When you set yourself a new goal, it might seem like a good idea to tell others about it. But if you really want to accomplish that goal, your best bet is to keep it to yourself.
To most people, that probably sounds counter-intuitive. Telling your peers about your goal should add some social pressure that gives you extra motivation to accomplish it, right?
Here’s the problem: when you tell someone your goal (let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds), their reaction is usually to praise you for it. Ironically, that praise makes you feel like you’re already closer to achieving your goal, and the satisfaction makes you less motivated.
Psychologists call this a social reality: telling people about your goal and receiving their praise in return basically tricks your mind into thinking that you’ve made progress towards your goal, despite the fact that you haven’t actually done anything to accomplish it.
In 2009, NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer became the first person to carry out extensive tests on this strange phenomenon. His work was published in the journal Psychological Science.
NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer (Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal)
In an earlier study, Gollwitzer and his colleagues had shown that individuals feel closer to their goals when people notice them engaging in goal-related activities (like exercising when your goal is losing weight). Gollwitzer and his fellow psychologists hypothesized that this same feeling could be triggered by people simply acknowledging your plans to accomplish a goal, and set up a series of experiments to test out their theory.
In one of those experiments, Gollwitzer and his colleagues took 163 people and had them all write down a goal on a piece paper. Half of the people were asked to read their goals aloud, while the other half were told to keep their goals private.
The test subjects were then given 45 minutes to do work that would bring them closer to their goals. They were told, however, that they could stop working whenever they wanted to.
The researchers found that the people who read their goals aloud were much less motivated to do the work necessary to accomplish them. On average, they worked just 33 minutes, while the people who kept their goals private worked for the entire 45 minutes.
And despite working for less time on average, most of the people who had announced their goal said that they felt much closer to accomplishing it after the 45-minute period, while those who had kept their goal a secret said that they felt like they still had a lot more work to do.
So just remember: the next time you have a goal you really want to accomplish, keep it to yourself!
Learn more from the Berkeley Science Review and NPR. You can also check out a short TED talk by entrepreneur Derek Sivers below: