Instead do the right thing and be happy doing it by Marcus Baur (Entrepreneur and double olympian)
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Abraham Lincoln
Winning competitions and maximizing returns (profit) are the most common goals we find in sports, business or politics. In this article I shall to argue that despite their popularity, they are also amongst the worst goals we can have. In fact, they should not be regarded as goals at all. Winning a competition, making a big profit or winning an election are more like rewards. Maybe deserved, maybe undeserved. It is a cognitive trap to confuse these rewards for doing the right thing, with ... well: doing the right thing.
I fact, winning and making a profit CAN BE a reward for doing the right thing, but sometimes it can be the opposite. People win rewards for doing the wrong thing rather often. It just depends on how lucky they get or how many people are fooled. But fooling people only works short term and every lucky streak must end. Long term, no one is rewarded for doing the wrong thing all of the time.
The recent financial crisis and the BP oil spill are two examples of the life-threatening consequences of a short-term focus on profit to the exclusion of all else. Some people were doing some very wrong things and they got away with it for quite a while. I found the exact same sort of blindness in sport, that little laboratory of life: many people want so desperately to win that their performance disintegrates. So before we get to business and how it can go wrong, I want to talk about sport and how it can go wrong.
Do the right thing in sports
I competed as a sailor in two Olympic Games, coming 5th and 9th in the 49er skiff class. The most valuable lesson I took away from Olympic level sailing is that Gold can be blinding. Winning is the result of doing something exceptionally well in the moment. This present-focused state is extremely joyful. Time has no meaning in this state. It is pure experiential happiness. In psychology it's called Flow. This is not a blissed-out state of peaceful meditation though: it can include speed, intensity and controlled aggression. It's all about doing the right thing. At its best, the athlete's mind is completely void of thoughts about the past or the future. In this state the benefits of winning and the fear of losing simply do not exist.
As soon as an athlete focuses on the potential reward that his performance can bring (that Gold Medal!), he or she starts underperforming. The hope of winning comes with the fear of losing – they are two sides of the same coin. Thinking about the outcome inevitably creates fear; and when fear sets in, movements and thoughts become lame and robotic, so the performance degrades. This causes more panic, even worse performance and desperate decision-making. Thus begins the horrific downward spiral of the blown brain.
So whoever manages to stay in the zone of the present moment will perform at his or her best. Anyone interested in the mastery of something strives for this state when practicing - consciously or unconsciously. But when competition time comes, with its tantalizing rewards, the majority are distracted. So the challenge is to lose this distraction.
The relaxed, focused state of Flow, when everything works perfectly in slow-motion is so joyful that achieving it is a goal in itself? Why not drop the goal of 'winning' altogether – it's a mere distraction from the real goal of achieving Flow and a master performance. Let the rewards roll in by themselves. The goal of anyone striving for mastery should be to perform at his or her best in the moment - because that's all that really matters.
So in other words, the real goal in sports is doing the right thing and being happy doing it. It should be the same in business and politics.
Do the right thing in Business and Politics
My call to "do the right thing and being happy doing it" is even more relevant in business and politics than in sports. In sports, not much is left when the game is over. The fans pack up, the footage is archived, nothing but the memory remains. But in business and politics, the results of a good or a bad performance can be felt for decades to come. Focusing too much on profit is the biggest distraction from doing the right thing.
So how do we find the right thing? How do we find the right goals? Goal setting is one of the most fundamental skills in life, yet one of the most difficult to master. Why? Because at its root, it's about finding out what makes us happy. But happiness does not come by mail order. We obviously did not evolve to be very good at being happy.
The good news is, we understand more about happiness all the time. Watch this great 20 min talk by Nobel Prize winner and inventor of Behavioral Economics Daniel Kahneman to learn about the state of happiness research:
Kahneman explains how a lot of the confusion about happiness comes from not telling the two essential modes of happiness apart: the state of being happy (experiential happiness) and the act of thinking about one's own happiness (reflective happiness). It's the confusion between experience and memory.
Goal setting for happiness is about finding goals that strike a wise balance between these two realms. Great goals make us happy in the moments that we work towards them; but they also make us happy when we remember how we acted and see what we created or when we imagine what we will create in the future.
To find the right goals we may need some insight from happiness research. It can help us to recognize why we sometimes choose the wrong goals: perhaps we mix up different time perspectives; or maybe we are confused about the different notions of "happiness".
At the end of his talk Kahneman mentions a striking finding of a recent worldwide Gallup poll that sheds some light on what makes us happy and what doesn't. Below an annual income of 60,000 USD, money correlates with happiness (or rather, lack of money correlates with misery). Above this level however, earning more money has absolutely NO EFFECT on people's experience of happiness in the moment! So money matters, but in a very different way than we usually think it does.
The contemporary obsession with growing profits is a partial hallucination. From a certain point onwards, having more money does not make a difference to us. It only works for the reflective self but not the experiencing self. For example: most people gambling on the stock market have an income above 60.000 USD a year. The stock market is a great place to make long term investments in the right people and ideas. But not a place to shop for instant happiness. There is nothing to win really. People might think they are gambling for happiness, but there is nothing to gain in terms of experiential happiness. Any windfall above 60.000 USD results in no experiential happiness gain (according to the Gallup organization and Daniel Kahneman), but losing can cost the pension. Its a bad bet.
Of course, this is only true for experiential happiness. Money and status does make a difference for the reflective self, the mode of thinking we are in when we consider how happy we are. But so does anything else that triggers pride, gratitude or a sense of security in us. It's time to change our focus.*
This is especially important since the business world has become so obsessed with profitability that it often passes a point where it entirely forgets about doing something useful. That's the point where a business is heading for bankruptcy. Maybe it takes decades for it to fail, maybe it takes years or just a few weeks: sooner or later a business will come along that serves customer needs better and has happier, more creative minds working for it. Then the old profit-chasing business is finished.
A business that stops striving for happiness has the clock ticking against it - sooner or later it will be obsolete. So aiming for happiness and doing something useful should be at the core of any business.
And the pursuit of happiness or goal setting for happiness is obviously not relevant to individuals only. It is just as important for businesses. Not a big surprise if you consider that a healthy business is not defined by its pretty logo but by its individual members striving to be happy and doing their best to serve others who also want to be happy.
Change is inevitable, but it should be motivated by goals that increase the usefulness of the organization whilst staying profitable. If change is focused on profitability, usefulness is compromised. And that is dangerous for the long-term health of the business.
Just as form follows function, profit should follow usefulness and happiness.
Here are two recent example of how focusing on profit alone leads us astray: the global financial crisis and the BP oil spill.
Do the wrong thing and be miserable doing it
Lending money (for which you need hold only 10% in reserve!) and drilling holes in the ground until you hit liquid gold are two of the best business models of our time. While I do not want to discuss here the degree of wrongness of these models, what I find puzzling about them is how huge corporations with ridiculous advantages and some very intelligent decision-makers can mess up so badly.
A nonsensical thirst for profits drove the financial industry into disaster. Lending money to people who could never repay it, then selling the risk in a bundle of securities is not a useful thing to do - and if at all, only to a very small number of people (and then only short-term). It may have raised profitability for some time, but, like any other bubble, it was certain to burst. And it did so in a spectacularly disastrous manner.
Instead of only considering short term profitability, banks should have asked: "Why can people not repay their loans? How can we create an environment where repayment is possible? How can we serve and be useful to society?" I am not naive - I know they are light years away from this sort of thinking. But some head honchos had to pay dearly for their greed: bankrupting their corporations, losing their jobs and their reputations... Even the most hard-headed of them must also suffer terrible guilt for destroying the lives of many "ordinary people" (both the hundreds of thousands of original debtors and the millions more who have lost their jobs as a result of the downturn).
The financial crisis was no accident - just like the biggest oilspill in history.
Since the BP oilspill in the gulf of Mexico in April 2010, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the incident. In a statement made in June it noted that in a number of cases leading up to the explosion, BP appeared to have chosen riskier procedures to save time or money, sometimes against the advice of its staff or contractors.
When BP saved a few thousand dollars on security equipment, and when politicians bowed down to lobbyists to deregulate security measures, they did not ask: "Is this a useful thing to do?"; they just asked: "Does this make us more profitable?".
