Goals

Let’s talk about goals because without goals we don’t know where we’re going.

We need some sort of a roadmap now setting big goals is exciting right.

But it’s also scary.

The larger the change we want to make the more scared we become.

And that’s actually part of our brain.

There’s a region of our brain called the amygdala which actually handles our emotions and detects fear.

And it’s what triggers our fight or flight response when we suddenly feel something strong emotionally

such as being scared of being uncertain.

The amygdala responds by immediately trying to seeking out comfort and finding something that can help

us avoid this feeling which actually hinders our learning.

It’s hard to concentrate and it destroys our long term goals.

Now to overcome this this idea of how do we accomplish our goals.

How do we get to where we want to be which seems so far away.

Robert Mueller in the book Kaizen offers us a solution Kaizen is a Japanese word for continuous small

incremental improvements.

The idea is to take small steps towards a goal in this way we avoid triggering the amygdala is fear

detection system so that the entire time.

We’re not going to give up on our goal.

We’re not going to feel like we’re never going to get there in this way by taking these small steps

we eliminate the fear of failure and we remove that desire to stop towards our goal.

The smaller the steps we take the easier it becomes for us to create those neural networks in our brain

and create positive habits.

Now this idea of small incremental steps are actually mentioned in quite a lot of books.

One of the books that we’ll talk about is atomic habits by James clear of making those small little

habits to improve and go towards our goal.

It’s not a new idea but it does consider one of the principles that we learned right.

This idea of compound learning it’s all about making those small goals small little steps each day that

over a long term is going to compound.

It might be hard for us to see how we’re ever going to achieve mastery but we can accomplish a lot over

10 years over 20 years.

The idea is to not make the goal too big.

The idea of small targets they can hit consistently is what we want to do.

And when we talk about habits later on in the course this idea of just creating a small habit of doing

something just for two minutes and setting a goal like if you want to go for a run to say I’m going

to run five times a week for two minutes by making a goal so simple and so easy I mean anybody can run

for two minutes right by just forming those habits by having those clear goals were more likely to accomplish

something in the long term.

Now we’ve all heard about this idea of smart goals.

If you haven’t.

Well a simple google image will show you all these diagrams of what smart goals are.

It’s this idea that our goals should be specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound.

Now we’re going to do an exercise where we learn what these goals are how to actually create good goals

so that we have a clear roadmap to success.

But the one take away from this video is that goals don’t have to be big as a matter of fact.

All we need are well-defined specific goals to succeed.

For example Anders Ericsson which we’re going to do an exercise on in the next lecture had a test subject

called Steve flute and by the end of the study Steve Balloon was able to recite 82 digits by memory

and how was he able to remember 82 digits.

Well because on the first day he could only do for each day he tried to improve his memory by increasing

to one digit when he could remember twenty seven digits.

Well now his next goal was to remember twenty eight digits each day.

All he had to do was improve by one and if he did it the next day he had the same goal.

Now let’s explore this idea of goals and how to create efficient goals that take advantage of our brain

works.