How to Become A Great Finisher

The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is.   Take a good look at the people you work with, and you’ll find lots of Good Starters – individuals who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen.  They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, or at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done.

And then something happens.  Somewhere along the way, they lose steam.  They get bogged down with other projects.  They start procrastinating and miss deadlines.  Their projects take forever to finish, if they get finished at all.

Does all this sound familiar?  Maybe a little too familiar?  If you are guilty of being a Good Starter, but a lousy finisher – at work or in your personal life – you have a very common problem.  After all, David Allen’s Getting Things Done wouldn’t be a huge bestseller if people could easily figure out how to get things done on their own.

More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a project’s beginning to its end.   Recent research has uncovered the reason why that can be so difficult, and a simple and effective strategy you can use to keep motivation high.

In their studies, University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking).  People routinely use both kinds of thinking to motivated themselves.   A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead.  A dieter who wants to lose 30 pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding themselves of the 20 pounds already lost, or the 10 left to go.

Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal.  But too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it. 

Koo and Fishbach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off.  For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48%. 

When we focus on progress made, we’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals.   This is classic Good Starter behavior – lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.

If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened.   Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired.  We are tuned in (below our awareness) to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be.   When your brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it:  attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.

In fact, it’s the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed - to–date thinking masks that signal.   You might feel good about the ground you’ve covered, but you probably won’t cover much more.

Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal, and never congratulate themselves on a job half-done.   Great managers create Great Finishers by reminding their employees to keep their eyes on the prize, and are careful to avoid giving effusive praise or rewards for hitting milestones “along the way.”  Encouragement is important, but to keep your team motivated, save the accolades for a job well – and completely – done.

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review (HBR.org) 

Quick Decisions Create Regret, Even When They’re Good Decisions

Why do we sometimes regret the choices we make?  The obvious answer is that we sometimes make bad choices, with unforeseen (though not necessarily unforeseeable) negative consequences.  But that’s not the only time we experience the pain of regret.   In fact, we routinely regret perfectly good choices – not because of the outcome, but because of our experience of choosing.

In his excellent book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the quick decision – the “snap” judgment – is much maligned.  He cites many studies showing that human beings are remarkably good at “thin-slicing” – making a speedy assessment of situations and acting on conclusions based on very little information.  Haste doesn’t always make waste, and Gladwell’s got plenty of scientific evidence to prove it. 

But even if speedy decisions aren’t necessarily bad ones, they still have a significant downside – they feel wrong. The popularity of Blink notwithstanding, people seem to implicitly believe that a quick choice is always a bad choice.  In fact, new research reveals that when people feel they were rushed while deciding, or that they rushed themselves, they regret the decisions they make even when they turn out well.

Two other interesting insights emerged from these studies that are worth noting.  When we make a choice from among many options, we naturally feel more rushed because there is so much more information to consider.  For example, in one study, people who chose a DVD from a set of 30 felt significantly more rushed – and regretted their choice twice as much - as those who chose from a set of 5, even when they could take as much time as they needed.

The second, related insight is that regret comes from feeling rushed, not from being rushed.  In other words, it’s not how much time you take to make your decision – it’s whether or not you felt you took enough time.

In the end, if you don’t give yourself the time you feel you need to make a judgment or choice, you will undermine your satisfaction and your subsequent experience.  You will regret you decision, even when it is completely unwarranted. 

So when someone tries to pressure you into deciding right now - whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or the guy waiting to take your drink order - get used to saying, “I’m going to need a little more time.”  You won’t regret it.

I Set A Harvard Business Review Record!!!

Just found out that my post, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, set the record at HBR.org for most pageviews ever!  I'm so grateful to everyone who recommended it to their friends and colleagues.  Is it too late to go back and rename my book?

The 3 Biggest Myths About Motivation That Won’t Go Away

People can have remarkably keen insights into their own behavior.  Then again, people can also be remarkably wrong about why they, and everyone else, do the things that they do.  And some of those people turn out to be motivational speakers and authors.

No doubt their intentions are very admirable – many genuinely want to help others to reach a higher level of success.  But too often, they simply end up reinforcing false notions (albeit intuitively appealing ones) about how motivation works.   Here are three of the most firmly entrenched motivational myths:

Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed!

