Achieving Our Goals in 2011

Why do we strive to achieve goals? Psychological research on achievement motivation has suggested that for many people the answer to this question may be found in one of two motives: the motive to succeed and the motive to avoid failure. Both of these motives may exist to some extent in the same person, and both of them may motivate him toward accomplishment—but for entirely different reasons.

A person with a high motive to succeed strives to achieve a goal because of a positive attraction toward success. He evaluates his accomplishments in terms of a standard of excellence that he sets for himself, and he is motivated by the good feeling he gets from having achieved a worthwhile goal.

A person with a high motive to avoid failure may also want to be successful. However, he is motivated not so much by the positive attracting power of success as by the negative repelling power of failure. Whenever his performance will be evaluated and failure is possible, he feels anxiety. In some situations his anxiety may be so strong that he does not even try, for fear he might fail. He is more worried about not failing than he is concerned with succeeding. This may be seen as apathy.

Although both kinds of people may desire to achieve the goal, we might expect that they would be more receptive to different types of goals. The person with a high motive to succeed would be concerned with knowing the things he should do, so that he can do those things to prepare himself to achieve the goal. On the other hand, the person with a high motive to avoid failure would be more concerned with knowing the things he should not do, so that he can avoid those things and the resulting failure.

Most people probably have a little of each kind of motive and thus are motivated by both kinds of goals, those telling us what to do and those telling us what not to do. But which kind is easier to acheive?

Try a simple experiment on yourself. Count to yourself slowly from one to ten. Do it now, before you read any further. Now try it again, with one modification: this time count to yourself slowly from one to ten without thinking of money. Could you do it? Which of these two “goals” was easier to obey? The first was probably easier because you were told what to do with no mention of what not to do. Consequently, you did not have to concern yourself with not doing what you were not supposed to do; doing what you were supposed to do took care of that problem.

The person with a high motive to avoid failure, who is going through life worrying about avoiding all the things he is not supposed to be doing (or thinking about), may find himself in a similar situation. Just as it is easier to count from one to ten than to count from one to ten without thinking of money, so it would be easier to “Be happy” than to “don’t frown.”

In too many people the motive to avoid failure is stronger than the motive to succeed. They are more worried about avoiding problems than they are concerned with developing, and thus they respond better to goals telling them what not to do.

Each person should ask himself what motivates him to seek the goals he has set for himself. Remember that fear of punishment, a motive to avoid failure, is not bad. It is better to achieve the goal because of fear of punishment than to not achieve the goal at all. We will likely find more joy in the achievement of our goals if we seek them because we want to rather than because we ought to.

Fred Abaroa
The Marketing Imagineer
Fred [@] TMIFred.com
@TMIFred