What do a fly in the urinal, chocolate elephants and photocopiers have in common? Goals! – Part 1

Another article about goals??? Oh no, not again! That is probably how readers who read multiple blogs feel There must be about 1985 blog posts about goals (ok. I totally made that number up, but it feels that way). Everywhere you go in the blogosphere, people are talking about getting SMART.

But bear with me, this is not another post about setting goals (Ha! that is what every blogger thinks!). Ok… How about this? I promise never to talk about SMART goals, instead I will tell you stories about a fly in the urinal, chocolate elephants and Prof. Zeigarnick. Professor who? What the hell! Oh yeah, we will talk about the “what the hell” effect too!

Why goals are important?

The month of January has resolving built right into its name: The ancient Romans named it after the two-faced god Janus, who, with one face looking backward and the other forward, symbolized the hope that we might learn from the past to improve ourselves in the future.

First we made resolutions, that failed to produce the desired results, so now we are set goals.. We’ve made resolutions for hundreds of years, if not more. Why don’t we just give up? Why do we even need goals? A couple of reasons -

1. Everyone else has goals. No, I am not recommending keeping up with the Joneses on this one. I meant businesses, advertisers and everyone else who wants us to sell something.

Photocopier effect : In the late 1970’s, Ellen Langer of Harvard University was conducting experiments on the use of ‘scripts’ in human decision making when she made  a stunning discovery. She found a subliminal technique that had the power to instantly make any claim, statement, or argument more believable and credible.

She and he co-researchers approached people at a photocopying area in her University Library. They tested two requests. The first was: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”  Sixty percent of the people complied.

The second request was: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” By adding a reason, the compliance went up to 94 percent. They wanted to check whether the increase was due to their reasoning. So the researchers tested a third request: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

Notice that the reason is not really a reason at all. Yet despite the redundant nature of the reason, 93 percent of people still complied with the request. Why? We subliminally pay attention to the “because”.

Have you seen any ads that don’t give you a reason for why you need to buy their stuff? Let’s see…

Amazon : You should buy the Kindle Fire because it includes thousands of popular apps and games, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and more, ultra-fast web browsing – Amazon Silk, free cloud storage for all your Amazon content,a fast, powerful dual-core processor, blah, blah…

Scenario 1

You : I shouldn’t buy a Kindle Fire. Amazon : Why? You : Umm…

Scenario 2

You : I shouldn’t buy a Kindle Fire, because that $199 will delay me paying off my debt by an additional 3 months and I will pay $100 in additional interest. If I pay my debt off by the end of the year, I will buy myself one. Amazon : Umm…

Which one do you think will likely hold under pressure? I don’t know about you, but for me, I will do much better with scenario 2. With scenario 1, sooner or later, I will give in because I don’t have any motivation not to.

2. The impact of a fly in the urinal. My first reaction when I read that was ewww… they did experiments in the urinals?  The fly in the urinal technique was initially tested at the Schiphol Airport. They etched an image of a fly in the urinals. Putting the fake fly reduced the spillage by 80%!

The now-famous flies are there in a lot of public urinals including the Amsterdam airport, JFK international, several Universities across US/UK and churches. According to the economist, Kieboom, who came up with this idea, it works wonders. “It improves the aim” says Aad Kieboom. “If a man sees a fly, he aims at it” (Source : Nudge). Apparently men can be potty trained!

The moral of the story is that we do better when we have an aim. Some people adapt greatly and have excellent self control, they can afford to work reactively with whatever life throws at them. For the rest of us, we need something to hold on to. We need to be proactively plan our lives.

Why goals fail?

The simple reason is because we lie. We lie about who we really are.

For example, lets take the perpetually high ranking goal – hit the gym. For this to work, I have to be a person who has a lot of perseverance and can just simply resolve to get fit from a specific date. And keep at it. The truth is that if I was such a person, I wouldn’t have waited until Jan 1st to make this resolution and would be competing with Barbie now.

It takes a lot more than just making a decision. I have to change the basic nature of who I am. I have to dig deeper into the reasons for my past failures.

There are several reasons why my goals fail

1. The first one is, as I explained, is that I am making a decision against my nature.
2. My other big one is a fear of failure.
3. Procrastination is not far behind that. Then comes the
4. Lack of commitment and
5. Lack of motivation : We generally direct our motivation & commitment towards a process, but without the big picture constantly pushing us, we lose our motivation very quickly. For example, if one of our goals is to lose weight. Losing weight in itself is a boring goal, so we can’t keep us motivated for more than a couple of weeks to do that. Where as if we constantly thought about why we want to lose weight and make that strong enough, like picture yourself in a yellow polka dot bikini then you will have the motivation to lose weight.
6. Finally not having a plan to go along with the goals also lands me in trouble. Enthusiasm and motivation are very powerful ways to get started, but they won’t carry you through the inevitable dry periods.

So are we doomed to fail over and over again? No. We all know we have to make SMART goals, so the planning part is already there.  The missing ingredient is – understanding ourselves and making some behavioral changes. Essentially trick ourselves into succeeding.

This post became too big so I will be posting the second part on Friday – “10 goal hacks : How can we succeed in completing our goals instead of re-setting them every year.” including the chocolate elephant and the what-the-hell effect.