Get It Done

The goals we set are powerful motivational tools. A goal doesn’t just point you in a specific direction, it also pulls you in that direction.

There is, of course, a downside.

Cultivating an abstract mind-set while pursuing a goal can make any goal seem less like a chore. If you think about your day-to-day life in the abstract—that is, you focus on the purpose and meaning of your actions—your orientation toward specific goals will also be more abstract.

How confident are you about your goal commitment? When you’re uncertain about your commitment, you can sustain your motivation by looking at the glass half full. What have you already achieved? When you’re committed to a goal, the glass half empty will keep you going. Ask yourself what is left to be done.

This failure to appreciate how much your future self will care to be intrinsically motivated is related to the “empathy gap,” the tendency to underestimate the strength of an experience that you’re not currently having. While you’re hot, it’s hard to imagine how cold you’ll feel on your next ski trip to Aspen, and so you might forgo packing your wa

Two classic theories in social psychology make a similar point about how engagement generates commitment. First, Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory. This theory posits that when our behavior doesn’t coincide with our beliefs, we change our beliefs to match the behavior. As humans, we don’t like saying one thing and doing another. So we tr

Not only do we underestimate others’ intrinsic motivation, we also fail to predict our own. Most of us know that intrinsic motivation is important to us in the present, but we fail to realize that it will also be important in the future.

According to the small-area principle, to sustain motivation, we need to compare our next action to whichever is smaller: the progress we’ve already made, or the progress we still need to make to meet the goal. At the beginning of pursuing a goal, we should look back at our completed actions. Beyond the midpoint, we should look ahead at what’s stil

you don’t select a goal to point you in a specific direction, you’re likely to move in circles.

The second ingredient in effective target setting is making sure your target is easy to measure.