Page 129 - Hard Goals

120 HARD Goals

of them lose their jobs, maybe that will adjust your discount rate
for retirement planning. And if you’re comparing yourself to a
bunch of CEOs and 80 percent of their companies are strug-
gling to grow, then perhaps that will impact how you assess the
costs and benefi ts of your goals.

Trick 6: Limit Your Choices
There’s one fi nal technique to outfl ank your brain and create a
much more deeply felt sense of requirement for your goals. It’s
to limit the number of alternatives you have competing with
your goals. It’s become an accepted truism that more choice is
always better. But the truth is that too many choices can actu-
ally hamper our ability to achieve our goals. When we go to that
restaurant, we want to be able to decide what we want based
on our feelings in that moment; we like to keep our options
open. But when we’re in that moment, staring at all those des-
sert choices, we can become mentally overloaded, lose focus,
and start making selections that undercut our goals. (If you
stare at that almost limitless dessert tray without a clear plan,
bad things will happen.)
Researchers at Columbia and Stanford, led by Sheena S.
Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, have made some fascinating dis-
7
coveries about how much choice is too much. In one study, the
researchers set up displays of gourmet jams in a specialty gro-
cery store. In one display, customers passing by could taste 24
different fl avored jams, while in another display there was only
the option of tasting 6 different fl avored jams.
Well, more choices are better, right? Initially the customers
thought so, as 60 percent of passersby stopped at the display with
24 jams and only 40 percent of passersby stopped at the 6-jam