Lately I keep coming across Goal Merchants, people from the Tony Robbins set who imbue goal-setting with various magical powers. They make what I think are outlandish claims for the power of goal setting. Many still love to cite the study of Princeton grads. According to the tale, some years ago, a class of Princeton grads was surveyed and one of the questions asked was whether they had written down precise, defined goals. When the researchers checked back many years later, those who had defined goals had achieved much greater success (whatever that means) than those who didn’t. Of course, we now know that no such study ever existed.

Fool’s Goal and the Value of Forests

Obviously, I’m not against long-term goal setting per se. As I mentioned, my weekly task list depends on having some longer term goals in order to decide what goes on the list. That said, if you set a long-term goal whose only value is in realizing the goal, it’s the wrong goal. As a historian, I’m in favor of long-term thinking. The problem is that when you chart a course into the future, you exclude the one-in-a-million probabilities, but over long enough spans of time, some of these come to pass, so there is too much uncertainty in long-term plans for them to have any degree of accountability.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, but the value in long-term planning is usually in the unintended consequences that result from the fact that projecting far into the future allows us to understand more clearly what’s happening in the present. I strongly recommend the best book I know on long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. Brand cites the example of the Swedish Navy who, in the eighteenth century, noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find tall straight trees to make masts for ships. Since having fast, powerful ships was an essential strategic resource, the navy commissioned the royal forester to set aside areas to grow these trees. Two hundred years later, the forester notified the navy that their trees were ready. The trees no longer had any great strategic value, but they did have tremendous value as some of the last remaining old-growth forest in Sweden. The goal of securing an essential strategic resource had been rendered null by new technology, but long-term planning had enabled the navy to recognize the problem of the disappearing forests.

It’s the same with the majority of goals we set. If we decide to train for a marathon, it’s not really finishing the marathon that matters for most of us. Most of the benefit is in the training for it.

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