How do you make the praxis of continuous goal-pursuit work in practice? It’s not a matter of avoiding the negative consequences of failure, but of celebrating the steady accumulation of successes.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think Jeff Brown and I are both thinking out loud, by this point, and I want to emphasize that I am not quarreling with him. It’s his hammering away on the topic of goal-achievement that induced me to think about the subject in a systematic way, and I am by his discourse and by his good example much enriched.

So here’s where I am tonight: You have to make the commitment, yes. Without a sincere resolution to do something different, you don’t have a goal, you just have a wish, a whim, a will-‘o-the-wisp wheedle issued for any reason or for no reason to a benignly indifferent universe.

But: Even so: Just having a specific plan is still not enough. You have to follow through. You have to do what it is that you have planned to do. But when we talk about the process of following through, too often we do it in a language that is inherently dis-motivating.

Like this: No pain, no gain. There is a truth to that cliche, obviously, and that’s why it’s such an easy sentiment to express. But by emphasizing the pain entailed by, in this case, exercise, the expression throws a formidable barrier in the way of actually digging in and doing the work required by the goal.

I keep thinking that for a serious resolution to change one’s behavior to be effective in the long run — to get fit or to lose weight or to learn to speak Spanish or to master a seven-figure state of mind in your career — you have to rethink the incentives. The reward — to yourself, in your own mind — for having made incremental progress toward your goal has to exceed both the cost of achieving that small success and the putative benefit of doing the opposite, instead.

Do you see? Eating is easy. It can be very satisfying, fun even. Not-eating is hard, and it’s hard to think of not-eating as being any fun. But if you cannot find a way to celebrate the victory of not eating the wrong foods, of not eating as much or as often, you probably will not lose weight. The reward for indulging your appetite is much too obvious. But if you try to motivate a program of weight loss by self-denial or self-denigration or self-loathing, you are likely not just to fail but to fail in a way that makes future efforts at any sort of goal-pursuit that much more difficult — and that much more likely to fail.

What would work better? How about digging deep into the idea that eating better, in smaller portions even if at greater intervals, is something to be celebrated. You will have to think more about food than ever you did when you were simply stuffing it into your face, but, by thinking about it, and by actively observing yourself doing precisely what you have said you would do, you will have earned the right to celebrate your success at living up to your goal.

Any goal you can name has built-in incentives, and so the failure to attain that goal will have corresponding disincentives. But everything that actually matters in human life — every value — is to be found to the right of the zero on the number line. The zero and that endless string of negative numbers to its left are just ciphers for failure. The benefits to be realized from the pursuit and achievement of your goals are what matter in your life. This is what you need to focus on to sustain your motivation to succeed.

Here’s one from me. I have always worked very hard, since I began to have conscious memories. But I have never been a creature of steady routines. I work until I’m exhausted, often falling asleep sitting up at my desk, and then I get up at dawn. This seems weird to other people, but it has always worked well for me, and — as you may have noticed — I don’t care very much about how other people organize their lives or what they think about how I organize mine.

But I have put myself in a small bind by resolving with Scott Cowan and Teri Lussier to pursue five demanding goals every day for at least a month. The problem is not getting the work done, it’s getting it done in a time-efficient way. If I haven’t worked out before ten in the morning, it’s good odds I’ll be doing it after eight at night. A nod’s as good as a wink, but the later I push things, the greater my risk of failure.

So my goals need a meta-goal: I need to accomplish as much as I can of these five goals as early in the day as I can get them done. If I can wake up no later than six a.m., I can deal with the overnight email, work out and then walk the dogs with Cathleen all by 7:30. I can eat breakfast, shower and shave and maybe even knock out my half-hour of web work, all before nine a.m. That’s 60% of the day’s goals taken care of before I make my first phone call. Surely this is worth doing.

So what’s the problem? Getting up — reliably — at six. I’ve never lived the alarm clock life, and now I have to. And we all know what a self-defeating curse the alarm clock — and the snooze alarm — can be. So here’s what I did: I’m using my iPhone as my alarm clock, of course, and I gave this name to my daily alarm: Make money.

We live by symbols, and that’s a powerful motivation for me: If I respond to that alarm — if I don’t turn it off and if I don’t take a snooze cruise — I am expressing my commitment to making money. And if I don’t? That’s a commitment, too, isn’t it? But doing the right thing — getting my ass out of bed — is a small success at the very dawning of a new day. I’ve already started the day a winner. All I have to do is keep winning.

I think working out the incentives has to be a part of your action plan for the pursuit of your goal, and accounting for those incentives — tallying up your incremental successes — must be a part of your active goal-pursuit. This is what makes the unbroken chain of red X’s on a calendar so valuable, and this is why sharing your plan with people who like you and support your ambitions can be valuable. Your objective is not to avoid the ignominy of failure but, rather, to rejoice in the experience — ultimately the habit — of success.

A praxis is a perfectible practice, and I believe in living the idea of praxis in everything I do. This is really what I’m doing right now, making a praxis of goal-achievement. I’ve always done everything I wanted to do, and I never thought twice about how I was getting things done. That was a mistake. As with everything else, working out the theory is how you discover how to perfect the practice.

I’ve always loved to work, and I’ve never cared about money, and I want for the second half of that policy to change by precisely 180 degrees. That’s a big change. It amounts to reprogramming my entire way of thinking. How will I do it? I’m going to start by getting up every day at exactly six o’clock with my mind already focused on making money. After that, all I have to do is follow through.

The big reward is baked in the cake, and the path to that cake is clearly marked by dozens of smaller incentives — with all of them aligned with the big incentive. I have no reason to fear financial failure: I’ve lived with that all my life, sometimes more, sometimes less. What I have to do is motivate my actions toward making more money. And said that way, my course of action is not only obvious but simple. All I have to do is follow through — and celebrate my successes at following through.