Caroline Miller is one of the world’s leading experts in goal setting, resilience and grit. She’s a bestselling author, executive coach, and speaker known for blending cutting-edge research with practical strategies to help people achieve meaningful goals. Caroline’s books, Creating Your Best Life and Getting Grit, have made her a pioneer in positive psychology, sharing evidence-based insights on how to cultivate perseverance and happiness in pursuing one’s dreams.
Caroline joined host Robert Glazer on The Elevate Podcast to discuss how to build grit, setting goals, and much more.
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Caroline Miller On Building Grit And Setting The Right Goals
Welcome to the show. Our quote is from Zig Ziglar. “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Our guest is Caroline Miller. Caroline is one of the world’s leading experts in goal setting, resilience, and grit. She’s a bestselling author, executive coach, and speaker known for blending cutting-edge research with practical strategies to help people achieve meaningful goals. Caroline’s books, Creating Your Best Life and Getting Grit, have made her a pioneer in positive psychology, sharing evidence-based insights on how to cultivate perseverance and happiness in pursuing one’s dreams.
Caroline, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
The Genesis Of Grit: Caroline Miller’s Personal Journey
I know you’ve talked about how your passion for building grit and resilience started with your own experience. Can you talk a little bit about those experiences and how they shaped you?
The seminal moment, maybe a founder story for my own grit, is that I overcame bulimia 40 years ago when nobody thought it was possible. There was no treatment available. There was certainly no hospital treatment available. I stumbled into a self-help meeting for compulsive eaters, and there were role models, a few who had recovered from bulimia.
That was the day I believe my life began because I learned how to do hard things. As a graduate of Harvard, magna cum laude, I can honestly say that overcoming bulimia was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, bar nothing, including anything academic or whatever. Today, that’s the thing I’m proudest of. When I realized, in hindsight, when I met Angela Duckworth and I was getting a master’s degree in Positive Psychology at Penn, twenty years ago.
I realized I’d cultivated grit, that it wasn’t some quality that you’re born with. I’d cultivated it in service of doing something extremely hard, almost impossible. That was my goal, no one else’s goal, my goal. I’ve been in unbroken recovery for 40 years. That is the thing I’m proudest of. It’s what taught me how to be happy, how to be a giver, how to have grit, how to be resilient, and really everything that matters in life came from that failure.
Beyond External Expectations: Defining Your Own Success
You said, “My goal” a few times there, and I think that’s interesting because I think a lot of people’s definitions of success and achievement are shaped by parents or community or teachers telling them, “This is what good looks like for you.” I think it’s where a lot of people run into trouble. Talk to me about that.
Women fall victim to this probably more than men do, but I think a lot of women are raised to be pleasers and to be nice and to be communal and warm and get along with others. I don’t think I know the research shows that we don’t always play big in life and set big goals because we’re swatted down by both men and women for being agentic. In fact, that is the only area in the last hundred years women have made zero progress in the world in terms of how we’re seen by others.
I do think in order to have the passion that’s requisite for having grit, what I call authentic grit, it has to be something that sustains you through your dark night of the soul, through all the failures that you experience with grit. Grit is long-term. Resilience is short-term. Grit is really something that you’d better have passion for, and that passion has to come from within. That’s what it’s really all about is it’s your goal, no one else’s goal. It doesn’t matter what other people think or say about your pursuit of that goal. It’s really up to you to feel fulfilled by it and to feel agentic about it.
It’s funny, agentic, I only hear in the context of AI these days. Now it’s getting more complicated. What’s your definition of agentic?
Agentic is being goal-directed.
I’m curious about the men versus women thing, because I feel like we have this interesting, a little bit full circle moment where most of the professional schools and colleges and everything is dominated by women now. They’re moving into the ranks, and you have a lot of men, as you say, who had these goals or whatever. They have a lot of life like dying regrets of like, “I focused on the wrong things. I had the wrong goals.
I should have paid more attention to family.” A lot of people are rushing into those things that they were doing and seeing that as the ultimate thing. I’ve seen this interesting dynamic. I see a lot of 15-year-old or 16-year-old guys be like, “I don’t want to do those striving goals anymore. I want to hang out with my kids or grandparents.” I don’t know. It’s just interesting. Maybe this is a little grass is greener, maybe.
The Gender Divide In Goal Setting: Men, Women, And Regret
I don’t know. Is your question, is that a gender issue?
