Newsletter - Goals determine what you perceive

On May 18th, 2012, after spending almost 80,000 dollars on guides, travel, equipment and sherpas, Shriya Shah-Klorfine was on her way to the summit of mount everest. After realizing how unprepared she was in terms of climbing experience and physical fitness, the senior sherpa of the Trekking firm she hired decided he could not include her in his group. He bluntly warned her not to climb and said if she did she would die and get the group killed as well. Her determination trumped this warning and she found herself climbing towards the summit from camp four - 8000 meters up.

She was moving at an incredibly slow pace. There were hundreds of climbers on the mountain that day, and if this were a race, she was just a few people away from last place. The sherpas that ended up guiding her warned her at 8,500 meters that she should go back to camp. Once again motivation trumped warning and a totally exhausted Shriya finally made it to the summit of Mt. Everest on May 19th. 

(Poster of Shriya advertising her climb for fundraising purposes)

Tragically, Shriya didn’t save enough energy for the way back down. She collapsed during the descent and efforts to revive her were futile. 

Why she was so motivated to complete her goal despite being warned more than once that it would cost her life? 

Your brain is so focused on goals that your perception of the world changes as your goals change. 

Whether an event is preferable or not depends on what your goals are. If you’re looking for a cash payout from a lawsuit, a minor car crash is welcomed. Otherwise it’s a wretched event. Pretty basic, but how you perceive things depends on your goals. 

In the book The Leading Brain, in a chapter talking about focus, they bring up the famous “selective attention test” - created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. 

If you haven’t heard of it, or if this screenshot and these instructions below don’t sound familiar, go and watch it right now. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it before. 

The test goes like this: There are three people wearing white shirts and three people wearing black shirts in a building in front of some elevator doors. You need to count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. Haven’t heard of it? The screenshot below doesn’t look familiar? Go and watch the video and see if you can actually come up with the right answer - it’s amusingly difficult. (Here’s the link again)

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You’re back. The point of this is to show that your perception is very selective based on your goals. People are so focused on the goal of counting basketball passes that they don’t even perceive something so conspicuous as the gorilla walking through the scene and pounding on its chest. 

Psychologist James J. Gibson came up with the concept of “affordances.” Essentially the point is you perceive the world in terms of action possibilities. More recently Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson reframes this as seeing the world in terms of “tools” and “obstacles.” This is very different from other theories that propose we see the world in terms of “objects.” I won’t get into that but essentially whether you perceive things and how you perceive things depends on if they present themselves as "tools" or "obstacles." 

Going back to the gorilla, you don’t notice the gorilla because
(1) you have a precise goal of counting the basketball passes,
(2) the gorilla does not assist in achieving your goal, and
(3) it is not an obstacle to your goal.
He doesn’t get in the way of you counting the passes, so you don’t even perceive him. 

Cool. But, what’s the point? 

Well, it answers why we should be clear with our goals. Because whether experiences generate positive or negative emotion depends on what your goals are. 

When you have a clear goal, you quickly categorize objects, experiences, nuggets of information into tools and obstacles.

You see a cab coming down the street and you hail it. The driver ignores you and keeps driving. Obstacle. Being in a rush makes you even more frustrated than usual. Your frustration quickly subsides as another cab saw you hailing and is already stopped in front of you just 5 seconds later. Tool. You’re happy about this. You hurriedly say your company name while preparing Google maps - you don’t expect him to know the building. Your internet is being slow. Obstacle. You're annoyed. The cab driver unexpectedly says “No problem, I know exactly where that is.” Tool. You're pleasantly surprised. As you anxiously sit in the backseat, turning your phone screen on and off to check the time, each red light (obstacle) annoys you but you get more and more excited on the stretch where you get green light after green liht (tool). 

Seems irrelevant to being late, we all like green lights and fast internet. But now you get out of the cab and start power walking towards your building. You’re calculating how long it will take you to get to the meeting room down to the seconds. 

Suddenly, a friend you haven’t seen in ages suddenly enters your vision as they excitedly wave their arms to get your attention. They walk slowly towards you with the “give me a hug gesture” while slowly saying  “Terrance Bogard, is that you? How have you been? You look great!” Normally you'd be very happy to see this person, but you're late. Obstacle. You apologetically tell them you are really late for a meeting and you’ll text them later. “That’s the oldest excuse in the book. Come on! I’ll buy you a coffee!” Normally you find this kind of teasing charming, but you're late. Obstacle. You're annoyed. You repeat that you really need to go and that you’ll text them. You hurry along towards the office while scanning the scene hoping to see if at least someone else from the department is late so at least your lateness will seem less bad. You see no one. This doesn't help with your goal of not experiencing repercussions from being late. You feel slightly disappointed.

As you enter the building you notice you see the department head talking on her cell phone. You don’t particularly like her and it's always awkward when you run into her. But she’s the one who’s supposed to lead the meeting. You can’t be late if the meeting isn’t started. Tool. What a nice turn of events. You hope that she’ll stay on the phone as you walk towards the elevator. People are just getting on and you gesture for them to hold it open. It starts to close. Obstacle. You see someone quickly push a button and it reopens. Tool. As you get on the elevator you see your boss is still on her phone and she hasn’t seen you. Tool.

A few moments later you walk into the meeting room. Your colleague says “These meetings suck. What are you so happy about?”

