The Antidote (9 page)

Mountaineers, of course, do not speak in the corporate language of targets and goalsetting. But when they refer to
‘summit fever' – that strange, sometimes fatal magnetism that certain peaks seem to exert upon the minds of climbers – they are intuitively identifying something similar: a commitment to a goal that, like sirens luring sailors onto the rocks, destroys those who struggle too hard to achieve it. Ed Viesturs, who watched the 1996 tragedy through his telescope, spoke of this lure in vivid terms. ‘When you're up there, you've spent years of training, months of preparation, and weeks of climbing, and you're within view of the summit, and you know, you have – in the back of your mind, you're telling yourself “We should turn around, ‘cause we're late, we're gonna run out of oxygen …” But you see the summit, and it draws you there. And a lot of people – it's so magnetic that they tend to break their rules, and they go to the summit. And on a good day, you can get away with it. And on a bad day, you'll die.'

If you've ever read a popular book about the importance of planning for the future, you will almost certainly have encountered a reference – and quite possibly several – to the Yale Study of Goals. This is a now legendary finding about the importance of creating detailed plans for your life: it is cited in the aforementioned
Goals!,
by Brian Tracy, but also in scores of other works, from the supposedly scholarly (books with titles such as
Psychological Foundations of Success)
to the more streetwise (the management manual
Train Your People and Whack the Competition).
The essentials of the study are as follows: in 1953, students graduating from Yale University were asked by researchers whether or not they had formulated specific, written-down goals for the rest of their lives. Only 3 per cent of them said they had. Two decades later, the researchers tracked down the class of ‘53, to see how their lives
had turned out. The results were unequivocal: the 3 per cent of graduates with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 per cent combined. It is a jaw-dropping finding, and a powerful lesson to any young person thinking of just drifting through life. It isn't surprising, then, that it achieved the status of legend in the world of self-help, and in many corners of corporate life. The only problem is that it is indeed a legend: the Yale Study of Goals never took place.

Some years ago, a journalist from the technology magazine
Fast Company
set out to trace the source of the alleged study. No academic journal reference was ever cited when it was mentioned, so he began by asking the motivational gurus who liked to quote it. Disconcertingly, when asked for their sources, they pointed at each other. Tony Robbins suggested asking Brian Tracy, who in turn suggested Zig Ziglar, a veteran of the motivational-speaker circuit, and a regular fixture at Get Motivated! seminars. Completing the circle, Zig Ziglar recommended asking Tony Robbins.

Taking matters into my own hands, I called a senior Yale University archivist, Beverly Waters. She seemed friendly and eager to help, but when I mentioned the goals study, a note of frustration entered her voice. ‘I did a systematic check, years ago, when this first arose, and there was nothing,' she said. ‘Then the secretary of the graduating class of 1953 did another systematic check, and nobody he spoke to had ever been asked to fill out such a questionnaire, or anything like that.' She added that it was highly unlikely that it had happened in some other year, and been wrongly described as taking place in 1953, because the Association of Yale Alumni would have been involved – and nobody there could trace anyone who remembered it. Waters sighed. ‘It's just too good not to be true, I guess,' she said.

Of course, the non-existence of one study about the benefits of setting goals does not disprove the suggestion that setting goals has benefits; there is plenty of very real research testifying to the fact that the practice can be useful. What the story indicates, instead, is how far the fascination with goals has gone. You might never have written down any ‘life goals' yourself, and you might well disagree with the imaginary Yale study's implication that material wealth is the ticket to happiness. But the basic urge beneath all this is nearly universal. At some point in your life, and perhaps at many points, it's likely you have decided upon some goal – to find a spouse, to get a specific kind of job, to live in a particular town – and then devised a plan to attain it. Interpreted sufficiently broadly, setting goals and carrying out plans to achieve them is how many of us spend most of our waking hours. Whether or not we use the word ‘goals', we're forever making plans based upon desired outcomes. ‘Consider any individual at any period of his life,' wrote the great French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.' Tocqueville's use of the word ‘comfort' should not distract us here; we are, of course, capable of setting far grander and more selfless goals than that. But the deeper truth remains: many of us are perpetually preoccupied with plans.

It is precisely this preoccupation that the followers of the ‘negative path' to happiness call into question – because it turns out that setting and then chasing after goals can often backfire in horrible ways. There is a good case to be made that many of us, and many of the organisations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.

At the core of this outlook is the insight that Chris Kayes and James Lester both reached in their studies of Everest mountaineers: that what motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn't any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it's something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present. ‘Uncertainty prompts us to idealise the future,' Kayes told me. ‘We tell ourselves that everything will be OK, just as long as I can reach this projection of the future.' Obviously, climbing Mount Everest requires plenty of planning, and implies a specific goal

– reaching the summit. But to Kayes, the evidence suggested that in 1996, an aversion to feelings of uncertainty might have tipped the balance in favour of a fatal overinvestment in goals.

We fear the feeling of uncertainty to an extraordinary degree

– the psychologist Dorothy Rowe argues that we fear it more than death itself – and we will go to extraordinary lengths, even fatal ones, to get rid of it. As we will see later in this chapter, though, there is a powerful alternative possibility: we could learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty, and to exploit the potential hidden within it, both to feel better in the present and to achieve more success in the future.

It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort. Try the following potentially mortifying exercise in self-examination. Consider any significant decision you've ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a relationship you entered despite being dimly aware that it wasn't for you, or a job
you accepted even though, looking back, it's clear that it was mismatched to your interests or abilities. If it felt like a difficult decision at the time, then it's likely that, prior to taking it, you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn't any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but simply the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty. Here are the words of one blogger on psychology, David Cain, reflecting on how an intolerance for uncertainty once dominated his own choices: ‘It's quite disturbing to take a mental inventory of where [the intolerance for uncertainty] has steered my life,' he writes. ‘It's the reason I spent three years and ten thousand dollars learning computer programming, when I didn't really want to do it for a living. It's the reason behind every single day I've spent working on careers that don't inspire me. [Uncertainty] feels like you're sinking, and [that] it is positively imperative to scramble to the next patch of firm ground, whatever direction it may be in. Once you get there, you can let yourself breathe.' Clinging too tightly to goals is one of the principal ways in which we express the obsession with reaching that next patch of ground.

To understand one of the many reasons why goals can backfire, consider the experience of trying to hail a taxi in a major city during a rainstorm. If you've ever had to do this, you'll be familiar with the despair it can induce – and you probably think you understand why it's so difficult, since it seems like the kind of economics problem even a five-year-old could solve. When it rains, more people want cabs, and so demand outstrips supply, making it harder to find an empty vehicle. That's obvious, surely? So when the economist Colin Camerer and three of his colleagues
set out to investigate the problem of the rainy-day taxi shortage – taking New York City as their field of study – you can imagine the kind of looks they might have received from their colleagues.

Except, as their research revealed, the reason for the problem isn't as obvious as it appears. Demand for taxis does surge when it rains. But something much stranger happens at the same time: the supply of taxis shrinks. This contradicts the standard economic assumption that when people stand to earn more money, they work more. You might have expected cab drivers, who have some discretion over the hours they work, to work the most when demand was highest. Instead, they clocked off
earlier
when it rained.

Further investigation revealed that the culprit was goals. New York taxi drivers rent their vehicles in twelve-hour shifts, and commonly set themselves the daily goal of taking in double the amount of money that it costs to rent the cab. When it rains, they meet their goal more rapidly, and head home sooner. New Yorkers are thus deprived of taxis during exactly the weather conditions in which they need them most, while drivers are deprived of additional income at exactly the time when it would be easiest to earn.

The point is not that it's wrong for a taxi driver to choose more leisure time over more income, of course – that's an entirely defensible choice – but that it makes no sense to take that time off when it's raining. Far from behaving like stereotypically rational economic actors, the drivers appeared to act more like the pigeons in experiments conducted by the behaviouralist psychologist B.F. Skinner. Having learned to obtain a food pellet by pecking on a mechanism in its cage, Skinner observed, a pigeon would indulge in a ‘post-pellet pause', relaxing after having attained a predetermined goal.

A taxi driver's daily income goal is a very different matter to the goal of climbing Everest, and the researchers did not investigate the drivers' emotional motivations. But it is possible to see the taxi-shortage problem as another, more minor example of how uncomfortable we're made by uncertainty. The drivers, it would appear, preferred the regularity and reliability of a predictable daily income to the uncertainty of remaining open to the possibility of earning more. They had invested in their goals beyond the point that doing so served their best interests.

New York cab drivers were much on the mind of a university professor named Lisa Ordóñez when, in 2009, she and three of her colleagues embarked upon the heretical project of questioning goalsetting. In their academic field, management studies, the wisdom of goalsetting was rarely questioned, thanks largely to the work of two North American management theorists, Gary Latham and Edwin Locke. Over the course of the previous four decades, Latham and Locke had established themselves as the godfathers of goalsetting, publishing more than twenty books between them. Their credo was one of the very first things taught to incoming students at business schools: to be a success as an entrepreneur, what you needed first was a business plan, focused on specific goals. Anything less was unacceptable. ‘When people are asked to do their best, they don't,' Edwin Locke told one interviewer. ‘It's too vague.'

Ordóñez and her colleagues mounted the case for the opposition in a 2009 paper with a heavy-handed pun for its title – ‘Goals Gone Wild' – in the usually rather dry pages of the journal
Academy of Management Perspectives.
The goalsetting that worked so well in Latham and Locke's studies, they pointed out, had various nasty side-effects in their own experiments. For example: clearly defined goals seemed to motivate people to cheat. In one
such study, participants were given the task of making words from a set of random letters, as in Scrabble; the experiment gave them opportunities to report their progress anonymously. Those given a target to reach lied far more frequently than did those instructed merely to ‘do your best'. More importantly, though, Ordóñez and her fellow heretics argued, goalsetting worked vastly less well outside the psychology lab settings in which such studies took place. In real life, an obsession with goals seemed far more often to land people and organisations in trouble.

One illuminating example of the problem concerns the American automobile behemoth General Motors. The turn of the millennium found GM in a serious predicament, losing customers and profits to more nimble, primarily Japanese, competitors. Following Latham and Locke's philosophy to the letter, executives at GM's headquarters in Detroit came up with a goal, crystallised in a number: twenty-nine. Twenty-nine, the company announced amid much media fanfare, was the percentage of the American car market that it would recapture, reasserting its old dominance. Twenty-nine was also the number displayed upon small gold lapel pins, worn by senior figures at GM to demonstrate their commitment to the plan. At corporate gatherings, and in internal GM documents, twenty-nine was the target drummed into everyone from salespeople to engineers to public-relations officers.