E6: Goal-Free Living

What if the fastest way to achieving your goals is to stop focusing on your goals? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to get with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today we're going to start off with one of the lenses, which is then going to lead us into the problem we will solve. And the lens I want to start with is lens number 18, which is called the performance paradox. I love this lens. The performance paradox says that paradoxically, sometimes the more you focus on a goal, the the less likely you are to achieve that goal. And there's a number of reasons for this. Part of it is stress. When you over motivate, overstimulate people, they tend to perform at lower levels because the stress will prevent them from performing at peak levels. Also, when you over motivate, or if you motivate for the wrong reasons, people will start to focus on the outcome rather than the process. They will do everything in their power to achieve the goal, to hit the number, even if it's not really in the best interest of the company. So paradoxically, sometimes the best thing we can do is to stop focusing on the goal and focus on something else. Let me give you a few examples of this. One is some work that we did a number of years back in sales. It was a quick study where we had teams of people inside of a retail store compete. Now, what we didn't tell them is there were two teams competing for different reasons. One team we told that they're going to be measured on who sold the most. It was a competition within that group to see who could actually outsell everyone else. The second team was told that their goal is to serve the customer, to be there in any way, shape or form, whatever the customer needs, that's what they do for them. Now, what's interesting is when everything was said and done, the team that was focusing on serving customers outsold the people who were focused on selling. And we see this in a lot of different areas of life. Sometimes the more we focus on the goal, the harder it is for us to achieve that goal. One of the stories I love was told to me when I worked for a race car team. I was actually in motorsports for a while and one of the people from the team told me a fascinating story and I always thought it was so interesting. If you watch any kind of motorsport, the pit crews to me are just so amazing. They change the tires they fuel the car, they do minor maintenance, all in a matter of seconds. I find this to be so fascinating. And so what they wanted to do is figure out how can they get the pit crews to go faster. Now, you would imagine that the way that they do it is they tell them to go fast. It's like mush, mush. Go faster and there's a stopwatch, and they time them, and they do it hundreds and thousands of times. And there's a point that no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try, they can't go 1 1000th of a second faster. So they decided to try a number of different techniques. Now, remember, sometimes we can over motivate, giving them more money, giving them a bonus if they go faster. How did that work? Not so well. They went slower. A number of different techniques were tried until they stumbled on something interesting. They told the pit crew members that they were to go fast, but they would not be timed. They were to go fast, but they would not be timed. Instead, what they would do is they would be focused on the their style. They would be evaluated on their movements. So as they were changing the tires, they were to think smooth. As they were fueling the car, they were to think smooth. As they're doing minor maintenance, they were to think smooth. So it was about the movement. Now, of course, they were timed when they did this, and they found they went 2, 10 to 3, 10 of a second faster than their best previous time. But when they asked the pit crew members if they thought they were going faster or slower, everyone said they thought they were going slower. And they. And this, to me, is the performance paradox, because paradoxically, in this situation, they were not focusing on speed, yet they went faster. And sometimes you've heard this expression, sometimes to go fast, you have to go slow. Well, that's exactly what's happening here. And the reason why I wanted to start off with this lens and this question, this perspective is because the problem statement we are going to solve today is how can we move forward when we don't know what's going to happen in the future? So right now I'm recording this. This is November of 2020. We're still in the middle of the pandemic, and the future is so unclear, we don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of possible things that could take place over the coming months, but we don't know when we're going to be able to open up to full capacity. We don't know when we're Going to meet in person, when we're going to be able to travel like we used to. So the question has been how can we move a business forward when we have no clue what the future holds? And I think the performance paradox holds the key here. In fact, the performance paradox, even though it's just one lens in Invisible Solutions, it is actually based on a book I wrote in 2005 called Goal Free Living. Now, unfortunately, I think a lot of people got caught up in the title thinking about, wow, we're throwing out our goals. That's crazy talk. But goal free living is not the same as goal less living. I'm not saying don't have goals, but we change the relationship we have to the goals. And just like with the performance paradox, it doesn't mean if we're trying to sell, we stop trying to sell, but we change our relationship to selling if we're trying to go fast. It doesn't mean we don't try to go fast, but we change our relationship to speed. So goal free living really is about how can we live in a life where we don't know what's going to happen in the future? So the first tip, the first secret, as I call them in the book, was to use a compass, not a map. And this to me is sort of the key essence of, of what goal free living is about. You want to have a sense of direction, not a specific destination. And then you want to meander with purpose. And that to me is the essence. In fact, I wish I had called goal free living meandering with purpose because that to me really captures the key message. It doesn't mean you don't have a sense of direction. You do, you move forward, you move forward purposefully, but you are open to changing direction. And if you think about the traditional strategic planning, so many companies have these one year, five year, ten year plans and the world is changing faster than their plan. So by the time that they implement their plans, their plans are completely irrelevant and they've moved in the wrong direction. So what if instead we were to be constantly observing the world, gathering new insights, gathering new data, and making decisions based on what direction we should go now, because we now have new information that's meandering with purpose. It doesn't mean you don't move forward, you move forward powerfully, but you move forward powerfully knowing that at any time when you get new information that tells you you should change direction, you change direction. Now, in some respects, this is actually one of the key approaches that we use in innovation