We’ve written and read a lot about goals: check out The Four Hour Work-Week or our previous goal post. I have a tendency to be skeptical of goals. I’ve had some great successes with personal goals and other times a great inability to get myself motivated for something that I was convinced was important. I didn’t really understand why this was until two events came together. I had a burning desire to accomplish a goal that I’d set for myself years ago but hadn’t had the motivation to do and I read Steve Pavlina’s article “Motivation for Smart People.”

Steve Pavlina’s article cleared up my previous confusion with goals. He writes:

When you set goals that are too small and too timid, you suffer a perpetual lack of motivation. Try all the emotional conditioning techniques you want, but you’re wasting your time. Deep down you already know the truth. You just need to summon the courage to acknowledge your true desires. Then you’ll have to deal with the self-doubt and fear that’s been making you think too small. There’s no getting around that if you want to experience lasting motivation. Ironically, the real key to motivation is to set goals that scare you.

It seems counter-intuitive that motivation may be highest when setting goals that lie outside your comfort zone, but I’ve seen this pattern too many times to discount it. Perhaps we have to set big, hairy, audacious goals in order to feel truly motivated. Maybe little goals just aren’t enough to trigger the release of motivational energy. If we think a goal is too easy, we won’t commit all our internal resources. It’s only when we set unreasonable goals that all our internal resources come online, including motivation and drive.

This immediately explained my previous goals, going to a tough college far from home, writing a 150 page thesis and learning Georgian. These things had all been personally audacious and ways out of my comfort zone. In fact, I was surrounded by people who told me I couldn’t accomplish them. This kind of prodding was just what I needed.

Steve’s discussion on emotional motivation and why it doesn’t work, explained my innate distrust of many goal setting strategies. I dislike inducing pumped up states of “go-get ‘em!” attitude in order to create motivation. That strategy has never been effective for me and caused much of my annoyance and railing against goal setting. He says:

Have you ever seen one of those rah-rah motivational speakers? If the speaker is good, s/he will have an emotional effect on you and get you to feel motivated. But within a day or two, that emotional boost fades away, and you’re back to normal. You can listen to hundreds of motivational speakers and experience an emotional yo-yo effect, but it doesn’t last.

I studied and practiced these kinds of emotional motivation techniques extensively during my 20s. In the long run, I didn’t find them particularly effective. My intellect saw right through all the chest pounding. The logical part of my mind was ultimately dissatisfied with attempts to induce motivation through emotional manipulation.

So I learned why I’d accomplished some of my goals in the past and learned why I disliked and distrusted most goal setting strategies that many people posit.

But how to explain my current situation? I now have a burning desire to study and take the GRE (the test to get into grad school). This may seem like quite a trifle, just study a bit, take the test and move on. However I’ve had the hardest time finding any motivation to study, despite many starts and plenty of free time. In fact I’ve been trying to study for this test for more than three years. Did all this hemming and hawing simply occur because the goal was too easy? I don’t think so. Because if so then I’d still have the same problem. The GRE hasn’t suddenly gotten any harder, so where did my motivation come from? Why now? And what does this mean?

The key is timing. I knew I’d eventually have to take the GRE and I figured it would be annoying, so I thought I’d just “get it over with.” It didn’t work. No matter how much I tried to pump myself up with rah-rah speeches or appealed to my rational self, pointing out I had lots of free time to study, I couldn’t keep it up. I didn’t have a burning desire to study for the GRE, even though I had the time.

We talked before about Yin and Yang, the idea that life is full of ebbs and flows comes out of this concept. The seasons flow from summer to autumn to winter to spring. The tides ebb and flow. The cycles of the moon wax and wane. The cells in our body are constantly changing and re-creating themselves. This give and take is an essential part of life. We have to keep this in mind, especially when we contemplate goals. This concept isn’t something we have a lot of practice with. Our society doesn’t exactly highly value time for reflection and relaxation. How many vacation days do you have a year? Now ask a friend in Europe how many they have.

We often try to create goals for ourselves when we’re in an ebb period. This will only cause us to meet resistance. This is exactly what happened with my GRE goal. I knew I was going to have to take it. My rational mind knew I had time for it, my emotions told me to study and get it over with, but I just couldn’t do it. The timing wasn’t right. I was ebbing and instead of just learning from that, I was constantly fighting against it and trying to make myself flow.

Next time you’re trying to make something happen, stop and reflect on what you’re doing. Is there something else at work? We can learn to trust that the time will come when we’re supposed to start working and we’ll know when that is. The key is to not only notice the ebb and flow but to embrace it.