There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953.  (Google it.  It’s everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down.  Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3% of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97% combined.  Isn’t that amazing?  It would be if it were true, which it isn’t.  (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.)

I wish it were that simple.  To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. (Not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important.)  In other words, specificity is necessary, but it’s not nearly sufficient.  Writing goals down is actually neither – it can’t hurt, but there’s also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.

Just Try to Do Your Best!

Telling someone, or yourself, to just “do your best” is believed to be a great motivator. It isn’t. Theoretically, it encourages without putting on too much pressure.  In reality, and rather ironically, it is more-or-less permission to be mediocre.  

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two renown organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the difference between “do your best” goals and their antithesis: specific and difficult goals.  Evidence from more than 1,000 studies conducted by researchers across the globe shows that goals that not only spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, but that also set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than simply trying to “do your best.”  That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus and commitment to the goal, persist longer, and make better use of the most effective strategies.  

Just Visualize Success!

Advocates of “positive thinking” are particularly fond of this piece of advice. But visualizing success, particularly effortless success, is not just unhelpful – it’s a great way to set yourself up for failure.

Few motivational gurus understand that there’s an awfully big difference between believing you will succeed, and believing you will succeed easily.   Realistic optimists believe they will succeed, but also believe they have to make success happen – through things like effort, careful planning, persistence, and choosing the right strategies.  They don’t shy away from thinking “negative” thoughts, like what obstacles will I face?  and  how will I deal with them? 

Unrealistic optimists, on the other hand, believe that success will happen to them, if they do lots and lots of visualizing.  Recent research shows that this actually (and once again, ironically) serves to drain the very energy we need to reach our goals.  People who spend too much time fantasizing about the wonderful future that awaits them don’t have enough gas left in the tank to actually get there.

You can cultivate a more realistically optimistic outlook by combining confidence in  your ability to succeed with an honest assessment of the challenges that await you.  Don’t visualize success - visualize the steps you will take in order to make success happen.

Why Keeping Your Options Open Is Really, Really Bad Idea

Given the choice, would you prefer to make an iron-clad, no-turning-back decision, or one you could back out of if you needed to?   Does that seem like a stupid question?  I understand why it might, but bear with me – because it isn’t.

People overwhelmingly prefer reversible decisions to irreversible ones.  They believe it’s better to “keep your options open,” whenever possible.  They wait years before declaring a major, date someone for years before getting married, favor stores with a guaranteed return policy (think Zappos), and hire employees on a temporary basis (or use probationary periods), all in order to avoid commitments that can be difficult, or nearly impossible, to un-do. 

People believe that this is the best way to ensure their own happiness and success.  But people, as it turns out, are wrong. 

Let’s start with the happiness part.  Research by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, shows that reversible, keep-your-options-open decisions reliably lead to lower levels of satisfaction than irreversible ones.  In other words, we are significantly less happy with our choices when we can back out of them.

(For example, in one of Gilbert’s studies, people were asked to choose an art poster that they could keep.  Those who were told that they could change their mind and return it for a different poster in the next 30 days reported being less happy with their poster than those who had to pick a poster and stick with it.)

Why does keeping our options open make us less happy?  Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in.  This is how psychologists like Gilbert refer to the mind’s uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions.  Once we’ve committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives.  Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice. 

Most of us have had to make a choice between two colleges, or job offers, or apartments.  You may have had to choose which candidate to hire for a job, or which vendor your company would engage for a project.  When you were making your decision, it was probably a tough one – every option had significant pros and cons.  But after you made that decision, did you ever wonder how you could have even considered the now obviously inferior alternative?  “Wow, I can’t believe I even thought about going to Yale, when Harvard is better in every way.”  (That’s just an example – I am neutral when it comes to Harvard vs. Yale.  I went to Penn, which incidentally was way better than those schools, but I digress…)

Human beings are particularly good at rearranging and restructuring our thoughts to create the most positive experience possible in any situation.  The psychological immune system protects us, to some extent, from the negative consequences of our choices – because after all, almost every choice has a downside.  The key to happiness is to dwell as little as possible on that downside.

