Success Requires Us to Differentiate Goals from Dreams
You may be planning your way to frustration and stress.
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Success Requires Us to Differentiate Goals from Dreams
One cause of burnout is the sudden irrelevance of small, achievable, immediate goals and the shifting of our larger goals into a more distant future.
It’s a psychological manifestation of our maturing out of the Dunning-Kruger effect and embracing the extended learning curve of this endeavor we’ve undertaken. We understand better how hard this will be, and the work ahead overwhelms the progress made. The novice mountain climber’s goal has proven itself a false summit.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an evolutionary advantage for the advancement of intellectual beings. Our underestimation of the work required for success enables us to undertake pursuits we’d otherwise believe beyond all hope, but there comes that dark moment of the soul where we must transition from dreamer to practitioner or simply give up because the effort outweighs the reward.
I doubt the foolishness of these beginnings can be or should be fully thwarted. This is the human process toward greatness. Approaching the new task with wisdom will extend Dunning-Kruger’s grace period, while a more naive implementation will lead to a more sudden and devastating encounter with the false summit. This early disillusionment more often results in abandoned dreams for we lack any history of success to encourage us forward—there’s no spent cost.*
*Another potential evolutionary advantage of our psychological shortcomings: the spent-cost fallacy plays an emotional role in our decision to persevere toward a goal that’s shifted toward a more distant future.
There exists a principle, the denial of which sets us up for that early disillusionment: dreams inspire research and knowledge inspires plans.
I came across a new Substacker who had a few followers but not a single subscriber, and yet she was ready to release her novel on Substack. She had her publishing schedule all worked out. I saw heartbreak in her future and tried to counsel her to get a bit of an audience first, but she was emotionally tied to the plan. She quoted the movie Field of Dreams: build it, and they will come.
I helped direct some subscribers her way, hoping to give her the best chance I could, and then left her to do things her way. There’s always the chance she’ll overcome the odds and do well—but if you have experience on Substack, you have a better idea of what comes to pass. Your early posts go unseen and unloved. That was the reason for the first incarnation of Literary Salon. We gathered as fiction writers to support one another’s posts. We still do.
If those early posts are chapters of a novel, that lack of interaction is harder to shake off. You’ve lost the opportunity to build a following with your first chapter, and everyone who finds you stumbles upon an ongoing serial with no interaction—no proof that other people find this worth an investment of time.
Another psychological shortcoming defines her approach: magical thinking. Again, it has its evolutionary advantage. Unreasonable expectations for success lead to greater performance. In studies, students who had a lucky charm performed better on memory tests.
All our illogical motivators start us down a path, but eventually we meet reality. In that moment, our illusions fail. Our emotions plummet, and our energy falters. For the first time, we approach the task as it truly is, and we decide if the journey ahead is worth it.
