Picture this, New Year has rolled around and your resolution is to have a healthier diet. Motivated to be thinner, you spend the next week surrounded solely by healthy foods and activities. Flash forward a month, and you’ve given up on your resolution, hoping that stronger motivation will arise in the following year. Why? Because you’ve made the same mistake as the other 90% of people that fail to stick with their New Year's resolutions: setting a challenge that is too difficult for them. In other words, the mistake of not finding the Goldilocks zone.
Fundamentally, the Goldilocks principle states that for challenges to spark motivation, they should be neither too hard nor too easy to accomplish. As this otherwise results in showing apathy to that challenge. For instance, if a beginner chess player played exclusively against grandmaster Garry Kasparov, they’d get bored within minutes and wouldn’t want to pursue the game. And the same would occur if a player only went against someone who repeatedly lost their queen in early moves: the game would grow meaningless. Confronting someone of your skill level, however, would result in a challenging but manageable match. When the difficulty of challenges are within the Goldilocks zone, hard work and focus arouses motivation. This is clearly what people should look for when setting goals for themselves: a level of difficulty that encourages them to follow through with those goals. However, many fail to accomplish this.
A problem that is not noticed enough regards the step before entering the Goldilocks zone: finding it. The importance of challenges that aren’t too hard nor too easy is relatively intuitive. But for humans, especially nowadays, finding these kinds of challenges is an unexpectedly difficult task. New Year's resolutions offer a great example of this human flaw. In a time when many of us reflect upon our lives and envision habits from which we could benefit, most fail to maintain such habits. Part of the reason for this relates to our desire to reach an end result as quickly as possible. We all seek ways to improve upon our lives, but often forget what comes with that improvement: hard work. And as a consequence, we fail to find the Goldilocks zone. We tend to subconsciously think of ourselves as more skilled and prepared to take on challenges than we really are. When we imagine goals that could benefit our lives, we often focus on the outcome but neglect the potentially difficult journey towards that outcome. This frequently results in a drop in commitment and causes people to give up quickly on goals.
Humans aren’t the best at dealing with change. This is why to maintain habits for the long run, they must be developed gradually. Reaching a desired outcome isn’t meant to be a fast and smooth procedure. When setting a goal, it is crucial to accept the fact that your level of preparedness potentially distances you from an end result. And sometimes, your craving for an outcome limits your patience. The response to this shouldn’t be to take overly advanced steps to reach the end result. But rather, to acknowledge a potentially long journey towards it. So if you want to lose weight, don’t tell yourself, “I’ll lose 50 pounds”, but rather start with something easier like, “I won’t eat fast food on weekdays”. A gradual increase in difficulty will eventually lead to the Goldilocks zone. And although this potentially distances a desired outcome initially, for habits to last long, you have to take it slow.
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