Well the clock was ticking for them; and now the tables have turned against BP and those governments. The oil spill has halved the BP share price (equating to losses of 60 billion USD). And they have not even paid the bill yet. No company with such an unbeatable business model, guided by the usefulness of its actions and the happiness those actions create could ever make such stupid decisions, if it were not focused solely on profitability (in conjunction with a clear greed disorder).
Put Happiness in the center
How much more rewarding is a sensible goal setting approach that puts human happiness at the center of attention. On top of the positive results that are produced by such a approach, there is another strong reason why usefulness and happiness should be central to any goal setting process: they increase human motivation.
We are in fact in the middle of a motivational crisis. According to another Gallup poll from 2009, less than 20% of the workforce are highly motivated. In a recent talk, Sir Ken Robinson portrayed two types of people: those who love what they do and those who don't. Its no surprise that the lovers are a minority. To solve this motivational crisis we have to convert people who work just to get paid into people who love what they do.
The cause of this motivational crisis has a lot to do with the isolated focus on profit. It leads people to do wrong and even nonsensical things. Motivation is only possible where people have set or adopted goals for themselves that mean something to them.
So in sports, business, politics and in our personal lives we should start a dialogue to find these goals.
Do the right thing with Goalscape
One of the biggest challenges in our lives is to strike a good balance between the "now" (immediate gratification) and the "later" (deferred gratification). Goalscape helps us to strike a delicate balance between these different time perspectives and do the right thing at the right time.
With Goalscape, your goals are right in the center of all your concerns in every area of your life: they are always in view so you think about them frequently and keep checking them. Are your goals worthwhile and useful? Do they represent a good balance between what you want to achieve long term and how you want to live right now? Do they trigger your passion and at the same time improve your life? If you are working in a team does everybody share the same goals and find them equally inspiring?
Once you have found these highly motivating goals, you can easily break them down into achievable parts, visualize relative priorities dynamically, track your progress along the way and reach your goals more easily.
We believe the best goals in the world deserve the best goal setting software in the world: that's why we created Goalscape.
*If you are looking for more insight into the state of happiness research, read the latest works by Philip Zimbardo, Daniel Kahneman, Martin Seligman, Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker; or or watch their other TED talks .
Lots of people have been asking when we are going to start the goalscape sharing/trading site... so we have now started a 'Goalscape examples' category on our forum.
People can post their ideas (or advertise them for sale!) in different categories (including sports, business, life coaching, etc).
I have kicked it off with a smart job specification. Most job specs give the relevant skills areas (technical, organisational, social, etc) and specific skills required within each area; in Goalscape you can also set the relative importance of each area and each skill, then use Progress to score candidates in each skill to produce an overall score that truly reflects the predefined criteria:
Watch this space for news of any interesting additions...
When it comes to defining and achieving goals, Goalscape is far superior to mindmapping.
Just look at the two screenshots below: they represent the same structure and content, yet they are very different.
The mindmap uses tiny icons to denote importance and progress, so it is
hard to tell what is more important and what is less important. The same is true for the progress.
By contrast Goalscape shows the relative importance and progress directly and intuitively: the size of each goal is its importance and the shading is progress. The information practically leaps from the screen and the picture is much more meaningful.
There are key differences in using the tools as well. While mindmaps are quite good at showing dependencies, they have no concept of upward progress. With Goalscape however, as you enter your progress in lower level goals it automatically reflects upwards all the way to the main goal. Every time you check off a completed task you immediately see the contribution it makes to your overall progress.
There is also some inherent rigor with Goalscape: the importances of any set of subgoals must add up to 100%. So when you change priorities by adjusting the importance of one goal, it has an immediate and obvious effect on all its neighboring goals. Mindmaps do not capture any information about the relationships between subgoals of the same parent, so changing the importance of a goal has no effect on its neighbors.
Goalscape beats mindmapping by a wide margin: it not only has a clearer and richer visual format, it has far more functionality and is easier to drive.
We have issued this second set of updates this month because we have finished some extra features and enhancements early! The two really big items are the new ‘Presentation Mode’ and much smarter Attachments handling.
