It seems totally counter-intuitive that difficult goals lead to better performance. But there’s decades of research to back it up. It’s because difficult goals demand our attention and engage the brain. And with that extra neurological horsepower comes better performance.
But the challenge is in finding your personal sweet spot of difficulty. You don’t want your goals to be so difficult that you give up, any more than you want to feel so unchallenged that you stop trying.
Here’s a quick way to test whether your goals are difficult enough to inspire optimal performance. Think about a recent goal and determine whether the following three statements apply:
- I’m really going to have to learn new skills before I’ll be able to accomplish this goal.
- My goal is pushing me outside my comfort zone; I’m not frozen with terror, but I’m definitely on “pins and needles” and wide-awake for this goal.
- When I think about the biggest and most significant accomplishments throughout my life, this current goal is as difficult as those were.
If you can’t answer “yes” to all three statements, keep reading.
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You can look to your own past accomplishments to see how effective difficult goals are. I’ll bet that every significant thing you’ve achieved, both personally and professionally, required serious work. Your brain was alive and buzzing with the challenge and you felt like you were on pins and needles. But it was the challenge, not the reassurance that you could achieve this goal no problem, that allowed you to push past the most stubborn roadblocks. It was the challenge that made you embrace (instead of dread) honing your knowledge and learning new skills. And once you achieved that difficult goal, you were left with a feeling of overwhelming pride that is still with you today.
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, psychology professors and pioneers of goal-setting theory, produced conclusive validation that people who set or are given difficult goals achieve much greater performance levels than do people who set or are given weaker goals that send a message of “Just do your best.” In one study, Professor Latham’s research team worked with Weyerhaeuser (the forestry, wood and paper giant) to study how difficult goals could improve the performance of logging-truck drivers. Ideally, you want logging trucks to come as close as possible to their maximum legal weight. This eliminates multiple runs, which cost time, fuel and additional trucks. But logging trucks present a unique challenge: Logs are all different sizes; they have to be fit on the trucks; weights have to be accurate, etc.
It was determined for this experiment that meeting 94% of the maximum legal net weight would be difficult, but not impossible to achieve. When given a goal of “do your best,” workers loaded the trucks to approximately 60% of the maximum legal net weight (lots of wasted space). But when given the more difficult goal of loading the trucks to 94% of their maximum legal weight, they met the goal, saving Weyerhaeuser about $250,000 within months.
OK, so setting difficult goals leads to better performance, but how difficult is difficult enough? An appropriately difficult goal is going to require two to four major new learning experiences. This stretches the brain and excites the neurons. Or you can determine how much you had to learn to achieve your own past great accomplishments and use this as a measuring stick.
If you can say, “This goal is a breeze, I don’t need to learn anything to ace it,” it’s a clear sign you’ve underset that goal. Just as if you find yourself scratching your head and pondering the 37 new things you’ll have to learn, you know you’ve definitely overset. Adjusting a goal by 30% is usually enough to engage the brain. If you find you still need more difficulty, you aren’t learning two to four new things, then take it up another 30%. If you are oversetting your goals, start by sliding them back 30% and reassess the situation. Stick to the 30% rule because if you start arbitrarily tripling or quadrupling the difficulty of your goals, they will all too quickly go from difficult to impossible.
When you hit your sweet spot of difficulty you should feel outside your comfort zone. Not so far that you are on a bed of nails, but not too comfortable either. You’ll know your sweet spot because you’ve been there before; it’s that place where you achieve your absolute best.
Stop encouraging mediocre performance, and start inspiring great results. Our complimentary white paper, “Are SMART Goals Dumb?” reveals research that shows how ineffective SMART goals really are. And, more important, it teaches you the radical new and better approach to achieving things you never thought possible.
