Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Tools for Titans #16 : The Value of Stupid Goals.

Shaun White is a professional snowboarder and skateboarder. He is also a two time Olympic Gold medalists.

This section is rather short so I only have two points to make.

a) Self-talk

Shaun adopts self-talk which Andre Agassi used which goes like "I'm here. I'm going to try my best and I'm going to go home and my family's there." It's a great way to keep calm in a stressful situation.

Maybe I should try it before a critical exam.

b) The value of "stupid" goals

Shaun decides on two goals every year. One goal is serious and involves winning a major competition. Another goal is "stupid". One example he gave was to win as many cars as possible that year as automotive companies were really focusing on his sport so they were quite generous with sponsorship that year. Shaun ended up winning 9 cars.

Not too obvious in the book is why "stupid" goals worked for Shaun ?

First of all, the term "stupid" is a misnomer. A goal like to win as many cars as possible a year is to an attempt to gamify an aspect of a person's life. Turning the goal of winning cars into a game can encourage harder and more inspired work.

Imagine if a salesman were to have an app which lets him track the number of rejections he gets and aims to be rejected 100 times a day. It is not difficult to imagine that playing this game can lead to increased sales.

Something worth trying if you intend to build up your wealth or go on a diet.


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