Page 151 - Hard Goals

142 HARD Goals

dinner. (By the way, if your boss walks into your offi ce, you’re
allowed to put down the book—I like career preservation as
much as the next guy. But for everything else, feel free to keep
reading.)
All of these events, not to mention all the background
thoughts just fl oating around inside your head, are competing
for your brain’s precious attentional resources. It’s like running
too many applications on your computer; they consume limited
resources and everything starts to slow down. But when you set
a diffi cult goal, it consumes so much of your brain’s resources
that it crowds out a lot of other less important stuff. It’s like
shutting down some of those background computer applications.
And with that extra brainpower comes better performance.
But it’s not just the brain’s resources that are affected; feel-
ings get involved as well. Leadership IQ conducted a study to
see how being assigned a diffi cult goal at work made people feel.
We asked more than 4,000 people a series of survey questions
such as the following:

I will have to exert extra effort to achieve my assigned
goals for this year.
I will have to learn new skills to achieve my assigned goals
for this year.

The fi rst thing we discovered was that when people gave high
scores on those questions, they also tended to give high scores
on some of the other survey questions like the following:

I consider myself a high performer.
The work I do makes a difference in people’s lives.