You don't have to set goals.
do you remember being in school and being asked to make like a five-year plan and like set goals for your future and hating every second of it and dying a little bit inside this video is for you [Applause] i've never made and achieved a single goal in my life i've done things i've made changes in my life i've grown as a person but my doing things and making changes and growing has never ever been motivated by a single goal that i have concretely thought of wrote down and made a plan for how to achieve it sometimes i feel like my lack of goal setting means that i'm holding myself back from my true potential maybe i could actually be achieving more things and making more changes and growing more if only i could set some damn goals like sometimes i feel super inadequate and even broken for not being able to set goals and follow through with them but as i get older and more stubborn that the approaches that i take to living my life are fine actually i'm starting to question what if i'm not broken what if goal setting is first of all let's back it up a bit when people talk about goals they generally mean two different things conscious goals or subconscious goals when i say conscious goals these are the things we consciously think of as goals new year's resolutions five-year plans smart goals and so on but sometimes when people talk about goals they're framing basically every human desire as a goal like this every human behavior is to produce an end so like you and i right now we're both actually trying to create an outcome we're having a conversation which might be just the outcome is for us to learn from each other i'm gonna refer to these as subconscious goals let's analyze conscious goals first but i'll get back to the subconscious goals later i promise there are endless productivity gurus and success gurus who will tell you that you are holding yourself back from your true potential and for you to really truly achieve what you want in life you need to dream bigger and set goals goal setting i call the master skill of success with it everything is possible without it nothing is possible don't just set vague goals like be happier or make more money set specific measurable time-bound goals actually you know what if you really want to know how to make goals that you can really achieve then you should buy my book oh if you don't like this book then try one of these or perhaps this one or this one or maybe one of these or maybe maybe one of these ones or this one or this one these books including the one that fell on the floor are just a very small selection from the ovra of the prolific author speaker and success expert brian tracy brian also wrote this book which is called goals which is very on topic but unfortunately it didn't arrive from the library in time for me to include it in the video sorry that one almost dropped on my head i'm glad it didn't oh my god almost kills my boyfriend on camera it shatters my glasses into my eyes sorry i can't finish filming this video to go to the er from my very shallow uncharitable reading of brian he appears to have made a living off of spouting opinions as if they were facts which is like most other productivity gurus or success experts or youtubers he makes vague often sloppy gestures towards more vigorous research or philosophy here and there to lend an error of credibility to his ideas aristotle said that 95 percent of everything you do is the result of habit only the top 10 percent of people are absolutely clear about what they really really want only three percent of adults have clear written measurable time-bounded goals and plans to achieve them and by every statistic these three percent accomplish ten times as much as people with no goals at all this simple technique has taken people from rags to riches all over the world for at least 100 years pick your most important task and start on it immediately and then discipline yourself to stay with it until it's complete mostly his work is like a bundle of rules that he's made up packaged and repackaged into 750 videos over 80 books and probably like hundreds if not thousands of talks and seminars and stuff like that in my brand new webinar i'm going to teach you my proven 12 step goal setting method now goal setting has seven steps i set goals every single day develop the habit of daily goal setting now daily goal setting is quite simple get yourself a spiral notebook make a list for each day of all the goals the little goals you're going to accomplish actually write the goal down physically on paper keep a journal and write down your goals on a regular basis when you go to sleep at night think about your goals for the coming day when you're driving through the day think about your goals when you're talking to other people think about your goals all successful people and all wealthy people think about their goals most of the time your ultimate success in life cannot wait and neither should you spots are limited for my webinar so if you want to change your future be sure to enter your information now he calls himself the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today and i i don't know what that means but it sounds impressive i guess brian says should i be calling him like mr tracy do you think he seems like a please call me brian or like a that's mr tracy to you i don't know um regardless i think that daddy tracy is full of sh he does not point to any official studies or surveys or any data to prove his very exaggerated claims all of his evidence is anecdotal and anecdotal evidence that i have gathered proves him wrong if all successful