Excellent ideas. I (hormetic) just re-tweeted my admiration for “pick directions, not goals” My dissertation examined why people hesitate to explicitly articulate goals for the domains that matter most. Because a goal has a definite failure state, it can motivate exertion to avoid failure. Upstream of that motivation, however, we don’t want to expose ourselves to the risk of failure. The more important some domain is, the more threatening it will be to encounter evidence of having failed. I observed that people (erm, Stanford undergrads) were least articulate about goals when the domain was very important. I labeled this “The Delmore Effect,” to describe the robust decay in goal articulation as something was of increasing importance. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160317034318/http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~wit/PhDraft.pdf
Excellent ideas. I (hormetic) just re-tweeted my admiration for “pick directions, not goals”
My dissertation examined why people hesitate to explicitly articulate goals for the domains that matter most. Because a goal has a definite failure state, it can motivate exertion to avoid failure.
Upstream of that motivation, however, we don’t want to expose ourselves to the risk of failure. The more important some domain is, the more threatening it will be to encounter evidence of having failed. I observed that people (erm, Stanford undergrads) were least articulate about goals when the domain was very important. I labeled this “The Delmore Effect,” to describe the robust decay in goal articulation as something was of increasing importance. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160317034318/http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~wit/PhDraft.pdf