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Keep your goals to yourself | Derek Sivers
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Keep your goals to yourself | Derek Sivers

The Psychology of Goal Setting

The Importance of Personal Goals

  • The speaker encourages the audience to reflect on their biggest personal goal, emphasizing the need to feel this goal deeply for effective learning.
  • Expressing a goal can create a sense of accomplishment and identity; however, it may paradoxically reduce motivation to achieve it due to psychological effects.

Social Reality and Motivation

  • When goals are shared with others, they become a "social reality," tricking the mind into feeling that the goal has been accomplished, leading to decreased motivation for actual work.
  • This concept contradicts common advice about sharing goals for accountability. Historical studies by Kurt Lewin (1926), Wera Mahler (1933), and Peter Gollwitzer (1982, 2009) support this phenomenon.

Research Findings on Goal Sharing

  • In an experiment involving 163 participants, half announced their goals while the other half did not. Those who kept silent worked longer towards their goals.
  • Participants who announced their goals quit earlier and felt closer to achieving them despite doing less work.

Strategies for Effective Goal Achievement

  • To counteract the negative effects of announcing goals, individuals should resist sharing them prematurely and delay gratification from social acknowledgment.
Channel: TED
Video description

http://www.ted.com After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone -- but Derek Sivers says it's better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10