Here are a couple of short videos that summarise the key changes and demonstrate how the new features work:
Presentation mode
This screenshot illustrates the new ‘fullscreen’ view with the menu bars stripped out and a pared-down panel, showing only the goal name, notes and attachments. It also shows the new Attachments display and image preview.
You can access Presentation Mode using the new View option in the OS menu bar (click the ‘X’ top right or press ‘Esc’ to revert to the standard mode).
Attachments
The Attachments tab now displays attached files as icons. For image files a preview appears on mouseover and there are different options to show the image, including fullscreen.
To indicate the presence of attachments on a goal, an asterisk appears next to the paper clip icon in the tab.
AIR 2.0 (currently in beta) offers further improvements here – particularly the facility to open attachments directly in their native applications rather than through your browser. If you do not want to wait until AIR 2.0 goes on public release, you can download the beta version here (check the License Agreement box and download Adobe AIR 2 Runtime).
HTML reports
HTML reports now include details of any attachments present (with live links) and text in user-defined fields.
Bug fixes
There were a few, er, “interesting” bugs that needed fixing urgently! The most obvious was the issue with the German ‘Get started with Goalscape’ template that caused an exception on starting Goalscape. There was also a problem opening old goalscapes that had goals with very small Importance.
There are a few more fixes and a couple of minor tweaks to the look and feel. As always you can find a full listing in the Release Notes.
Goalscape Online beta test
We already have a basic alpha version running and we are putting it through its paces right now. Many of you have already signed up for the beta test: this is still open and you can sign up on this forum thread.
Goalscape Affiliate Program
Lots of people have also joined our affiliate program: if any more of you want to earn rewards by helping us to spread the word about Goalscape you can sign up here.
Most of the changes in the latest updates are in Goalscape’s look and feel. Here is a short video to illustrate the most significant:
Start and End dates
Goalscape enforces the rule that subgoal start and end dates must lie within those of their parents. If you try to select an invalid (grayed out) date a pop-up tooltip explains the constraint. You can now delete dates.
Goal names
Once you select a goal, if you click it again the ‘Rename goal’ pop-up text entry field will appear. (A faster double-click still accesses Focus view functionality.)
Hotkey options
We have extended the hotkey options so those who dislike moving the mouse can now cut, copy, paste and delete goals with standard ‘Ctrl+’ functions (Cmd+ on the Mac) instead of using the relevant icons.
Responsibility
When you copy a goal from another goalscape, any new people it brings with it (as Responsible) are added to the target goalscape’s Responsible list.
Look details
Further refinements of the automatic resizing of goal names
Changed order of items in the right-click context menu; invalid options are disabled and grayed out
More compact Search results list
There are other minor tweaks to the look and feel and a few bug fixes. A full listing of all changes appears in the Release Notes.
Lots of you are already using the forum to ask questions, make suggestions and report problems. Your feedback is very valuable to us and we always try to respond quickly. In fact some of these latest bug fixes are the result of your notifications, so thanks again!
...is surely not your motto, otherwise you would not have ended up on a website about goal-setting. But according to David Logan from the University of Southern California for 2% of the US population "Life Sucks!" is their daily mantra. This is Stage 1: the lowest of 5 motivational stages described by Logan in his book called "Tribal Leadership". Do you employ anyone who acts as if they believe this? If so they may need some help and support.
Most probably you do not; but what about those who are at Stage 2 – those who subscribe to the motto: "My life sucks!" According to Logan, this group comprises 25% of the working population. So it is quite likely that you work with or employ one off those poorly motivated, pessimistic individuals.
Things get a lot better in Stage 3, where people say “I am great…” but that’s usually followed by a unspoken “… but you are not!” About half the working population operates on this level. The benefit of Stage 3 is that it is future oriented: deferring immediate gratification to improve the future situation. The downside is that it´s also ‘ego oriented’ (“I am only great because you are not so great”).
Leaders in Stage 3 believe they can force their own goals down everyone else’s throat and they will happily swallow it. But this kind of operation is rarely effective and it can become expensive. You may be able to make people swallow by paying them (or by threatening refuseniks with the sack): so they might even smile as they swallow, but they will rarely digest.