and wealthy people think about their goals most of the time why can i think of a ton of examples off the top of my head of successful wealthy people who seem to have not known what the they were doing i remember reading that one of my favorite directors academy award winner sir david lean just went into filmmaking because he was terrible at everything else sophia nygaard has compared her channel's success to a wild horse simply nailogical just really liked doing nail art wong jun ho has credited the success of parasite to him just being a weirdo and doing what he always did in other words i don't think these successful people's achievements were ever listed on a vision board or in a five-year plan they didn't make goals for success they just did stuff they enjoyed doing and success just kind of happened to happen to them but hey maybe we should listen to mr tracy after all he's written over 80 books quantity over quality in my right lens this is like a like a tick tock content creator method of authorship pre-tick talk he's releasing one book every six hours brian is just over here like throwing books at the wall like spaghetti to see what sticks this is absurd this is too many books although to give him credit there are some things about goals that he points to that aren't just things that he pulled out of his ass that are based in research and science like specific and measurable or smart goals this type of goal setting has been rigorously studied by real sciency people to have some proven benefits but let's investigate what this research says about goals exactly do you think he like gives his friends autographed copies of his own books guaranteed oh my god i don't want to bag on him too hard if you like him that's fine i just think he's kind of full of i think he's one of the many people who says like oh i can tell you how to get rich but the way that he's getting rich is telling you how to get rich which is such a scam real science part one lock and latham's goal-setting theory in the late 1970s a couple of psychologists hung out with some loggers they were testing the hypothesis if managers set specific goals will this increase productivity to test this they selected a group of 20 supervisors and trained 10 of them to set goals for their workers the other 10 were told that psychologists were studying how absenteeism and injuries affected productivity they measured the two groups for 12 weeks and found that the group that set goals achieved higher productivity and lower absenteeism than the non-gold group other similar studies that they and other researchers conducted at the time had similar results so they concluded setting goals increases productivity for a bit of context and to appease any supreme nitpickers or experts in management theory who might be watching lock and latham did not magically think of this in a vacuum they drew from lots of prior thinking from a diverse array of white men in suits from locke and latham's findings we get some golden rules of goal setting that your goals must be specific and measurable and challenging yet reachable thus spawned the inspiration for smart goals and endless other intricate goal-setting rituals and checklists for what constitutes a good goal but locke and latham and many other researchers of goal-setting are operating in a very specific context employee management locke and latham have demonstrated that goal setting can increase productivity it can increase the amount of logs logged the amount of words typed the amount of keys punched by an employee who is managed by a manager but this finding does not prove that goal setting will guarantee anything else it doesn't guarantee an increase in the quality of the work nor an increase in the quality of your life nor an increase in your income nor your level of success so there are some ways that applying these very specific contextual benefits of goal setting done by managers for employees starts to fall apart when we try to apply it to our personal life goals or paths first of all success in life is not as easily measurable as logs logs words as logs logged words typed keys punched and so on sure some measures of success are kind of measurable like money and admittedly when people say that someone is successful what they really mean is they have made lots of money but a lot of people will tell you to set goals and encourage you to goal set in all areas of your life not just in the amount of money that you make but in areas that are way harder to really measure your success in like making friends or dating or to put it a different way a lot of people's goal in life is just a vibe what does it mean to set a measurable goal to just vibe similarly lock and latham emphasize the importance of setting challenging but reachable goals but it's hard to determine what is challenging but reachable in the context of your own life often setting specific goals encourages us to overreach like sometimes i think that getting up at 6 a.m every day or exercising regularly is a completely reasonable and reachable demand to place on myself especially since lots of other people seem to do it just fine but so far every time i have consciously set goals to do these things i have failed either i'm a weak ass or more charitably these goals were just not reachable for me and similarly to that it can be really difficult for us to implement one super key recommendation from lock and latham's paper to be a good manager locke and latham end their paper by saying used incorrectly goal setting may cause rather than solve problems like any other management tool goal setting works only when