Page 124 - Hard Goals

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I’m in it for the long haul; I’m absolutely going to hit my goal.
And remember that one of the factors that cause our discount
rates to be so high is that we feel the future is highly uncertain.
So when you combat uncertainty with certainty, your discount
rate declines, future benefi ts seem more appealing, and so on.
Or to put it another way: “ain’t nothin’ gonna breaka my stride,
nobody gonna slow me down, oh no . . .”
There are two very good questions you can ask yourself in

order to reframe a cost as a benefit. The fi rst is, What will I learn
from this? And the second, How does the cost demonstrate my
commitment to an even bigger goal? Let’s take a look:

What Will I Learn from This?
One of our studies on goals found that people really like to
learn, that gaining new knowledge or skills is an incredibly

rewarding benefit in its own right. We’ll go deeper into this in
the “Diffi cult” chapter, but right now I want to introduce some
results from when we looked at employees who will have to
learn new skills to accomplish their work goals.
Those who will have to learn new skills are:

• Twenty-two times more likely to say, “I would like to
spend my career at this organization.”
• Seventeen times more likely to say, “I recommend my
boss to others as a great person to work for.”
• Twenty-one times more likely to say, “I recommend this
organization to others as a great place for people to
work.”

When you can evaluate a tough goal and say, “You know
what, that was really hard, but wow, did I learn a lot of new
skills,” you’re signifi cantly more likely to walk away from that