The conventional model to having great success in your career is setting and ardently pursuing big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs), even if you have no idea how you’re going to achieve them when you start.

Want to build a billion dollar company? Set the goal and work backwards from long-term goals to medium-term goals to short-term goals to today’s to-do list. Then take action, measure your progress along the way, and constantly course correct so you’re always on the most direct path (that you’re aware of) toward your ultimate goal.

Want to cure cancer? Set the goal and work backwards. Measure your progress.

Want to find the love of your life or be happy? Set the goal. Rinse and repeat.

This goals model is so obvious in our culture, it goes without saying. It’s central to our collective success recipe. Goals give motivation, meaning, and focus when we feel lazy or distracted. We can’t accomplish big things without them — at least so we’re told.

However, recent research is finding the exact opposite to be true. When it comes to BHAGs, goals are often OBSTACLES to LARGE feats of innovation rather than enablers. Furthermore, goals can sap motivation.

In this article, I will share some of the most compelling research about the downside of goals, including…

In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, artificial intelligence researchers compellingly present research for a new model of success and innovation. I have now read the book three times, and it’s had a profound impact on how I view the world. Out of the 1,000+ books I have read, I consider this one to be in the top 10 .

Researcher Robert Root-Bernstein studied the habits of every single Nobel Laureate ever and found a fascinating pattern that goes against everything we were taught about the benefits of specialization.

Another researcher found that people who are too focused on goals are actually less lucky.

Together, these paint the picture of a completely different model for success and innovation. By the end of the article, you’ll:

Understand what this new model is and how to use it.

How to more effectively use goals without the downsides.

Let’s jump in…

Study: Most Nobel Laureates Are Not Specialists

After spending months studying the habits of every single Nobel laureate across every single discipline across all of history, researcher Robert Root-Bernstein found a fascinating pattern…

Nobel Laureates have significantly more and deeper interests than average scientists.

Whereas average scientists view their hobbies as having nothing to do with their work, Nobel laureates don’t look at their hobbies as hobbies. They look at them as fundamental parts of their creative process.

A camping trip isn’t just a camping trip. It’s an opportunity to get perspective on their work while looking at the stars. Art isn’t just art. It’s an opportunity to hone their visualization skills and therefore think better. Just as every moment, personal or professional, is potential material for a comedian, so too is every moment potential fodder for a Nobel laureate. Everything we learn or experience is fodder.

When we look back at many of the most creative people in history, including Nobel laureates, they seem to operate in a completely different way. They pursue curiosities, sometimes purposely not thinking of immediate applications. They embrace serendipity. At certain points in their career, they were even considered aimless or seen as lazy under-performers. I write about Einstein’s winding journey in How To Rapidly Double Your Brain Power With The Einstein Technique.

We see a similar pattern among many of the most innovative companies and founders in the world as well…

Our Great Innovators Share These Three Traits In Common

Over my last several years of writing about great innovators, I’ve seen that they almost universally share three uncommon commonalities. They…

Are modern polymaths

Explore their curiosities and meander

Follow the 5-Hour Rule (spending at least five hours per week on deliberate learning)

All while conventional wisdom recommends that people become specialists who are razor-focus on their goals.

For example…

When Michael Dell was asked to name the one attribute CEOs will need most to succeed in the turbulent times ahead, he answered, “I would place my bet on curiosity.”

was asked to name the one attribute CEOs will need most to succeed in the turbulent times ahead, he answered, “I would place my bet on curiosity.” Under Eric Schmidt’s leadership as CEO, Google grew from a few hundred employees to over 32,000. After years of experimentation, he found that two qualities mattered more than anything else: persistence and curiosity.

grew from a few hundred employees to over 32,000. After years of experimentation, he found that two qualities mattered more than anything else: persistence and curiosity. Jeff Bezos believes Amazon’s success is directly correlated with the number of experiments they perform.

is directly correlated with the number of experiments they perform. Elon Musk famously spent hours a day during his childhood exploring his curiosity by reading books across physics, programming, philosophy, spirituality, and science fiction.

famously spent hours a day during his childhood exploring his curiosity by reading books across physics, programming, philosophy, spirituality, and science fiction. Many of Apple’s greatest innovations directly come from Steve Jobs ’ meandering curiosity. Learning calligraphy helped Apple pioneer typefaces on the first personal computers. Jobs’ love of music enabled him to spot the opportunity to launch the world’s first truly successful MP3 player.

’ meandering curiosity. Learning calligraphy helped Apple pioneer typefaces on the first personal computers. Jobs’ love of music enabled him to spot the opportunity to launch the world’s first truly successful MP3 player. Self-made billionaire Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett’s right-hand person has collected the most valuable mental models across the biggest disciplines for his entire career.

I write about this surprising pattern more deeply in The Founders Of The World’s Five Largest Companies All Follow The 5-Hour Rule.

Learning that following my meandering curiosity and love of exploration could be a strength rather than a weakness if harnessed correctly has been life-changing. So has learning about the hidden downsides of goals…

The Surprising Downsides Of Goals That No One Talks About

Since I can remember, I’ve been a deeply curious person. I love reading across disciplines. I love meeting interesting people and peppering them with questions. I love understanding things at a deeper level that may not have an immediate and obvious connections to my goals.