Yeah, the question is that sometimes those goals, I understand that a lot of men put these career goals and stuff at present, and have the ability to do that. There also seems to be a lot of late-life regret about that as well.
I think that’s true. That well-known book, 15, 20 years ago, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, involved the number one regret was that you lived someone else’s life. That someone else’s life could be something you chose to pursue professionally. It could be a missed love relationship. I know this has been studied pretty well in terms of what both men and women regret, but it really encapsulates, did you follow your own dreams and passions?
Do you have the courage to even have a big dream? We know from positive psychology that it boils down to other people mattering. If you’re not prioritizing relationships and not just any relationships, the right relationships, the heliotropic effect, the people you turn towards are light-giving, life-giving. It’s like the sun shining on a plant. If you’re not prioritizing those relationships and being a giver, not just a taker, then you aren’t going to age with any well-being.
The people you turn towards are light-giving, life-giving, like the sun shining on a plant. If you’re not prioritizing those relationships and being a giver, not just a taker, then you won’t age with well-being.
I’ve had multiple guests and people on the show. It comes up a lot that strivers think that. Earlier this week, I had a similar. They think that if you don’t enjoy the journey, they think that you’re not going to get to the top of this mountain, and the views can be amazing, and it’s all going to have been worth it. In most cases, it’s not, and they just switch to the next goal, and it is this empty achievement.
That’s true. There was even a really interesting study done ten years ago of the best Hollywood films of all time. What did people enjoy the most, and say mattered the most, and they thought it was just going to be about winning, getting what you want. No. What it boiled down to is having a journey, doing something hard, but celebrating it with someone you love. Other people always show up in terms of the pursuit of a big goal, but having someone to celebrate it with.
Even more importantly, knowing who has your back on that journey. I think that is a fraught topic for a lot of women in particular, because there’s been a lot of noise and fog about do women lack confidence. Is there imposter syndrome? What it’s really boiling down to is that women have lots of confidence, but what they don’t know is who has their back.
This goes back to the whole issue of agency and how in the last hundred years, the needle has moved on women are being seen as competent, they’re being seen as warm, but they’re not allowed to be seen as agentic with big goals and dreams. I read your newsletter, so I know where you stand on some of this. I think we’re living in a time of historic rollbacks of women’s rights and women’s abilities to be powerful, to be agentic, to be ambitious, to have big goals, and to be celebrated for achieving them.
I actually have more rights right now than my daughter does. That is a shocker to me, and it’s a shocker to most women of our generation, but the rise of autocracy tends to go right along with a diminishment of women’s power. This topic has never been more important, at least in my lifetime. That’s why I wrote Big Goals is that I realized that people are still quoting SMART goals as if it’s a science when in fact it’s bogus. Anyone who studied Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory knows that too many people and too many organizations are still laboring under the assumption that SMART goals are a way to set goals.
Did you mean the acronym SMART?
The acronym. It’s been disproven over and over again, but it’s sticky. Some consultant made it up in the ‘80s, and it was sticky. No resources are supporting it.
Is it Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely?
There are 55 definitions of SMART. That’s part of it. It’s called jargon mishmash syndrome. It’s become so many different acronyms broken down into so many different words that it’s meaningless. The most important thing about SMART is that if you use realistic or attainable goals, you’ve immediately diverted yourself away from the number 1 of 73 management theories, and the number one theory voted by all academics is goal setting theory by Locke and Latham. I do not know why people don’t know it. I really don’t, because everyone has goals. Every company has goals.
Debunking SMART Goals: The Science Of Effective Goal Setting
Let’s dive into that. I always understood the SMART in the context of the quarterly or one-year as to the way people worded a lot of things. You couldn’t even tell if you achieved it or not. It was meant to be specific as to have you achieve that goal or not. Is that concept right?
Specific is, but the problem is SMART. Too many people think SMART is the recipe for setting and achieving goals, and it’s just not. I remember the first time I was introduced to Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory. It was an assignment in October of 2005. I was in the first class in the world for Master’s of Applied Positive Psychology with Martin Seligman. Thirty-two of us from all over the world were sitting there.
He’s the godfather, right?
Yeah, and he’s my main mentor. They assigned Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, and I owned every book on the market about goal setting at that point. I was an executive coach working with people. My great uncles won the Olympics, set world records. I came from a whole background of competition. It was in my DNA and my blood. I read goal-setting theory, Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, and people around me still remember me saying, “What is this? This science?”