Your brain interprets information based on your goals and tracks progress towards these goals. 

We intuitively know that we feel positive emotions when we come across tools, a negative emotion when we come across an obstacle, and a positive emotion every time we overcome an obstacle. The point is your goals determine what you enjoy.

Let’s get back to Shriya and her everest expedition. She had a very clear goal - the conditions for success were totally unambiguous. To succeed she had to reach the summit. Every kind gesture, stroke of luck or obstacle overcame that brought her closer to the goal would have felt good and increased her motivation to complete the goal. 

Research on rodents Animal research has found that dopamine gradually ramps up as one progresses through a task and closer to completion. An example Neuroscientist Yael Niv gives (see picture above) is that we should expect dopamine and your motivation to drink coffee to slowly ramp up as you go through the steps of grinding the coffee, heating up the mocha pot, heating up the milk and finally adding the sugar. 

This would explain why it’s so hard for us to let go of things we’ve invested plenty of time, money and mental effort into even though those things aren’t doing us any good. In Shriya’s case, she had told everyone she was going to climb Mt. Everest, she even made a poster advertising her adventure for fundraising purposes, she had spent thousands of dollars on travel, equipment , sherpas and so on. Her physical and mental investment by the time she got to camp 4 was gigantic. She was completely focused on the goal and the motivation to do just a bit more climbing to get to the summit was high enough to disregard multiple warnings that she would die. 

Not only this, she surely expected that all the suffering would be worth it.

Research from University College London has found that dopamine enhances expectation of pleasure in humans.[R] This may sound obvious at first - of course we are motivated to do things by the expectation of pleasure. 

However, when it comes to more mundane things like doing your taxes, one of the reasons you procrastinate on it is precisely because you expect it to not be pleasurable. Does this mean that we will become more motivated and expect more pleasure from doing our taxes as we make progress on it? 

At least for me, this was the case. 

I would set a 10 minute timer to “work on taxes,” but after writing down earnings for each month from youtube and then being halfway through earnings for each month from sponsorships, I found that I ignored the timer when it rang and kept going because I wanted to finish writing down the last couple months of sponsorship earnings. 

Then, the next day I wasn't starting on my taxes, I was continuing the progress. I knew the next step was to write down expenses and what I had to do was clear: check my box of physical receipts and write down my business purchases on amazon. I had a sense of progress because there was a finite amount of receipts and there was a finite list of things bought on amazon. This sense of progress kept having me put in a bit more time on this “project” than I initially intended when I grudgingly made myself to get to work on it. 

So what’s the takeaway?

At least for me, the way I’ve been enhancing my motivation lately is to simply:

(1) Define the clear end goal for the project.

(2) Break the project down into as many steps as possible. 

(3) Turn that into a checklist to where you can check off each step and monitor your progress

(4) Use these checklists to generate a daily list of “to-do’s” to complete by 7PM

For videos, I use dropbox paper and make checklists that look like this:

I like how you can make headers and then collapse or expand the contents of the headers as you need. 

Wow, a checklist. Big deal Mr. Genius. Never heard of that before. 

This was the type of reaction I had when I was presented with this concept in the past. My thinking it was “lame” was what prevented me from actually implementing it consistently.

In Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto, he explains how a checklist for surgical procedures has saved many lives. Yet, when first presented with the idea, 20% of surgeons reacted saying they didn’t need such a thing. They were experts. They had trained for years and practiced for decades to become the revered surgeon they are now. Yet, when surgeons were asked whether they would want a surgeon to use a checklist when operating on them, 93% said yes.

Gawande explains how implementing a simple checklist that took two minutes to go through provided every single hospital that used it with a double digit reduction in complication rates. The average reduction of complications was 36%. 47% reduction in deaths.

What if a simple checklist that took a couple minutes to make could make you 36 to 47% more productive or more motivated?

The reason it took me 1800 words to say “make a checklist and it’ll make you more productive,” is because I’m the type who’s very resistant to changing my behavior. If I don’t understand the ins and outs of how something works and how it will benefit me, it doesn’t translate into action. I thought maybe some of you would be similar. 

So far, making a checklist that monitors and tracks my progress has made me more motivated in a significant way. Often the days when I don’t accomplish nearly as much as I hoped are due to tiny setbacks that are just enough to prevent me from doing something. I didn’t sleep quite enough, I'm don't quite have enough motivation to run my 5K, I'll just do a 3K. I ate a bit too much and am just a tad bit too sleepy to start writing. I need to do X, but I’m only at 73% motivation. I need to pass the threshold of 75% motivation to get started. 

I feel like I’ve heard multiple people say “you get a dopamine kick every time you cross something off your checklist” but never saw a reference. I always thought "where did this come from?" I don’t know of a study that actually monitored people’s dopamine levels as they cross things off a list. However, that makes sense to me now. 

-Brain tracks progress towards goals
-Dopamine signaling happens in response to making progress
-Nowadays tasks are so open ended and "fluffy" that progress isn't always clear
-You can manually create a blueprint for progress by making a list of concrete actions
-Item crossed off a list is an indicator of progress
-Dopamine increases, motivation increases. 

Now that I understand the logic behind something so basic as a checklist I’ve actually started to implement it and yes, it does feel good to cross things off.