Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Dr. Emily Balcetis

Andrew Huberman opens by introducing Dr. Emily Balcetis, a professor of psychology at New York University whose laboratory studies motivation, goal-setting and tools for completing goals. He explains that he first came across her work as a vision scientist: he had heard of a psychologist studying how the way people visualize problems can predict whether they overcome challenges and how they plan to set and meet goals. He also mentions her 2020 book for general readers, "Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World," which he read in print and listened to as an audiobook.

Huberman previews the central claim of the episode. Whether a person pictures a goal at the top of a steep hill or a shallower one, far away or close by, strongly shapes whether they approach it with more or less energy. He says it also shapes whether they push toward immediate milestones or feel they must take on the whole task at once, and whether reaching the goal feels like a step toward further rewards or a finish line followed by exhaustion. He stresses that he means visualization in a literal, visual sense.

how you visualize things in your mind, and when I say visualize, I mean literally how you visualize them as a visual problem or a visual goal, has everything to do with whether or not you will be able to meet those goals

He promises peer-reviewed science together with practical tools that apply to educational, career and relationship goals. He adds that Balcetis will draw on her own experience as a parent, as someone managing different kinds of relationships, and in a demanding career. He also notes that the podcast is separate from his teaching and research roles at Stanford. His first question asks her to explain how perception, and seeing in particular, relates to setting and pursuing goals.

Balcetis begins with what people report when psychologists ask how they make progress on their goals. Three answers come up again and again: encouraging self-talk or "self-pep talks," reminding oneself how important the work is, and putting up Post-it notes as constant reminders. Her criticism is that all of these take effort. You have to keep reminding yourself, keep talking to yourself, make the notes and remember to look at them. That costs time, effort and commitment.

In her account this explains a familiar pattern. Early excitement brings some initial progress, but people often give up before the halfway point, once things get hard. She argues that the go-to strategies add a second burden on top of the original goal.

those tactics that are our go-to strategies are themselves a goal to maintain.

Huberman adds a point from vision science. Post-its and fridge magnets may have an immediate effect, but over time they become part of the visual background and people stop noticing them.

if something is stably in your environment, eventually you're blind to it.

Balcetis says her team looked for strategies that need less effort and can be automated, building on processes already running in the body and mind. That search led them to vision. Sighted people look at the world without thinking about it, so the team asked whether a different way of looking could be automated to help people get past obstacles and perhaps literally see opportunities they had missed.

Their first step used visual illusions to explore several questions. Do people realize there are other ways to see what is around them? Can that be adjusted? Is there room to intervene, and can people be encouraged to see what they had not seen before? She describes this as the start of their work where vision science and motivation science meet. Huberman says, acknowledging his bias as a vision scientist, that vision is the dominant sense by which people navigate the world and survive.

Huberman asks which findings matter most, both on how people can adjust their vision to reach goals faster and on whether different visual perceptions might separate more motivated people from less motivated ones. Balcetis answers by explaining how the team picked its target. They asked hundreds, then thousands of people about their New Year's resolutions and also looked at other polls. Whatever the source, the number one goal was health-related: losing weight, exercising more, getting more steps, for mental or physical well-being.

She notes that the goal would slip in the rankings if people were achieving it. It does not, because it is hard. She compares the situation to diets, which she says do not work for the same reason self-talk does not: people go in "full bore, hardcore," and a lifestyle change demands major commitment and effort. The team wanted the reverse, which she calls "the golden ticket": something that takes less effort and pays off more.

The first fieldwork took place in a former military armory in Brooklyn that now houses a family YMCA. A physical therapist invited Balcetis there one winter afternoon. Among the families, new moms and casual runners was an elite training team. She says she could not tell a high school student in the group apart from some of the fastest runners in the world, including someone who had won the gold medal for the 400 meter at the most recent Olympics before her visit. Nothing about how they looked or behaved suggested elite status.

She describes going in with an intuition the athletes did not share. She expected elite runners to be hyper-aware of their surroundings: where the competition was, what was in their peripheral vision, who was behind and who was ahead. All of them said no, and some said that when they did pay attention that way, it was a mistake that did not work for them. Instead they described being hyper-focused, with a narrowed field of attention, "almost like a spotlight is shining on a target."

The target depended on the distance. In a short race it could be the finish line itself. In longer races the runners set sub-goals, such as the shorts of the person ahead they wanted to beat, or a fixed landmark like a sign they would pass. Balcetis compares this to having blinders on. All of these athletes said they used the strategy, and the faster ones said they used it more. Her conclusion was that this visual strategy does not require being in perfect physical condition, so it might help people who are not chasing Olympic medals but want to exercise better, enjoy it more, and keep a January resolution going past February or March.

She describes this early stage as what could be called focus groups or case studies. Next came studies of competitive New York Road Runners runners, who were not Olympians. Among hundreds of these runners, those with better and faster pace and better times used the narrowed strategy more often than an expansive, open scope of attention. She describes this as an apparent correlation: the more often and more consistently runners used narrowed focus, the better they seemed to do.