I cannot believe it. I went home, and I looked at Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, all these men who had written books that, when you flip to the end, there’s zero research. There’s no study supporting what they say. Do we know that’s true? Yes, we do. The problem is I’m trying to move the Titanic by bringing Locke and Latham’s work to the world in a broader way. I think everyone deserves to have real science. If you have a goal or a dream, you sure as heck better know goal-setting theory.
What’s the Cliff Notes on this for people who are not exposed to it?
Have you heard of it?
I have, yeah.
I’ll try to make it simple because you can correct me. You can correct me where I’m wrong.
I’m not going to correct you on this, but that’s okay.
No, you might.
I know enough to be informed not to be dangerous. Go ahead.
Let me just reiterate something really important to me, and that is, of all the management theories that have been studied, written about in business school books everywhere, 73 theories. This goal-setting theory is ranked number one over and over again for its efficacy and its excellence. That’s how important it is.
This isn’t about me. This is about them. Locke and Latham divided goals into two different buckets. One is learning goals, and the other is what they call performance goals. That’s too confusing. I call it checklist goals. Checklist goals are recipes, things you’ve done before. You know how long it will take, what you have to do to break it down into little tiny steps to achieve an outcome.
It’s like running a marathon.
Run a marathon, do a performance review, pack for a trip.
You know what you’d have to do. You just have to do it.
You have to know what it takes to be excellent because you should always be striving for excellence and efficiency. That’s a checklist goal. On the other hand, there are learning goals, and learning goals are things you’ve never done before. Often, it’s things the world hasn’t done before. What really motivated me to write this book was that Creating Your Best Life came out in 2008.
That was the first book ever to put goal-setting theory into the mass market. That’s why it became such an international bestseller. People had never heard of it before. I decided to make Big Goals a stripped-down version, especially because post-COVID, we are in a learning goal condition. There are very few people, very few organizations that are not in a learning goal condition, which means the way you did things 5 or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, cannot be the way you’re doing things any longer.
It’s all a learning goal condition, which means you need the humility to be teachable, to go out and find new ways to use AI, new ways to use drones, new ways to study, and new ways to do medicine. There are smart bandages on the battlefields now. There are so many things that are new, and people who are holding onto the way they used to do things and trying to measure their success in those old ways are creating a condition I call goals gone wild. When you look at, let’s say, the Titan submersible.
You need the humility to be teachable, to go out and find new ways.
That’s a good example. It’s funny we don’t talk about that.
These are all examples of people who had so much hubris that they declared that they would have an outcome by a certain date, and it’s usually about making money or being seen by your stockholders as some great CEO. You declare, “This is the outcome I’ll have and this is the income I’ll have by this date,” but you have a learning goal and you’ve never done it before.
You’ve never built a submersible that goes down to the Titanic. In the case of Boeing, how dare they say that we’re going to retrofit the Boeing 777 Dreamliner and make this feel efficient long-haul plane just to compete with Airbus, which took the time to create that. Now look what we’ve got. We’ve got goals gone wild.
They had a learning goal that they turned into a checklist goal and said, “We’ll have it out by this date. They cut corners. They didn’t let the pilots train in simulators. Goals gone wild. When you have this, both people and companies, what you end up having is the greatest disasters. People lose their reputations, their lives, and frankly, they don’t succeed. Short term, they get maybe a win. Long term, it’s always a disaster. Don’t skip the steps.
Goals Gone Wild: The Perils Of Artificial Timelines
This is super interesting. Is it the artificial timeline? Elon Musk has put some timelines that he tends to miss, but he also tends to be the first person to catch a rocket on a booster. You shoot high, you’re going to miss. What is he doing right or wrong?
He has created a lot of disasters. I just go ahead and say he’s a brilliant man. I’m coaching a major CEO in the space world. I know a lot about Elon Musk. I’m going to pick my words very carefully, but in my book, Big Goals, I have a section on both Bezos and Elon Musk, who have created goals and gone wild with scenarios. I’ll just take the Tesla, for example. Elon Musk has forced people to work in conditions that are so toxic and so cancer-causing, and people have died or been burned over most of their bodies because he makes people work in such conditions.
He takes away their health insurance, or they won’t let the ambulances come pick them up. The same thing with Bezos in warehouses where Amazon has ambulances lined up because they won’t spend the money to have air conditioning. People are passing out on Amazon fulfillment lines. They have goals gone wild all over the place. Does it take away from their vision, from their genius? No, but we also have to call them out on what they have done wrong.
Too often, what we do is we worship at the altar of prophets. That’s always where we go wrong in big goals. What I did was I went back 150 years to when the time and motion studies started with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s. Whenever we have done this, whenever we’ve basically turned people into robots at Amazon, they’re called Amabots. You have goals gone wild, and you lose all of the character, you lose all of the humanity that exists in the workplace.
No wonder we’re still talking about it. The workplace is a place where you can thrive. We’ve been wrestling with this for 150 years. If people had taken advantage of Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, their research started in 1970. For decades, they worked in anonymity, coming up with all of these different field studies and lab studies to come up with goal-setting theory.
What I did was I added something called a bridge methodology, which bridged goal setting theory, which came out in 1990, with all of the new research on grit and resilience and mindset and character strengths, and positive psychology. When you combine those two, you actually have a formula that works for all goals. As a woman who’s not allowed to be agentic, I have waded into alligator-infested water, being someone to talk about goal setting and agency, but also to bring science.
However, there’s one last thing I’ll say. We’re in a period right now that is so identical to what happened after the black death in the Middle Ages. When so many people just died in the streets from the bubonic plague. It was just a horror show to walk out into the streets and see people with these black bulges under their arms just dying in the streets. What happened from that?
The Renaissance. In the Renaissance, we found new ways, evidence-based ways to do medicine, art, you name it. That’s where we are now. We’re finding new ways to do things. We’re in learning goal conditions, and we have to be evidence-based. It’s time we called out the goal-setting process, because it hasn’t been evidence-based until I started to bring Locke and Latham’s work to the broader public. Let’s make it evidence-based. If you have a dream, give yourself the gift of learning science. My book’s the best one on the market.
I’m curious. There’s some nuance in it, because I see this more than the average person who’s listening. I’m trying to understand. You said it works. I was thinking about the Kennedy space mission, and at the time, what did it look like? Give me a big, hairy, audacious goal that worked versus not. When you say work, do you mean that it works for all the stakeholders? How are you defining that difference? Obviously, some goals get to them, trash a lot of things along the way. Is that part of work, or what do you define as work?
What I define as work is not staking the lives and reputations on getting something out by a certain date. We have to be audacious. You have to be JFK and say, “We’re going to put a man on the moon.” When you have a total of fifteen minutes of space experience in your country, that’s where we were. When he gave that famous speech at what Texas A&M?
He did put a time on it, right?
He did put a time on it, but there were disasters. However, what we had was that he created awe. In that awe, which was looking up and saying, “What if we shot bigger?” There were more PhDs created in the United States at that point than at any other period in history, because people wanted to learn and they wanted to figure out how to do this. There was a learning goal process. There were some early disasters, but when you study the Apollo missions, what you often find is that they learned from their disasters.
They would stop, they hit pause. They began to say, “What did we do wrong?” They created a lessons learned archive. If you studied the space industry, you’ll see what they did to minimize the failures. When you risk big and you dream big, you’re going to have failures, and Elon Musk has had failures, but he also had a pretty blank check from the United States government. He had no bid contracts underwriting all of his risk-taking. Let’s be honest about what he really risks in order to do what he did.
Learning goals shouldn’t have a specific deadline. Is that part of the framework?
What you want to do is you want to learn what you don’t know. You have to add skills and knowledge as quickly as possible. What you want to do is set aggressive, challenging, and specific learning goals with deadlines to check in. What have I learned? What’s working? If I want to learn conversational French, should I do Duolingo or go to a class? What’s working fast? You don’t dawdle your way through learning.
Don’t dawdle through learning; be aggressive, because learning goals become checklist goals.
You do have to be aggressive because learning goals become checklist goals. It’s like the first time you make the turkey for Thanksgiving. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes, believe me. In the process of learning how to do it and checking in with people and reading recipes and watching shows, you’re going to come up with a timeline that’s going to work for baking a turkey. Goals are no different.
You want to aggressively add that knowledge and those skills by mentoring with people who know what they’re doing, and aggressively looking on YouTube or somewhere else to get that knowledge. When you have a recipe goal, a checklist goal, or something you’ve done before, of course, you want to continue to be as excellent and efficient as possible. The number one question you should always ask yourself is “What’s new?”
What’s been created in the world that’s new? I’ll take solving cold cases. It used to be fingerprint analyses or blood types. When they started asking what’s new in reopening cold cases, genetic genealogy ended up closing all of these cold cases that were open for decades. Even though people knew how to solve them, there’s always a what’s new question.
That’s what technology and AI are doing for us. One of the most exciting examples, the thing I’m just completely lit up about, is the Herculaneum scrolls. During COVID, the CEO of GitHub reached out to all his Silicon Valley friends and said, “Why is no one able to solve this whole issue of the scrolls that were covered with ash when Vesuvius erupted in 69 AD or 79 AD or whatever it was?
Because he said what’s new, they combined a particle accelerator, AI, and something else, and they are now unrolling the scrolls from the greatest library of the ancient world. That is, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law had the greatest library of the ancient world, and now they’re reading these scrolls that were like firewood. You always want to say, “We know how to do things, but what’s new?” That’s how we continue to advance and solve these big goals.
The Spectrum Of Grit: From “Stupid Grit” To True Perseverance
You talked about working with Angela Duckworth, and I know you’re big on Gritty. We had Annie Duke on, we had both of them on. She talks about being quitty.
I love Annie Duke. I love her. I quote her a lot in Big Goals.
Like her California train example is a great example of a coal gone wild/expensive. How do you think about, like, look, everyone starts on a path, and I hypothesize like this train to build a high-speed rail, and clearly they didn’t do the right research and figure out how much money, and now they’re so deep that they keep going, but probably they should have stopped a while ago. Where does the quit and grit function come in in the goal setting? What does the science say about that?
There’s a lot of science on this. My book, Getting Grit, came out in 2017, and in it, I coined a few phrases to talk about this, and one is stupid grit. There is something called stupid grit, at least in my book, and it really caught on. A lot of people like that term because, yes, you need a certain amount of resilience and passion and perseverance and other things to do hard things, but there is a point that you see in mountaineering called summit fever, where you’re so drunk on getting to the top of the mountain that you stop listening to the Sherpas.
You stop heeding your fellow climbers who are roped in with you. You see this all the time with entrepreneurs, where they just don’t have any humility, and they won’t listen to their board of directors. They won’t even have a CFO who tries to rein them in. Stupid grit is when a situation changes and you fail to heed or even notice the warning signs around you that tell you to abort or go in a different direction. You have to be surrounded by people. I think she calls them, I love Annie Duke, like “Quit coaches,” something like that.
It’s like having a personal board of directors whom you trust. I do that for a lot of CEOs. That’s what I do for a living is I work with a ton of CEOs on strategy, and this comes up all the time, stupid grit. There are two other kinds of bad grit, I’ll say. Selfie grit is when you do hard things, but you tell everyone. All the time, and you take all the credit. There’s faux grit, fake grit, where it’s like performance-enhancing drugs or you’re doing a triathlon and you skip a whole loop of the marathon. Some people are faking their way to success.
What was her name? Shook the Train in the Boston Marathon. I cannot remember her name.
There are so many. Rosie Ruiz.
Right. It took them a while to figure that out. That was before cell phones and cameras.
The chips in the shoes, but there are other ways, like the most egregious example I opened up my faux grit chapter with, Getting Grit was about people who pretend to have won the Medal of Honor. I’m so indignant that the highest award of our military people says they want it. They buy fake medals of honor on eBay and the rest of it. Come on, people.
Who is the broadcaster who said he was in the helicopter?
I have him in my book, too, Ryan Williams. Come on. You’re going to get found out. Don’t fake it. There’s selfie grit, faux grit, and stupid grit. There are three kinds of bad grit. Good grit has one key sign, and it awes and elevates other people. You don’t even have to give a speech about what you’ve done. It creates a contagion. Angela found that grit is contagious.
More than that, my experience with good grit is that it awes and elevates other people and makes them ask themselves, “What if I did that? What if I live like that? What if I chose goals like that? What if I did something without expectation of a trophy or a raise, or a pat on the head?” We have too many soft people from the millennials who grew up with comfort animals and trophies for all who really don’t know what it’s like to persist without getting a trophy.
Also, you need to have some failure. If you’re 23 and you’re getting your being told that the first project that you didn’t do wonderfully, like you don’t have that muscle. One of the things that Annie said that I think was that you talk a lot about the psychology, obviously, like humans, we’re emotional. She talked about this quite in advanced criteria. I think that’s what saves people on Everest. Here’s the time of day if we’re not climbing, because in the moment it’s, “Let’s just go another hour, but setting the parameters that, if I’ve spent a million dollars by this date, like I’m going to cut it because we’re bad at this.”
Once you’ve had a drink, you lose the ability to self-regulate. This is like Serena Williams deputizing everyone around her. She has this famous quote, “I don’t know how to control Alt-Delete on myself. I don’t know how to stop when I’m going too far and I’m hurting myself.” She’s deputized people around her, advanced, quick coaches, essentially, who know what to tell her.
My brother is a brat about to swim around Manhattan, twenty bridges. He’s doing it at the end of July. I’m going to be in a kayak following him. Believe me, his coach and I already know ahead of time what to do if he says a certain thing, how to override his insistence. He can keep going. If a dead body is floating past them, you’ve got to have those agreements ahead of time. People with humility do that. People who are arrogant do not do that.
Values-Driven Grit: Choosing What Matters Most
My favorite resilience quote of all time just because I think it goes, “To some things matter to us more.” I think it’s worth being gritty when it’s tied to our values. It’s important, but it was Elizabeth Edwards who said it during her time with Senator Edwards. She said, “Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable over something that matters or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn’t matter.” I think that can be a good distinction.
You have to know what your values are, and you have to know what you’re planning to die on. People do have to know their values. My favorite character values test is the VIA Strengths Test. It’s free for fifteen minutes, and it ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. It’s VIACharacter.org. I get nothing from it.
Like VIA?
Yeah. The VIA Institute is very well known, and it’s 50 million people or more have taken it. It’s the most validated character strengths test in the world. I have a lot of respect for Gallup, and I know Tom Wrath and all the rest of that. I do send people to the VIA because it’s free. Most people don’t know what their top strengths and values are because they take them for granted. They’re so used to seeing the world through the prism of love or zest or curiosity. They think everyone lives that way, and they don’t. You have to know what your superpowers and your values are.
Obviously, you want people to read the book to be a lot more detailed. If someone wants to improve their goal setting and just thinks it’s very poor today, what’s the first change you would recommend making?
First change, of course, I’m going to send it to the BigGoalsBook.com because I have case studies of how goal setting works. I’ve taken examples from history and the news and the rest of it and said, “Here’s how goal-setting theory would break it down.” Here’s where my bridge methodology adds to complete the picture. Go there. That’s free. Just do that. BigGoalsBook.com. The first thing you should do is ask yourself, “Do I have a learning goal or a checklist goal?”
If so, you break it down and you set the metrics differently. Learning goal, “I’ve never done it before. Where am I going to gather that knowledge and those skills as quickly as possible?” Rank myself as I go through it to know, “Am I acquiring this knowledge effectively, or should I go to another method to do it?” Checklist goal is, “I’ve done it before, is this as excellent as I can do? If not, what’s new that would make me faster, better, stronger, higher?” Just start there. Start with two buckets, goal-setting theory, Locke, and Latham.
This is a hotly debated topic, and I know people have strong opinions on it. I don’t know whether they’re scientific or not, but in an organization or for an individual, is there a right number of goals?
3 to 5.
There seems to be some magic in threes. I don’t know what that is, but when I see organizations with ten. You’re barely going to get two of those done, and they’re probably not even the most important two.
There was a really famous piece of research that came out in 1962 that basically said, “The reason why phone numbers are seven numbers is that’s really the capacity of the human brain.” I think you can go to seven. Some people are more able to put things in containers and move along. Ideally, what you want are leveraged goals. If I had chained this goal, it would make this other one more likely.
You don’t want a lot of one-off goals. 3 to 5 is what I recommend. Seven is the upper limit. Again, I only do evidence-based work. I don’t just do what works for me, because I’m an N of one. There are so many influencers and people out there who are an N of one who write books and say, “Do this because it worked for me.” Be careful. Again, we’re in a post-bubonic plague situation. Everything needs to be evidence-based to be excellent.
We’re in a post-Bubonic plague situation. Everything needs to be evidence-based to be excellent.
The two things I think that we fall most prey to are, now why am I cognitive dissonance, like I think is the number one thing. The second is survivorship bias. LinkedIn and these things are just full of survivorship bias.
I think that’s part of it. There’s also noise. Danny Kahneman talked a lot about noise before he died last year, which was he said that it was even more of an issue in decision-making than bias was. He spent most of his career talking about bias. It’s very famous. He got a Nobel for that. As he went through the last part of his life, and Annie Duke, I know, agrees with this, “Noise is incredibly important and that is having the same decision to make identical situations, on different days, and you make different decisions.” This is where AI is brilliant. AI removes noise. It’s huge.
