I conceded, and realized that I had just committed one of the fatal flaws in goal pursuit. I’d set my sights too high, and tried to take on too much right out of the gate.
This is all too common an error. Aspiring home chefs, among other hobbyists, do this all the time. Want to try cooking? Don’t start with a Baked Alaska. A high-quality rendition of the dessert requires that you first churn your own ice cream, then craft a chiffon cake that weighs as little as a box of paperclips, and select French, Italian, or Swiss meringue, whichever better suits your nationalistic palate. The assembly could go all wrong for any number of reasons. What starts as essentially a rectangular piece of two-dimensional sheet cake must transform into a three-dimensional sphere surrounding the ice cream. The confection is topped off with piped meringue resembling a 1950s synchronized swimmer’s cap covered in flowers. Toss the whole thing into a 500-degree oven, and when it’s set, douse it in flaming liquor. Without the frozen ice cream melting.
The first song I set my sights on playing was my Baked Alaska.
Pete gave me another band to check out. The Outfield. They were an English rock band based in London. Their top single was “Your Love.” It reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986, and barely survived beyond the ’80s, which is an aspect of the song’s history that resonated with me personally. (The middle-school years were rough.) It had a basic rock beat, and the drummer didn’t do anything for the first sixty-five seconds of the song anyway. Even though it was pretty straightforward, coordinating all my limbs in space repeatedly was definitely going to pose a challenge for me. A challenge that I’d feel pretty proud of myself for if I mastered, but one that didn’t require I take on the impossible for my first song. I thought I’d give it a go—despite Pete’s warning that this would defy my aspirations of finding something cool to brag about. The song was rereleased over thirty years after its debut—six months into my musical studies of it—as a jingle for dryer sheets. But being cool has rarely been a priority of mine. Case in point: In marching band, I wore one of those hats with a giant feather plume sticking out of the top. For eight years. By choice. This was the song for me.
What Pete seemed to understand intuitively about how to foster success was what researchers know to be true: the best-laid goals are the ones that are set at just the right level. They can’t be too hard, or people give up before they’ve even really started. Set a goal that requires a number of incremental milestones to be passed along the way, or a very rapid rate of progress, and the pursuit of that goal will exhaust us. Set a goal that’s too easy to achieve, and we sit back on our laurels unmotivated to move forward, because the future rewards just don’t seem that great. Goals set at levels that are moderately challenging but not impossible are the ones that inspire. Just as people can’t complete a marathon sustaining a sprinter’s pace but won’t win a footrace by walking, setting goals is about balancing between taking on too much and not trying for enough.
To wit: Companies that set goals at just the right level—far from easy, but seeming almost too high to meet—have the potential for fostering innovation at record rates. For instance, 3M holds as a company expectation that 25 percent of each year’s revenue will come from products that did not exist five years ago. It produces more than 55,000 products each year that span the spectrum from adhesives for sticking stuff together to abrasives for rubbing it off. It also creates medical products like wireless stethoscopes to see inside people’s bodies, and health-care software to process the numbers faster than humanly possible. 3M’s goal for the creative pursuit of new designs is a lofty one, but by all reports it has designed a corporate culture that allows the company to meet it. It expects its creative innovation teams to give 15 percent of their time to the free exploration of ideas of their own choosing, which may or may not turn into anything lucrative. The research and development departments present posters at internal science fairs to showcase projects still in development, awaiting potential collaborators’ involvement. In the five years since 3M’s launch of this initiative, net sales attributed to products that weren’t on the books five years earlier have topped 30 percent every year.
The song Pete suggested and that I elected for my percussive debut followed 3M’s principle for goal setting.
And when I tried the same goal-setting approach early on in my lessons, the benefits were palpable. My first attempts to coordinate all four of my limbs while playing “Your Love” were far from graceful or effective. I chose to set my sights on something more manageable. I focused first on the snare and the bass drum, leaving out the hi-hat and ride cymbal. My right arm lay in wait at my side, presumably at the ready to deaden the incoming sound by covering one ear at a time. Tapping my right foot on the bass drum pedal on each of the four beats of the measure and whacking the snare with my left hand on the second and fourth, I am embarrassed to say, required that I take the song down to about half the speed of the recording. But this was where I started and stayed; it was a relatively small but manageable goal.
After executing the snare and bass drum pattern became less of a fluke and more the result of intention, I switched up the parts. My right arm reached across my body to chink-chink on the closed hi-hat. My right foot was squarely positioned on the bass drum pedal; I tried tap-tapping on the hi-hat at twice the rate of my foot. None of these combinations would rock music make, but breaking down the goal of achieving star status into manageable subgoals—beginning with grooving on the backbeat, half the sounds at a time—was something I could and did achieve.
Focusing on the Goal
After my relative success at laying down a rudimentary beat for “Your Love,” I would encounter other challenges along the way. It turns out that successful goal pursuit is more difficult when you are spread too thin or find your attention drawn to too many things (especially when those things might be too intensive to pursue at the time). We are not always as efficient as we think, and when we try to take on multiple tasks, we’re usually not generating a product that reflects our best abilities. Marcel Just, a neuroscience researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, sought to quantify this concept. He set up drivers in a virtual-reality simulator and asked them to navigate the road while occasionally focusing on what someone else was saying. Drivers were 50 percent more likely to run their car off the road when they tuned in to the conversation than when they drove uninterrupted. The issue, it turned out, had to do with changes in neural functioning. The parietal lobe is an area of the brain responsible for handling information about our bodies and the environments around us. When drivers multitasked, their parietal lobes showed an average reduction in activity of 37 percent compared to when drivers were focused just on the road. In other words, their brains were acting as if they too were spread too thin to do the job well. Our best work requires us to focus on the target of our aspirations, and to ignore objects, events, experiences, and people on the periphery.
Toward this end, I found some inspiration in someone who might initially seem like a pretty lusterless character. When he was in the fourth grade in the early 1800s, in an area we now know as Slovakia, a boy named Joseph Petzval seemed destined to become a shoemaker; this was the profession his parents had chosen for him. Maybe one reason for this choice was that he wasn’t a traditionally strong student. Math, in particular, didn’t click for Petzval, and he was going to have to repeat his last year of studies in the subject. But that summer he decided on his own to read the rather sophisticated-sounding Analytic Paper on the Elements of Mathematics, and a transformation occurred.