Effective organizational goal setting occurs at Stage 4, where people say “We are great” – this is 22% of the workforce. Here, goals are not pushed down top to bottom, but developed and agreed collaboratively. It’s not a one-way street; rather it is a hub of ideas and insights. Stage 4 organizations outperform Stage 3 teams because their members actually have a personal commitment to the common goals. Stage 4 people genuinely want to perform and will put in the effort required to reach the organization’s goals. Monetary reward is a secondary factor – the satisfaction of achieving worthwhile results is much more important.
Stage 4 is surpassed only by Stage 5: the opposite extreme to “Life sucks!” Stage 5 people deeply believe that “Life is great!” It’s not even about winning – at Stage 5 there is no competition and no lonely winners: instead the focus is on cooperation so everyone wins. In Logan's words: “People work together in innocent wonderment.” Stage 5 is extremely rare: only 2% of the workforce operates at this elevated level. It can only be reached by working through Stages 3 and 4.
Goalscape can help everyone in your organization to climb the ladder through these stages. It opens the door to a goal setting dialog and provides a clear, engaging format for discussing the real goals and values of the organization and the people within it. These are the foundations of a successful shared endeavor, and will help you to move to Stage 5. A organization that is driven by the belief that life is great, can achieve things that "level 1 to 4" organizations only dream about.
Watch this great TED Talk by David Logan, and check out Zappos - a company truly immersed in a stage 4 culture.
This release of Goalscape delivers greatly improved performance for quicker interactions and slicker navigation. Better performance is an ongoing goal for us and this step took a lot of work over a long time. The faster response times are especially valuable when working with very large goalscapes: our company goalscape contains hundreds of goals and it runs like a dream!
The other significant enhancements are in the appearance of goal names in the goal map: the automatic resizing is now very sophisticated and the manual adjustment is finer.
Most of the other changes are subtle refinements of the functionality and look and feel, along with some small bug fixes:
Color-coding
The color-coding window now has a checkbox ‘Apply to subgoals’ in place of the selection button. We have also corrected the intermittent bugs that caused changes to subgoal and neighbor colors.
Application window preferences
Goalscape now stores the selected size and in position of the application window. For example, if you are in full-screen mode when you Quit, it will open in full-screen on restart.
User-defined text fields
Cut or copy and paste now includes the contents of all user-defined text fields and any attachments. The selection of user-defined text field is preserved on navigation to another goal that has the same text field. Search finds text in user-defined fields.
Save As
We have tidied up the default filenames and folders for first Save and subsequent uses of Save As. Details of all the changes are in the Release Notes. If you have any trouble updating Goalscape with the automatic Install process, you can download the latest version here.
Goalscape Online
Development of Goalscape Online, our new online collaboration service, is going really well and we are confident that we can deliver it this quarter. Before we launch it we will run a full beta test, so if you would like to participate please post on the Goalscape Online Beta Test thread under ‘Questions’ on the forum.
Goalscape Affiliate Program
We are extending our affiliate program and have now implemented a new software tracking system for such business. So if you like Goalscape and know others who would like it too, you can become an affiliate and earn rewards by helping us to spread the word! Click here for full details and registration form.
Support questions If you have any problems, questions or suggestions please post on the forum. Thanks again to those who have done so in the past few weeks: your feedback has been a great help in finding errors; and there have been some interesting discussions about future developments.
"Don’t be encumbered by history – go off and do something wonderful." (Robert Noyce, Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel)
If you want to do something wonderful, the first step is to decide what that something will be. Goal setting is probably the most significant factor in improving performance in nearly every area of life. Goals are not only great motivators; they provide a focus for your efforts and help you make decisions along the way.
This article deals with the practical side of goal setting and planning. When we set a goal we are actually stating how we would like to improve the world – specifically some aspect of it that we can control. So we can express the goal as a description of the improved situation. How would you like to change your world?
Start with the long-term view: what do you really want to achieve in your lifetime? Many people find this difficult: after all, it could be a long time, with many possibilities and opportunities. So put it another way: what would you really regret not having done or achieved in your lifetime?
