Page 131 - Hard Goals

122 HARD Goals

being less satisfi ed with their purchases and experienced much
more regret. By contrast, people that were offered fewer choices
were signifi cantly happier, experienced less regret, and in the
case of the fi rst study I mentioned, were 10 times more likely to
buy something.
Remember that our brains are always calculating costs and
benefi ts. When we see too many choices, our brains get over-
whelmed and crash like a cheap laptop. So before you go into
a situation laden with choices, narrow your options and then
pick one. In the studies I mentioned, good outcomes were those
where people made a purchase or chose a retirement plan. When
it comes to goals, good outcomes are those where you stick to
your goals, and bad outcomes are those where you do some-
thing clearly incongruous with those ends.
So narrow your choices, and you’ll have a much better
chance of sticking to your goals. Read the restaurant’s menu
before you go out to dinner so you don’t get overwhelmed by
the dessert tray and end up gorging on that chocolate cake and
spending the subsequent hours in a cycle of self-recrimination.
Plan your trips to the gym well before you have that long day
at work and then don’t feel like going. Don’t buy your company
that online training library that has 300 different course titles
and just throw it out there expecting your employees will initi-
ate an educational binge; pick a narrow menu of specifi c courses
you want everyone to complete.
Finally, anytime you have a deadline on any type of goal,
don’t give yourself too many choices. In one study, researchers
Dan Ariely (author of the terrifi c book Predictably Irrational)
and Klaus Wertenbroch analyzed how people set their own
deadlines in a class and what happened to their grades when
9
they did so. This was an executive education class at MIT (in
other words, not a freshman class but rather seasoned profes-