You Got Paid Early

Hi friend,

Some years ago, at a university in Germany, a researcher stopped a group of law students on their way out of a lecture and asked whether they would take part in a short study.

They were chosen because they were serious. Every one of them was committed to becoming a lawyer, the kind of student who already thought of the profession as part of who he was. The researcher asked each of them to write down two things they intended to do over the coming week to get there. Read the law journals regularly. Work through extra practice cases. The sort of plans ambitious students make all the time.

Then the study split them in two, with one small difference between the groups.

For half the students, the experimenter took the sheet, read what they had written, and acknowledged it in front of them. Their plan had been seen. For the other half, the students were told their sheets were anonymous and would not be read by anyone, so their intentions stayed private.

Afterwards, every student was given a set of criminal law cases to work through, forty-five minutes to do it, and permission to stop whenever they liked.

The students whose plans had been noticed worked on the cases for less time than the students whose plans had stayed private. And when the researchers asked how close they felt to becoming the lawyer they wanted to be, the students who had been noticed felt closer.

They had done less, and they felt further along.

The study was published in 2009 by Peter Gollwitzer, Paschal Sheeran, Verena Michalski and Andrea Seifert, under the title When Intentions Go Public, and it held across four experiments. The explanation they gave goes back to an older idea Gollwitzer had worked on for years. When a goal is bound up with who you want to be, telling people about it is not neutral. Being seen intending something gives you a small piece of the identity in advance. The people who heard your plan now see you, a little, as the person you described. You get paid before the work is done, and a man who has already been paid has less reason to show up.

The finding was strongest among exactly the students you would least expect it to touch: the most committed ones.

That should bother anyone who has grown up online.

Look at how ambition gets practised now. You announce the business before it has a customer. You post the first day of the training plan, the new year’s goals, the screenshot of the course you just bought. You tell everyone at dinner about the book you are going to write. Every one of those moments produces a small warm feeling of progress, and the research suggests that feeling is not a sign you are moving. It may be the thing that replaces the movement.

I have felt that warmth myself, after describing a plan to someone who was impressed by it, and noticed that the plan went quieter in the weeks after.

There is a second half to this, and it changes what you should do with the first.

In 2019, a team at Ohio State led by Howard Klein argued that the 2009 study was being read too broadly. Their question was not whether to tell people, but whom.

In one experiment, participants set a goal for a simple task and shared it with a lab assistant. For some, the assistant was presented as a doctoral student in a suit. For others, the assistant was a casually dressed community college student. The participants who told the higher-status assistant were more committed to their goal and performed better. In a longer study that followed students through a semester, those who chose to share their grade goals with someone of higher status than themselves showed more commitment and did better in their courses.

The mechanism Klein pointed to was plain. When you tell someone whose opinion you care about, you become afraid of their judgment, and that fear keeps you working. When you tell people whose opinion you don’t value, nothing is at stake, and all you collect is the applause.

Put the two studies side by side and the rule becomes clear. Telling people a goal is not the problem. Collecting credit for it is. An announcement to a crowd buys you identity. A commitment to one person above you buys you a judge.

So here is how to handle it.

Keep the identity quiet. Don’t announce who you are becoming, the founder, the author, the athlete. Let people find out from the results.

Pick one judge. Choose a single person whose opinion you value and whose respect you would hate to lose, ideally someone further ahead than you. Tell them the specific goal and the date.

Report actions, not intentions. When you do talk about your work, talk about what you finished, not what you plan to do. A plan earns praise without cost. A finished thing has already been paid for.

Treat the warm feeling as a warning. If you leave a conversation feeling closer to your goal and you have not done any work, that feeling is the one Gollwitzer measured. Go and do something before it settles.

The law students in that study were not lazy, and they were not pretending. They wanted it more than most. They had simply been paid early, and it turned out to be enough to take the edge off the hunger.

Who have you told about your goal, and what did they do for you?

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill