Gotta Get Goals? Why?
I have been tagged by Victoria Pynchon at Gotta Get Goals : Settle It Now Negotiation Blog to "to respond to Alex Shalman's Gotta Get Goals by "list[ing] and writ[ing] about the top 5 to 10 goals that you gotta' get so that you can truly say you have achieved your wildest dreams in life. These have to be your best, most exclusive, and over-the-top goals that you can pick off your goals list."
Why? Why do we need goals? This is not a flip response to what appears to a very successful meme/linkbait project. There is a serious question here, raised by Daniel Gilbert in his provocative book "Stumbling on Happiness."
As Daniel Gilbert so eloquently writes:
"If we the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking. They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn't good enough for them.
How can this happen? Shouldn't we know the tastes, preferences, needs and desires of the people we will be next year, or at least later this afternoon?" (my emphasis)
This partially imaginary dialogue between the present self and possible future self is a clever rhetoric device infusing Gilbert's prose.
"How can they [or future self] be disappointed when we accomplish our coveted goals, and why are they [our future self] so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot that we worked so hard to steer them clear of? Is there something wrong with them? Or is there something wrong with us?"
Our frontal lobes give us the ability to plan for what we to happen later, much later or even for when we retire. (Odd word that, rhyming with "expire"). Gilbert argues that in order to escape living in the perpetual present we need to imagine the future, using the frontal lobes as "a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens."
Here comes one of many punchlines for goal setters. We think about the future because it is pleasurable, but "forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit". Might we not be more inclined to think about our future rather than doing something to get there, if we only set goals?
But the more radical punchline is this.
"We want -- and we should want to control the direction of our boat because some futures are better than others, and even from this distance we should be able to tell which are which.
The idea is so obvious that it barely seems worth mentioning, but I am going to mention it anyway. Indeed, I am going to spend the rest of this book mentioning it because it will probably take more than a few mentions to convince you that what looks like an obvious idea, is in fact, the surprisingly wrong answer to our question. We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea os where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain --not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears [to us now]."
So, gotta get goals? Why?
