What makes you want to step up to the next level?

This question was addressed in a paper by Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach in a July, 2010 paper in the Journal of and Social Psychology. These authors pointed out that there are two ways to think about your current level within a goal hierarchy. You could spend your time thinking about what you have accomplished so far in your current position. Alternatively, you could focus on the tasks that you have left to accomplish in that position.

The general finding of the five studies in this paper is that you are more satisfied with your current position if you focus on the tasks you have accomplished than if you think about what you have left to achieve. However, you are more interested and energized to advance to the next level if you focus your thoughts on what you have left to achieve than if you think about what you have accomplished. The authors demonstrated this point both with experiments in which they created hierarchies of goals within tasks they created in the lab (such as reviewing snippets of music) as well as in studies in which people thought about their current jobs and prospects for advances.

At some level, these findings fit with intuitions about goals. If you think about the future and the tasks that lie ahead of you, it makes sense that would also give you energy to move on to the next level. If you think about the past, then it also seems reasonable that would make you more satisfied with what you have already achieved, and should be less motivating for advancement.

These experimental results also suggest a way out of this bind. It is possible to shift your focus between what you have accomplished and what lies ahead of you. When you are focused on your accomplishments, you can feel good about the journey, at least temporarily. When you are focused on what is left to achieve, you can feel energized to move into the future. By shifting your focus at different times, you provide yourself with the chance to have some contentment with your life's journey and still have the energy to achieve bigger things.

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