-ER Goals: What, why, and how?
On this day, the 21st of July in the year of our Lord 2021, my current goals are to:
Wake up early at 6am
Do yoga/mobility work every day
Walk for 30 minutes
Eat a more slow carb/keto diet
Start running again (2x a week)
Write every day
Call my friends and family more frequently
Meditate
Study and train for BJJ every day
Practice my Spanish again
Work on this website
In terms of progress…I'm doing about half. As in 0.5 out of the roughly 30 things I just listed.
It seems like everyone has at least one goal to get fitter, healthier, smarter, better, etc. In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke calls these -ER Goals, (all the above aims ending in -ER). She points out the key difficulty lies not in choosing the goal, or even in the knowledge of how to achieve it, but in the "executing all the little decisions along the way to our goals."
Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash
To pick up running again is not a complex recipe; put your running gear on, go outside, run. Waking up early involves setting an alarm and getting up when it goes off. Writing every day means sitting down with pen and paper or a computer, and putting words on a page. Rinse and repeat.
While all of these recipes are simple, that does not mean they are easy. There's a massive difference between knowing and doing, the "tiny execution" of mundane activities that eventually add up to something significant. And what I find endlessly fascinating is the 'why' behind we struggle with these things that are so clearly better for us.
The answers lie in the wiring of the brain and how the mind operates. The short answer is that the way we evolved as a species (and as a product of all the animal ancestors that came beforehand) means we have certain tendencies. Those tendencies, hard-wired into our brain, make it difficult for us to choose the harder path that is better for us in the long-term, but hurts in the short-term.
Historically, pain has always been a signal of danger, of a risk or of a threat that could keep us from reproducing and passing down our genes. Stepping on a stone hurts. Food that's rotting smells and tastes bad. Rejection from peers puts at risk of being kicked out of the tribe and starving to death. Our evolution tells us that pain is to be avoided, and pleasure is to be sought, more or less at all costs.
For a long time, that little recipe worked. That wiring in our heads established us as the dominant species of the planet. However, the cracks started to show in the modern age, with depression, suicide, low life satisfaction, and any number of mental health issues. For many people, myself included, in this age of plenty, we might find ourselves asking "Is this it?" and saying "I want more." It is a fascinating contradiction.
So how does this relate to our -ER goals, and what do we do about it? Well, it more or less means we have to make it easier for ourselves to do these hard things. We have to ‘trick’ our minds into finding the pleasure, in order to make it worth the pain of waking up at some god-forsaken hour in the morning, or the agony of throwing our body forward on the pavement for miles and miles. I have a few suggestions for making that easier.
Identify 1-2 goals. Instead of twelve goals all at once, choose one, maybe two, goals to focus on. No more than that. Your mind needs time to adopt to these new changes in your life, and half-assing eighteen of them will ultimately result in zero of them sticking around for the long haul. Write down your list of all the things you wish to do, choose one or two of the most impactful and move forward.
For your chosen goals, get super clear on why these goals matter, and what success in them looks like. This is necessary for two reasons: 1) You need to be clear on why this matters to you because that ‘why’ is hopefully big enough for you to push through the hard days. If your ‘why’ is big enough (i.e. bigger than you), you’ll endure a lot of pain to get through it. 2) Clarity on that ‘why’ and what success looks like means you now have a metric to measure against. Your measurements matter, because you need that to get feedback, and you need feedback in order to feel like you’re making progress. If there’s no change in the quality of your life after waking up at 6am every day, then why in God’s green earth would you keep doing that?
So clarify why this thing matters to you, what success looks like, and work backwards to find the metrics that will tell you whether or not you are making progress.Start small. So small. So small as to make it easy on your shittiest day (thanks James Clear). By making it a tiny step (Ex; I just have to put my running shoes on step outside my door), we lower the perceived pain in our minds that might keep us from even starting. Putting my shoes on is not as scary as running 5 miles. But once my shoes are on and I’m outside, I am probably going to be way more willing to start that run that might lead to my 5 miles.
Show up. You have the recipe, so now it’s just showing up to do the work. If it’s not working, make it smaller/easier. This is also where you can experiment with accountability from somebody else, creating and tracking ‘chains’ of consecutive days, or adding incentives. There’s mixed success for each of those, so you just have to experiment with what works best for you. But the underlying key to all of it is to keep showing up. Even when it’s hard. Even when you fall off. Show up.