when we are developing new concepts, new solutions, we don't want to spend years coming up with an idea and just moving forward with blind implementation. What we want to do is experimentation. We want to do what would be called iterative development. And basically what iterative development means is that we're going to build something, we're going to try it, and then we'll fix it, and then we'll do another experiment where we build it out to the next level of detail, and then we try that out and we fix it. And we go through this process of iterative development where we learn by doing and we do what we learn. And it's this process that I find to be really powerful. So when we think about how can we plan for the future when we don't know what the future holds. To me, the key is this. You want to have a sense of direction, not a specific destination, and meander with purpose. And I think the key here is to recognize that no matter how much information we think we have, it is always flawed. The data we have is flawed because it is almost always past based. And if we are making decisions based on our past data, we are not taking into consideration the world as it is changing around us. So it is our ability to be flexible and adaptable that's really key. And if you go back actually to Darwin, when he talked about evolution, he didn't say it was survival of the fittest. Darwin actually said it's survival of the adaptable. It is our ability to adapt, evolve and change to meet changing market conditions, to meet changing demographic conditions, to meet the world where the world is. And so to me, that's really sort of a powerful concept for us to think about when it comes to innovation and planning. I think the key to being able to perform at peak levels is to have that sense of direction, to move forward powerfully, but to not be overly concerned with the outcome. Because once we become overly concerned with the outcome, we, we then start losing our power, we start creating stress, we start creating disappointment. Let me share with you just some interesting statistics from the book goal free living. 45% of Americans usually set New Year's resolutions, yet only 8% of the people who set them are successful in achieving them. 24% of the people who set New Year's resolutions never succeed and have failed on every single one of those resolutions. So that means that we are setting up a system whereby we are failing more often than we are succeeding. This means we are not achieving our goals. So there must be something flawed in the goal Setting process. Consider this. The less happy you are, the more likely you are to set New Year's resolutions. This is especially true for those who set money related resolutions. 75% of the people who are setting New Year's resolutions around money are either not happy or moderately happy. And here is the punchline. This is what we found in our research is there's no correlation between happiness and resolution, setting and success. People who achieve their resolutions every year are no happier than those who do not set resolutions or who are unsuccessful in achieving them. Think about that for a moment. Fascinating. A lot of us believe that money will bring happiness. If you have money, you will be happy. And this one study actually showed that there is indeed a correlation between money and happiness. The correlation is the happier you are, the more money you make. But here's what's fascinating is most people will assume when they hear that, and this is a really good point when it comes to critical thinking, don't confuse correlation and causation. What the study found was the people who are happiest attracted the wealth. Wealth did not cause happiness. Happiness created wealth. So we need to really get very clear on what we're trying to achieve here. Now, I know I've gone down a little bit of a tangent from the original question, but the point is maybe goals aren't the answer. Maybe we need to be more in tune with what we need, what we want. So let's talk about New Year's resolutions just for a moment, because one of the things which I believe is that setting resolutions because most people fail at them is a masochistic ritual that we undertake every year. This is why decades ago, I stopped setting New Year's resolutions and started setting New Year's themes. Now, I know this is trendy now, but back when I was first doing it is a relatively new concept. And the concept of the theme is you choose a word or an expression or something that will call you forward. What I love about the concept of the theme is you can't fail at a theme. If your theme is, for example, freedom. Now, you could be more specific than that if you want, is it financial freedom? Is it freedom of emotion? But if freedom is your term, then what you do is every day you just make sure that the decisions you make are consistent with you moving towards freedom. Maybe you set a theme around local, which was a theme of mine for my business. And what that meant was I wanted to, instead of being on planes all the time, which I'm not on a plane right now, but what I wanted to do is do more work locally. How could I build business locally? And so every day, if I look at my theme and I ask myself, am I doing what I need to do in order to focus on creating local work that's going to help me move in the direction of creating local work? Now, I'm not setting a goal. I'm not saying I have to do 90% of my work locally. I'm just saying every day I'm going to take action in the right direction. And then at some point, here's the cool thing is if I decide the theme is not the theme anymore, I change the theme. Why do we wait for New Year's Eve to set our themes, to set our resolutions, when we should be doing it all the time? And the same thing is true with business. I know we have annual planning cycles, but what if we moved away from those and started really focusing on making decisions on a much more regular basis? What if we were to constantly be gathering new insights and new data in order to help us make better decisions? So today we talked about the performance paradox that paradoxically, the more you focus on a goal, sometimes the less likely you are to achieve that goal. And we started to address the conversation around planning for the future when we don't know what the future holds. And for that, we talked about a few different perspectives from my Goal Free Living book this time, which were all around using a compass, not a map, have a sense of direction, not a specific destination, then meander with purpose. And as we get closer to the new year, I hope that you'll consider some of the concepts in here instead of setting a New Year's resolution, maybe just set a theme today. Give it a try. So with that, we're going to come to the end of this episode of Invisible Solutions. It's a little different than the last few, but I thought it might be an interesting time as we get close to the end of the year with that. So if you're interested in learning more about Goal Free living, go to meanderwithpurpose.com meanderwithpurpose.com that will take you to the page of my website around Goal Free Living. And of course, if you want to get the lenses for invisible solutions, go to get. And with that, we're at the end of our episode. I'm Steve Shapiro, Happy problem solving. See you next week.