Why Our Brains Like Short-Term Goals 03-06

Why Our Brains Like Short-Term Goals

In her book, The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Business, author Monica Mehta explores the role of brain chemistry in entrepreneurship. In this excerpt, she details goal setting.

Achieving your goals isn’t just about hard work and discipline. It’s about physiology. By understanding how the brain processes success and failure, you can jump-start your productivity to create a winning streak and put an end to failed New Year's resolutions.

The more times you succeed at something, the longer your brain stores the information that allowed you to do so well in the first place. That’s because with each success, our brain releases a chemical called dopamine. When dopamine flows into the brain's reward pathway (the part responsible for pleasure, learning and motivation), we not only feel greater concentration but are inspired to re-experience the activity that caused the chemical release in the first place.

This is why the cultivation of small wins can propel you to bigger success, and you should focus on setting just a few small achievable goals. While your ambitions can remain grand, setting the bar too high with goals can actually be counterproductive. Each time we fail, the brain is drained of dopamine making it not only hard to concentrate but also difficult to learn from what went wrong.

Why We Learn More From Success Than Failure

Ever find yourself destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again? According to a study completed by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, that is exactly how our brains are wired to work. Their findings determined that our brain cells only learn from experience when we do things right and failure doesn’t register the same way.

In the experiment, monkeys viewed two images on a computer screen, one that presented a reward if the subject reacted by looking right, another when it looked left. The study showed that the brain response when a monkey received an award for looking the right way improved its chances of performing well on the next trial.

The study makes important discoveries not only about the way we learn but the brain’s neural plasticity or ability to change in response to experiences. When behavior is successful our cells become finely tuned to what the animal was learning at the time while a failure shows little change in the brain or improvement in the monkey’s behavior.

Set Goals Your Brain Likes

Collecting wins, no matter how small, can chemically wire you to move mountains by causing a repeated release of dopamine. But to get going you have to land those first few successes. The key to creating your own cycle of productivity is to set a grand vision and work your way there with a few, achievable goals that increase your likelihood of experiencing a positive outcome.

“Your vision is your destination, and small, manageable goals are the motor that will get you there,” says Dr. Frank Murtha, a New York-based counseling psychologist with a focus on investor psychology, behavioral finance and financial risk taking. “Without the vision you’re on a road to nowhere. Without the goals, you have a destination but no motor. They work in tandem, and you need both.”

Create a Road Map for Your Subconscious Mind

Kick off goal setting by preparing a short vision statement of where you want to go. “Vision creates a picture for the subconscious mind. Our subconscious is what makes us such good problem solvers compared to a computer,” says Dr. Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist and neuroeconomics researcher who has written two books on financial risk taking. “We can see 1,000 dimensions of a problem and sort it down to the most important very quickly.”

The subconscious is not only responsible for 90 percent of the decisions we make in day-to-day life, but is also the part of the brain that is largely in charge when we are performing creative tasks or charting unknown territory. The very act of giving your emotional brain a detailed portrait of your end goal also ensures that, even inadvertently, you will take the steps needed to steer yourself toward it.

Articulate your vision with words and a picture or two; the more detailed the better. Post this where you can see it regularly.

Work Your Way There With Short-Term Goals

To rack up those first few wins, you’ve got to set only a few short-term goals at a time. Each should ideally take no more than three months to achieve. The goals should be realistic and specific, and incorporate your strengths. Writing them down, ideally in a place where you will see them every day, will help you stay focused.

If success releases the production of dopamine, failure can do the opposite. Setting over-reaching goals, or too many goals at once, can be counterproductive for those seeking to harness the power of the brain’s reward center. If you set four goals and achieve only two of them, it’s human nature to focus on what went wrong; even the successes you were able to accomplish fail to drum out what you weren’t able to achieve.

Remember, success begets success.

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Why We Pay to Save Time 02-25

Why We Pay to Save Time

Feeling torn between conflicting goals makes people less inclined to fulfill either one.

Many people consider holiday cheer synonymous with seasonal stress as they rush to finish up their shopping and decorating. But what exactly makes people feel so pressed for time? How do time constraints affect our behavior and the choices we make — not only during the holidays but year-round? And how much are people willing to pay to minimize the pressures?

A new study co-authored by Stanford GSB professor Jennifer Aaker offers some intriguing answers to these questions. When people perceive goals to be in conflict — baking cookies, for instance, means putting off addressing the holiday cards — the ensuing anxiety makes them feel short on time, which affects not only how they spend that time but also how much they are willing to pay to save it.

 Furthermore, Aaker’s research — conducted in collaboration with Jordan Etkin of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Ioannis Evangelidis of Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management — shows that people can reduce the stress of juggling competing goals simply by breathing slowly and learning to recast their anxiety as something more positive, like excitement.

Being stretched to the limit increasingly seems like an inevitable condition of the modern age. | Illustration by Tricia Seibold

Building on prior research demonstrating a close correlation between stress and time constraints, the researchers devised a series of experiments to demonstrate that consumers who see their goals as competing experience greater anxiety — and thus, more time pressures — than those who don’t. They also suspected that the stress of competing goals would make consumers not only less willing to wait — whether in a checkout line, for delivery of an online order, or to speak to a customer-service representative — but also more inclined to pay more to save time, as with expedited shipping.

As they predicted, participants who noted a higher degree of conflict between their goals felt like they had less time. This held true regardless of the nature of the conflict; those who felt conflicted about money — should you save or buy nice things? — felt just as pressed for time as those weighing goals that directly competed for their time, such as staying late at work to build a successful career or coming home early to be a good parent.

In another experiment, the researchers asked participants to choose between two goals they deemed important to them. Then, participants were told to pick one of four cars sporting variations in price, occupant survival rate, styling, and environmental friendliness. Drawing on prior research that identified safety and pollution as the two biggest consumer concerns, Aaker and her colleagues developed various scenarios to measure different levels of conflict. In the high-conflict condition, for instance, the car with the worst survival rate was the most eco-friendly while the safest car spewed the most pollutants, creating stress by forcing participants to make a trade-off. The low-conflict condition included one car that was clearly superior in both categories.

As in the prior experiment, participants measured both the degree of conflict they felt and the amount of time they thought they had — and again, the results showed that those in the high-conflict group reported more stress and felt more time - constrained. But here the researchers added a new twist: They told the participants that their chosen car was not ready and asked how long they’d be willing to wait. Those in the high-conflict group who had to choose between competing preferences were willing to wait fewer days than those who had made no concessions on their dream car. In a similar scenario, goal-conflicted subjects who felt short on time were willing to pay 30 percent more for expedited shipping of a DVD from Amazon. Such results confirm the hypothesis that feeling pressed for time shortens patience and increases willingness to pay.

To test whether reducing stress and anxiety would expand the perception of available time, Aaker and her colleagues created two simple interventions. As in the first experiment, they asked one group of subjects to list two goals and another to list two goals that they perceived to be “in conflict with one another.” Then they randomly assigned participants one of two sets of instructions: Half were told “to breathe so that each complete breath (inhale plus exhale) lasts 11 counts”; the others were told simply to count to 11.

Those with conflicting goals who practiced slow breathing reported less anxiety and a more expansive view of time than those who simply counted. Likewise, conflicted subjects who were instructed to reappraise their anxiety as excitement (mainly by saying “I am excited!” repeatedly) regained a sense of control over their time. “Both interventions made participants feel they had as much time as when goal conflict seemed low,” the authors wrote.

Our new study paints a parsimonious picture by demonstrating that conflicting goals can directly reduce subjective perceptions of time.

Jennifer Aaker

Being stretched to the limit increasingly seems like an inevitable condition of the modern age. Aaker and her colleagues help us understand why. “While previous research shows that stress influences time perceptions and that goal conflict can cause stress, our new study paints a parsimonious picture by demonstrating that conflicting goals can directly reduce subjective perceptions of time,” says Aaker. “That in turn impacts behavior.” Feeling torn between conflicting goals makes people less inclined to fulfill either one, limiting their patience and compelling them to pay to buy back some time.

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