combined with good managerial judgment although it is sometimes possible to have a sober objective view of yourself to ensure that you're giving yourself regular feedback to judge which reasonable and what's not reasonable often it is really hard so i wonder if some cases telling people to just goal set without also coaching self-management skills might per lock and latham's warning here cause rather than solve problems for you overall i just want to ask why are we using tools from business management psychology to try to shape the course of our lives why are we being told to treat ourselves like employees to constantly be optimizing and increasing our productivity hot take goal setting is internalized capitalism i was hoping at this point in the video i could be all smug and huffy and congratulate myself for like cracking open this conspiracy and then we could all move on to part two where i get to talk about subconscious goals unfortunately not all goal-setting and not all goal-setting research is about optimizing our productivity um cold take to counteract the hot take not all goal-setting is internalized capitalism a lot of it is actually about trying to find ways for us to improve life satisfaction and achieve personal growth which i think are perfectly fine things to aspire to so let's delve into what that goal-setting research has to say real science part two maybe goal's good so as i said this other genre of goal-setting research focuses on how goal-setting can help us improve life satisfaction achieve personal growth become happier good stuff like that and interestingly they don't really focus on smart or specific slash achievable slash time bound lock and latham style goal setting sometimes they do but usually the key focus is on coaching participants to make goals that are aligned with their values the studies mostly have findings that say something like when people have goals that align with their values they're more likely to make progress on them and generally have better well-being this makes perfect sense to me just try to do stuff you enjoy and is important to you and you'll probably do it and you'll feel happier doing it to his credit brian tracy does also kind of dispense this genre of goal-setting advice telling you to prioritize some goals over others ask yourself once you have your list for the day if i could only do one thing on this list before i was called out of town for a month what one activity would i want to be sure to get completed and put a circle around that and start on that activity immediately first thing and then discipline yourself to work non-stop until you complete that one activity so he's not totally full of there's just like a lot of in there mixed in with some gems you know like making diamonds from peanut butter that's the image i'm imagining right now you're welcome although i'm not going to completely let brian off the hook here these studies still don't substantiate his absurd claim that all successful people set goals and the implication that you not goal setting is what is holding you back from becoming a millionaire these studies link goal-setting to increased well-being or happiness or life satisfaction not income or career success and although making business or workplace goals smart to increase employee productivity might be good business practice these studies don't really prove to me that it's valuable for your personal goals to be smart the goal of your goals doesn't have to be to increase your productivity it can just help you frame your desires if you do choose to make goals just make sure that they matter to you some people might argue that nobody really chooses to make goals as i mentioned earlier sometimes when people talk about goals they're really framing every single human desire as a goal like in the opening of an essay from this book on goal directed behavior every day from the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed goals influence our thoughts feelings and actions we as organisms are fundamentally goal-driven and structure our social worlds around these desires and concerns it turns out we are all already thinking about our goals most of the time and it turns out i am full of also like when i said i have never made and achieved a goal in my life that was a lie i am setting and achieving goals all the time if we are all already always making goals maybe a different way to think of conscious goal setting is for it to be a way to bring those subconscious goals into our conscious mind to take a closer look at the goals that we are subconsciously trying to achieve like this plant is older than i am it's a bonsai from my grandfather he died when i was 11 and i never learned cantonese or mandarin and his english was not the greatest so there was always a language barrier i didn't really know him very well i know for my mom that he was quiet and gentle um i remember him making me laugh by making faces at me across the dinner table with damn you in his teeth this bonsai is looking a little sad right now partially because it is infected with scale once something has scale on it it is very very difficult to get rid of i would like to get rid of the scale on this bonsai you might say i have a goal to get rid of the scale on this bonsai but i wonder what subconscious goals i might be trying to meet by wanting to get rid of the scale like maybe what i'm really trying to do is to connect with my grandfather and if i'm trying to connect with my grandfather maybe what i'm really trying to do is understand the people who raised and shaped me and to understand who i am and to feel a sense of place duty and belonging or maybe what i'm really trying to do is just get asian points like as a mixed kid i never really feel chinese enough but maybe by taking care of this bonsai and having like an asian hobby then i will earn more asian points and eventually i will earn enough of them to feel genuinely chinese or maybe i just want to remove it because it's gross and it's satisfying to wipe it off i don't really know what my real goal is here but regardless maybe by poking around in my brain and trying to become more aware of why i might care for this bonsai is a good thing if cleaning the scale off of this bonsai is say like a way for me to connect with my dead grandfather then maybe i will actually be motivated to actually properly wage war on them and like actually get rid of them or becoming more aware of my subconscious goals could mean that i can like question and let go of some of these goals like maybe it's pointless to go around trying to get asian points to prove that i'm really chinese either i'm chinese or i'm not and me caring for a bonsai doesn't really change that i hope conscious goal setting doesn't have to focus on achievements and success instead it can be a tool to exercise some curiosity to lift the lid of your brain and rummage around in there to see what you are prioritizing and deprioritizing and check if you agree with your decisions or not like i often have to check in with myself around my goals for this channel you might have noticed that my uploads are not super consistent and a big part of that is because i have a different other goal to not re-enter burnout so when i've gotten sick or when i've been facing a ton of other deadlines or when things have fallen apart in my personal life then i haven't been pushing myself to make videos for this channel but as a result my goal of having a successful youtube channel has been de-prioritized which i think is the right choice sometimes but don't get me wrong the guilt of not regularly uploading still gets to me sometimes i wish i didn't have this alternate goal of avoiding burnout i wish i could just be so driven to do youtube that i would just run myself to the ground to make it big and then after i am wildly successful then i'm allowed to have a well-timed meltdown for a couple months maybe like even a year i can like take time off while also breaking in that sweet sweet passive income and then i can come back with some like highly successful video about why i left youtube maybe some of you watching have had thoughts like this as well and while we are on the subject i want to remind you and remind myself that grinding it out to the point where you burn out is a huge gamble it does not guarantee that you will achieve whatever punishing goal that you set out for yourself it does not guarantee that you'll get a million subscribers the only thing it really guarantees is that eventually you will be exhausted and being exhausted feels real bad whereas being easier on yourself setting less ambitious deadlines giving yourself time to rest and actually enjoy life is a much more reliable way to guarantee that you'll most likely not burn out and that you'll have spent at least some of your time on this planet doing stuff that is worthwhile to you stuff that matters to you so maybe maybe i'm choosing the right option here i sure hope so back to the actual video i was talking about the value of being conscious about your subconscious goal setting maybe by making your subconscious goals concrete and conscious you can spend your time doing stuff that actually aligns with your values doing stuff that actually matters to you maybe goal setting is actually really good for me and i should suck it up and just make some goals already but there is still one more fundamental remaining problem here goal-setting still makes me feel like trash goal-setting encourages me to think of myself in a deficiency mindset to dip into the when i finally mind when i can't really be happy with myself until i achieve this or that goal until i make a certain amount of money like sure there are probably ways to goal set without thinking that i'm currently a piece of trash but the thing is if i'm telling myself that i'm trying to get better in some way then fundamentally i have to think that my current state is somehow worse that i'm currently somehow incomplete or in the words of success gurus not meeting my full potential but what does it even mean for me to be incomplete or not meeting my full potential i am who i am today what do these other unchosen possibilities really matter one paper i read ended with this observation despite strenuous efforts by the researchers in both studies to recruit to the study people seemed for no obvious reason unwilling to commit to it the researchers are very practical about the potential implications here saying no matter how effective an intervention is it is not effective at all if no one participates in it even if goal-setting would improve my life it doesn't really matter if i'm not able to bring myself to do it there's no requirement for us to set goals really so even if doing some concrete goal setting or improving our abilities to goal set would improve our mental well-being if we actually got around to doing it if we never do it does it matter like if only a few already highly motivated people actually do the work of goal setting does it matter if the rest of us don't oh my god i folded this paper so much and it's impossible i feel like the hydraulic press in that one video that has been in my watch later for three years i've reached saturation point with the folds it's just like one solid