The difference between Hall’s kickboard and DeGeneres’s vision board is the object of visualization. Hall and his coach didn’t draw pictures of gold medals—well, at least not on his kickboard. They wrote down race times and splits. Hall and his coach materialized in a clear way where Hall wanted to be, but most important, they identified concrete action plans for growth. And pinned them down on a spot he would see every day in the pool.
Materializing a Concrete Plan of Action
Of course, there’s more to Hall’s remarkable success than a kickboard and a waterproof marker. He practiced, practiced, and practiced. Not haphazardly but intentionally, following a well-designed regimen that put that kickboard in his hands and line of sight often. The second step in plating a full plan: materialize a concrete plan of action. Inspiring real progress early on requires us to move beyond clearly identifying the destination. We must materialize where we want to be, of course—but also how we will get there.
There is reason to believe that literally seeing the particular steps Hall would have to take to get from the practice pool to the Olympic pool made a difference in his preparations. Shelley E. Taylor, a psychologist at UCLA, found that materializing the plan of action separates the metaphorical tadpoles from the sharks—the newbies from the pros. In the late 1990s, she and her team conducted an intervention with stressed-out college students prepping for their first midterm exam. The researchers contacted each student a week before the midterm and gave them specific instructions they expected would affect the student’s performance. Based on chance alone, some students received instructions to materialize a plan of action. They were to visualize the concrete steps they would take to prepare for the exam in order to get the grade they hoped for. In addition to the hours they would commit to their review of course materials, they were told, it was also important to see themselves studying and to hold that picture in their mind. They were prompted to visualize themselves sitting at their desk or on their bed, studying the chapters and going over lecture notes. These students practiced this visualization technique each day leading up to the exam.
Other students received instructions to materialize the goal, much like people would do with a vision board. They conjured up the outcome to which they aspired, and imagined themselves getting a high grade. They were told to see themselves standing in front of the glass case where the midterm exam grades were posted, holding their breath, moving their gaze horizontally to find their score, finding out that they got the grade they wanted, beaming with joy, and feeling confident and proud. They also practiced this visualization each day leading up to the exam.
The night before the exam, the researchers called all the students. They asked them how many hours they had studied, when they had started studying, and the number of times they had reviewed each chapter and their lecture notes.
What Taylor and her colleagues found was that students who had materialized the plan of action reaped the biggest rewards. They started studying earlier and spent more hours preparing for the exam. They were more likely to do what was needed to meet their highest educational aspirations. And that translated into big outcomes. Students who had visualized the desirable outcome didn’t do as well. Actually, they performed significantly worse than the class average. On the other hand, materializing the plan, compared to materializing just the hoped-for outcome, was the difference between passing and failing. It was that impactful. Even though all the students said they were quite motivated to study, the ones without a plan didn’t actually do it. Visualizing academic success alone cranked them up, but failed to translate their desires into any sort of helpful action. The students who met their goal had turned it into a visualization that included the actionable steps separating where they were from where they wanted to be.
The same goes for inspiring voter turnout. The Center for Responsive Politics has estimated that candidates in the 2008 American presidential and congressional election spent a total of $5.3 billion, the costliest election up until that time. The hopes were, as they always are, that this was money well spent, that voters would show up at the polls. With the stakes so high, social scientists Todd Rogers and David Nickerson asked whether people follow through on their plans to vote, and what gets them into the polling stations. They followed almost 300,000 Pennsylvania residents through the end stages of the 2008 Democratic primary. The team called up one-third of them and delivered a typical get-out-the-vote script. Would-be voters were reminded that there was an election, encouraged to vote, and asked if they planned to. A second group heard the same script, but were also encouraged to talk about their concrete plans for the day of the primary. The researchers asked (1) when they would vote, (2) where they would be traveling from, and (3) what they would be doing before voting. The final group did not receive a phone call.
The researchers analyzed public voting records and found that about 43 percent of those who did not get a call voted in the election. But receiving the typical get-out-the-vote call increased voter turnout by 2 percentage points. Even more impressive, though, was that materializing a concrete plan of action upped voter turnout by more than 4 percentage points, compared to those who received no call. Adding those three simple questions to the phone call made a get-out-the-vote call more than twice as effective. Though 4 percent might not seem all that big a change, keep in mind that in the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s total popular votes were within less than 1 percent of each other.
Foreshadow Failure
So, we know that we are more likely to master life’s to-do list when, in addition to visualizing what the moment of victory looks like, we materialize what we need to do to win. Effectively materializing our goals, though, requires that we push our preparatory visualization further. Because while visualizing the steps we must take to become our successful future selves produces benefits, the steps we choose might not always be the right ones. We might not fully know what to do to or how to do it. We’ll likely stumble in trying to get to where we want to be. Materializing our way to the top involves accepting the possibility that we might make mistakes. The third step in plating a full plan: We must foreshadow failure.
Accepting the possibility, or even likelihood, of failure is becoming an embraced part of corporate culture worldwide. The Tata Group, a multinational holding company based in Mumbai, India, has a Dare to Try Award that recognizes audacious attempts at innovation that fail. Applications from employees grew over sevenfold within the first five years of the award’s inception. Supercell (the gaming company behind the megahit Clash of Clans) cracks open a bottle of champagne every time a game fails. And Procter & Gamble confers its Heroic Failure Award each year. So does the Grey Advertising agency in New York. In 2010, for example, it created a commercial for E*TRADE in which a talking baby called Lindsay Lohan a “milkaholic.” E*TRADE was slapped with a $100 million lawsuit by the actress, but the members of the creative team got their names engraved on the company trophy.