Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals

Most people find that their level of attention and motivation is going to be highest 30 minutes, 3 hours, and 11 hours after waking up.

If a goal is too easy to achieve, it seems that it doesn't recruit sufficient amounts of the arousal network that involves the amygdala but a bunch of other brain structures as well that get people into the necessary actions to continually pursue that goal.

I'd like to mention two popular myths about goal-setting and pursuit. The first one is that if we set a Post-it, you know, a little Post-it sticky, where you write down what you're trying to achieve, and you put that on the refrigerator or you put that on your mirror, that it increases the probability that you are going to stick to your goal. Turns out, that is not the case. And the reason for that is that your visual system adapts to whatever is regular in your environment.

The best productivity app is already on your phone, which is to put your phone into airplane mode or, more ideally—and this is the one that I try my best to incorporate—to simply turn the phone off and remove it from my workouts or my attempts to learn a language or my attempts to learn anything.

Guess what, folks? Most people who try to achieve many goals simultaneously fail at all of them.

This thing of setting specificity, really spending time with it on paper, setting specificity of action—so, which specific actions, and then setting specificity of how long you are going to engage in each of those actions each week—greatly increases the probability that you will achieve that what previously seemed to be all-too-lofty goal.

The positive feedback that we get from others when we announce that we're going after a goal activates certain reward systems and motivation systems within our brain that then quickly dissipate and then diminish the probability that we will engage in the type of behaviors that actually lead us to achieve that goal.

So, a 12-week cycle, or roughly a 3-month cycle, sometimes called the quarterly cycle, of goal-pursuit, toward your particular goal, I think, is a good macro time to focus on. And then within that 12-week cycle, to define very clearly how many hours each week and each day and on which days you will pursue that goal.

The best way to incorporate the mechanics of the dopamine system such that you can achieve not just immediate motivation but ongoing motivation is to incorporate what is referred to as random intermittent reinforcement ... Randomly reward yourself and randomly don't reward yourself for successful completion of milestones.

If you are not feeling motivated, then what the scientific literature tells us is that you actually want to spend 1, 2, 3, maybe 5 minutes visualizing failure, visualizing how terrible you will feel if you do not achieve your goal.

When we narrow our visual attention and we hold that narrow visual tension on a spot, several things happen. First of all, there's recruitment of circuitry within the so-called brain stem that then deploys neurochemicals that increase our level of alertness and arousal...

If you reward yourself every time you reach a milestone—say you finish out an hour or two hours of work, so you treat yourself to something, you reward yourself—that you are going to diminish both the potency of that reward and you're going to reduce your motivation over time.

Those four structures were the amygdala, the basal ganglia (the go and no-go circuitry), the lateral prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex. And those represent the core components of the neural circuitry involved in goal-setting and pursuit.