Here is the full transcript of American entrepreneur Derek Sivers’ TED Talk: Keep Your Goals to Yourself.
Listen to the MP3 Audio: Keep your goals to yourself by Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers – American entrepreneur
Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. For real — you can take a second.
You’ve got to feel this to learn it. Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay?
Imagine deciding right now that you’re going to do it. Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you’re going to do. Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. Doesn’t it feel good to say it out loud? Don’t you feel one step closer already, like it’s already becoming part of your identity?
Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it.
The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it.
Ideally you would not be satisfied until you’d actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it’s called a “social reality”. The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it’s already done.
And then because you’ve felt that satisfaction, you’re less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? So they hold us to it.
So, let’s look at the proof 1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this “substitution”. 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind.
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published.