The Domino Effect: Strategic Goal Orientation For Lasting Impact
There’s luck in time. I say all the time, some people closed on apartment buildings the day before COVID, and the day after, they look brilliant or foolish, and it was a day. There were people who forgot to sign their lease, which was a really bad decision. It turned out to be a really good one. There’s some timing and luck in that. You mentioned this, but I think this is another thing that people struggle with. I always call it the domino effect, but what is the right orientation around goals?
Am I setting a five-year and then working back to three and one and quarterly, or what’s the cadence? I agree with you. I changed my whole goal-setting years ago when I realized I was setting a bunch of goals, and I was patting myself on the back. They weren’t all flowing together. There were a lot of one-offs. I increased the time span and then tried to work backward from that. What’s your thought on that?
Back to Locke and Latham, they said the best outcome for either a learning goal checklist goal is always going to be challenging and specific. You can set a lot of goals, but if they’re low goals or no goal measurement, essentially, you can pat yourself on the back all the time. The best outcomes are always stretch your arm out past your fingertips, challenging, and specific. You also cannot just have long-term goals.
People really have difficulty sustaining delayed gratification for too long. What you need to have are short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. Again, this is what the research shows is you cannot keep yourself all lit up with passion for very long-term goals, but you also cannot have all of your dreams in one bucket because there’s research on passion. There’s harmonious passion and obsessive passion.
This is Robert Valorant’s work. What he talks about is it’s like basketball players who only think about basketball and dream about basketball all the time, they’re competitive basketball players, but they don’t have any real relationships outside of what they do. We might even look at Aaron Rodgers and say that he has an obsessive passion about football, and he doesn’t have a harmonious passion for it.
Sometimes you have the wrong passions for too long in the wrong way. You cannot just have yourself grinding all the time in pursuit of something where if you get there, you’re going to be miserable along the way and even miserable after you achieve it because it’ll never be enough. I happen to be neighbors with Katie Ledecky. I’ve watched her grow up, and I have to say this young woman is impressive in every possible way you can imagine. She has a harmonious passion for swimming. It’s always been her goal.
Sometimes you pursue the wrong passion, in the wrong way, for too long. You can’t just grind all the time where, even if you achieve it, you’ll be miserable because it’ll never be enough.
I remember walking by their house to the park when she was a very little girl, and her mom came out and she said, “I know you just wrote, but I have to ask you, Katie has these aggressive goals. I just found them on her desk and they’re like outrageous.” She said, “What do I do?” It was like, it was her goals, but she also had want goals and like reach goals, but it always came from Katie Ledecky. No one did it for her. You can see the results of someone who has a harmonious passion for their sport.
The parents probably weren’t swimmers, right?
Her mom was. Her dad is the least athletic human being I’ve ever met. I remember before she went to the London Olympics in 2012, where she blew the doors off the world record holder and won the 800-meter freestyle. I remember she was warming up next to me because I’m a master swimmer, and I looked up at her dad. She was going to the Olympic trials the next day. I looked up at her dad in the glass denier. He’s reading the paper. He’s not even looking at her. Many sports parents don’t allow their children to develop their own passion. What you want is harmonious passion. I’ll just stop there.
Look, the youth soccer fields and youth athletics fields are just filled with this professionalization of youth sports of parents who were failed hockey, soccer, and tennis players, just dumping this onto their children. They join these club teams. You’re seeing both mental and physical burnout. You’re seeing these surgeries on twenty-year-olds, but you’re also seeing people just quit the sport at seventeen because it’s like, “I’m playing soccer five days a week. I’m not even playing for my high school and having people watch me.” I’m playing fields that like, yeah, I can see this. It seems like that is not something that came from within.
No, and it’s just that too many parents think there’s going to be a college scholarship. As far as I know, the Trump administration has turned a rollback of Title nine, too, so that women don’t even have a fair shake at having the same experiences in college as men do. Don’t hope for a college scholarship. It’s probably not going to be there.
The amount of college things has not. What’s interesting is the funnel hasn’t changed. If you think about the last twenty years, there probably aren’t any more positions, but the number of leagues and private leagues and funnels, and camps has quadrupled. You’re talking about a for-profit motive. There are no more outcomes, but man, the funnel is pumping more people into it.
This is where you get goals gone wild. You get parents assuming, and try to create a condition where they set a goal that they’ve never achieved before. Their child has never achieved before, but they decide by this date, they will be able to do this thing without allowing them the ability to learn how to do it, and even find out if it’s their thing? Is their body wired to be a swimmer or a runner or a pickleball player, or a flag football player? Do they even know? Do they care? Again, arrogance is what you see over and over with bad goal setting.
