Friday, April 24, 2015

Goal Setting: Big and Small



In the past year, six books by well-known authors were published on the subject of goal setting.  This is perhaps not too surprising because setting goals is a popular business topic and a popular focus for self-help books.  What caught my eye is the clever way Fortune Magazine contrasted three that advised to “think big” and three that advised to “start small.” These are not necessarily mutually exclusive – it is possible to have a big long term goal and to set up a path of incremental goals.  But the clever way they contrasted the six books inspired me to contrast the two approaches, even though they are not direct contrasts.

The first three books are:





The second three books are:




Here are the key differences that contrast the two approaches.  In Bold, Diamandis recommends that we ambitiously target a huge problem with a large impact and/or for a wide population.  It would be hard to set small goals to get from here to the moon.  Newton tells us to ignore the little diversions that fill up a normal life so that you can truly focus on the grand challenge of your life.  Ignoring the little things requires avoiding the incremental to some extent.  Mohr’s recommendation is more about one’s attitude, recommending that her readers put forth the air of confidence and greatness in all of their dealings.  To pull this off, it would be necessary to do it all the time, which would mean never having a visage of uncertain confidence.  So in all three cases, “Thinking Big” is really the antithesis of “Starting Small.”

Now let’s turn the tables and look at the other three.  Arnold’s recommendations share some similarity with the progressive extremism I shared here.  Instead of “eating healthy” just give up cookies at first. Work on the rest once you have the cookies out.  For this to work, it is best not to think of the end goal too much or it will seem overwhelming.  Lots of temptations to give up after cookies.  So thinking small requires ignoring the big.  Martin et al’s recommendations are similar, which is not surprising if you are familiar with the wide body of behavioral research published by Robert Cialdini.  They tell us that if you design to trigger unconscious behaviors, no one will even know you are there are can’t take steps to counter your objectives.  By definition, none of these can be big, or even medium sized.  Finally, McKeown recommends that we learn to value small things so we don’t need to pursue big goals in the first place.  Again, directly in conflict with big goals.

So which of these approaches is better?  Does it depend on who you are?  Your personality?  Your talents?  Your abilities?  Your motivation?  For today, I will leave that up to you.  Perhaps later, I will fill in some of these blanks.

This Week in EID - Episode 51



We have a new feature on EID this week: our Hall of Fame article. On Monday we republished an earlier piece on eReaders.  France when through our analytics for the year and picked out the one that was read the most.  Many of you probably still missed it, so this is our attempt to save you from your own inattention :-). 

Then on Tuesday we started a new series: socially responsible human factors and ergonomics.  Kind of like corporate CSR, but with the idea that we can apply our tried and true methods and principles in ways that increase the general welfare.  Perhaps the environment. Perhaps global health. Perhaps global happiness.  I am not sure how many of these we will do, but at least a few.  This week we featured pre-cycling and the article next week will continue the idea with an article on up-cycling.

On Wednesday, we continued the “Fun with Words” series. Another great and amusing example of the government getting caught up on the meaning of one or two terms in a 400-page legislation and going to court about it.  And not using anything resembling user centered design to decide.

Finally, we summarized the human factors and ergonomics principles that were common among Fortune Magazine’s Best Places to Work. It should be no surprise that there are so many.  After all, that is what we do. We make the company happy by making the employee effective and efficient and make the employee happy by satisfying their personal motivations, both intrinsic like expertise self-expression and extrinsic like money and socializing.

Hope you liked them!!