No one disputes that goals are an important part of succeeding at anything. It’s well-documented that setting goals helps people stay on track and succeed more often. However, I believe that goals can be dangerous to our long term growth and success if not used in an effective way. 

Happy New Year!

I love using the example of New Year’s Resolutions to explain goal-setting concepts because it’s something everyone is familiar with. Everyone has set New Year’s Resolutions and everyone has failed to maintain them. It’s universal, and a great way to demonstrate how using goals improperly is actually hurting your progress.

Most people set New Year’s Resolutions that have tangible, measurable goals. This is a good thing, it makes it easier to see progress. However, the REASON for setting these goals is where failure brews. If your only reasoning for setting a goal is to get an outcome, you will likely fail. 

So You Want to Buy a Car?

You might be thinking; “how can setting goals to get outcomes be WRONG? That’s what goals are for!” I’d argue that you are wrong in that assumption. Let’s use the example of buying something expensive as the goal. Recently I saw a 2021 Corvette Stingray at the gym, and they look amazing. I looked up the price, they start at just shy of $60,000. 

If you wanted to buy in cash your goal would be to save 60k. If your goal was to finance, a 5 year term would cost you 1000 a month. So your goal would be to free up that much money each month. Either way, you have a tangible, measurable goal in mind. How could this possibly fail?

Let’s take the first option of trying to save 60k to pay in cash. How would one go about achieving this goal? You would likely assess your income and budget, figure out how much you could save each month, and calculate how long you would have to save for. Likely, you would realize this would take quite a bit of time to do. The gulf between where you are now and where you would like to go is large. 

The First Problem

This highlights the first problem with outcome-based goals. They put into stark contrast where you are starting from and where you would like to go. You see the entire journey in one big picture, and it makes the magnitude of the journey much harder to accept. You have to consider it all at once. You don’t consider each individual deposit into your savings one at a time, you consider the lump sum of 60k you need to get. Any hope of using willpower and patience gets extinguished when you are faced with the entirety of what you need to do all at once. 

But it’s more realistic to go the other route of making payments. In this scenario you need to free up the monthly income in your budget to be able to make each monthly payment. You don’t have to wait as long to get the car, but your available money each month is restricted. Your lifestyle has to be adjusted to make room for this goal you are trying to achieve. 

The Second Problem

Which brings us to the second problem of outcome-based goals. They leave no room for lifestyle adjustment. You have to shift everything around the goal. The goal takes up conceptual “space” in your lifestyle and everything has to be adjusted to accommodate. In our example, it is likely that the amount of restriction placed on your lifestyle would reduce the perceived value of getting the car. The car would become associated with all the restrictions to your lifestyle since it was the cause of those changes and you would grow to resent it. Suddenly your outcome is the source of frustration. 

Beyond how difficult each path would be to navigate, we have to take into account another point. Let’s consider you manage to achieve your goal of getting the car. How much happiness and fulfillment will it provide? Certainly for the first few months you’d get a giddy feeling every time you drove it. But eventually it would become routine, it would lose its luster and become mundane. 

The Third Problem

This is the third and most insidious of the problems with outcome-based goals. After you achieve them, they lose all meaning eventually. Even if you manage to overcome the hurdles of having to consider the entire journey at once AND are able to adjust your lifestyle around your goals, once you get the outcome it is unlikely that it will have been worth the effort. 

Outcome-based goals highlight what you lack. They operate from a place of scarcity. They provide no sense of fulfillment once achieved. 

“That’s all well and good Zach,” you might be saying, “but I don’t want to buy a 60 grand car. My goals are more realistic.” Sure, I’m using an extreme example to highlight the problems clearly, but it applies to more realistic goals as well. Consider weight loss, my favorite goal example.

A Simpler Example

Losing 30 pounds is certainly a more reasonable goal than buying a Corvette. But the same problems above occur. When you are starting a weight loss journey you measure your current weight and compare it to the weight you want to get to. For most people, this kills their motivation in a few weeks. 

When you see the scale creep down one or two pounds a week it can be very demotivating because it feels like you will never reach your goal. That’s problem one as discussed above. 

Next, you have to make concessions in your already established lifestyle. You have to restrict what and how much you eat, you have to make time for meal prep and exercise, you’re willingly subjecting yourself to uncomfortable workouts you aren’t used to. It shifts your lifestyle. You have to sacrifice things you enjoy for a goal that is far off in the future, and you begin to resent it.

Lastly, if you do manage to get the weight off you have achieved your goal. Likely you will return to your old habits, and the weight will come right back. It’s called rubberbanding, and it’s an incredibly common occurrence among people who lose weight. This is the third problem coming up here as well. The change either loses its value to you or your lifestyle reverts to normal and you undo all your work. The change isn’t sustainable. 

What’s the Alternative?

So what do we do? We’ve been told all of our life that goal-setting is an important part in achievement, but clearly setting goals is pointless! It seems like an uphill battle from day one to achieve anything. 

Well, to an extent, it is. Change is hard. Anything worth doing will require struggle and sacrifice. But we can mitigate a significant amount of failure by re-orienting our perspective about goals. 

The 3 Problems Revisited

To quickly recap, these are the three main problem with relying on outcome-based goals:

1. They highlight what you lack and how far you are from achieving your goal. You are forced to consider this gap all at once, which destroys motivation.
2. They intrude on your already established lifestyle and require you to make concessions and changes to accomodate. This can create resentment.
3. If you do manage to achieve the goal it quickly loses its value by becoming a normal part of your life. You either lose the enjoyment it provided initially, or in the case of things like weight loss you return to your old habits and lose your achievement. The rewards are unsustainable.

The Goal of Setting Goals

Goals are used to keep you on track towards something. Outcome-based goals attempt to achieve this, they just create problems along the way. I’m not advocating that you give up goal-setting, it’s an important part of achievement. I want to discuss how to change our thinking about goals so that we are focusing on things that will bring success.

Let’s return to the Corvette example for a moment. Trying to just get the car from the perspective of a regular person requires a significant change to lifestyle in order to have the money to afford the vehicle. But consider a wealthy person who has no problems dropping 60 grand if they wanted. They no longer have to set a goal to get the car, they can just buy it. It’s not an achievement to them. 

Now consider which is a better way of getting the car; the way I discussed in the example, pushing towards the outcome of owning the car, or figuring out how to become the kind of person who does not have to work towards the car. If your goal is to become a wealthy person, the car is just something that comes with achieving the goal of being wealthy. 

Identity-Based Goals

The example is a bit shallow for simplicity’s sake, but the point is this: if your goals are identity-based, trying to BECOME the kind of person who gets the outcome you want, the outcome is a natural consequence of aligning yourself with that identity. 

Let’s return to the weight loss example. The problems with trying to hit a specific number goal are that you have to consider all the weight loss at one time, you have to adjust your set lifestyle around the goal which makes achieving the goal require sacrifices, and when you do get the goal you will likely return to your old habits. 

What if we decided the goal was to become an athletic and healthy person instead? How would the process change? 

We can start by considering what an athletic and healthy person does. They exercise regularly in ways that they enjoy. They count calories or at least pay attention to their diet. They are careful about what they eat. They live a healthy lifestyle rather than just do healthy things. If you decided to become a healthy and athletic person and chose to think of yourself that way, you would start doing these things. Not because you wanted to lose 30 pounds, but because you wanted a healthier lifestyle. 

Solving the 3 Problems

How does this address the problems of outcome-based goals? Let’s review each of them. 

Problem 1: the distance between you and your goal kills motivation.

If your goal is to just engage in the behaviors of the identity you want, simply doing the healthy behaviors is success. The distance between you and success suddenly becomes much smaller. Choosing a healthy meal and going to the gym regularly BECOME the successes, not just steps towards success. The natural outcome of these successes is that you will become healthier and begin losing weight. 

Problem 2: You must make sacrifices in your lifestyle to achieve your goals.

You still have to make changes to your lifestyle, but now they are not SACRIFICES. The changes are just adjustments in service of becoming a better person. They are still challenging, but no longer breed resentment. They create excitement about becoming the person you want to be. 

Problem 3: Once you have achieved your goal you have no incentive to maintain it, or it loses its value and becomes mundane.

If you are focused on being healthy and athletic and consider engaging in healthy and athletic activities as succeeding at achieving your goal rather than hitting specific numbers you will naturally create habits out of exercise and proper diet. When you do eventually hit whatever outcome based goal you want you will have built up your lifestyle in a way that can sustain the change without much conscious effort. 

Identity-Based Goals Are the Way Forward

By using identity-based goals we can effectively circumvent the major problems that outcome-based goals create. We can certainly use tangible, outcome-based goals to give us a direction to begin working towards. The rewards should still be enjoyed.

 By operating from the framework of identity-based goals we work towards something much bigger than losing some weight or buying a car. Those things, once the finish line, become checkpoints along the path to much greater success. 

I firmly believe that the best way to have an enjoyable life is to do things that are fulfilling. Buying a car isn’t fulfilling, but becoming the person who can easily buy the car is. Getting a six pack isn’t fulfilling in the long term, but the pursuit of health and the experience of overcoming difficult challenges is. 

The key to a good life is in overcoming struggles and solving problems. Problem 3, as discussed above, sucks the value out of the tangible rewards if they are the goal. This is the problem that causes unhappiness and lack of fulfillment more than the others because it is the RESULT you get after getting what you think you want. Even worse, once your reward becomes mundane you’ll just seek another one, dooming yourself to repeat the cycle of searching for tangible rewards, maybe getting them, finding no fulfillment in them, and so on.

By working towards identity-based goals you overcome problems that prevent you from changing and improving yourself. This is where fulfillment and happiness lie. Growth and progress in life are more important than getting to the finish line.