Page 117 - Hard Goals

108 HARD Goals

go get some hot wings,” you’re in the norm. Your brain is doing
its thing and telling you the future is less important than right

now, benefits be damned.
If you only discount the future by 10 percent, you have a
chance. You’ll probably take my offer to give up $100 today and
get $170 next year, or give the diet a go, or take the risk and
start a business. Whatever your goal is. But if you’re discounting
your future payoffs by 80 percent, then the $170 you’ll get next
year is only worth $94 today, and there’s no way you’ll take my
offer. Same goes for the diet and everything else. Unfortunately,
most of us fall into the high discount rate category.
The good news is that we can combat the problem. It just
requires taking some deliberate steps (tricking the brain, really)
to diminish the impact of our discount rates. Our minds may
basically be wired to apply this discounting formula to all our
decisions, but we can manipulate that formula to our advan-
tage by tweaking how we structure the inputs and outputs.
This allows us to outfl ank our own brains, thus opening the

floodgates to a sense of urgency about our goals (they become
required). Following are six great ways to do this.

Trick 1: Put Your Present Costs into the Future

One way to cut down on your high discount rate is to move some
of the immediate costs of your goal into the future. You’ll still

be dealing with discounting the future benefits of your goals (it’s
just what we do), but by discounting some of the future costs
you can shift the balance a bit. Often just this alone is enough
to radically alter the mental equation in favor of your goal.
One example of how this is done is the brainchild of one of
the great minds in behavioral economics, University of Chicago