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Why Announcing Your Goals Before Working on Them Causes Failure
Success in public requires discipline in private
A bad omen, evil eye, or “nazar” in my native language, Hindi, is a terrible excuse we give when we screw up but don’t want to accept responsibility. So, instead, we love deflecting the blame to external circumstances beyond our control to feel good temporarily until it becomes a familiar pattern of self-sabotage.
Announcing our goals in public is an effective way to build accountability. But when we share too much too soon without backing our statement with proof, it becomes difficult to follow up on our promises in the future, which slowly eats at our self-confidence in facing even tiny challenges.
Why does publicly announcing our goals increase pressure on performance and ultimately lead to failure even though we start with the best intentions?
We’ll discuss how we can tame this harmful behaviour to capitalise on accountability correctly instead of chasing false promises.
Phantom external validation
We are social creatures, which means external validation can sometimes make us do crazy things devoid of logic and reason because of an uncontrollable desire for approval from others, sometimes even from people who…
