What you should think about the next time you set goals
Between 2009 and 2013, I ran five editions of the Mumbai marathon. For each year, my preparation would start three months prior. I would draw up a schedule that had a weekly upping of the mileage, cresting with a long weekend run. This would continue until a couple of weeks before the marathon or until I completed a 35-km run, whichever happened earlier. All of this was geared for me to be in the best possible shape for the third Sunday in January. My goal every year was the same: run a sub-4-hour marathon.
Despite setting myself a clear goal each year, I clocked between 4:00 and 4:40. Why did I fall short?
The answer is in what I did after, each year. None of the years did I continue running after the event. The marathon day seemed a natural endpoint to weeks of dragging myself out of bed on winter mornings. I told myself a number of stories: I deserved the break after the hard toil; I could do better the next time with a few adjustments; I had lost muscle mass in training so I needed to stop running. It felt natural to pause. So much so that I would only start running again several months later, in time for the next cycle. I never ended up making a habit out of running.
The problem with goals
Goals have historically enjoyed good PR. Knowledge workers have all been delivered the value of setting SMART goals. Goals are great for making destinations tangible. In business, destinations are important.
The problem with goals is that they can be so bright and shiny that they make us forget what is needed to get there. We want to deliver an NPS score of 75, but we do not make a habit of attending to every customer within a minute of their walking into our store. We want to make our organization the best place to work at but we fail to celebrate birthdays or recognize achievements. Our goal could be to make better decisions but we will not cultivate a habit of journaling to enable learning via reflection, so we end up repeating our mistakes.
The common response to the challenge of each of these goals is to take the harder path. We will solve this by being more committed, we tell ourselves. But commitment comes at a cost. It requires the fuel of willpower. We think we can summon willpower from our reserves when the need arises. But willpower is finite. In the absence of habits — rules, processes, systems — we will lack willpower sooner or later. It’s a problem if all we have are our goals.
About habits
Habits free up our processing power by using less of our neocortex to perform otherwise complicated tasks. They push actions into the realm of our automatic thinking system. When a certain action becomes automatic, two things simultaneously happen: we no longer have to motivate ourselves to do it and we do not feel the exertion of doing it.
Habits offer reliable check-in mechanisms. If we follow a routine every day and it feels unusually hard one day, something is most likely off. There’s nothing we should pay more attention to than a background that takes over the foreground. It is easy at that point to identify any new variables, allergens if you may, that are disturbing equilibrium. This allows us to re-calibrate our process and become better at what we are trying to do.
If we take care to not interrupt or break habits, they deliver compounded value. Because doing something habitually is doing something automatically, habits can have tremendous longevity. Just as good habits set us off on a virtuous cycle, if we are not mindful, bad ones can hold us back for life. Bad habits are the hole that drain out the tub. Plugging the hole is sometimes more important than turning up the tap.
We have complete control over our lives to the extent of choosing the habits we want to define ourselves with. Habit is the process. We can dictate the process as we wish. But when we focus on goals (outcome) at the expense of habits (process), we are hoping to be lucky, oftentimes without realizing it. Much like how it was for me during those five years of trying for a sub-4-hour timing. When we’re fixated on a goal we’re optimizing for one outcome. But nothing is a total certainty. There are variables outside our control that affect the outcome. Good habits are what give us tools to deal with a range of outcomes. If we’ve made a habit of iterating and building lean we will find it easier to pivot if the market turns.
Necessary, not sufficient
We tend to focus on the winners and attribute their success to ambitious goal-setting, but as James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, observes: winners and losers have the same goals. Goals are necessary for success, but not sufficient. In fact, goals can offer a false sense of security by tricking us into thinking that by the very act of having defined a destination we are on the right track.
What separates the winners from the rest are habits. Without habits, attending to goals can be cumbersome. Imagine a day where everything you do you are doing for the first time. Habits start as deliberate effort but with time run in the background, leaving our minds free to tackle newer challenges.
The joy of habit
Kids do not have a goal in mind when they make sandcastles or paper planes. They are not interested in making the most structurally sound castle or the most aerodynamic plane. They do it because they enjoy it. And that makes them plunge into it over and over again without getting tired. If we truly enjoy doing something, every time we do it we are re-energized. The joy is in the routine. It makes us want to keep getting better at something. When we have to be motivated with goals, we may be egged on for a while but it will not guarantee that we will enjoy the process and it will test our resolve once we cross the finish line. But when we enjoy doing something and fully experience the excitement of the process, goals can be a way for us to do it even better. A good interview question to check alignment is to ask about what routines/habits energize you
Goals and habits
The difference between goals and habits becomes apparent in the action words we use for each. We set goals but we build habits. One is an outcome, the other is a process. One is a destination, the other is the journey. I was caught up thinking about the destination when I was training for the marathon and I didn’t enjoy the journey enough. (Maybe that wasn’t my jam, but that’s for another day).
Life is an infinite game. Goals break it up into finite passages and lend those passages meaning. One issue with associating meaning just to a milestone is that once we reach that point, there is a certain gratification that makes it hard to continue pushing at the same intensity. Habits, on the other hand, can make our lives better without being reliant on outcomes. The work is the reward. The satisfaction comes from the action.
Goal-less living is not easy to pull off, unless we are Buddhist monks, but habit-less living is disorienting. Without habits, we start from scratch. We face each situation in life as if it were the first time. It could easily overwhelm us.
We need both in life. Goals to set us on the right path. Habits to keep us going.
Thanks to Atul Sinha for reviewing drafts of this.