When you keep your options open, however, you can’t stop thinking about the downside – because you’re still trying to figure out if you made the right choice.   The psychological immune system doesn’t kick in, and you’re left feeling less happy about whatever choice you end up making.

This brings us to the other problem with reversible decisions – new research shows that they don’t just rob you of happiness, they also lead to poorer performance.

Once again, it’s because thoughts related to making the right decision stay active in your mind when your options are open.    This places a rather hefty burden on your working memory, and it’s distracting.  When you’re still deciding what you should do, you don’t have the cognitive resources to devote yourself fully to what you’re actually doing.  Your attention wanders.  And as a result, your performance suffers.  (For instance, in one study, people who made a reversible decision were able to recall fewer correct answers on a subsequent task then those who made a choice they had to stick with.)

So keeping your options open leads to less happiness and success, not more.  Ironically, people don’t actually change their minds and revise decisions very often.  We just prefer having the option to do so, and that preference is costing us.

I’m not, for the record, saying reversible decisions are never beneficial. Obviously if you have no real basis for making a good choice in the first place and you’re just guessing, or if the consequences of your choice might end up killing someone, the option of a do-over is probably a good thing.

But assuming that your choice is carefully considered and you’ve weighed your options, you will be both happier and more successful if you make a decision, and don’t look back.

Getting Others to Embrace Risk

Why aren’t companies hiring?  Why aren’t homes selling, despite bargain pricing? Why is growth and innovation in some industries so sluggish?

Americans have a well-earned reputation for risk-taking, but these days we are something of a timid lot.  Our reluctance to stick our collective neck out has everything to do with the psychology of motivation – specifically, how we think about the goals we pursue. The problem, in a nutshell, is simply this:  when making decisions, lately many of us have been focused much more on what we have to lose than on what we might gain. 

Whenever we see our goals – whether they are organizational or personal - in terms of what we have to lose, we have what’s called a prevention focus.  Prevention motivation is about obtaining security, avoiding mistakes, and fulfilling responsibilities.  It’s about trying to hang on to what you’ve already got and keep things running smoothly, and it isn’t at all conducive to taking chances. 

If, instead, we see our goals in terms of what we might gain, we have what’s called a promotion focus. Promotion motivation is about getting ahead, maximizing your potential, and reaping the rewards.  It’s about never missing an opportunity for a win, even when doing so means taking a leap of faith.

In the last decade, researchers in psychology and management departments across the country have conducted hundreds of studies showing that promotion and prevention motivations lead to different strengths and weaknesses, and very different strategic approaches.  The promotion focus on potential gain leads to speed, creativity, innovation, and embracing risk, while the prevention focus on avoiding loss leads to accuracy, careful deliberation, thoroughness, and a strong preference for the devil-you-know. 

The recent recession, coupled with financial and health care reform, have left American businesses (and individual Americans) focused far more on keeping what they’ve got than boldly going where they’ve never gone before.  People don’t want to rock the boat at a time when consumers (and jobs) are harder to find, and when risk feels like recklessness.  Unfortunately, they forget that without organizational innovation and growth, no business (and no job) will be safe for long.

If you’ve got great, forward-thinking ideas, and their reception has been lukewarm at best, you are probably wishing your boss, your coworkers, or your clients were a bit more comfortable with risk.  There are really only two solutions:  get them to adopt the promotion mindset (the harder option in the current climate), or use the right language to work with their prevention mindset instead.  You may be thinking of your great idea as an opportunity for gain, but you can always reframe it as an opportunity for avoiding loss. 

To persuade the prevention-minded person to take a risk, recent research by psychologists Abigail Scholer, Xi Zou, Ken Fujita, Steve Stroessner, and E. Tory Higgins suggests that you should emphasize how a course of action can keep your company (or your client) safe and secure - how it will help them to avoid making a terrible mistake.   A new venture isn’t a chance to get in front of the pack, but a way to not fall behind.  (“Everyone is moving in this direction.  It’s inevitable.  We could lose market share if aren’t prepared for the future.”)

Matching a pitch to the listener’s current motivation is the key to effective persuasion. Research shows that even the most timid, prevention-minded person among us will gladly take a risk, once you help him understand why it would be a greater risk not to.

