How to trick your mind to achieve “impossible” goals in life

All of us have goals assigned to various things in life. Career, happiness, personal life, and more. The one thing that we sometimes tend to overlook is a ‘health goal’. If I was to ask you what’s your goal for your health when you turn sixty, no one would say it’s to be overweight and sick. But, the problem is that unless you intentionally strive towards a goal to be physically fit in your sixties currently, there is a very high chance that the lifestyle choices you’ve already made will have cumulative effects and eventually you will wake up and realize that without extreme course correction you will not be healthy in your later years. Even worse, you may wake up and discover that although you had this unvoiced goal to be fit and healthy, there is no way to attain it due to all of the sequential, cumulative choices you made along the way.

There is a basic reason for this procrastination. The human mind is motivated by both short-term and medium-term rewards, and NOT by longer term goals and accomplishments.

Clay Christensen has an amazing talk on this. The example he gives is of spending time at work vs. with one’s loved ones. Specifically it is easier to imagine immediate outcomes of spending time at work versus investing time with loved ones and friends.

I’ve had many weeks which were perfect examples of this dynamic — such as very exhausting planning sessions at work and round after round of development sprints. After such weeks, I feel like, hurray! And, the fantastic endorphins kick in at my pleasure at accomplishing each milepost. My brain feels joy after such accomplishments, and the near-immediate gratification can be addictive.

After weeks like that, I return home and spend time with my kids. I have to be honest, sometimes teaching younger kids can be a rather slow and tiring process with no immediate rewards — although, as my kids are now growing older I do take more delight in their random discoveries, and I vicariously rediscover the world through their eyes. But, when they were infants and toddlers, time invested in them did not deliver instant gratification!

Your brain, being the lazily-motivated animal it is, wants to take the path of least resistance whenever it comes to getting that feel good feeling associated with instant gratifications, or medium-term gratifications. That’s why playing video games like Candy Crush can be so super-addictive and why eating a chocolate bar can be so much more appealing than eating a serving of brussel sprouts.

So, to overcome the impulse to take the quick and easy route to instant gratifications, one has to trick one’s brain. Trying to tell it, “I want to be fit at sixty” will not be particularly motivating for one to get up off the couch.

How do you eat a elephant? One bite at a time.

Question: How Do You Eat An Elephant?

To overcome your lizard brain, chop down your goals into bite-sized pieces so that the payback will seem closer to an immediate gratification than a theoretical long-term benefit. For example, my personal long-term goal is to be physically fit when I reach the age of sixty, and well beyond. So a more medium-term goal for any given year for me is to get to climb a different 14,000 foot or higher mountain somewhere. I’ll pick different locations for different holidays.

In that way, I can look forward to my adventures that are coming up soon, and I can imagine the gratifying feelings of overcoming the physical challenges as I scale the mountains, and I can fantasize about the beautiful vistas I’ll see at the top. Once I accomplish it, I get those memories of the experience to feed my soul. I also often have great times with friends that go with me, and I even get some great photos to look at afterwards.

One of the top worldwide challeges for mountain climbers: Mount Everest

Sign up for a medium term stretch goal, make it public. Sign up with a friend to commit yourself to the deed. If it requires to put money down, even better. If it requires raising money for your favourite charity, success is guaranteed

So, I advise that you use the power of fear to motivate yourself to get moving towards your life’s goals! Nothing will suck more than signing up for a marathon, raising funds for it and collapsing at the first mile mark! Prepare for each of your iterative shorter term goals so that you can experience sequential successes. For the marathon metaphor, you would want to set a fitness tracker to keep yourself honest as you prep in advance, measuring your weekly and monthly progress, and then also acknowledge each of the small successes along the way.

After you have achieved your iterative goals, bask in the glory and feel it! Then set yourself the next goal. Maybe it will be more audacious than your last one — give yourself stretch goals for even better growth.

Repeat and improve.