4 ways to beat the odds and achieve success and fulfilment in 2024 (and beyond)
Photo credit: Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Daniel Kahneman, renowned psychologist and economist, says that our success is mostly about luck. If this is true, how do we stay motivated towards our goals?
In summary: Hold on loosely
Don’t over-focus on the goal outcome, or take responsibility for what you can’t control.
Do pay attention to what you can influence, and make the journey, not the destination, the focus of the story.
This might be especially relevant to you if you are someone that tends to feel overly responsible, self-blame, or have any tendencies towards perfectionism, people pleasing and imposter syndrome.
My last blog post was about how to stay strong and energised to make the impact and changes that you are planning this year – sustainably.
This post is about how to manage your goals for a successful and fulfilling year, but it might not be what you expect.
We are a few weeks into January, and if you are already doubtful about the likelihood of hitting your goals for this year, you are absolutely not alone. The second Friday in January is known as ‘quitters’ day’, and around a third of people with goals (depending on which survey you read) will give them up this month.
Are your goals looking a long way off? Photo credit: Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash
I know your goals are important to you, you want to live a meaningful and impactful life. The thought of not achieving your goals is frustrating and disheartening. There are so many things you want to improve, achieve, and experience, and the idea of ‘wasting a year’ (your words, not mine!) without managing to do it is just too painful. So how can you maximise your chances of having a successful and fulfilling year?
Firstly, it’s not too late to change your goals if they aren’t the right ones, or the time isn’t right. Take another look at them. Get in touch with me if you want the support of a coach to set values-aligned, motivating, and realistic goals that aren’t going to tip you into burnout.
Grit is important, but not enough
And now onto the main theme for this post. I think we imagine ourselves as more powerful than we are – that if we just have determination and belief, we can do anything. Grit is important, as Angela Duckworth and other psychologists have demonstrated. But it’s not enough. Although grit and determination and self-belief can do a lot, we are not as powerful or able to control our destiny as we would like to believe - we can’t see the future. We can’t ‘make it happen’ (although trying makes it a lot more likely). What looks possible right now, might turn out to look quite different as time passes, and factors emerge that didn’t even exist when you set the goal. The final result might not be as you hoped. It might take longer, or you might get there via a different path (grit can come in handy here). You might end up somewhere else entirely. It might be better. (Grit is less useful here).
Do we imagine ourselves more powerful than we are? Sometimes we remember the role of grit and talent, but we forget the influence of luck. Photo credit: Alora Griffiths on Unsplash
Daniel Kahneman, says that as humans we grossly underestimate the role of luck, and that luck has a huge part in our success (or lack of).
Believing that we have full control over our lives, that we can ‘make it happen’ if we believe in it strongly enough, is empowering. If we believe that we have no control over our lives, how would we rouse ourselves to do anything? In fact, this is the belief at the basis of Seligman’s Learned Helplessness theory of depression. I certainly don’t want to disempower or trigger depression in anyone, and I’m not saying we have no control. We have neither no control, nor full control over the outcomes in our lives. We have influence.
Research suggests that feeling that you have control is a strong driver of well-being and performance. And that ‘feeling’ seems to be more important than the reality. For some people, this feeling of control will cause them to be more adaptable and resilient if they don’t get the result they hoped for: they will feel empowered to look at what they can do differently and try again (Shawn Achor, a Happiness expert who works with Fortune 500 companies, has a lot to say about this).
Believing that you have more control than you do might not be so helpful
But for other people (especially those with tendencies towards perfectionism, people pleasing or an over-active sense of responsibility), believing that you have more control or influence than you do might not be so helpful. If, for whatever reason, you don’t reach the expected destination, you might take on more responsibility for that outcome than you should, tipping into self-blame, despair, frustration, giving up on the goal and even giving up on yourself. You tried so hard and did everything right, or so you thought – what went wrong? You must be useless. Or the realisation that you don’t, in fact, have control over your future, can lead to believing that you have no control over anything – that nothing you do will turn out right. Or, in other people it can lead to blind determination - forcing yourself on without stopping to reflect and redesign or reimagine. Daniel Kahneman also talks about the Sunk Cost Fallacy – where we irrationally keep going even if the costs outweigh the benefits, because we have already invested in it. Over-focussing on the end result, that we believe we can control, can lead to rigid, inflexible ways of operating, and missing the opportunities and experiences that are happening right now.
High achievers, perfectionists, and people with imposter syndrome can be particularly at risk from all of these because they are:
so anxious about not being seen to make a mistake or perform badly.
so invested in the outcome, which they are more likely to believe will define their self-worth.
more likely to interpret a negative outcome as evidence of their shortcomings.
The foundation for a lot of these tendencies are often laid in early experiences but they are not foundations of stone – and awareness is the first step to replacing them with foundations that are more adapted to your current experience. Consider seeking help from a coach or therapist if this is familiar.
Guarantee or give up?
The thing about ‘no control’ and ‘full control’, is that they both appeal to our natural desire for certainty. Even certain failure can often be more easily accepted than the thought of an uncertain outcome that may or may not include success. That’s why it’s easy to give up (or not even start) if you don’t know that you can do it. Guarantee or give up. And we like things to make sense, to be able to see clearly how one thing results in another. Luck makes the world uncomfortably random.
Believing that you have more control than you do can lead you to take more of your share of the blame if it doesn’t work out, and for some people this can mean giving up on yourself. Photo credit: Dev Asangbam on Unsplash
But it’s ok.
You can learn to come to terms with an uncertain world, stay motivated with your goals and live a satisfying and fulfilling and impactful life even if you don’t have the control over your future that you hoped for. Here are four ways:
1. Let your goals, vision and dreams set the direction, but keep your attention on what you have most influence on throughout the ‘journey’
Remember that you DO have influence and you rarely have NO control, so focus most of your attention within your circle of control. So for example, the vision might be to get top 3 for your age category in a particular big running event. This hoped-for destination provides the motivation, the reason to start the journey. But, as the ‘philosopher’ says in The Courage to Be Disliked, by Koga and Kishimi (a book about Adlerian Psychology that is full of useful gems), if you live as though the purpose is the destination, the whole of that journey becomes ‘en-route’ instead of being your ‘real life’. But the journey is where you’ll spend most of your time, and also what you have most ability to shape. So in our example, on the ‘journey’ you might run 4 times per week, eat well, do core strength training twice-weekly, get a running coach, listen to running podcasts, read running blogs, join a running a group, make running friends, enter smaller running events and so on. These are the things that make the progress, growth, fulfillment and challenge. They’ll give you outcomes like physical and mental strength, fitness, stamina, speed, technique, knowledge, resilience, endurance, friendship and even wisdom. They’ll lead to experiences and unexpected positive outcomes and new destinations that you could never have planned for, and that will probably have a positive impact on your life outside of running too. They also make it more likely that you will reach your goal, whether it is this year or not. But if for whatever reason, luck isn’t on your side on the big day – the race is cancelled, you are injured, the competition is particularly strong, you have a family emergency, or over the course of the journey your priorities change – you still have all of those positive outcomes, in the bank. And keeping your attention on the journey, with the destination held just loosely, you don’t need to have full faith in yourself or to ‘know that you can do it’ to get started or to keep going, because whether you ‘do it’ (reach the destination) is just one small moment in the overall story. So it’s less overwhelming to get started, and easier to stay with it.
2. Build in flexibility
Build in flexibility to your goal-planning so that you can still feel satisfaction and find reasons to celebrate your achievement, even if things don’t go to plan – for example set a few variations of the main goal outcome or different ranges of what would constitute success. My husband is a runner and running coach, and he knows that training and determination aren’t always enough to guarantee dream results in the time frame that you want. So he often sets himself A, B and C goals so that he maximises the likelihood of the morale boosting satisfaction of achieving a goal, even if he missed the ‘A’ goal – because you can’t fully control what happens on race day.
3. Step back from data points and look at the ‘line of best fit’
Whilst motivation, staying power and self-belief are supported by celebrating the small progress, and I have written before about celebrating micro-wins, be prepared to step back from monitoring each ‘data point’ on the way to meeting your goal, and think about the line of best fit instead. Otherwise all it takes is a couple of misses or disappointments, (whether it’s word count or training sessions, proposals, or income targets), to shake your belief that you can still reach the overall goal, and you might feel tempted to throw in the towel. Getting perspective that these are just a few data points as part of a bigger journey means it doesn’t matter so much how each one goes, or if there are a few gaps here and there, just that you, overall, show up and make enough ‘data points’ to produce a line, and that it goes in the right direction. By stepping back you can also be more objective and less emotionally reactive, so you can genuinely ask yourself, is it going ok really and that blip was just one of those things, or is there something I need to re-look at – whether it’s adjusting the target to make it more realistic, changing strategy or reprioritising some things so that I am more able to commit.
4. Make your invisible lenses visible
There are so many factors interplaying to create an outcome, but because of our invisible lenses and biases, shaped through our beliefs and experiences, we tend to focus on only some of them. For example, when you have imposter syndrome you tend to mostly see your failings, and only the role of luck when things go well. When you are recovering from imposter syndrome you try to practice saying ‘I did that’ instead of ‘I was just lucky’ when things go well. As you become more aware and adjusted, more objective and less influenced by looking through biased lenses, you can come to appreciate BOTH how your personal attributes AND luck contribute to the outcome – and more able to celebrate, reflect honestly, learn and grow. This is all invaluable for fulfilment and success - wherever you end up.
Life doesn’t follow a formula
Determination, strategy, preparation and effort – these are all things that will take you far – and you are probably unlikely to get very far without them. However, as much as we wish it were, life is not a formula where you can add in all the factors and get a guaranteed result. We can try to control as much as we want, and we can certainly influence the outcomes, but the truth is, the final outcome will be affected by many factors that are not within our control. If you believe that it is all within your power and then things don’t work out, this can lead to self-blame, self-doubt and giving up on yourself and the goal. What starts as empowering can become quite punitive. If it’s all within your gift to make it happen and you didn’t make it happen, what’s wrong with you?
On the other hand, putting most of your attention on the journey, holding on more loosely to the outcome, being flexible, keeping shame and blame out of it, not obsessing over how certain it is that you will reach the goal, might help you to keep motivated, resilient, and adaptive, increasing your chances of getting somewhere meaningful and fulfilling (including maybe even the original planned destination!). Life is an adventure, and the best adventure stories contain unexpected twists and ups and downs. Who would read a story that says, ‘She decided on her destination and then she arrived. The End.’?
It is not easy to let go of the outcome, especially if your sense of self-worth and value is tied up in it, or you are afraid of being found out to be ‘not good enough.’ If this blog post makes sense to you but you know that you will need some help to genuinely make the shifts, get in touch to arrange a free introductory phone call to see how coaching can help.
So what do you think, is handing over some of the responsibility for your goals to luck your idea of a nightmare or a bit of a relief?
