you’ll light upon the magic number. That’s how many items you should put on your daily list of clear goals. By getting this right, we maximize motivation. But we also know when to declare the day a success.
For me, if I tick off all eight items on my daily to-do list, then I’ve “won” my day. It’s done. I can turn off my brain and recover. This is important. Recovery is critical to sustained peak performance, but peak performers can become a little obsessive, getting into workaholic mode and never getting out. So knowing how to stop working without feeling bad about stopping is key for long-term success. It’s not just that you need to recover, it’s that feeling bad about taking the time to recover, even if you are taking the time, actually hampers recovery. Worse, those negative feelings further impact performance—lowering motivation, scattering focus, and blocking flow.
The big point: Impossible is always a checklist. Do every item on your checklist today, do every item on your checklist tomorrow, and repeat. This is how clear goals become high, hard achievements, which become milestones on the way to massively transformative purposes.
Yet, there’s no hiding from the truth. Even if you’re winning your days and making noticeable progress toward your goals, the need to endlessly repeat this process demands persistence. And resilience. And this explains where we’re going next—straight into grit.
5
Grit
NO PRESSURE, NO DIAMONDS
“No pressure, no diamonds.”
Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle said this three hundred years ago.1 It was true then. It’s still true now.
What Carlyle means is excellence has a cost. The challenge of sustained high performance is the grind. So even if you harness the full suite of intrinsic drivers and turbo-boost the results with proper goal setting, it’s still not going to be enough.
And this is exactly why grit matters so much.
Grit is motivation writ large—not just the energy it takes to push through a difficult task but the energy needed to push through years of difficult tasks. Without the ability to tough out the hard times, you’ll rarely get anywhere worth going. Think of it this way: intrinsic motivation launches you down the path of peak performance, proper goal setting helps define that path, and grit is what keeps you keeping on despite the odds and obstacles.
Yet, most people think of grit as a single skill. We say, “She’s a gritty athlete” or “He’s a gritty scientist,” as if that explained everything. The actual truth is a little more complicated.
When psychologists describe grit, they often lean on University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth’s definition of the trait: “the intersection of passion and perseverance.”2 Yet, as helpful as this definition is, it may not take us far enough. If you speak to peak performers, they often describe six different types of perseverance that they regularly train. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Next up: the neuroscientists.
When neuroscientists talk about grit, their discussion focuses on the prefrontal cortex, or the part of the brain that sits right behind the forehead. The prefrontal cortex controls3 most of our higher cognitive functions, including both “goal-directed behavior” and “self-regulation.”
The term “goal-directed behavior” covers all the different actions required to accomplish one’s goals. Self-regulation sits downstream from here. It’s how we feel and what we do with those feelings on our way to accomplishing those goals. In other words, self-regulation is both the ability to control our emotions and the ability to persist through challenging, strenuous tasks.
Neurobiologically, these two attributes are our recipe for grit.
In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, these attributes show up in a very particular way. People who have trouble with grit have a higher amount of spontaneous “resting state activity” in their right dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.4 Grittier people have less. This part of the brain helps govern both self-regulation and long-term planning, but to understand why it quiets down in gritty people, we also need to know more about the relationship between dopamine and persistence.
In the last chapter, we learned that whenever we accomplish a hard task, dopamine is our reward. In this chapter we want to build on this idea, seeing that if we accomplish hard tasks over and over again, the brain starts to connect the feeling of persistence with the dopamine reward to come. We’re making the act of tapping into our emotional reservoirs a habit. This automatization may be the reason that the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex stays quiet in gritty people. Once the emotional fortitude required for digging deep becomes a habit, we can dig deep without having to think about it, so the part of the brain required to think about it doesn’t have to get involved.5
What does it take to train up these resilient reward loops?
If you ask peak performers this question, they don’t answer it like the scientists. Psychologists tend to talk about the intersection of passion and perseverance. Neuroscientists focus on the prefrontal cortex. Yet, elite performers cast a much wider net.
If you ask them this question, you get six different answers. Six types of grit that peak performers regularly work to improve.6 For sustained high performance and high achievement, you’ll need all six. And there are no shortcuts. Each of these grit skills has to be trained up independently.
We’ll take them one at a time.
THE GRIT TO PERSEVERE
In 1869, Sir Francis Galton undertook the first study of grit and high achievement.7 In a lengthy historical analysis, he examined standouts in the fields of politics, sport, art, music, and science, looking for traits that accounted for their success. While he found that high achievers all seemed to possess an unusual amount of talent, which he thought might be innate (i.e., genetic), this wasn’t enough to explain their actual achievements.
Instead, he lit on two characteristics that mattered more: “zeal” and “capacity for hard labor.” It’s been over 150 years and nobody has yet proven Galton wrong—though we have updated his terminology.
In the early 2000s, Angela Duckworth replaced “zeal” with “passion” and “capacity for hard labor” with “perseverance.” It’s the combination she famously calls “grit.” In a series of studies, Duckworth discovered that this combination was twice as important to academic success as IQ. And what is true for academics is true for a host of additional fields. Which is to say, as Duckworth puts it, “All high achievers are paragons of perseverance.”8
Perseverance is the most familiar version of grit. It’s day-to-day steadfastness. The kind of persistence that lets you tough it out no matter the circumstance. Kick me in the teeth or sing my praises, doesn’t matter, I’m still here. This is why I have a sign above my desk that reads DO THE HARD THING and why the Navy SEALs trumpet EMBRACE THE SUCK as their unofficial motto.
Yet, lost in this tough talk is a soft underbelly. Psychologists have found that humans can achieve three levels of well-being on this planet, each more pleasurable than the last.9 The first level is moment-to-moment “happiness” or what’s often described as a hedonic approach to life. The next level up is “engagement,” which is defined as a high-flow lifestyle, or one where happiness is achieved not by the pursuit of pleasure but rather through seeking out challenging tasks that have a high likelihood of producing flow. The next level up, the peak level of happiness and the best we get to feel on the planet, is known as “purpose,” which blends the high-flow lifestyle of level two with the desire to impact live
s beyond our own.
In a study of nearly sixteen thousand subjects, Angela Duckworth and Yale psychologist Katherine Von Culin found a clear link between grit and what level of happiness people pursue.10 Less gritty people hunt happiness through pleasure, while grittier folks choose engagement. By consistently choosing engagement and triggering flow, the grittier folks are actually getting more happiness, not less. Thus, while grit requires more energy and emotional fortitude in the short run, it provides a much bigger boost in mood and motivation in the long run.
My bet—this isn’t new information.
Think back over your life. Think about your proudest accomplishments; now think about how hard you worked to accomplish them. Sure, everybody gets lucky a few times. There’s always a handful of occasions when you get exactly what you want without having to work very hard to achieve it. But are those the memories that brought you the most happiness? The ones that provided actual optimism and confidence in your future? The ones that significantly boosted your long-term performance?
Doubtful.
We humans like gritty hard work, because gritty hard work provides better long-term survival benefits. And if we can tap into that drive, we can fundamentally change the quality of our life.
But there’s a rub. Even this version of grit is more nuanced than many suspect. When researchers tease “persistence” apart, they find three psychological traits: willpower, mindset, and passion. Again, there are no shortcuts. You need all three for sustained high performance.
WILLPOWER
Willpower is self-control. It’s the ability to resist distraction, stay focused, and delay gratification. It’s also a finite resource.
How much of a finite resource: that’s an open question.
The Art of Impossible Page 6
