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CHAPTER 2
Cut Your Goal in Half
hen I was a freshman in college, I wanted to try out for the football team.
Given my 5’7” soft frame, this makes complete sense. You can’t keep a
tiger out of the jungle.
I decided to become a field-goal kicker. I bought a stand and a football at a
sporting goods store. Late at night, I’d sneak into the stadium in Birmingham,
Alabama, and practice my kicks.
Had I ever kicked a field goal? No. Had I ever played a single down of
football? No. Did I ever make a field goal during my private midnight practices?
Also, no.
So then why did I think I could walk on as a field-goal kicker for a Division
I college team that occasionally played schools like Auburn?
Because I am crazy.
That was a foolish goal.
You’re not as foolhardy as me, but you probably tend to overreach a bit with
your goals, too.
We all supersize our goals at the beginning and the reason why is simple.
Perfectionism.
In the middle of a goal, perfectionism gets real chatty. The first thing it says
is that you won’t be able to do something perfectly and you shouldn’t even start.
Far better to give up now than waste all that time and fail.
Perfectionism trots out a laundry list of reasons you shouldn’t begin. You’re
too old. You’re too young. You’re too busy. You have too many goals and don’t
know which one to focus on. You don’t have enough money or support.
Someone else has already done the exact thing you want to do. Someone smarter
with better teeth.
If you ignore this initial barrage and start something, perfectionism changes
its tune completely. Now it says that you have to do it perfectly. It’s the only

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its tune completely. Now it says that you have to do it perfectly. It’s the only
possibility that is acceptable.
What’s brilliant about that “do it perfectly” tactic is that it seems logical. If
you are going to do something, shouldn’t it be amazing? Shouldn’t it be larger
than life?
Go big or go home!
We’ve now bumped into the second lie of perfectionism: Your goal should
be bigger.
That’s a fun sentiment, and the bigger the goal, the bigger the initial rush we
get from imagining it, but today I’m going to dare you to do the opposite. In fact,
I want you to cut your goal in half.
I’m not telling you to do less—doing this will actually help you do more.
Think about it this way. At the beginning, when our excitement is through
the roof, we think our achievement must be as well. This is why people who
have never run one hundred yards will tell me they are going to run a marathon.
I will gently ask them, “Have you ever run a half marathon? Have you ever run a
5K? What about a K? Have you ever run just a single K? Get yourself a tiny
little medal?”
The answer is always no, they’ve never run before, but they insist on doing
that marathon.
Have you ever wondered why 92 percent of people fail at their goals?
Because we tend to set goals that are foolishly optimistic.
Scientists call this “planning fallacy,” a concept first studied by Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They described this problem as “a phenomenon
in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future
task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.”
Study after study has confirmed that we are prone to fall prey to planning
fallacy, but one of my favorite examples involved college seniors working on
honors theses.
Psychologist Roger Buehler asked the students to predict how long it would
take to finish their theses, with both best-case and worst-case scenarios. On
average, the students guessed it would take thirty-four days to finish. In reality, it
took them fifty-six days, almost twice as long.
What’s really interesting is that not even half the students finished by their
worst-case estimate. Even estimating that everything that could go wrong did,
the students didn’t guess correctly.
Across every form of goal setting, you see planning fallacy rear its ugly
head. When he was twenty-three, a friend of mine decided to try something big.

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head. When he was twenty-three, a friend of mine decided to try something big.
He hadn’t run anywhere except on a treadmill or during a pickup soccer game.
He barely swam a few laps at a pool once or twice a month. He hadn’t ridden a
bike except the stationary one at the gym. What did he decide to do in that
moment? The next 70.3-mile Ironman in San Antonio, Texas.
“I had eight months to train so I went to work on planning out my regimen. I
was already going to the gym every weekday so it would be easy to spend more
time on running/swimming/biking than on lifting, right? I planned it out, had it
all ready to go. And never went to the gym again.”
What’s amazing about that is the goal wrecked what he was already doing.
Before that massive goal showed up, he was consistently going to the gym. Not
only did he not do the race, he quit everything that was already in motion. That’s
how powerfully destructive a wrong-sized goal is.
This goes against every sappy motivational statement in that cursive script
on photos of a waterfall universe, but if you dream too big at the start, you curse
your finish.
That’s certainly what the data will tell you.
On Day 9 of my 30 Days of Hustle program, I asked participants to cut their
goals in half, just like I’m asking you. My theory was that people, especially
chronic starters like you and me, overestimate what they can accomplish in a set
period of time. When they fail to hit the massive goal, it leads to
discouragement, which results in people quitting and never finishing.
For instance, if your goal was to lose ten pounds and you lost only eight, you
would have failed by two pounds. Most of us believe the old adage, “Shoot for
the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” but that’s not how life
really works. The all-or-nothing mentality of perfectionism tells us that close
doesn’t count. The stars are not good enough.
You now have an ocean of incentive to quit your goal. But if you’d cut the
goal in half to five pounds and then lost eight, you’d be a lot more likely to
continue because of your initial victory. You would have lost the same amount
of weight, but one approach would have almost guaranteed that you’d finish
your initial goal and try another one.
“Cut your goal in half” is not the kind of thing you’d see painted on the wall
of a gym. It felt like a cheat, but it worked.
When my researcher sent me his report on the 30 Days of Hustle, one result
stood out: Those who cut their goal in half increased their performance from past
similar goal-related challenges on average by over 63 percent.
Not only that, 90 percent of the people who cut their goal in half said they
had an increased desire to work on their goal; it encouraged them to keep going,

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had an increased desire to work on their goal; it encouraged them to keep going,
and it motivated them to work harder because the goal seemed attainable.
The people who took the shortcut finished.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are real people just like you who tried
this approach.
I wrote 30 new blog posts of 300+ words each day on my blog. I cut
my goal in half to write 100+ words each day. And I did WERK. 28 out
of 30 days I wrote 300+ words on my blog, the other 2 days I wrote
100+words. The goal was to write, and write I did!
I bite off more than I can chew, always. I am glad you cut the goal
in ½. My goal was “re-organized” about 4 times because it is
demanding a lot of time that was not available. SO, although I didn’t
attain my original goal, I am further down the field than I would have
been a month ago. I am starting the hustle on the next phase of my goal
and I now feel like I have the tools to apply with some thought.
I lost 6 lbs.! Was hoping for 10, but since I cut my goal in half, I
met and exceeded it! Here’s to another 30 days!
Do you see what happened in each of these cases? They cut their goals in
half, still did great, and, most important, are eager to do it again. That’s the key.
Most people will think this approach is weak, but hard-core approaches that
force you to overreach forget to take in the importance of the word “pace.”
Goals are a marathon, not a sprint. I know that if I can get you to do a little
one month and win, you’re more likely to do a little more the next month and
win even more. In the course of a year or maybe even a lifetime that approach
will always beat the kill-yourself-for-a-month approach. That tends to end one of
two ways: you miss your goal and give up, or you hit your goal and are so spent
that you give up.
No, for me the best sign that a paced approach can work is the very last thing
the last person above said: “Here’s to another 30 days!”