The Key Trait Successful People Have, and How To Get It

Which character traits do you need to have if you want to work effectively and get ahead?  The answer depends, to some extent, on the kind of work you do – but there’s one trait that everyone needs to have if they want to succeed, and that’s trustworthiness.  Technically, it’s not so much being trustworthy, but being perceived as trustworthy, that matters.  You can be as honest, fair, and reliable as the day is long, but if nobody else sees you that way, it won’t help you.

When your boss doesn’t trust you, you don’t get key assignments, promotions, or the latitude to do things your own way and take risks.   When your employees don’t trust you, you don’t get their best effort, or all the information you need from them to make good decisions.

If you want other people to believe that you are trustworthy, you should be aware that you may be seriously undermining that belief if you appear to lack self-control.   New research shows that people just won’t trust you when you seem like you might have a willpower problem.  If you think about it, this makes a lot of intuitive sense.  We trust people because we know that when things get hard, or when it might be tempting for them to put their own interests first, they’ll resist temptation and do what’s right.

Studies show that when you engage in behaviors that are indicative of low self-control, your trustworthiness is diminished.  In other words, all those things you know you shouldn’t do - smoking, overeating, impulsive spending, being lazy, late, disorganized, excessively emotional, or having a quick temper - may be even worse for you than you ever realized, because of the collateral damage they are doing to your reputation.

So if you want to be trusted, you’re going to have to conquer these trust saboteurs.  To do that, you’ll need to understand how willpower really works, and how you can get your hands on some more of it.

The Secret to Earning Trust:  Willpower

Your capacity for self-control is like the muscles in your body.   Like biceps or triceps, willpower varies in its strength, not only from person to person, but from moment to moment.  Just as well-developed biceps sometimes get tired and jelly-like after a strenuous workout, so too does your willpower “muscle.”

Even everyday actions like decision-making or trying to make a good impression can sap this valuable resource.  So can coping with the stresses of your career and family.  When you tax it too much at once, or for too long, the well of self-control strength runs dry, no matter who you are.   It is in these moments that the doughnut (or the cigarette, or your hot temper) wins.

So if you are serious about resisting your unwanted impulses, start by making peace with the fact that your willpower is limited.  If you’ve spent all your self-control handling stresses at work, you will not have much left at the end of the day for sticking to your resolutions.  Think about when you are most likely to feel drained and vulnerable, and make a plan to keep yourself out of harm’s way.  Decide, in advance, what you will do instead when the impulse strikes.

The good news is, willpower depletion is only temporary.  Give your muscle time to bounce back, and you’ll be back in fighting form.  When rest is not an option, recent research shows that you can actually speed up your self-control recovery, or give it a boost when reserves are low, simply by thinking about people you know who have lot of self-control.   (Thinking about my impossibly self-possessed mother does wonders for me when I’m about to fall off the no-cheesecake wagon.)

Or, you can try giving yourself a pick-me-up.  I don’t mean a cocktail – I mean something that puts you in a good mood.  (Again, not a cocktail – it may be mood-enhancing, but alcohol is definitely not willpower-enhancing, nor trust-enhancing).    Anything that lifts your spirits should also help restore your self-control strength when you’re looking for a quick fix.

The other way in which willpower is like a muscle (and the really great news for those of us trying to rid ourselves of a trust saboteur) is that it can be made stronger over time, if you give it regular workouts.  Recent studies show that daily activities such as exercising, keeping track of your finances or what you are eating – or even just remembering to sit up straight every time you think of it – can strengthen your capacity for self-control.  For example, in one study, people who were given free gym memberships and stuck to a daily exercise program for two months not only got physically healthier, but also smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, and ate less junk food.  They were better able to control their tempers, and less likely to spend money impulsively.  They didn’t leave their dishes in the sink, didn’t put things off until later, and missed fewer appointments. In fact, every aspect of their lives that required the use of willpower improved dramatically.

So if you want to build more willpower, start by picking an activity (or avoiding one) that fits with your life and your goals – anything that requires you to override an impulse or desire again and again, and add this activity to your daily routine.  It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier over time if you hang in there, because your capacity for self-control will grow.    Other people will notice the change, and trust you more.

Armed with more willpower and the trust of those around you, you’ll be more successful than ever before.