Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (17 page)

The Pinto is only one of several examples
that lead the authors to caution against the “high bar” goal. The narrowness of focus induced by a single difficult goal not only encourages people to take shortcuts like those Ford's executives took but also facilitates lying and cheating, all in the name of achieving the goal. Interestingly, one of the article's examples is the disastrous and tragic failed Mount Everest expedition, which became the subject matter of Jon Krakauer's book
Into Thin Air
. In that case, the team leaders, who were the experienced climbers, so identified with their clients' goal to reach the summit that like the Ford executives, their focus overrode their caution and judgment.

How the setting of a time limit for achievement affects human behavior is amplified by other examples beyond the Pinto; similarly, goals that are simply too challenging also encourage unacceptable amounts of risk taking, as does setting too many goals at once. Finally, stringent goal setting undermines intrinsic motivation in a business setting. These are, the authors assert, the very predictable consequences of setting high performance goals. In fairness, we must add that
the rejoinder to “Goals Gone Wild”
was published by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, who criticized the authors' use of anecdote.

What are the takeaways for the rest of us, trying to manage our own goals? Here are some suggestions, none of them vetted by science but entirely in keeping with what research has suggested.

Setting a performance goal isn't necessarily a good thing.
Thinking about what you want to achieve as a learning goal—one that requires the mastery of certain skills or the formulation of strategies to achieve your end goal—may be more helpful than simply setting a performance goal. The cultural wisdom about persistence, of course, tends to emphasize performance, and as a result, people tend to think about their goals in those terms. In the arena of work, it might be making $150,000 a year; becoming a vice president of the corporation or making partner in five years; hitting X amount of dollars in sales. But focusing on how you are going to get there—and being flexible about your strategies—is more likely to increase your chances of success than is focusing on performance alone.

That's also true of goals we set in the area of relationships—smoothing out problems, improving communication, becoming closer, making new friends—which may be better served by thinking about what you need to do to achieve that end, rather than thinking about the end itself. This requires a mental shift: instead of thinking about finding the right partner for yourself, think instead about what you can do to make yourself more open and more communicative when you meet someone you might consider as a partner. In the next chapter, we'll tackle how mental contrasting may help you achieve more in every area of goal pursuit.

Framing may be the key to successful goal setting.
Understanding how you personally respond to challenges in your life is a necessary first step before you begin to assess your own goals and how they connect to your own happiness. As discussed, your propensity for seeing things in terms of either approach or avoidance will influence
both the goals you set for yourself and how you respond to the work of achieving them. In addition to articulating your goals consciously, you'll need to become fully aware of how you frame them or, for extrinsic goals, how other people are framing them for you. Imagine that you are assigned a task and are told that 85 percent of the people who attempted the task failed; are you more likely to identify yourself with the 15 percent who succeeded? Does the stress of a challenge energize you, or does it stop you in your tracks? (That's a sneaky way of asking whether you are action or state oriented.)

If you're having difficulty in a relationship—it could be with a spouse, a friend, a relative, or a colleague at work—do you tend to frame the difficulty in terms of a challenge (“We could be so much closer if we learned not to argue over the small stuff”), or do you often frame it as a threat (“I'm not seeing how we're going to stay together if we don't stop bickering over every little thing”)? How would you respond to those two ways of framing? In any kind of partnership—whether it's in the arena of work or love—it's important to pay attention to how the other person is framing not just his or her goals but also your mutual goals. The kind of conscious appraisal of goals we're advocating relies on being aware of framing as a process.

Single-mindedness isn't reliably helpful.
Along with rugged individualism, our cultural mythologies extol keeping your eye on the prize, but as the examples of the invisible gorilla and the Pinto demonstrate, that's not necessarily the best approach. In fact, single-mindedness is, in many ways, the very opposite of the mental contrasting that you need to learn to function at your best. A narrow focus, too, makes you much more vulnerable to other kinds of cognitive distortion—making us more vulnerable to counting hits rather than misses, intermittent reinforcement, the sunk-cost fallacy, and a brand-new one based on an article written by B. F. Skinner, called
“The Superstitious Pigeon
.”

What Skinner did—and we apologize ahead of time to animal lovers and advocates, but this all took place over sixty years
ago—was to put a very, very hungry and deliberately starved pigeon in a cage. A food dish swung into the cage at random intervals. Skinner discovered that three-quarters of the pigeons attributed causality to their actions and the appearance of the food. How did Skinner deduce this? By the repeated behaviors of the pigeons themselves. Whatever they happened to be doing—which, of course, was totally unrelated to the delivery of food—when the food appeared was what they would do to “make” it appear again. These behaviors were very distinct and obvious—one bird would twirl around, stretching its neck, while another would hop from side to side, and so forth.

Skinner drew an analogy between the pigeon's behavior and the superstitious rituals people engage in, such as wearing a lucky shirt or hat. Skinner focuses on the bowler who, having already released the ball, continues to motion with his or her arms and shoulders to keep the ball out of the gutter and on line to strike the pins. This behavior will certainly be familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in a bowling alley or who has watched someone try to sink a putt.

Think of the bowler as a metaphor, and ask yourself whether you're like the bowler when you're pursuing a goal single-mindedly. Are you likely to assume a causality every time you think you're making progress? Is your focus letting your brain go on automatic—the kind of fast thinking that has people drawing inferences where there are none—or are you paying attention to strategy? The single-minded approach, alas, is more likely to make you the bowler gesturing at the ball than not, no matter what the “keep your eye on the prize” myth says.

Perhaps even more importantly, the narrow focus encourages you to look at a single goal out of context, without looking at its relationship to other important goals in your life.

Are your goals in sync?
As we'll see, much of our happiness, in fact, depends not on achieving a single goal but how close we come to achieving all the various goals we have at any moment. For most of
us, this is a grab bag of short- and long-term aspirations, personal and professional goals, and learning and performance goals that may be approach or avoidance oriented. The kind of reductionist thinking that comes out of focusing on one goal animates many of the cultural discussions about having it all.

Seen from the point of view of goal theory, whether we can have it all has a great deal to do with the amount of conflict or congruence between important goals. A good example is
the article published in the
Atlantic
in 2012 by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Titled “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” the piece ignited a firestorm of comment, pro and con, and garnered a lucrative book deal for its author. Slaughter, a Princeton professor, was at the time a director at the State Department, which required her to work in Washington, D.C., and to travel frequently; she was also the mother of two sons, who stayed in Princeton with their father, a professor, during her two-year tenure. A crisis with one of her children forced her to give up her State Department job—hence the “not having it all” gist of the piece.

From our point of view, the real question is why she didn't anticipate, as her children neared adolescence, a possible conflict between her goal of holding down a high-level job at the State Department and that of being a mother. Why was it surprising that goals that appeared to be manageable, if not really congruent by definition, came into conflict, and that she was required to make a choice? It seems that if we are hell-bent on having it all, each of us needs to take a look at our goals in relation to each other, not as single, unrelated items on a wish or to-do list. Changing our focus to a broader view in this way may be the only way to get close to having it all—whatever
all
might be.

Thinking about our goals as interrelated instead of singular aspirations—as pieces of an interlocking design—helps us weigh our decisions about whether it's actually possible to achieve several goals at once and whether we should hang in or bail with greater intelligence. If what we want for ourselves consists of goals that are nearly congruent, then we're in good shape, but we'll still have to
keep in mind that at some point, there might be a conflict. (This is exactly what Slaughter should have been able to imagine.) We also have to be prepared for the likelihood that, sometimes, goals we've achieved will stop making us happy.

That was the case for Robert, a real estate attorney, whose main priorities included both a good salary and a challenging work environment, and for years, he achieved both. But after years of his practice, he found himself increasingly dissatisfied and bored; additionally, in a job that involves a tremendous amount of attention to detail, the more bored he got, the more he worried about making a mistake. His anxiety left him sleepless—reviewing details in his mind in the middle of the night—and only made him unhappier with his work. He realized that rather than manage the real estate deals for his clients, what he wanted to do was be a part of the transaction itself. He found a partner for his venture, a designer, and bought his first property, which he intended to refurbish and put up for sale. Like most shifts in life, this change required him to redefine other goals as well and manage new stresses, one of which was the risk of failure. The pace of his new business required patience and vision, something else he had to come to terms with, along with the loss of the steady income stream he had been used to for many years. His faith in himself, too, was newly tested, but still, he was happy with the shift he'd made in his life.

Sometimes, a goal needs to be adjusted to accommodate other priorities. Getting married when she was a resident in pediatrics forced Diana to rethink both her specialty and the arc of her career. An only child, she'd always wanted children—her love for children drew her to pediatrics in the first place—but when she married Martin, whose specialty was international finance and who traveled widely, she realized she wanted a specialty that would be less demanding of her time. She basically started over, switching to radiology. It's a choice she has never regretted, she says: “In my case, the overarching goal was to live a life that balanced work and family. I knew that from the start. Is radiology as soul-satisfying as a pediatrics practice might have been? Perhaps not. But my choice
was very deliberate, and I would have had to sacrifice a lot as a mother if I hadn't switched.”

Too many of us find ourselves living with perpetual conflict because we haven't consciously made a choice about which goals are our absolute priorities.

Goals and Identity

The boy looks to be about six or seven and is wearing a Batman outfit. He and his father are waiting for their lunch to be brought to the table. The child is smiling broadly, holding a Batman action figure in his hand, gesturing as he speaks: “I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be Batman.” The father smiles and says, “Jake, you can't be Batman, because Batman isn't real. He's a character in a story.” There's a pause, and then the little boy says, “Well, I still want to be him. Getting the bad guys.”

The father answers, “Well, you could be a policeman. Or a detective.” “No,” the little boy says firmly, “I don't want to be a policeman. I want to be Batman.” This seems to take the father aback, but he answers anyway: “You could be a doctor like me, Jake. I decided to be a doctor when I was about your age, but you have lots of time to decide what you want to do.” “Nope,” says the little boy. “I want to be Batman, not a stupid doctor.” The father looks up to see if the server is anywhere nearby, as if her presence might rescue him. “Jake,” the man says, “Batman isn't real. You can't be Batman.” The young woman puts their plates down just as the little boy answers, “You're wrong. I can be Batman. Just wait and see.”

As children, we fantasize about what we'll be when we grow up—a veterinarian or an equestrian, a ballerina or an astronaut, a bus driver or pilot, a mommy or daddy, a professor or policeman, or perhaps Ariel the Little Mermaid—or even Batman. For a few of us, the trajectory will be the one the culture loves the best—the goal set early, the progress sure and steady, the rise respectable or meteoric. (This is the Steven Spielberg script: He knew that he wanted to be
a filmmaker when he was a kid, set his plans accordingly, had early success, and kept going.) The myths of persistence have us imagining an upward trajectory, with a best-case scenario that's somewhere between very successful (for work) and happily ever after (for relationships) and that continues this way throughout life. But these stories of finding a passion early and achieving success without setbacks are the exceptions to the rule.