Define your Goals in the Negative and Witness Positive Outcomes

How to counter the goal paradox

The goal of this post is not to have a goal.

Hear me out.

I want you to achieve your goals. But I want you to flip it.

From the positive to the negative setting of goals.

It all starts with systems thinking

In system dynamics, there is a concept known as leverage points.

Leverage points are action points where effort applied on one end results in actions on another. It borrows from the idea of levers.

Imagine closing the door using the handle compared to pushing it a small distance from the hinges. You would use little force at the handle and a lot of force if close to the hinge.

You wouldn’t want to use a lot of effort in closing a door. The principle is to use little force for greatest outcome. That is the idea behind leverage points.

One of the greatest leverage points is the goal of a system. A system tends to follow its goal. It adjusts all its components to achieve its goal. We can use the door to further demonstrate this point.

Here’s the key to the door to understanding leverage points

If your goal is to close the door, then you will use all the resources to close the door.

You will use your hands if the handle is close to you. You can stand and close it silently or push it and let it close with a bang. You can use your legs or nudge it using your butt (the best way by my standards).

The door will also comply with whichever force is subjected to it at different points. It can be at the handle, or close to the hinge.

The door is not the only component of the system. You too are.

The goal of closing the door would not be achievable if you were not present to act on the door. The components, thus, are you, the door and its attachments to the hinges.

These are the tangible components of the system.

One of the intangible components in the system is the goal. If the goal is to close the door, therein lies a discrepancy — the system is far from its goal. It creates a feedback.

This is the other intangible component of the system.

Remember, a system gravitates towards its goal. This is noticeable through feedbacks.

You will then use whatever force you can think of to achieve this goal. The more you push the door, the closer the system achieves its goal. Once it is achieved, there is little discrepancy between the state of the system and its set goals.

Of note:

• The door has moved;
• The hinges have slid over each other;
• You have used force to move the door;
• The feedback has reduced the discrepancy between the past system state and the closed-door state;
• Most importantly, all these components have aligned to match the system’s goal.

It also opens the door to understanding systems

While this concept is simple, it applies to all known systems.

If you want to set the shower to the right temperature, you have a goal to achieve. You will tinker with the knobs for a while until you get just the perfect temperature.

In such a system, the shower, the knobs and yourself are parts of the system aiming to achieve the goal you have defined.

If you flush the toilet, there is an outflow of water, offsetting the system to a state far from the goal, which is set in place by the engineer.

The discrepancy triggers the feedback. This jumpstarts the inflow of water, until the cistern is filled to the preferred level. Here, the goal is present independent of your existence. It demonstrates how systems can achieve goals without human intervention (excluding the engineer).

The goal is the intangible force driving all the tangible components.

Don’t define your goals positively. Define them in the negative

There is, however, a way in which you can define a goal without specificities but end up achieving a lot more.

You might not be strange to the SMART acronym. I am not a fan of this acronym, as it is very limiting. It defies all known great achievements which were not specific, measurable, achievable at the time, realistic nor timebound.

To have profound impact, goals have to be bold.

Let me repeat.

To have profound impact, goals have to be bold!

They have to defy the prevailing ideas of the era. They have to disrupt profoundly.

This achievable when we define goals negatively. Here are several examples.

Positive — To close the door

Negative — To avoid instances when the door is open

Positive — To get the right temperature for a shower

Negative — To avoid burning or extremely chilly water when showering

In these two examples, the range of options for the positive is limited. For the negative, it is large.

For the first negatively described example, you can close the door by even calling your son or daughter to do it. You can then hire a security guard (or Hodor, for those who watched Game of Thrones) to prevent anyone from opening the door.

In the second example, an idea of what the right temperature is defines the positive means of defining your goal. However, the negative way is more adventurous. You could even have a different idea of what might be right at the beginning compared to midway into the shower.

Defining goals negatively is extremely powerful. It is the reason I use it to explain how organisms evolve.

The goals organism have is:

To avoid annihilation.

To achieve this goal each of the following levels, an organism will:

At the genetic level — mutate, exchange genes, integrate itself to another genome, imprint or express its genes

At a cellular level — it will regulate the entry and exit of materials and maintain the proper channels of cellular transport

At a tissue level — it will coordinate the transport of material and the regulation of tissues to achieve tissue level balance.

At the organ level — it will control the distribution of resources and excrete waste material through the appropriate channels

At the organ system level — it will integrate the outputs of various systems to ensure coherence of system functions

At individual level — it will avoid the bully, swat the mosquito, run away from the venomous snake or cut off individuals that drain their energy and morale.

At a family or community level — see how a mother defends its young ones. Similarly, at adolescent stage, see how the children defend their friends of groups or cliques.

If I am to defend the other levels, I would have to redefine what an organism is. This I manage to do in my book, but it is not the objective of this article.

The point is to see how the negative defining of goals explains evolution at whichever level you would want to look at it.

To avoid deviating from the point (see what I did there), I shall leave you with the song by the legendary Nyashinski. As the chorus starts, he says:

Nimeingia hii mwaka na goals

Translated, it means — I have started my year with goals.

No doubt, Nyashinski has big goals. I doubt they follow the SMART acronym. In the short time he made his comeback, Nyashinski has shaken the music industry by its roots.

I am here to argue how you too can achieve immensely by defining your goals in the negative. Organisms have been doing it for billions of years. The entire field of evolution and its sub-branches are built on organisms avoiding annihilation.

Defining goals in the negative sense can be adventurous, fulfilling and liberating.

Go ye forth, thus, and positively define your goals in the negative

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