Why Sharing Your Goals Can Sabotage Your Success
How revealing aspirations drains motivation
It happens a lot of times with me; whatever I’m doing or want to do, I share it with my friends, and whatever I want to quit, I keep it myself.
This is because when I tell people what I’m about to do, it makes me feel more than who I’m right now, and when it comes to telling people the bad habits or anything else I am going to quit, it makes me feel worse than I’m right now.
Perceptions Matter
We always want people to know us for our aspirations, not our flaws, because when someone hears that we are going to start writing one article per day on Medium, he thinks, Wow, you are really a creative person who is also going to be consistent.
But when he hears about flaws, like wanting to quit watching Netflix because it’s affecting our routine, this makes them think we are lazy people who are not able to follow their routine or stop before Netflix automatically plays the next episode.
This is the sign that shows we haven’t accepted ourselves for who we are. When we don’t show empathy to ourselves, we’ll always look outside, and trust me, it never goes right. Whatever we tell someone, it backfires on us because not all our aspirations come true.
There are a lot of negative consequences to telling people what you are about to do.
When you are starting something, you have motivation and aspiration for where you want to go. This helps you keep pursuing the goal.
The gap between where you are and where you want to go is the motivation, or force, that keeps you going. But when you tell people about what you are going to achieve and you keep doing it day after day, your mind starts to expect the goals as achieved.
Anything that you think you are definitely going to achieve and you keep talking about it, your mind perceives it as achieved. So it loses interest in it, and things become boring.
Your mind loves something that is attainable, but with some challenges, and when you are working towards it, you can see the progress of where you have started and where you are going.
This keeps you motivated because you are aware that you are reaching your goals.
The Dopamine Effect
But when you tell your friends about it, your mind releases the same chemical (dopamine), which you release when you actually achieve the goal. Once the chemical is released, your mind will lose interest in actually pursuing the goal.
That is why we quit the projects, habits, or goals that we tell our friends we are going to achieve.
Just think about it: anything that you wanted to achieve in the past, how motivated you were before you actually got it, and once you got it, you lost all your motivation to pursue it because you now have it and don’t need to work on it.
Dopamine is basically a guide that takes our mind towards our goal. It needs to know that we are progressing towards our goal and we haven’t achieved it yet, so it can give our body motivation to keep pursuing it.
When we keep our goals from our friends and colleagues, we are making sure that our minds don’t get confused about our progress.
Your mind takes the words you speak very seriously; it doesn’t have a filter to tell if you are lying or telling the truth.
To better understand this motivation and pursuing, let’s take the example of eating.
Dopamine releases a little bit when we feel hungry because it gives us energy and motivation to go and eat. Even though we need food to have energy, we still need energy to pursue eating.
Once we go out and have dinner, our dopamine chemical comes back to its baseline, and now even if you see your favourite food, you won’t feel hungry because you have already completed the cycle of pursuing it.
You can see, or probably you have seen, that some people who are addicted to gaming, social media, or watching Netflix feel less energetic to go out and eat something. Because they are releasing their chemicals from these attention-engineered platform which drops their dopamine level below baseline, once your chemical level is below baseline, you’ll not feel motivated to even eat.
There is a study done on rats in which the experimenter depleted all the dopamine from the body of one rat, and the rat stopped eating and pursuing anything. Then they injected food into that rat, and the rat actually enjoyed the food.
The important thing here is that even though the rat enjoyed the food, but he didn’t had energy or motivation to pursue that food and eat it.
Conclusion
So whatever it is that we love to do or achieve, we must keep our motivation by telling ourselves that we are making progress and that we are behind our destination, and we shouldn’t tell anyone about it until we have arrived at our destination.
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Thank you for reading this story.
Kamal
