Scott H Young

What are you more likely to achieve, a goal to earn twenty thousand dollars a year in sales or a goal to earn a hundred thousand? Rationally it would seem obvious that setting the smaller goal makes its attainment more likely. Recently, however, I’ve started to have my doubts that this seemingly logical conclusion holds up in reality.

Taking a look at the goals I had set for myself, I started to notice that more ambitious goals have a greater chance of realization then seemingly modest ones. Setting a goal to fully produce an interactive personal development program in only six months was fairly ambitious considering I had no budget, little experience and had to produce the artwork, coding and content by myself. Yet I managed to achieve this goal when I had once failed to stick to doing a half-hour of speed reading practice a day for a month.

This trend of achieving goals that were really difficult and letting modest goals slip in my past was too obvious to ignore. Why would a goal that, objectively, has less chance of success, consistently beat the odds, while goals that seemed like sure things never manifested? In exploring this problem I noticed two key factors that were present in the success of a difficult goal and seemingly absent from the modest goals I couldn’t achieve.

Worthy Aims

The first factor that seemed to created this paradox was that more difficult goals inspired more action than modest ones. Goals I knew would be difficult inspired me to work doubly hard to complete them. Conversely, modest goals didn’t inspire the extra effort needed for their achievement.

It is easy to exaggerate the ease of completing a modest goal. Even though setting a goal to lose five pounds in six months may sound easy, you still need to restrict your diet and exercise more. Without the sense that the goal is a worthy challenge, you may feel it will get completed without your direct attention. This translates into zero action and zero results.

Concentrated action is an all or nothing event. Either you are pushing hard or you aren’t pushing at all. You may oscillate between these two states throughout the achievement of a goal, but modest aims are likely to create a lot of time with virtually no pushing. When you know the goal will be difficult in advance, you are more likely to push hard almost the entire time to ensure its success.

Believing a goal will definitely be doable, but will require all your resources is the best way to ensure that you actually use all your resources. Having a challenge that is worthy of your effort is absolutely necessary if you want to achieve it.

Talented Action

The second factor that makes it easier to achieve a challenging goal than a modest one comes from the identity and self-image of the person who usually sets these goals. People who feel that they have a lot of talent or skill in an area already are more likely to set difficult goals for that area. While people who feel that they are below average or naturally poor at an area will likely set very modest goals when trying to improve.

Now these beliefs become a fulfilling prophecy. The person who thinks they are great at something already and are going to get greater will put a lot of effort into improving. The person who feels they are awful and lacks self-esteem in an area won’t put in the effort and will fail to achieve even a modest goal.

I’ve noticed both of these goal-setting behaviors in myself for different areas. When I would set a health or project related goal, I knew I was already skilled in that area. Thinking about those goals charged me with positive emotions and allowed me to utilize all my resources in achieving them.

In the past I had set social or relationship goals that didn’t come from this place of confidence. I would set seemingly modest goals, but every time I would think about the goal I would frustrate myself, filling with negative emotions. My resources were under-utilized and I failed to achieve some of those goals.

In a conversation with a reader, he pointed out a way around this factor. By focusing on all the things you do well at and show you have talent in an area after setting a goal, you are more likely to achieve it then by focusing on what you lack. This can move you to a place of greater confidence, where you can set more challenging goals and summon up the will to improve it.

So if you consistently fail to achieve even minor dietary goals, focusing on other areas where you are successful with your health or commitment might give you the greater confidence you need to move forward. Maybe you don’t smoke or you are currently free of major diseases.

Set a challenge that is worthy of your attention. Believing that a goal is possible is necessary, but you also need to believe the goal will be challenging or you won’t invest the resources to attain it. Once you set a challenging goal, pick out references that demonstrate your underlying skill in an area to move you into a state conductive to achieving the goal. Mediocrity isn’t the result of too many obstacles but usually, in having too few.

You become part of your environment. Surround yourself with certain values, behaviors and skills and you start to pick them up yourself. Like a sponge, your mind soaks up what ever it is repeatedly exposed to. This process can allow you to passively adopt more empowering behaviors and beliefs. But, just as a sponge repeatedly soaked in dirt is never entirely clean, this process can degrade your ability to grow.

This is the last article in a four part series dedicated to modeling. In the introduction I outlined what modeling is and how you can use it to specifically imitate a result. The second article focused on deliberate instruction for rapid learning. The third article discussed how conscious observation of role-models can allow you to pick up behaviors. This article will explore passive modeling through osmosis.

Imitate Your Way to Success

Introduction
Instruction
Observation
Osmosis

Cells maintain concentrations of certain chemicals through osmosis. Water and other fluids pass through the membrane taking chemicals from the environment with them. On a larger scale, human beings work the same way. Culture, values and patterns of behavior are all transmitted subconsciously throughout society.

Ever notice how behavior tends to travel in groups? Smokers tend to know a lot of other smokers. Athletic people know a lot of other exercise lovers. Tight social circles often have similar mannerisms and expressions. People of one country have a particular accent and expressions that aren’t found in another region.

These people didn’t sit down one day and decide to behave like each other. There was no conscious decision. They modeled through osmosis. Passively observing their environment, these people slowly adopted the culture, beliefs, values, behaviors and expressions as the people surrounding them.

Osmosis is something that operates whether you want it to or not. You can influence your conscious power to resist certain behaviors and values that are common throughout your group. I’m a lone vegetarian in a sea of omnivores, but I can still maintain this distinction.

But you can only do this with the minority. Creating an identity that is completely resistant to osmosis is like trying to maintain a sand castle that is being washed away by the surf. You may be able to preserve a few columns of sand and rebuild a few others that degrade, but much of your castle will still be sculpted by the water.

Osmosis is a natural law of society, just like gravity is a natural law of physics. You can complain that gravity is forcing your legs to work harder and it hurts when you fall. But you can also use gravity to your advantage to generate electricity through dams and keep things rooted firmly in place. Gravity is even necessary for planes to fly on the air. Laws are neither good nor bad, just a feature of the universe, osmosis exists whether you utilize it or not.

Passive Modeling

The key to start using, instead of fighting, osmosis is to take a look at your environment. As much as you conscious will can try, your environment is going to make a huge impact on your growth. Does your environment support you or tear you down? Does your environment stimulate or deaden the senses?

Take a look at who you consistently spend time with. Are they worth modeling? Do they have distinctions you want to learn from? This social group is putting a lot of osmotic pressure on your results, so choose carefully who you decide to associate with.

Shifting Your Associations

Most people don’t live in such a dangerous environment that their results are being completely stifled. They just live in a mediocre environment. Their friends aren’t dragging them down, but they don’t really offer a new level of behavior to model. This trap of mediocrity is what inevitably keeps people from achieving what they want. Mediocre input, mediocre results.

I’m not harsh enough to say you should immediately abandon all your friends to go associate with perfect super-heroes. Even if those people did exist, they might even consider you to be dragging them down via osmosis. What I’m suggesting is a far more modest step to creating positive osmotic influence.

Start by finding people you want to model and start associating with them more. If you want to become an entrepreneur, start befriending local entrepreneurs. If you want to become physically healthy, spend more time associating with healthy people. Slowly seek these people out and develop new associations that you can model from.

People shift all the time. Many of the people I am close friends with now I didn’t even know a year ago. You don’t need to abandon your old friends and burn bridges. Just make small shifts in your social circle to create different results.

If you don’t know where to find these people, the law of osmosis tends to handle this problem nicely. Since people become part of what they are around, the people you are looking for are often clumped together. Visit organizations and you can often find many people with similar patterns you can learn from.

Positive Osmotic Influence

Everyone bases their success on their personal values. Values tell you what is good or bad, a priority or a bonus, a must or a should. Even your sense of morality comes from your values. From these values you can then determine a direction of what would be better or worse. Your core values were probably installed early in your life so that they are relatively stable.

From this center of values you need to examine the group you are in. Does this group have a positive or negative osmotic influence? If left over time is it likely that your environment will inspire you to become more or force you to settle to be less.

I mention values because I don’t want to imply that certain groups of people are inherently better to associate with than others. That depends on your personal value structure. I’m not a religious person so associating with highly faith based people isn’t high on my list of things to acquire through osmosis. But if faith is important to you, then you might consider a very religious group to have a positive osmotic influence.

Whatever your values are, you should always strive to keep a positive osmotic influence in your life. If you lack this balance then you need to be proactive about shifting your environment to create a positive influence. Start associating with people who are successful in what you value most. You can’t have a sterile environment where you only have good influences, but try to ensure there are enough positive influences to outweigh any negative ones.

Conclusions

Humans learn through imitation. You can take over this process by examining how people think, feel and act to produce a result. Personalized instruction and mentoring is the most effective way to rapidly pick up skills. Observing successful people and copying their patterns can allow you to get their results. Modeling will occur through osmosis whether you want it to or not, so choose the environment that will empower you in moving towards your highest values.

Imitate Your Way to Success

Introduction
Instruction
Observation
Osmosis