brick of wood at this point i've recreated the tree can you see how thick it is it's chunky that's a chunky lat right there we're gonna start on a new piece of paper if i've never bothered to make intricate prescriptive goals for myself then it doesn't really matter that a potential different me could have made those goals and could have achieved more that potential different me doesn't exist i do so why should i fret that i'm not them like it doesn't make sense to say that we haven't achieved our full potential we are always already complete we exist in the bodies and lives that we have now and that's it i feel way more confident and settled when i shift into this mindset that i am already enough i'm already complete i don't have to make or achieve any goals really i can just learn and grow with circumstance and take life as it comes oh my god i ripped this one to shreds we'll get one i swear this is not to say that i won't continue to grow and change but i don't have to frame this inevitable change as something i have to strive for or reach towards i can trust my subconscious brain to figure it out i can trust context to change and my future self to be able to adapt and i can approach the future coming nearer with a mindset of curiosity and delight instead of dread i made it i can wonder with openness what's going to happen next what do i generally want to do with my time what are some things that i would like to do what opportunities might open to me what choices might i be able to make in the future and like what opportunities are actually already open to me right now are you comfortable never origami is very sensual there's a lot of rubbing involved four minutes ago i nearly cried and stopped for good who knew making a dollar bill penguin could destroy your soul it's because the money is fake this stuff's literally meant to go it's i wonder what it's made of it's paper when will it end in three minutes two minutes three minutes four minutes i can do math what's eleven minus eight three so you're going to write twice and you corrected yourself incorrectly twice my arithmetic is really bad straight a's in math class flunked arithmetic i didn't flinck i just didn't try to test once a little speech what are we doing the head no yeah see just do it how to fold origami penguin just do it i just split the top of its head open it already looks like a penguin does it needs to be perfect yeah no it can sit i got racks on racks on racks look wow wikihow.com told me that this was the safest way to burn paper inside so we're gonna try it i think that there's this worry that if we don't consciously goal set then we'll procrastinate our lives away that's definitely the anxiety expressed by and provoked by productivity gurus but if you if you like me can't use a lighter if you like me seem to inevitably fail at every single goal that you set that doesn't mean that you aren't achieving anything and if you don't set conscious goals for yourself that doesn't mean that you won't achieve anything in the future you can probably just keep feeling it out you'll know what to do and i opened up a window to create a breeze and it's putting out the that's probably good it's very safe you don't have to make a five-year plan and rush yourself into the future you've never wasted your potential if you could have done it by now you would have the choices that you made in the past were the best that you could make at the time and you'll continue to make the best choices that you can given the circumstances that you'll find yourself in unfortunately although i do think that brian tracy is kind of full of shock i do also agree with him it is all about routine and we do achieve what we think about most of the time i just think that what we're thinking about and what we're achieving and what we're doing is usually fine and if you like me feel the pressure to succeed then maybe think about what other subconscious goals you're trying to meet with the goal of success my eyes are watering so much from the smoke but i'm going to press on and think about whether there might be an easier more reliable way to get that need met oh good lord light some on fire inside i said it'll be a great idea and very cinematic i said you don't have to think about your goals most of the time you can think about like honestly you can think about whatever you want but if you want to shift your thinking here a little bit then you can think about the routines that you do think about why you do them and why they're important to you and how they might help you and try to like cherish and enjoy them you don't have to do your routines for the sake of achieving your goals you can do your routines for the sake of doing your routines and maybe by being really present in those routines that you do and the habits that you hold you might discover that you've already achieved some of the goals that you thought you were still striving towards am i gonna do one of the penguins i love these but the point is to burn it so you don't have to achieve your goals before you make your life better you don't have to succeed you're already here now and you can start making your life better today thanks for watching subscribe if you'd like it does help to see those numbers go up leave a comment i always appreciate reading all the really thoughtful and sweet things that people say um even the critical stuff is like so thoughtful i'll catch you in the next one thanks so much okay i want to show you my favorite dollar bill trick if you put it down then it's frowning and if you put it up then it's smiling all right it gives me joy
2022-06-15 03:33