On the other hand, I love setting and achieving ambitious goals. Since I became an entrepreneur at 16, I’ve believed that if you want something bad enough, you get specific about what you want and when you want it, you keep visualizing it, and then you take massive action, you can have it. And worst case scenario, “shoot for the stars and hit the moon.”

The tension is that my curiosities are rarely on the direct path to my goals, making pursuing them hard to justify. Therefore, I’ve often relegated my curiosities to the hobby zone. Telling my team that I was going to read a book on evolution or network science felt like I was letting them down, even if those have paid huge dividends for my business over the long term. Earlier in my career, I hid my curiosities from my bio and resume, because they didn’t give a clear story of someone who was ambitious and focused.

Previously, I saw the holes in the goals model as personal shortcomings. Now, I have a clear picture of how only using the goals-only model can backfire:

Downside #1: Goal obsession can lead to being unlucky

One of the best examples of how goals can lead to myopia is a famous study conducted by UK researcher Richard Wiseman.

In this study, Wiseman gave people who considered themselves lucky and unlucky a newspaper and then asked them to look through it and count the number of photos inside.

Here are the average results of how long it took people:

Unlucky people: 2 minutes

Lucky people: seconds

How was this even possible? On the second page, there was a huge half-page ad that said:

“Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Amazed by the results, in his next experiment Wiseman placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper:

“Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.”

Once again, the unlucky people missed the message. They were too busy counting.

To summarize the surprising results, Wiseman writes:

And so it is with luck — unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

The goal paradox is that the people who most fixedly pursue a goal might also be the worst at recognizing opportunities along the journey.

Downside #2: Achieving goals can leave you feeling empty

“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.” —Yuval Noah Harari

As the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

Or more eloquently:

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him the most about humanity, he said, “Man. Because he sacrifices in health in order to make money. Then, he sacrifices money to recuperate his health, and then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present. The result being that he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.”

We’ve all had this experience of going after empty goals. We think a goal is going to change everything, so we sacrifice our health or our close relationships (or both) for it. Then, in the end, we realize that what we sacrificed may have been more important than the goal itself. In my twenties, I had a goal to build a business with over $1 million in revenue. Our team referred to it as the two commas goal. When we achieved it, nothing really changed, and I wondered why we had put so much energy to achieving this goal as rapidly as we could.

When we look at some of the world’s top performers, one is left to wonder about the sacrifices they made. For example, consider Michael Phelps and Tiger Woods — two of the best athletes in history. They followed the goal playbook to a tee (no pun intended). They started super young, accumulated tens of thousands of hours of deliberate practice, were single-minded, and actually achieved their most ambitious goals. Yet, they were left feeling empty.

Phelps, for example, has gone on the record saying that, “Really, after every Olympics I think I fell into a major state of depression.” He even added, “I didn’t want to be in the sport anymore … I didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

Tiger Woods repeatedly ignored signals that parts of his body were failing him. He prided himself on playing through pain. He will now have to live in significant pain for the rest of his life. And his rampant cheating on his wife and lying about it ruined his marriage. In the biography on him, which I recommend, we see how being so single-minded didn’t leave space for Tiger to do deeper work on himself or build deep relationships with those closest to him.

Downside #3: The second you set a goal it starts to become stale

“The reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals, not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them, but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them.” — Jim Coudal

Two things happen after you set a goal:

You change

The world changes

Yet, when we set a goal, we often unconsciously make the assumption that we won’t change significantly and neither will the world. Neither is true.

If we set a 10-year goal to go down a certain path, the person we are in five years may actually feel trapped by it. There is such a large sunk cost of time, money, and energy. We have publicly committed to it. Many of the people we have built relationships with still value the goal. As a result, it’s hard to give up.

Furthermore, we will be confronted with new opportunities in the future we can’t even imagine now.

Downside #4: Goals can make you feel insecure

Goals predictably make us feel insecure. Here’s how:

Photo credit: Wikipedia

First, most people tend to set big goals that stretch them and to set aggressive deadlines. One of the 20th century self-help bibles, The Magic Of Thinking Big, proclaims, “Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier — certainly no more difficult — than small ideas and small plans.”

Naturally, we underestimate how long it will take us to achieve the goal, because it is a big goal and likely something we haven’t done before. This is known as the Planning Fallacy.

And, even when we are aware of the Planning Fallacy, it still takes way longer than expected. This is known as Hofstadter’s Law.

As a result of the Planning Fallacy and Hofstadter’s Law, we are almost always behind where we thought we should be, which then makes us feel insecure.

When I set the million dollar revenue goal, I framed the goal, and hung it in the closet so I could see it every morning when I got dressed. Year after year, I full heartedly pursued the goal. The more I missed it, the more I felt insecure, like I was doing something wrong.

Downside #5: Goals can reduce learning

When it relates to learning, several studies have shown that setting performance goals can backfire.

For example, when someone sets a goal to get an A in school, they may end up studying for the test rather than studying to learn. As a result, performance goals can hurt learning goals.

Downside #6: Goals can actually make you feel unmotivated

They can even lead to procrastination. When you set a big goal you inevitably create a mental image of the road in front of you, and science shows that this journey to a big goal has predictable motivation dips: