Why you need to STFU about your goals

I saw it on a true fact post on some site like imgur last night so I decided to check it out to see if it was legit or not.

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.

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http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself/transcript?language=en

http://lifehacker.com/5921478/shhh-keeping-quiet-may-help-you-achieve-your-goals

I used to talk off about all the kind of goals I did and it did feel satisfying thinking about them when I was talking about it. I just never knew that talking about them led to me not having motivation to actually doing it.

Well i don't have friends, so i got that going for me which is nice.

I agree with op. Goals are essential but personal. I set goals for my sales crew but I only review them 1 on 1 (I'm in charge of 4 mobile phone stores). Goals have definately got me where I am though. I started two years ago as an underpaid commissioned DTV salesmen, but made it my goal to use the experience to further my self. Fast forward, two years later with a job hop, and a couple promotions, I'm on the fast track to becoming a district manager making 100+k a year. Never shared these goals tho, was a personal motivator. I also used this method when I was in the prime of my first I'M venture thay was netting me 1 to 2k a week. Just my two cents on it.

I think it's different for each person. For me it's a motivation to work harder if I tell my friends about my plans, because I do not want them to see me failing.

lol @ "why you need to STFU about your goals" ... awesome. I assume dit was going to be a "nobody cares about your goals" angle

Telling people im going to do bla bla or im going to have bla bla bla makes me keep going.

I tell my mom im going to get her a benz soon, she doesn't believe me. Just wait and see

uncguy4321 said:

lol @ "why you need to STFU about your goals" ... awesome. I assume dit was going to be a "nobody cares about your goals" angle

Click to expand...

Cause STFU seems like a better title.

Yep, the book "Getting Things Done" talks about this all throughout the book. This is just a short excerpt on getting shit done...

I try to make intuitive choices based on my
options, instead of trying to think about what those
options are. I need to have thought about all of that
already and captured the results in a trusted way. I
don't want to waste time thinking about things more
than once. That's an inefficient use of creative energy
and a source of frustration and stress.


And you can't fudge this thinking. Your mind will keep
working on anything that's still in that undecided state.
But there's a limit to how much unresolved "stuff" it can
contain before it blows a fuse.

The short-term memory part of your mind - the part that
tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized
"stuff"—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your
conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a
storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once.


But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term
memory space. And as with RAM, there's limited capacity; there's
only so much "stuff" you can store in there and still have that part of
your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with
their RAM bursting at the seams. They're constantly distracted,
their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered
off into some area that doesn't have anything to do with
what you're reading here? Probably. And most likely where your
mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation
that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear
up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally.
And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put
it in a trusted "bucket" that you know you'll review appropriately
sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the
most effective behavior: no progress was made, and
tension was increased.

The big problem is that your mind keeps
reminding you of things when you can't do anything
about them. It has no sense of past or future. That
means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need
to do something, and store it in your RAM, there's a
part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the
time. Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks
you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two
things to do stored in your RAM, you've generated personal
failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This
produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can't
be pinpointed.

Most people have been in some version of this mental stress
state so consistently, for so long, that they don't even know they're
in it. Like gravity, it's ever-present—so much so that those who
experience it usually aren't even aware of the pressure. The only
time most of them will realize how much tension they've been
under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.




Then he goes on to describe "The Core Process" in detail describing in detail how he gets shit done.


THE CORE PROCESS I teach for mastering the art of relaxed and controlled
knowledge work is a five-stage method for managing
workflow. No matter what the setting, there are five discrete
stages that we go through as we deal with our work. We (1) collect
things that command our attention; (2) process what they mean
and what to do about them; and (3) organize the results, which we
(4) review as options for what we choose to (5) do.


This constitutes the management of the "horizontal"
aspect of our lives—incorporating everything that
has our attention at any time.


The method is straightforward enough in principle,
and it is generally how we all go about our work in
any case, but in my experience most people can stand
significantly to improve their handling of each one of
the five stages. The quality of our workflow management
is only as good as the weakest link in this fivephase
chain, so all the links must be integrated
together and supported with consistent standards.


Most people have major leaks in their collection process.
Many have collected things but haven't processed or decided
what action to take about them. Others make good decisions
about "stuff" in the moment but lose the value of that thinking
because they don't efficiently organize the results. Still others
have good systems but don't review them consistently enough
to keep them functional.

I can't post the whole book but I've recommended it multiple times before and highly suggest people read it: Getting Things Done

Great Post OP
Usually people that like to talk about their goals are action fakers. I know because I used to be one myself.
The best way to go about goals is to STFU and get to work.

STK...I'm curious what your name means. I could take a stab but it would probably rub people the wrong way.

I would tend to agree.

I have always held the view that 'people who make threats are not the ones you need to worry about - it's the silent ones that will actually do shit'.

Similarly, along those lines, it seems logical that people who talk in general mightn't be likely to do as much as someone who keeps quiet and presses forward.

Great Post, I totally agree with OP

Some nice and true words in this thread... My elder brother never told anyone anything anytime about his plans, and he was able to bring them to reality! I always told my plans to my mom, before my marriage, then to my wife and my mom, and most of my plans became too difficult to achieve. I believe that you build your plan through your energy (call it your soul power if you wish to), and when you tell others about those plans, the energy loses its power to focus on its job of building to completion.

Nice and dandy as long as you have no business suppliers, investors, partners, or cash (labor or collaboration) influxes. Might put a little damper on married life as well. I think there is credence to it for those that "just tell" others, and do little of the actual, usually on paper planning that also has been proven to help goal setting, or the work that goes into achieving them.

That being said, there are two rules to success:
1. Never tell everything you know. (yeah I stole the phrase).

My friends Dad had a radiator shop. His tag line was "Your hole is our goal", pretty sure he didn't tell his wife his goal until he printed everything.

I almost never left my room and was on the computer the majority of the time I was in there growing up.

At 21, randomly out of the blue I told my family "Hey, I found a job writing software and they're moving me to Singapore in two months" (I'm from the US). Shocked the hell out of them, but I'd been working with the company on a project and making the plans for 6 months.

I think next 6 years I traveled constantly working for 3 different companies around the world, usually not telling anyone what I was working on until it was about to happen.

I'm still a hermit that rarely leaves home, but I do love to travel now. I only enjoy leaving home if I'm at least going a 100 miles away -_-;.

I'm so far behind on several projects by as much as ~5 years from bragging too much to people and fantasizing. One recent project I started thinking about back in Nov. I bragged about it to probably a few hundreds people and so far I'm not even close to launching it. I had to get 1,000,000 units for the project yet since Dec. 1st of last year I've done 332k units and 35k of it was today. I could have easily launched my project by the 1st week of January, yet I was more into bragging about to alot of people.

This is true but I never really thought about it or figured it out. Very interesting stuff.

I know that these days I am pretty good at sticking to my plans and achieving my goals but most that I have shared with others or talked about at length tend to have fallen by the wayside so this would kinda explain why.

Thanks for this.

The thing is: nobody really cares what your goals are except you. Maybe a spouse since they are stuck with you and your failures.

People express goals on here because no one around a freelancer or the like really understands what it's like. I could talk to several people all day and most people don't understand what it's like to hold out for that awesome gig only to lose it. Most people have the luxury of fucking off at work for a day because they're sick or just feel like calling in. They have no idea what it's like to take risks or be stressed out about that next gig. They have no idea what it's like to know that if you fuck off for a day, you don't make money.

At the same time, getting that vapid "good luck on your journey" doesn't mean anything either.

Talking about doing x1,x2,x3,x4 etc. seems like a better way than to say "Next Summer I'll be partying in ibiza".