Peak Performance Newsletter #19 | Aggressive Goal-setting, Non-Dual Thinking, and Embracing Risk for Growth
Three related essays on Growth
Hey all,
Three micro-essays this week. No completed updates to the Founder’s Guide, though if you click through you’ll notice the scaffolding is in place for a few more topics.
Setting Aggressive Goals
One common difficulty I see in both personal and company goal-setting processes is the fear of setting aggressive goals. By aggressive, I mean goals that you’re not entirely sure that you can achieve. They exist at the far reaches of what you’re currently capable of. Some people like to call these stretch goals.
Most people, in lieu of aggressive goals, set safe goals. Safe goals are goals that you have a reasonably high probability of accomplishing, say 80-90%+.
The fear of aggressive goals and corresponding preference for safe ones comes from a preference for achieving our goals. More deeply rooted is the inverse: the fear of not achieving our goals.
I strongly believe that this fear comes from a pervasive culture of goal as expectation. The model for goals that many of us inherited is that goals are expectations with pure downside risk: achieving goals is not celebrated, but missing them is most certainly punished.
The price of this relationship to goals can be made clear via a thought experiment. Imagine we are goal-setting revenue targets for the year. You are accountable to a boss for these targets. I tell you to choose one of two options:
We can set a goal for $250K with a guarantee that you will exceed it and bring in $300K.
We can set a goal for $500k with a guarantee that you will miss it and instead bring in $425K
Did you feel what I did? Your intellect clearly sees that option two is better—you make $125K more! And yet part of you is pulled to option one. Why? In option one you have the security of having achieved your goal, exceeding it by $50K, whereas option two, while absolutely better, is relatively worse given that you have missed your goal by $75K.
If you hone in on goals and lose sight of your absolute objective, you develop a preference for achieving or exceeding goals that are absolutely worse than failing at more challenging ones. Also note that this is completely rational if you are embedded in the culture of goal as expectation. More aggressive goals only expose you to more downside risk.
As leaders, the opportunity is to call out and shift this fundamental paradox. Humans are wired for loss aversion and the pursuit of social status, and so will prefer to exceed an easy goal over missing a challenging one. How can we change this? Flip the relationship to goals that many of us grew up with:
Switch from goals as expectation to goals as inspiration
Switch from the primary outcome of Goals as punishment to the Primary outcome of Goals as celebration: of accomplishment or the opportunity to learn.
Treating goals this way acknowledges what they really are: vehicles for progress.
An aggressive goal challenges us to get better and grow, and that’s something nearly all of us want. People don’t avoid aggressive goals because of the growth they induce but for the fear of negative repercussions. The opportunity is for us, as a culture, to choose aggressive goals to inspire, challenge, and move us, and to celebrate both the choosing of the aggressive goal and the outcome it creates.
Questions
Where are you avoiding aggressive goals for fear of goal as expectation? How can you shift to celebrating and being inspired by aggressive goals?
Embracing Non-Dual Thinking
I’ve recently developed a sensitivity to my own tendency for “or” level-thinking. I’ve identified that a lot of my life’s frustration has come from thinking in this way. I define Or-level-thinking as the automatic and unconscious tendency to assume tradeoffs between things. This then leads me to instantly get wrapped up deciding how to balance or tradeoff between the two. Examples:
Happiness or Success
Time for Work or Time for Relationships
Joy or Survival
A Positive Culture or World-Class Pursuit of Excellence
The problem with the automaticity of or-level-thinking is that it assumes the tradeoff into existence, even if it isn’t real. You become blind to possibilities where you can have both.
If you automatically assume that your company’s culture can either be supportive of people or pursue world-class excellence, you will be blind to possible avenues that get you both. If you assume you can either be joyful or be in pursuit of what you want, you’ll miss the opportunity to be joyful while pursuing what you want. You will make decisions that only allow you to pursue one because your mind isn’t even awake to the possibility that you could have both.
This is one of the more costly aspects of human cognition: we abstract reality into flawed and reductive models, and the limitations of those models become limits on how we interact with reality.
The alternative to Or-level-thinking is what psychologists refer to as Non-Dual thinking. This is as simple as identifying your “Ors” and shifting them to “Ands”. Identifying and shifting “Ors” to “Ands” opens new avenues of possibility. It allows us to challenge our assumptions of reality and possibly have our cake and eat it too. “Ors” self-limit, “Ands” let reality limit. “Ors” discourage creativity, “Ands” inspire it.
Questions
Where are you assuming an “or” where you could have an “and”? What tradeoffs exist more in your head than in reality? How can you create the “and”?
Risk and Growth
As you shift from “Ors” to “Ands” you’ll inevitably land on questions of possibility. Can you really have both sides of an assumed tradeoff? How?
There are often real tactical considerations to be made when asking these questions. There is only so much time, money, and energy available to you. Can you really allocate those in such a way that you get both?
These questions often become another form of self-limiting. We allow the fact that we’re asking them to rule out the possibility. If we’re not sure, we might as well go with no and save face. See the conversation on aggressive goal-setting above for why one might do this.
We let these questions rule out the possibility because we sense that there is a risk in pursuing this thing: there is a chance that you will spread yourself too thin and land in a pile of shit. And so we don’t pursue a new world of possibility.
What we miss with this thinking is that the potential breakdown could be precisely the trigger you need for your next metamorphosis. Having too much on your plate could break you down, or it could:
Force you to “trim the fat”, removing less meaningful things from your life in favor of more meaningful ones
Upgrade your systems, creating a permanent increase to your capacity for what you can handle
Lead you to upgrade your skills, either in executing or delegation, once again leading to a permanent increase in capacity
Running into these breakdowns 24/7 can and will wear you down. But chronically avoiding them isn’t the right answer either. We must be willing to walk into the fire at pivotal times to discover who we are on the other side. In these moments the threat of breaking down becomes a gateway to possibility.
Questions
Where are you self-limiting because you’re not sure that you have the capacity for everything you want? Are you willing to step into that possibility with the goal of creating it? How can you take the first step?