Minisode Monday #26 | Are Your Goals Killing You?

The Art of Charm

http://www.TheArtOfCharm.com

Business, Health & Fitness, Education

4.7 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2016

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, joins us for this Minisode Monday to talk about how the relentless pursuit of goals can figuratively -- and in some cases literally -- kill us. The Cheat Sheet: Popular beliefs about goal setting strategies may do more harm than good. The overpursuit of goals can, in extreme cases, kill. Case in point: the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster as detailed by D. Christopher Kayes in his book Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mt. Everest Disaster. Why being completely identified with a goal (like a mountain climber or arctic explorer) can make us charge ahead when all signs are really telling us to turn back or regroup. As an alternative to this approach, Oliver urges us toward a looser, more flexible conception of goals -- like a frog on a lily pad. To learn more about social dynamics and productivity hacks, take the Art of Charm Challenge by clicking here, or text CHARMED to 33444. Also be sure to check out our Social Capital Intensive here! Let us know about how you put today's Minisode Monday into practice! Leave a comment below, tweet with @TheArtofCharm in your response, or write to Jordan directly: [email protected] (he reads everything)! Does your business have an Internet presence? Now save a whopping 50% on new webhosting packages here with HostGator by using coupon code CHARM! Listen to The Art of Charm, The Unmistakable Creative, and hundreds of your favorite podcasts with the free PodcastOne app (on iOS and Android) here! Find out more about the team who makes The Art of Charm podcast here! Show notes at http://theartofcharm.com/podcast-episodes/minisode-monday-26-are-your-goals-killing-you/ HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! If you dig the show, please subscribe in iTunes and write us a review! This is what helps us stand out from the crowd and help people find the credible advice they need. Review the show in iTunes! We rely on it! http://www.theartofcharm.com/mobilereview Stay Charming!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Jordan Harbanger here. Welcome to Miniso Monday. Happy to be here with you.
0:03.7	Kicking off the week was something quick and actionable that you can implement right away that'll
0:07.8	make you more magnetic and more effective. Today, Oliver Berkman back with a little bit about
0:13.2	goals. Oliver, thanks for coming back. You have an interesting take on goals. Essentially,
0:19.2	that we don't have to have these concrete long-term goals. And you've even got some great stories in
0:24.9	the book about how goals literally have killed people. I think so, right. It's this kind of
0:30.0	absolute doctrine and dogma of the mainstream self-help movement that you need to have really clear,
0:36.4	written down precise goals, smart goals, however you want to think about them, and then just kind of
0:43.5	relentlessly focus on them. And there's a lot of evidence that this is not the best way to achieve
0:47.7	really cool stuff. And as you say, the things can go really badly wrong. The story you're referring to
0:54.4	is the 1996 tragedy on Mount Everest. When a large number of climbers died in a short period,
1:01.2	it's been a mystery about exactly what went wrong for a long time. But there's a business writer
1:07.6	and scholar, Christopher K. Zuh has this pretty persuasive theory that what happened was
1:15.0	something he calls the over-pursuit of goals, that when you are completely identified with a goal,
1:21.8	in this case, reaching the summit. You start to interpret incoming information that suggests
1:27.9	you should change direction. You start to interpret it as reason to keep going and to commit even harder
1:33.2	to the goal. In this case, it's to do with the time you're supposed to turn back when you're trying
1:37.9	to get to that final last bit of a summit on Everest. If the time goes past a certain time of the day,
1:45.2	you've got to turn around because otherwise it's going to be too late in the day. It's going to be
1:48.9	darkness and it's going to get much more dangerous. A lot of climbers that year just kept on going
1:54.0	through their turnaround times. His argument from various different diaries and reconstructions is
2:01.1	that this was because they were interpreting this negative information as like, well, okay,
	...

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