The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals | Episode 55

There's a near doubling, near doubling, in the probability of reaching one's goal if you focus routinely on foreshadowing failure.

Whenever we're trying to learn something new, if we make an error, we know it feels frustrating, but that state of frustration actually cues up particular brain areas to be more alert so that on subsequent attempts to learn that thing, we have a heightened level of focus and a higher probability of learning the new skill, regardless of what that skill is.

When trying to learn something new, you want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you're getting things right about 85% of the time, that you're making errors about 15% of the time.

There are really nice studies now pointing to the fact that doing a bit of multitasking prior to jumping into some focused goal-directed behavior, whether or not it's mental behavior or physical behavior, can actually be useful because it gets us into action.

And indeed, just looking at a narrow piece of the visual world, a small piece of the visual world, for some period of time and forcing yourself to hold that gaze on that location as best you can increase your level of cognitive attention and your ability to focus and stay focused.

Visualization is effective in getting the goal pursuit process started, but it actually is a pretty lousy and maybe even counterproductive way of maintaining pursuit of that goal, meaning continuing to engage in the sort of actions that are going to get you to eventually achieve that goal.

We've all heard that multitasking is bad ... Well, turns out that's wrong. It turns out that there is a role for multitasking, but the multitasking has to be placed at a particular time within your goal-seeking behavior in order to be effective.

I would argue that the visual system and harnessing your visual attention to a narrow point is going to be the most effective way to get your brain and body into a mode of action to pursue whatever goal it is you're trying to pursue.

There is basically one neurotransmitter, or rather neuromodulator system, that governs our goal-setting, goal assessment, and goal pursuit, and that is the neuromodulator dopamine.

If we are to be good at goal-seeking, if we are to be good at setting goals and assessing goals, if we are to achieve our goals, we have to be able to toggle back and forth between a clear understanding of our peripersonal space (what we have and how we feel in the immediate present) and our ability to understand what's out there in the extrapersonal space and our ability to move into that extrapersonal space.

Bringing our visual focus to a particular location does a number of things to the brain and the whole system of the body to prepare it, to place it into a state of readiness, that makes us more likely to lean into our goals, into action.