The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is.
Take a good look at the people you work with, and you’ll find lots of Good Starters—individuals who want to succeed and have promising ideas for how to make that happen. They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm or, at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done.
And then something happens. Somewhere along the way, they lose steam. They get bogged down with other projects. They start procrastinating and miss deadlines. Their projects take forever to finish, if they get finished at all.
Does this sound all too familiar? Maybe a little too familiar? If you are guilty of being a Good Starter but a lousy finisher—at work or in your personal life—you have a very common problem. After all, David Allen’s Getting Things Done wouldn’t be a huge bestseller if people could easily figure out how to get things done on their own.
More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a project’s beginning to its end. Recent research has uncovered the reason why that can be so difficult and a simple and effective strategy you can use to keep motivation high.
In their studies, University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking). People routinely use both kinds of thinking to motivate themselves. A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead. A dieter who wants to lose thirty pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding himself of the twenty pounds already lost or the ten left to go.
Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal.
But too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it.
Koo and Fishbach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had fifty-two percent of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed forty-eight percent.
When we focus on progress made, we’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals. This is classic Good Starter behavior—lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.
If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired. We are tuned into (below our awareness) the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When your brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.
In fact, it’s the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed—to-date thinking masks that signal. You might feel good about the ground you’ve covered, but you probably won’t cover much more.
Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal and never congratulate themselves on a job half done.
Great managers create Great Finishers by reminding their employees to keep their eyes on the prize and are careful to avoid giving effusive praise or rewards for hitting milestones “along the way.” Encouragement is important, but to keep your team motivated, save the accolades for a job well—and completely—done.
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is a motivational psychologist and the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Her new book is Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence. She is the author of the best-selling books is Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals and Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. For more on Dr. Grant Halvorson, please visit her website or follow her on Facebook or Twitter.
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