Deciding How Much Is Enough Before You Get There

You set a number two years ago and last month you hit it. It felt the way you expected for about a day, and then the day ended, and by Friday you had already said a bigger number out loud to somebody. Nothing has gone wrong with you. That is what a target does when it is defined by motion instead of by a line, and it happens to capable people more than anybody, because they are the ones who keep clearing the bar.

There is a fix and it is unglamorous. You decide what enough looks like in advance, in writing, while nothing is at stake yet and the decision is cheap. Not so you will want less. So that the thing you want has an edge on it, and so that on an ordinary Tuesday you can tell whether you are winning.

Why does the finish line keep moving?

Because your expectations rise with your results, and they rise faster than you notice. Researchers have been measuring this since 1978, when Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman compared major lottery winners with people who had not won and found the winners were no happier than the control group, and took less pleasure from ordinary daily events.

Later work sharpened that picture rather than repeating it. Diener, Lucas and Scollon reviewed the adaptation research and found that people do not simply return to one neutral baseline after everything: set points differ between people, they differ across parts of a life, and they can move under some conditions. So this is not a rule that nothing you achieve will ever count. It is a narrower and more useful finding. The satisfaction from hitting a specific number fades faster than the effort it took to get there, and the mind quietly re-bases on the new normal.

The practical consequence is the one that costs people years. If enough is always whatever is next, then enough is by definition somewhere you are not, and you can run a twenty year career without ever arriving anywhere. Naming the line in advance does not make you less ambitious than the person who refuses to. It makes you the one who will be able to tell when they won.

What does an enough line look like on paper?

One sentence, in your own handwriting, naming the figure, the title, or the condition at which this particular thing is finished. Then a date on which you are allowed to look at it again.

Three shapes cover almost everything:

• A figure. Revenue, salary, savings, subscribers. Specific enough that a stranger could tell you whether you hit it.
• A title or a position. The role, the credit, the seat in the room. Write the actual words, not the feeling you expect the words to produce.
• A condition. This is the one most people skip and it is often the true answer. Enough is when the business runs a week without me. Enough is when I can take the Friday. Enough is when the work I do most days is the work I am best at.

Then write three prices this want is not allowed to cost, and make one of them physical: sleep, or training. Those are the first two things an ambitious person spends and the last two they can afford to lose.

Writing it down changes the odds, which is a measured claim rather than a motivational one. A meta-analysis of mental contrasting with implementation intentions, covering 21 studies and nearly 16,000 participants, found a small to medium effect on goal attainment from the plain act of naming the outcome and writing the specific plan. Small effects compound over a decade.

Does naming a number cap what I could do?

No, and this objection is worth answering directly, because it is the reason most people never write the line. An enough line is not a ceiling on ambition. It is a definition of the win, and a definition caps nothing. It tells you which game you are playing so you can play it properly.

Two things happen once the line exists. The first is that you stop paying the panic tax. Somebody who does not know what winning looks like reads every quarter as evidence about their own worth, and that is precisely the state in which people take bad deals, hire in a hurry and agree to things on a phone call. The second is that saying no gets faster, because a request can now be measured against something specific. Most of what slows an ambitious person down is not a lack of effort. It is the twenty commitments that were never checked against the target.

You are allowed more than one line, in sequence. Hit this one, take the week, then write the next one on purpose instead of drifting into it. That is the difference between ten years of compounding work and ten years of starting over on a bigger number.

What is everything past the line for?

For somebody else, decided in the same sitting and in the same handwriting. The moment you name the point at which this is finished, you have also named the point at which everything after it is surplus, and surplus with no destination quietly becomes the new baseline, which moves the target again and puts you back where you started.

So write a second name on the same page. Not a cause and not a percentage. A person, plus one specific thing you will do for them on the way to your own line. Say their name in a room they are not in. Make the introduction you could have kept. Give them an hour of the thing you are paid for rather than an hour of general help.

The founder of KEEP CALM describes giving back as one of the mechanisms rather than the prize at the end. In his own account he hustled all his life, found ways to stay calm through it, and got where he was going, and the whole way up he was looking for chances to coach, advise, lift up, commend and champion the people in his sphere. He says what came back was ten times what he put in. That is his account of his own twenty years, offered as evidence rather than as a law you should expect to hold for you. The reason it belongs on the same page as your number is practical: a goal with another person inside it survives the year the purely private goal does not.

When is it honest to move the line?

On the date you wrote down, and not on the afternoon you feel like it. That is the entire function of a check date. It turns moving the line from a drift into a decision, and a decision leaves a record.

When the date arrives, ask three questions in order. Has the reason under this goal changed, or only the number? Would you still want the new line if nobody found out you reached it? And what did the last twelve months cost against the three prices you said you would not pay? If the reason has held and the prices went unpaid, moving the line is a legitimate call, and you write the new one down the same way you wrote the first.

Writing it down protects you in the other direction too. Sheldon and Elliot, tracking people through three longitudinal studies, found that goals which fit a person's own developing interests and values got more sustained effort, were more likely to be attained, and produced more from being attained. A line you check on a date is a line you can notice you have stopped believing in, at the earliest possible moment rather than four years late.

Enough is decided while you are still hungry

None of this is a brake. The point of naming the line early is that you can go at the thing without stopping every few months to wonder whether the thing is worth going at, and that question is far more expensive than the work.

Do it in the next hour, on paper: the sentence, the figure or the condition, the three prices, the name of the person you are carrying, and the date. Ten minutes. Then go back to work. In two years you will either have hit it, in which case you get to feel it properly, or you will have changed it on a date you chose, which is not quitting.

The reason to be precise now is that you intend to be doing this for a long time. Somebody who knows what winning looks like can push harder, because they are pushing at something with an edge on it instead of at the horizon.

Sources

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?
• American Psychologist, Beyond the hedonic treadmill: revising the adaptation theory of well-being
• Frontiers in Psychology, A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: the self-concordance model