I remember exactly two concepts from my college Rhetoric class.
The first is primacy versus recency which states that some people will believe the first thing they hear in any argument and some will believe the last or most recent thing they hear. Almost no one buys into what is said in the middle.
The second is that people will remember information long after they’ve forgotten the source of that information.
For example, people will remember that Ryan Reynolds has a love child with a three-headed space alien while they will have forgotten if they heard that from their crazy Aunt Miriam via a Facebook post or if they read it in the New York Times.
I am currently suffering from this exact problem.
There was a well-circulated meme or joke (as I stated, I can’t quite remember where I first saw it) that goes something like this:
“An atheist, a vegan and a CrossFitter all walk into a bar. You know how I know? None of them could stop talking about it.”
Which leads me, less circuitously than usual, to the point of this relatively and thankfully brief post: people love to tell other people what they are doing. Particularly if they feel like they have some moral high ground to stand on or whatever the activity or belief is goes against the grain.
I’m totally cool with this. I like when people are into things and I like learning about activities and beliefs that are off the beaten path.
What I am not so keen on is people who chirp about what they are “going” to do.
We all have those friends who talk about what they are going to do before they ever actually do it.
Which leads me to another meme or Onion article or something (see, this source confusion is very real) where the headline went something like “Woman signs up and trains for a marathon. Actually does it without telling everyone she knows.”
There is a reason we engage in this behavior of telling people what we plan on doing before we actually start doing it.
It feels good.
In fact, you will get a similar dopamine hit from telling people you plan on running the marathon as you do from telling people you ran the marathon last weekend.
This fault in our reward system will actually deter you from doing the thing you just told everyone you are about to do. Because while telling people feels great and doing it feels great everything that comes in between triggers almost no reward system at all.
This is kind of like the primacy versus recency bias I mentioned above. We like the beginning and the end. The middle where all the work, hard training, practice and building up of capabilities happens is never really the fun part.
You can consider yourself as process-oriented as you’d like, the truth is you are hard wired this way. It will always feel good to tell people in advance.
So, how do we overcome this?
It’s actually pretty simple. When you set out on a long-term goal, tell no one except those that are directly influencing that outcome.
In our marathon example, surely tell your coach and your husband that you are planning on taking this on. They need to know. Who does not need to know is Steve in accounting.
Doing this will make you more likely to complete your mission and make the end result feel much more rewarding.
And, before you email me back with something like “Won’t me telling more people actually hold me more accountable to do the thing I said I was going to do?” the answer is “no”. Research shows that we would rather be embarrassed by our lack of success than put in the work to finish a challenging task.
Bottom line: set a goal, keep your yapper shut and celebrate the sweet victory of achieving what you set out to do.
Think of this as the mullet approach to accomplishment. Business up front. Party in the back.