Parenting And Grit: Fostering Resilience In The Next Generation
For high-achieving parents, I assume they have a really hard time watching a kid fumble and figure out, like what advice would you give for high, and for A-type parents with B-type children? If you are fat, that’s where a lot of those kids are going to be in therapy in 10 or 20 years.
My husband’s a Hall of Fame lacrosse player. I was a competitive swimmer. My great-uncles won the Olympics. Believe me, we were parents who felt that sports taught a lot of lessons, so we wanted our kids to play sports, and they all played sports. I have to say, let it be your child’s sport and try to stay out of it because you will ruin the experience for them, and the field is littered with parents who don’t do this. Let your child fail and then go cry all by yourself in your closet because none of us wants to see our children miserable. In hindsight, now that my kids are adults, I will say that this was as hard for me as it is for anybody else. Every awful failure my children experience has been the best thing that has ever happened to them, so far, none.
I had a story with my son this year, like that. I told him, “At the time, you don’t know how this is going to play out at the rock bottom, and the way it ended six months later, none of it would have happened had he not gone through that.” The problem, I think, is that, as parents, we are biologically hardwired to protect our children. In the hundreds of years before now, that meant physically protected. They were physically in danger, whether that was malnutrition or, as if we eliminated a lot of those dangers, I think those skills have been honed in emotional protection. There’s some real harm in interfering with that.
That’s been studied. When I wrote the book Getting Grit, I talked about the self-esteem parenting movement and how this very misguided movement was about just making your children happy at all costs. Now, in hindsight, and I quote John Height, he was one of my professors at Penn, it created narcissists and sociopaths. We did not allow them to even fall out of trees. Kids stopped climbing trees and breaking bones in the 80s and 90s, and 2000s.
All because of that milk carton.
The milk carton, that’s what I wrote about. The milk carton started it. My daughter went to Brown University. She ended up being a rower. She’s 5’11”, but I remember she called me in 2012 as a speaker who was showing up on the Brown campus. It was somebody who had a different point of view than a lot of these college students. They had complained to the administration that they were going to feel in danger and ruined, and scared if the speaker spoke on campus miles away.
What did the administration do? They caved. They created a room with goldfish and puppies on videos and soft lights, and cookies. We did them such a disservice. We need to let them get their scars. We need to let them cry. We need to let them sit through the night without solving their problems for them because that’s a piece of why psychologists think suicides have gone up. They cannot sit with the pain that will pass if you develop resilience and know another day will come.
Last question for you. I always say this is a multivariant, so it could be personal or professional or single, or repeated. What’s a mistake that you’ve learned the most from?
I think the mistake I made is the one that I’ve been talking about a lot lately, which is expecting that other women would be supportive of my own big goals, that they would cheer for me if I did something well or put something on LinkedIn. I think by tying my feelings of success to whether or not I was seen by people who I thought had my back, I began to play a little smaller at times.
I took six years to study the research and realize that you just have to develop a tribe in Okinawa, Japan. It’s called the Moai. It’s a group of people who have your back, and you know it. That’s when women in particular begin to play bigger. You have to know who has your back to do hard things. I made the mistake of thinking that playing smaller would make me more likable. It didn’t matter. You just have to go for it.
You have to know who has your back in order to do hard things.
Thank you. Caroline, where can people get the book, learn about your work? Where should they go?
It’s all at CarolineMiller.com, or Big Goals has its own website, BigGoalsBook.com. It’s audio, it’s Kindle, it’s all those different things. Actually, the book’s on sale this week, I just found out. Big Goals is on sale for a period of time, I should say.
Thank you for joining us on the show and sharing your story. I know goals are always a hot topic, so I’m glad we got to dive into the science.
Great. Thank you so much.
To our listeners, thanks for tuning into the show. We’ll include links to Caroline’s site, books, and the content on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed our episode of the show, I hope you’ll sign up for Friday Forward if you’re not already a subscriber. The short note that started out as something I sent to my team every Friday now has 100,000 subscribers in over 150 countries and is one of the top newsletters on Substack. You can join at RobertGlazer.Substack.com or just search for Friday Forward on Substack. Thanks again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Caroline Miller
- Creating Your Best Life
- Getting Grit
- The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
- VIA Character
- Big Goals
- Friday Forward
- Annie Duke – Annie Duke On Thinking In Bets, Rethinking Quitting, And More – Past episode
- Angela Duckworth
