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Hey, Jordan Harbinger here.
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Welcome to Mini-Sode Monday.
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Happy to be here with you, kicking off the week with something quick and actionable that you can implement right away that ll make you more magnetic and more effective.
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Today, Oliver Berkman back with a little bit about goals.
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Oliver, thanks for coming back.
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You have an interesting take on goals, essentially that we don t have to have these concrete, long-term goals, and you ve even got some great stories in the book about how goals literally have killed people.
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I think so, right.
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It s this kind of absolute doctrine and dogma of the mainstream self-help movement that you need to have really clear, written down, precise goals, smart goals, however you want to think about them.
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and then just kind of relentlessly focus on them.
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And there s a lot of evidence that this is not the best way to achieve really cool stuff.
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And as you say, the things can go really badly wrong.
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The story you re referring to is the 1996 tragedy on Mount Everest, when a large number of climbers died in a short period.
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It s been a mystery about exactly what went wrong for a long time.
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But there s a business writer and scholar called Christopher Kays, who has this
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pretty persuasive theory that what happened was something he calls the over-pursuit of goals, that when you are completely identified with a goal, in this case, reaching the summit, you start to interpret incoming information that suggests you should change direction.
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You start to interpret it as reason to keep going and to commit even harder to the goal.
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In this case, it s to do with the time you re supposed to turn back when you re trying to get
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to that final last bit of a summit on Everest.
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If the time goes past a certain time of the day, you ve got to turn around because otherwise it s going to be too late in the day.
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It s going to be darkness and it s going to get much more dangerous.
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A lot of climbers that year just kept on going through their turnaround times.
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His argument from various different diaries and reconstructions is that this was because they were interpreting
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this negative information is like, well, okay, now we ve got some adversity, we got to really try, we got to really, really keep fighting.
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And so you see what happens, you know, negative information comes in, you take the wrong decision as a result of it.
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In a much less sort of life and death way, you can see this happening in all sorts of business contexts where people people set some goal for a company or for themselves.
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It gets harder and harder and harder.
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they face more and more adversity.
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But instead of seeing that maybe that s an argument for readjusting, for being nimble, flexible, changing the end point that they were shooting for, they re just like,
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Well, now this really shows that I ve just got to fight my way through.
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And as often as not, it ends in failure or even disaster.
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So the alternative approach that I talk about in the book is not abandoning goals completely.
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I don t think we can do that just as humans, and I don t think we should, but having a much, much looser conception of goals.
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I quote this guy, Steve Shapiro, who has the idea that if you think about yourself as a
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Frog on a lily pad that your life is sort of jumping from one pad to another Seeing what s there doing some interesting cool stuff there?
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And then when it s time moving to another rather than this kind of relentless ladder a pyramid that you re trying to get to the top of one of the big advantages of this approach is then that you can You can change direction.
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So if opportunity calls, but it s in a slightly different way or if the
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If you if you re launching your business brings you into contact with some people who give you a really good idea, but it s not quite the one you started off with, like then you re nimble enough to switch and get the most out of that instead of this kind of blinkered situation where you we sort of put on blinders and and and and focus relentlessly on this one goal, right?
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I mean, we have
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There s the term summit fever, which is over commitment to a goal.
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Climbing to the top of the mountain is what ends up killing you.
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So technically you achieve your goal, you just die on the way back.
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But I think this is important to realize because I think a lot of entrepreneurs and I think a lot of everybody gets this way where you re like, I need to get promoted to the top of this.
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And then after a few years of striving and striving and striving, if you manage to take a pause, often you ll go, wait a minute, I hate working here.
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Why the hell am I trying to be a director?
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Or what s the point of becoming a partner?
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I can t stay in this profession.
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And that happens to so many people.
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I think that this is another aspect of the problem, right?
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We characterize our goals in weird or overly specific ways.
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And one of the examples in the book, if you decide as a 20 year old,
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that by 35 you re going to have so many million dollars.
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A number of things could happen.
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One is you could fail to reach that wealth target.
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But the other is you could succeed and have completely alienated all your friends, destroyed your marriage, ruined your health, and that would not really be success.
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And if someone had asked you at the beginning of that process,
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would that look like success to you, you would have said that it isn t.
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So part of the problem with goals is that we like pick one variable or two variables, and you just assume that as long as you maximize those variables, you re on the right path, regardless of what s happening to you holistically in the round.
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And by the way, that s not an argument against making a huge amount of money if you ve got
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the skills and the energy and the good fortune to do so.
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But it s about understanding that every single aspect of a life is connected to every other single aspect.
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And if you start sort of pulling on one thread, you re going to have an effect somewhere else.
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And it s worth staying aware of whether it s a good effect or not.
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The book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking, that will be in the show notes, and don t forget about the Art of Charm Challenge.
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It ll help you connect with others, create more productive personal and business relationships, and has step-by-step challenges to help you move forward.
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There s also a Facebook group with thousands of other AOC family taking the challenge as well.
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Of course, AJ and I are in there with the rest of the Art of Charm team, helping you all move through the challenges.
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Just text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444,
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or go to theartofcharm.com slash challenge and get rocking.