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Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

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Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#71

Post by WhompingWindows »

I find this has cut both ways in my life. In piano, it was always my goal to play Chopin Ballade No 1. After ~5 years of playing, I heard it and KNEW I wanted to learn it. It was only around ~15 years in, when I got the gumption and a teacher who didn't put the idea down, I signed up for a concert to play it, and I was FORCED to learn it. At that point, announcing to friends/family enhanced my practice, because I knew it'd occur on X date and I knew the beastly passages would require dozens of hours of repetition each.

On the other hand, the number of pieces I have stated my intention to learn, and never done so, is far greater than the number of pieces I actually know. I think it's just so easy to say "I love this piece, I'm going to learn it." Well, that took 5 seconds to say, but it will take 100 hours to learn the piece.

So, for me, it comes down to how truly/deeply motivated I am to begin with. If it's something I truly want, announcing makes no difference. If it's something I'm lukewarm on, I'm probably likely to announce something impulsively and commit myself to something I didn't think through.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#73

Post by wccrawford »

nomilk wrote: post #67

Reminds me of a quote from Sara Blakely: “I was very careful right away, it was a gut instinct that I had, to keep it to myself because I believe ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy, and it’s instinct to turn to your right or left in that moment and tell a friend, or tell your husband, and the moment you do that ego is invited into the mix, and then you end up spending all your time defending it, explaining it…

I have definitely had my battles with people who want to poke holes in my plans, rather than support me. They think they're helping me, but they aren't. They're just killing my enthusiasm.

If I'd been left to try, I'd have worked hard at it, had an experienced, learned some things, and maybe even accomplished it. Instead, they did their best to stop me.

I now snap at people who do this to me. I no longer let them throw problem after problem at me, and instead shut them down before they can destroy my dream.

I accomplish a great many of the things I try, and I get exercise and knowledge from the failures.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#74

Post by wccrawford »

mrcoder111 wrote: post #70

I really hate this article. Pretty much everything I've ever accomplished in my life is because I speak it into existence and hold myself accountable. But then again, if you're the type of person who makes things happen, you don't rely on crappy psychology studies to tell you how to live your life.

I've seen a lot of these "successful people do this thing!" stories, but after years of reading them and watching how people act, I've come to the conclusion that those people are successful by nature first, and all these things they do are helpers, not enablers. Doing that thing won't turn people into successes.

These things are crutches that successful people use to improve themselves, not something that they learned in order to be successful. They'd be successful either way, this is just easier.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#75

Post by smacktoward »

mbarronj wrote: post #37

I call them "Secret Plans". You gotta save up the emotional energy and reward. On so many projects, you get the same neuro-chemical reward by talking about your project plans and how cool the result will be, as you do by making progress. By holding out, and only allowing progress itself to be a reward, and not just the talking, I usually get much further. The project may still die, but then I have something in my han…

The soft overcomes the hard.

The slow overcomes the fast.

Let your workings remain a mystery.

Just show people the results.

-- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 36, Stephen Mitchell translation (http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=36&a=Stephen+Mitchell)

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#76

Post by CM30 »

Wonder if the feeling of being overwhelmed by the work involved in carrying out said plans feeds into this somehow. I mean, it's very easy to get carried away when planning things, and end up creating an absolutely enormous list of requirements you 'need' to meet to finish the project, many of which may require knowing more about the field to proceed.

That's certainly been an issue with my own projects, where the 'plan' ends up being more in line with the current HTML 5 specification in terms of length.

Meanwhile whenever I don't announce my plans/write them down in any way, it works better because I just get on with stuff and stop get sidetracked by irrelevant details and extras.

Also, announcing plans publically gets everyone hyped up about something to the point its original creator may struggle to get said project to live up to its own hype.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#77

Post by LanceH »

dimitar wrote: post #68

Caveat for team and organizations: often leadership announces grand initiatives with great fanfare and the lack of follow-up, perceived or real makes people cynical. Unfortunately, you cannot avoid announcing your plans if you expect others to follow you - its possible people don't understand what you want to achieve and end up just as frustrated. This is part of a leaders job. I like what TA said about "make sure no…

The rule for big corporations is that you must announce your plans and make them as grand as possible to build your budget/empire. This is necessary to prevent a takeover from one of the other many groups doing the exact same thing within the company.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#78

Post by LanceH »

munificent wrote: post #55
GCA10 wrote: post #31

This article treats all types of announcements as being equal. Not so! A hazy announcement like "I'll be doing more to fight climate change" may indeed be empty virtue signaling that leads to nothing. But what about a more precise announcement like: "I'll be writing a book on Topic X, which I plan to publish 15 months from now, and I'll be completing one chapter on the 25th of every month until then"? Now we've got i…

> "I'll be writing a book on Topic X, which I plan to publish 15 months from now, and I'll be completing one chapter on the 25th of every month until then"? I did something similar when I began my first book. It accomplished nothing. I ended up stalling for several years. What helped was a private commitment to myself to work on the book every day. It's definitely important to have a plan, but that's orthogonal to sh…

Not the least reason is that you've constrained yourself to Topic X due to your own announcement.

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#79

Post by tunesmith »

Note the followup link he posts at the end: https://www.bassam.com/single-post/CSI-TED-Talks-What-Derek-...

Where it comes out in support of stating goals in some circumstances, and clarifies that what it's really against is saying things like "I want to be a lawyer", because then what that means is that you'll be apt to behave consistently with wanting to be a lawyer, and not with taking the steps to actually become a lawyer. (Or how my yoga-instructor friend explained it, "So then the universe responds, 'ok, poof! You now want to be a lawyer!'")

Re: Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

#80

Post by esotericn »

tunesmith wrote: post #79

Note the followup link he posts at the end: https://www.bassam.com/single-post/CSI-TED-Talks-What-Derek-... Where it comes out in support of stating goals in some circumstances, and clarifies that what it's really against is saying things like "I want to be a lawyer", because then what that means is that you'll be apt to behave consistently with wanting to be a lawyer, and not with taking the steps to actually become…

Precisely.

You don't "want" to stick to a vegan diet. You have a vegan diet.

The distinction is roughly, between a goal, and a plan.

A plan is something that you can immediately begin executing upon. That doesn't mean you won't falter, or that it has to be an on/off switch style revolution, but there's a clear set of things to do.

A goal is embryonic. You don't know how, or if, you can achieve it yet.

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