Goal Setting in the face of Ego Depletion: for Businesses and Individuals
Icarus’ flight is a popular Greek myth. The story tells of a young man who attempts to fly too close to the sun with wings made of wax and feathers. The heat of the sun causes the wax to melt, and Icarus falls into the sea and drowns. The story warns of unrestrained ambition. But surely our ambition is not of flight, and wings of wax. When it comes to ambitions to be managers and leaders of tomorrow, we’re told that ambition is a good thing, and the strides towards it are to be swift and definitive.
The purpose of this article is for each of us to acknowledge the Icarus within us, with the ambition to conquer the sun, but with wings of wax holding us back.
While ambition is a good thing, there should be limits to our goals, as radical and unrealistic goals can lead to defeat and alter our neural pathways, lowering our ability to undertake realistic goals in the future.
To define ‘just enough’ ambition – because ambition is conjured up by our brain – firstly we will look into the two systems of the brain proposed by Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel Laureate, notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. We will see how the two systems interact with each other and individuals. Secondly, how this, coupled with ego depletion, can lead to erroneous goal setting. Setting goals that are incremental, realistic, and sustainable will help us turn our wings of wax to ones that will not only take us to the sun, but far beyond it.
Cold turkey to cold feet
In theory, achieving ambition is simple: decide on a goal and put your mind to it. We’re told that this goal is personal and outside the realms of criticism. Ambitious goals are likely encouraged, but can there be limits to them? When we set goals or quit a habit, how do we avoid going from cold turkey to cold feet; from radical, unrealistic, non-sustainable goals to incremental, realistic and sustainable ones?
It is appropriate to begin our probe into effective goal-setting behavior by delving into an understanding of the human mechanism of thought – the brain.
The brain can be a friend or foe depending on one factor: how well we can converse with it. A conversation is a two-way street, and to talk, one must first understand. So, let’s start there.
Daniel Kahneman proposes two systems of the brain in his book Thinking, fast and slow (2011). They are:
System I Thinking
The system operates automatically and quickly, with little to no effort, often in an involuntary way. This system has evolved and developed by learning from primordial responses to the human environment. (Kahneman 2011)
Examples: Detecting intonations in voice, distinguishing happy faces from sad faces, and understanding simple sentences.
System II Thinking
It is the effortful and voluntary system. This system allocates attention to complicated and deliberate activities that demand focus and concentration. (Kahneman 2011)
Examples: Solving an advanced math problem or seeking out a person in a crowd.
Okay, so there are two systems in the brain, but they aren’t our friends just yet. To help us in our goal setting – we must see how they interact with each other and in turn with us. But before that, we require some context about the world we live in today.
The time for change is now, albeit from tomorrow
Our media feeds are crowded with stories of individuals and corporations reporting merely success stories and underreporting failures. These include remarkable weight loss journeys or growth stories, rarely going into the painful failures and the work that goes into them. This clouds our minds into inducing a sense of familiarity with a small sample size without the full picture. It makes us underestimate the efforts required to achieve ambitious goals and pressures us into setting heavy goals, expecting immediate results.
So why is failure bad? At least I’m trying, right? Well, that’s not exactly the case.
Not a perfect soldier
In his work, Dr. Jordan Bernt Peterson (2018) argues that lobsters, like humans, exist in hierarchies and feature a nervous system that ‘runs on serotonin’ (brain chemical associated with happiness).
“We diverged from lobsters in the evolutionary history about 350 million years ago. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters.” (Peterson 2018)
This brain function helps make more serotonin available when a lobster moves up the food chain. The greater the defeat, the more constrained is the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin levels are related to more negative feelings, potentially making it more difficult to climb back up the ladder. Peterson also supplements his argument by saying that a defeat experienced by a lobster can have fundamental alterations to brain chemistry.
Drawing from the proximity between the nervous structure of lobsters and humans, along with the recent advancements in neural links in the brain and the ability to train the brain to strengthen certain links and weaken others, it is reasonable to say that defeat also has the ability to alter human neural pathways. This means that overly ambitious or unrealistic goals not only cause momentary failures but also lower our ability to undertake realistic goals in the future.
In essence, it means picking your battles wisely, because the idea of a ‘sore loser’ has biological implications.
How close to the sun is too close?
So, which battles should we pick? And when is a battle even wise?
Ever felt exhausted during an ambitious diet or consciously avoided thinking about a negative emotion or incident? Here’s where the enemy of our newly acquainted friend – the brain – comes in, and its name is ego depletion.
Ego depletion (ego used psychoanalytically and not colloquially) posits the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. Given this, it is understandable how consciously avoiding thinking about a negative emotion or avoiding thinking about eating unhealthy food is draining. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body. Drawing from our prior discussion from System I and II, ideally, we would want System II to be involved in effective goal setting. But when System II is overburdened – that is a feature of avoidance of negative emotions or exercising restraint (during a diet) -, it is likely we resort to System I – and believe almost anything. This can lead to erroneous or oversetting of unrealistic goals.
Mistakes were made (but not by me)
“I am my remembering self and the experiencing self; she who does my living is like a stranger to me.” (Kahneman 2011)
Kahneman (2011) outlines the distinction between experiencing self and remembering self, and warns against the potential errors in judgement and goal setting as we try to draw inferences between our remembering and experiencing self.
In essence, it means that the conclusions we come to while experiencing an event are different from when we remember them. This argument is the cornerstone of the catharsis method of therapy. While setting a goal, we must defer decision taking into account in the context of the decision-making event: whether it is taken while experiencing a particular event or while remembering the said event.
Sensitizing oneself to the limitations of our cognitive and biological systems allows better goal-setting: for revising the goals of today and answering the call of tomorrow.
In the story of Icarus, one character left out of discussion in the beginning was Daedalus: Icarus’s father, a master Greek craftsman. It was Daedalus who fashioned wings out of feathers and wax so he and his son could escape from the island of Crete, where they were imprisoned by King Minos. In the story, before they left, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or too close to the sea, as the heat would melt the wax and the moisture dampen the feathers, However, this advice was to no avail to Icarus.
Just like that, this article can’t guarantee infallible decision making. But what it can do is sound warnings, just as Daedalus did, right before the Icarus in us soars too close to the sun, only this time, we’ll be more equipped to hear the warnings.
Author: Sudhanshu Pathare
About the Author: Student of MBA-08
References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited.
Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited.
#goalsetting #realisticgoals #egodepletion #icarusflight
#danielkahneman #drjordanbrentpeterson #iimbg #enlighteningiim