Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (Kindle Location 1807). Hyperion. Kindle Edition.
The Twenty-First Habit: Goal Obsession
By itself, goal obsession is not a flaw. Unlike adding value or punishing the messenger or any of the other twenty annoying habits, goal obsession is not transactional; it’s not something you do to another person. But it is often the root cause of the annoying behavior. Goal obsession turns us into someone we shouldn’t be. Goal obsession is one of those paradoxical traits we accept as a driver of our success. It’s the force that motivates us to finish the job in the face of any obstacle—and finish it perfectly.
A valuable attribute much of the time.
But taken too far, it can become a blatant cause of failure. In its broadest form, goal obsession is the force at play when we get so wrapped up in achieving our goal that we do it at the expense of a larger mission.
It comes from misunderstanding what we want in our lives. We think we’d be truly happy (or at least happier) if only we made more money, or lost thirty pounds, or got the corner office. So, we pursue those goals relentlessly. What we don’t appreciate until much later is that in obsessing about making money, we might be neglecting the loved ones—i.e., our family—for whom we are presumably securing that money; in obsessing about our weight with extreme diets we might actually end up doing more harm than good to our bodies; in pursuing the corner office we might trample upon the colleagues at work whose support and loyalty we will need later on to stay in that corner office or move even higher. We start out with a road map heading in one direction but end up in the wrong town.
It also comes from misunderstanding what others want us to do. The boss says we have to show ten percent revenue growth for the year, so when it appears we will miss that target, goal obsession forces us to adopt questionable, less than honest methods of hitting the target. In other words, the honorable pursuit of a difficult goal set by someone else transforms us into cheaters.
The only problem is that we either don’t see this or we refuse to admit it to ourselves.
Goal obsession has warped our sense of what is right or wrong.
As a result, in our dogged pursuit of our goals we forget our manners. We’re nice to people if they can help us hit our goal. We push them out of the way if they’re not useful to us. Without meaning to, we can become self-absorbed schemers.
As I say, this is why I’ve given goal obsession its own special corner. It’s not a flaw. It’s a creator of flaws. It’s the force that distorts our otherwise exemplary talents and good intentions, turning them into something we no longer admire.
It’s one thing to pursue your dreams—but not if that pursuit turns a dream into a nightmare. Take the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai and the lead character, Colonel Nicholson, a prisoner of war in Burma who is compelled to lead his fellow prisoners in building a bridge for their Japanese captors. Nicholson is an officer of high integrity, dedicated to excellence, a great leader of men—and thus well trained to complete any mission he is given. So he doesn’t just build a bridge, he builds a beautiful bridge. At film’s end, he finds himself in the painful position of defending the bridge from attack by fellow officers who want to destroy it to prevent Japanese trains from using it. There’s a chilling moment of realization, right before he detonates the bridge, when he utters the famous line, “What have I done?” He was so focused on his goal—build the bridge—that he forgot the larger mission was winning the war. That’s goal obsession.
One of the most ironic examples of goal obsession was the “Good Samaritan” research done by Darley and Batson at Princeton in 1973. In this widely-referenced study, one group of theology students was told that they were to go across campus to deliver a sermon on the topic of the Good Samaritan. As part of the research, some of these students were told that they were late and needed to hurry up. They believed people would be waiting for them to arrive. Along their route across campus to the chapel, Darley and Batson had hired an actor to play the role of a “victim” who was coughing and suffering. Ninety percent of the late students in Princeton Theology Seminary ignored the needs of a suffering person in their haste to get across campus. As the study reports, “Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!”
The solution is simple, but not easy. You have to step back, take a breath, and look. And survey the conditions that are making you obsessed with the wrong goals. Ask yourself: When are you under time pressure? Or in a hurry? Or doing something that you have been told is important? Or have people depending upon you? Probable answer: All the time. These are the classic conditions of the goal obsessed. We confront them every minute of every day. They do not go away. This makes it all the more important to reflect upon our work, match it up against the life we want to live, and consider, “What am I doing?” and, “Why am I doing this?” Ask yourself, “Am I achieving a task—and forgetting my organization’s mission?” Are you making money to support your family—and forgetting the family that you are trying to support? Are you on time to deliver a sermon to your staff—and forgetting to practice what you’re preaching? After all this effort and display of professional prowess, you don’t want to find yourself at a dead end, asking, “What have I done?”