Think about what you could aim for in different areas of your life:
Family
Career
Education and personal development
Hobbies and personal interests (art, music, intellectual pursuits, community, sports and fitness, etc)
Peer group: career, social and neighborhood
Whatever goals you can think of in each area, write them down – or put them straight into Goalscape!
Once you have collected all the goals you can think of, review them, narrow down your list and start to set priorities. Consider what you have already achieved and how you did it; and where you have failed and why. What does this tell you about your strengths? Where might you need to develop and learn new skills? Answering these questions will provide clues as to which goals are within your reach.
Play to your strengths in terms of your talents and skills; yet look for ways to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone. Make sure you choose your own goals: those that are in line with your own personal values, rather than merely reflecting the expectations or wishes of others (parents, teachers or peer group). Do however share your goals with those close to you – especially where they are involved in a particular area (eg your spouse, boss and other team members at work, tennis partner, etc) – and take their wishes and opinions into account.
Keep breaking down your big goals into smaller subgoals. Set their relative importances according to the contribution they make to their parent goal.
Always be prepared to add or change some of your goals and their relative importance. Set specific targets in the lowest level goals, decide how to measure your progress and enter it into your plan as you go. Checking off completed tasks and seeing your progress advance will make you feel really good! Celebrate your major achievements with everyone who helped you.
Future articles will include specific advice about working towards your goals; some background about why goal setting is so powerful; and how to make sure your goals are meaningful.
The most obvious change in the latest software update is that Goalscape now starts with an open goalscape “Get started with Goalscape”. This contains a basic user guide and a few standard templates. We will be adding more templates soon – in fact if you have a good goalscape of your own particular area of expertise please let us know. We may even ask if we can include it in the next ‘Get started…’ so other people can use it!
The other main enhancements to functionality are:
Color-coding Applies colored borders to goals (seven colors are available). You can color individual goals, subgoal areas or entire sectors of the goal map. This adds another dimension to Goalscape’s visual model and opens up some new options for “tagging” goals.
User-definable text fields There is a tab in the Notes area to open a new text field, to which you can attach your own label.
Refined Search function Search can now find text that appears in goals that are not in the current view and even in other open goalscapes.
Navigation options If you are fed up with moving the mouse (thanks, Emmett!) you can now navigate around the goal map using the cursor arrow keys.
Themes You can now choose between the standard ocean blue or graphite black as the background color. More colors (and different options to apply them) are coming soon.
There are some minor fixes and other changes to the functionality and look. As always a full listing of all changes appears in the Release Notes.
We like seeing your comments and suggestions on the forum and we try to respond straight away. Let us know what you think of these latest updates.
We are proud to present the latest software update, which includes some major steps forward in both functionality and use. The most important(!) of which are:
Search function: Finds text in goal names, notes, filenames of attachments and Person responsible. We have used Goalscape to manage our whole company since we started – our company goalscape is quite large so we know how valuable this function will be! It also provides an immediate solution for team working: if you enter a person’s name in the search field you can quickly find all the goals this person is responsible for.
Adding and naming goals: After the search function, this was the most popular enhancement that users requested. You can now add a child goal and immediately start writing its name. If you want to add lots of child goals at once you can still do so, using the new ‘Add Sibling’ option.
Icons for common functions: Add Child, Add Sibling, Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete buttons in the Form area. We have also introduced the ‘browser-like ‘+’ tab to the right of the tabs for open goalscapes: this replaces the New’ icon on the File menu.
Language support: Users can now select a German language edition of Goalscape – more languages are coming soon!
Notes text: It is now easier to apply the formatting options and the whole field has a much “tighter” feel.
Attachments: We have simplified the process for attaching files to goals.
There are some more minor fixes, enhancements and additional functions - and many little tweaks to progress our goal to “provide a beautiful interface”! For a full breakdown, check the Release Notes when you install the latest software – then try them out for yourself.
We are already working on the next batch of treats, which will include further improvements to attachment handling, color-coding options, slicker automated resizing for goal names, more ‘hotkey’ shortcuts, standard goalscape templates and improved performance.
