Success may not appear clear to many of us, but the road to failure surely is. Have around you at the people you work with, and you’ll find lots of Good Starters. Business leaders who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen. They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, ambition, a commitment to getting the job well done.
And then something happens. Somewhere along the way, they lose steam, enthusiasm is gone. They get bogged down with challenges. They start procrastinating and miss deadlines of their commitment. Their projects take forever to finish, and sometime fail even to finished at all.
Does all this sound familiar? May be for some people too familiar? If you are somewhere guilty for being a Good Starter, but a lousy finisher at work, or in your personal life, or in your society, or among your relations, you have a very common problem that Seleaninews drawn a practical understanding of such situation. After all, we recommend you to read David Allen’s Getting Things Done one of the huge bestseller to how people could easily figure out how to get things weel done on their own.
Getting into it….
More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a beginning to its end. The uncovered reason on why that can be so difficult to many people, and a simple and effective strategy to other, is based on the rate you keep motivation high along the way of your commitment.
In recent studies in the University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking). People routinely use both kinds of thinking to motivate themselves:
A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead.
A dieter who wants to lose 30 pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding themselves of the 20 pounds already lost, or the 10 left to go.
Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal. But too much to-date thinking, but focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it. It has an aside motivation but that can lead you to laziness of early satisfaction. Koo and Fish Bach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to back down and slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important science course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover compared to being told that they had already completed 48%.
When we focus on progress made, we’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals. This is common classic Good Starter behavior that lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.
If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, and it’s heightened with a continuous strategy. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brain cells are wired among them. To-go thinking helps us tune in to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we actually want to be. When the human brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at its attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower any opportunity that can jump us into the road of achieving the missing step.
In fact, it’s the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed which in to-date thinking masks that signal. You probably feel good about the ground you’ve covered, but you possibly won’t cover much more in to-date thinking behavior.
Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal, drive themselves from what was done and never congratulate themselves on a job half-done. Great managers create Great Finishers by reminding their employees to keep their eyes on the prize, and to be careful on avoiding any giving effusive praise or rewards for hitting milestones “along the way”. Encouragement is important, but to keep your team motivated, save the accolades for a job well in a completely done mode.
Activity Quiz to send the answers (as Comment, or on Twitter or by email):
Suppose you were alive in 1884 and were approached by an aspiring entrepreneur who had developed the most efficient and durable horse carriage ever created. Would you invest in this company?
If you were lucky to stay alive one year later, another inventor by the name of Karl Benz would patent what is now considered the first automobile, how could you feel about your above answer?
Within 20 years, the horse and carriage industry would be under assault from the automobile, what is your feeling now?
And within another 15, the nascent automobile industry found itself rocked by yet another innovation of Henry Ford’s system of mass production, which obliterated hundreds of competitors who could not produce cars as quickly or cheaply that I am sure you start asking yourself, what can you do?
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