Get It Done

When Alice asked, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” the Cheshire Cat replied, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

This quote from Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reminds me of a popular exercise in my management class. Each year, I ask teams of business students to imagine that they’re passengers on a floatplane that has just crashed. Each team must decide which items to salvage from the plane to ensure that they’ll survive in the wild. There are two approaches my students could take: they could either choose items, like matches and an ax, that will allow them to set up camp and wait until help arrives; or they could choose items, like a compass and a navigation book, that would allow them to leave and search for help. Too often, teams jump into the task of sorting and selecting items without first deciding on their objective: take off or stay put. Not knowing their goal, they make decisions that contradict each other, resulting in an eclectic array of items that serve opposite purposes. In the end, they don’t get anywhere.

While the missteps of Alice and my students may seem obvious from a distance, many of us make their same mistake. If you don’t select a goal to point you in a specific direction, you’re likely to move in circles. You’ll do whatever is at the forefront of your mind, even if it contradicts other actions you might have taken just moments ago. You might decide to go on a diet the same day you sign up for a macaron-making class, or you’ll open a savings account while also taking out a loan for a new car.

The goals we set are powerful motivational tools. A goal doesn’t just point you in a specific direction, it also pulls you in that direction. Once you set a goal, it mobilizes your resources toward achieving it. You’ll spend mental and physical effort, money, time, and your social capital. Consider deciding to become a parent or to change your career. These goals require continuous effort invested over a long period of time. Other goals, like trying to eat more healthily or exercise more, require willpower and self-control. Even goals that seem straightforward—wouldn’t it be fun to adopt a puppy?—might over time prove to be costly. And yet, despite the cost, once a goal is set, you’re willing to expend resources and pay the price.

Powerful goals feel worth the price tag—they pull you toward your greatest wish. And in order to pull you, a goal has to feel more like an aspiration and less like a chore. For example, reaching the summit of Mount Everest is an aspiration, but training for it seems like a chore. Similarly, studying law describes an aspiration, but studying for the bar exam might seem like a chore. And while becoming a parent is an aspiration, doing so because you fear regretting a decision to remain childless makes it seem more like a chore. These examples illustrate three traps in setting and framing a goal: framing it as a means to another goal instead of the end goal itself, setting a goal that is too specific or concrete instead of an abstract goal, and setting a goal in terms of something you wish to avoid rather than something you wish to approach. Falling into any of these three traps will diminish the power of your goals.

Set goals, not means

When it comes to setting a goal that feels like an aspiration and not a chore, the old adage to “keep your eyes on the prize” holds true. A powerful goal defines a desirable state, not the means to get there.

Consider dining out. You might not hesitate to order a $12 cocktail at a restaurant, but you’d think twice, and even drive around the block a few times, before paying the same amount for valet parking. You don’t like paying for parking because parking is, by definition, a means—it gets you into the restaurant and in front of the dinner plate you’d set your sights on. Similarly, shipping and gift-wrapping fees are a means to the goal of getting your friend the perfect birthday present and, indeed, we dislike paying these fees. Many of us would rather pay a little extra for the gift and earn free delivery than pay a shipping fee. In general, we want to invest our resources in the goal, not in the means. And because companies know we dislike paying for means, many online stores will include shipping costs in the product price, giving the impression that shipping is free.

This aversion to investing in means can have surprising effects, as Franklin Shaddy and I found. An experiment we conducted with our MBA students showed us that people are willing to spend more overall to avoid spending anything on a means (as many of us do to avoid shipping fees). In our experiment, we auctioned an autographed book by the prominent economist Richard Thaler, which is something our MBA students would treasure. The average bid for the book was $23. We next auctioned a tote bag, which contained the same autographed book, to another, similarly enthusiastic group of students. While these students were technically bidding on a bag, their deal was economically superior given that the highest bidder would win both a bag and a book. To our surprise, the average bidder was willing to pay only $12, significantly less than what bidders were willing to pay for the book alone. In economics terms, the value of the tote bag was negative, meaning that throwing it in decreased the value of the deal. The reason for this surprising result? It didn’t feel right to pay that much for a bag whose only function was to carry a free book. People don’t want to invest in means.

When you’re setting goals, remember this lesson and choose to define the goal in terms of benefits rather than costs. It’s better to set your goal as “finding a job” rather than “applying for a job,” or as “owning a house” instead of “saving for a down payment.” Finding a job and owning a house are desirable outcomes. Filling out applications and saving for a down payment are the costly means needed to achieve these outcomes. Achieving a goal is exciting; completing the means is a chore.

Set abstract goals

Imagine you’re trying to find a new job. You could describe this goal as “exploring career opportunities” or as “reading job postings and submitting applications.” These are two different descriptions of the same goal. “Reading job postings” is a concrete description that explains how you explore career opportunities, and “exploring career opportunities” is an abstract description that explains why you read job postings. But while they describe the same goal, one description is more motivating than the other. The concrete description emphasizes actions, thus turning the goal into a chore. The abstract description, however, emphasizes the meaning behind those actions.

More abstract goals capture the purpose behind an action, describing what you’re trying to achieve rather than the actions you’ll take to achieve it. And while an abstract goal identifies the purpose of a goal, a concrete goal only identifies the path to get there; it’s a means.

Cultivating an abstract mind-set while pursuing a goal can make any goal seem less like a chore. If you think about your day-to-day life in the abstract—that is, you focus on the purpose and meaning of your actions—your orientation toward specific goals will also be more abstract. To test this principle, psychologist Kentaro Fujita and his colleagues assigned people to an abstract or concrete mind-set by having them answer a series of “why” (abstract) or “how” (concrete) questions. For example, they answered “Why do you maintain good physical health?” or “How do you maintain good physical health?” After answering several such questions, the research participants started to think about their goals either more abstractly or more concretely, depending on the series of questions they’d answered. Those who answered a series of “why” questions were more motivated to channel resources to their goals. They worked harder. So, for instance, they exercised more physical effort when holding a handgrip.

There is, of course, a downside. When you make a goal too abstract, it becomes vague. It may not be linked to a specific set of actions and is therefore difficult to actively pursue. “Explore new career opportunities,” for instance, is miles better than “be successful.” Similarly, “start going to church” is better than “be morally pure.” There are no clear or specific means by which we should pursue success or, if it’s your thing, moral purity, rendering these goals ineffective. When there’s no clear path to get from point A to point B, people revert to fantasizing about their goals instead of taking action toward achieving them.

When we fantasize, we imagine what our lives will look like once we achieve our goal. We envision how great it will feel to wear that graduation gown, medal, or wedding dress. But fantasizing doesn’t generate action. Fantasizing about graduating with honors won’t necessarily make you study harder; fantasizing about coming first in a 5K won’t make you run more; and fantasizing about walking down the aisle won’t make you set up more dates.

Indeed, in one study, the psychologists Gabriel Oettingen and Thomas Wadden had weight watchers rate their expectations (how likely they were to lose weight) and how much they fantasized about weight loss at the beginning of a weight loss program. A year later, those who had high expectations lost more weight than those with low expectations, but those who fantasized more didn’t. Those who fantasized actually lost less weight.

Fantasies might feel good, but they’re largely ineffective as a motivational tool. And when abstract goals become too abstract, they’re at risk of turning into fantasies that substitute for action. Optimally abstract goals describe a purpose without losing sight of the actions you need to take to reach them (“improve my mental health” is better than “be happy”). You should immediately know what to do next (start therapy, for example). They allow you to contrast your current state with where you want to be so that you can connect the dots from here to there by making an action plan.

“Do” versus “do not” goals

When dining out, is it better to define your goal as eating healthily or as avoiding unhealthy food? When playing a sport, should you define your goal as winning or as not losing? “Do” goals, also known as “approach” goals because they identify a desirable state that we’re approaching, pull us toward eating healthily or playing well to win the game. “Do not” goals, also known as avoidance goals, push us away from a state we wish to avoid. These are essentially “anti-goals.”

When we define our goals as approach goals, we move toward those goals (decreasing the gap between us and our desires). When we define them as avoidance goals, we move away from anti-goals (widening the gap between us and the outcomes we want to avoid).

Just as framing your goal as a means or as too concrete is likely to make your goal feel like a chore, framing it as an anti-goal is likely to do the same. If you want to win your school’s championship basketball game, the “approach” frame of winning the game is more enticing than the “avoidance” frame of not losing the game.