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Proximal goals more effective than long-term goals

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My favourite way to integrate long-term values into day-to-day decisions draws upon a simple fact: short-term targets feel much easier to reach than long-term ones. This is something psychologists have understood for decades. In one famous study, researchers asked a group of seven-to-ten-year olds who struggled with maths to set themselves targets for the days ahead. They were split into two groups and each was given a subtly different prompt. The first was told to aim for six pages of math problems in each of the seven sessions to come; the second simply to aim for forty-two pages of problems by the end of all the sessions. Of course, these two sets of targets are just different ways of saying the same thing – in each case, the children ended up doing all forty-two pages.

And yet the effects of focusing on the immediate goal over the distant one were remarkable. The kids who were set the ‘proximate’ goal didn’t just perform better; they performed twice as well as the other kids, correctly solving 80 per cent of problems to the 40 per cent of the other group. What’s more, they also ended up feeling more confident – one of our most important paths to feeling good. As the organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich summarised it, ‘Proximal goals hadn’t just helped these children solve problems – they’d changed the way they looked at math.’