Do you want to actually achieve your goals? Then make your commitment real by making specific, explicit, objective, detailed plans.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier turned me on to this TED talk on goal-achievement. The video makes the seemingly confounding claim that announcing your goals to other people makes you less likely to achieve them. As with every other seemingly confounding “argument,” the matter turns on the conflation of unlike things. What the speaker, Derek Sivers, is talking about are not actual goals but casual whims. What a huge surprise: Eating cotton-candy spoils your appetite for real food! Who knew?

I once worked with a woman who would issue random statements of desires completely unconnected to her real life. Like this: “I think it would be fun to be a flight attendant.” This is actually an easy goal to attain, but it requires a process of thought and effort and a significant amount of focused action taken over time. The same criteria would apply to any sort of meaningful goal.

Simply announcing to another person that you might like to lose weight, or you might like to see the pyramids, or you might like to be a better Realtor — these are all equally meaningless expressions of whims. They are the verbal equivalent of cotton-candy, a big pile of sugary nothing whipped up by your mind to confound itself into believing that it has been nourished — when you know without any possible doubt that it has not.

The TED talk turns on psychology, which should be warning enough that it’s pure bullshit. The “science” of psychology exists to “persuade” you to be “satisfied” with a lifetime of dull dissatisfaction. “Come on, now, you know that expressing your goals only makes them harder to achieve. Now take another pill and go back to sleep.”

No, thank you. And don’t make me say it again.

The problem is not expressing goals, but expressing empty whims and then doing nothing. Yes, that is self-destructive, but this is not something anyone needs to be told.

Here is what needs to be explored in detail:

Expressing your goals requires a very strong commitment. A true goal is detailed and specific, explicit and objective. It includes a list of serious actions that must be taken through time, and it entails specific performance targets to be achieved by specific dates. A goal is a plan, not just a notion.

Do you need to make your goals public? If you have expressed your goals in the way I just described — you already have. You may not have shared them with other people, but you have made your goals objectively real — and therefore undeniable.

And that’s the problem: The game we play, each one of us inside his own mind, is the game of deniability: If I merely think that I might someday like to learn to speak Spanish, I haven’t really made a commitment. When I see myself, day after day, failing to learn to speak Spanish, I’m not really failing, I just haven’t started to succeed yet. If I tell a stranger about my desire to learn to speak Spanish someday, I can be a hero in that person’s eyes — and in my own — without actually having to do anything. Hurray for me! And the best part is, that other person will probably never even hold me accountable for failing to make any effort to learn to speak Spanish. Cotton-candy is great for every meal!

That much is stupid, obviously. But once you have made your goals real — specific, explicit, objective, detailed, with clear performance targets — making them public can help to keep you motivated. You will be accountable to your own public pronouncement, and other people will feel themselves justified in holding you accountable. To fail to act as you have said you would will make the self-destruction that is always inherent in failing to pursue your goals obvious and undeniable — to the people you have made your commitment to, yes, but especially to yourself.

This is how every great thing gets done. Nothing is easy, that’s a given. The easiest thing to do — always — is nothing. But you cannot achieve anything without making a serious, explicit, detailed commitment, and you cannot make a real commitment without making your commitments objectively real — by giving them an undeniable reality outside of your imagination.

Do you want to see how it’s done? Take a look at this commitment to goal-achievement from Tacoma Realtor Scott Cowan. His expression of the desire to achieve his goal is open, naked, achingly vulnerable. But it is also detailed, explicit, objective and specific — and it openly seeks a public accountability. Growing in any way from your comfortable old self takes guts, and Scott is showing us all what that kind of courage looks like.

Of course, his ordeal just got that much tougher by me drawing attention to it, but, in compensation, his reward will be that much richer for daring to strive — daring to soar — and for daring to do it in public.

Don’t share our goals with other people? Nonsense. What you do about your cotton-candy whims matters nothing at all. But to achieve your goals, you must make them real. If sharing your action plan with others motivates you to work that much harder, so much the better. But the simple act of making an explicit, objective, undeniable commitment to your goals is the first step to achieving them. It’s doing that — or not doing it — that is the decisive factor. And if you won’t make that commitment, you might as well tell the world you want to be an astronaut. You’re not going anywhere anyway.

But the most interesting benefit of taking the other course — making every one of your goals real and explicit and then pursuing those goals relentlessly — is that this is itself the best possible expression of your goals. It’s all one thing, always. Living as a human being is self-expression. Living as your best self is the best possible way of illustrating the value of living up to the ideal of being your best self. Intentions are not deeds — that’s always the problem. But a deed cannot be both wise and unintended. Live your dreams. That is egoism in action. Live your dreams — period — and the world can take care of itself.