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Professor and psychologist Janet Polivy posits that people don’t behave logically when time and time again they try to introduce a change in their lives despite previous failures.
According to her concept of the “false hope syndrome,” many individuals are stuck in a cycle in which they have unrealistic expectations about accomplishing their goals. They tend to be wrong about the speed, amount, ease, and consequences of their attempts.[16] They try, fail, brood over it, process it, and try again, but with the same unrealistic expectations, which guarantees yet another failure.
Bob wants to lose 50 pounds as quickly as possible. He sets a goal to burn excess fat within three months. This new diet he just read about looks easy, and after all, what’s so difficult about losing weight?
When he steps on the scales two weeks later, he realizes he’s only lost 4 pounds. There’s also little difference in his appearance. Frustrated at the slow pace and his restrictive crash diet, he gorges on fast food for the entire week.
A month passes. Bob realizes he really needs to lose weight. He’ll reach it this time, he assures himself. He just didn’t try hard enough with his previous attempt. He picks a new popular diet — this one will surely work — and starts again. Three weeks later, Bob is seen filling his shopping cart with so much junk food that he can barely push the cart to the counter.
This process repeats over and over again. After each failure, Bob rejects the notion that his approach is flawed. He either didn’t try hard enough or it was the wrong diet. He never questions that maybe it’s not about little adjustments, but that his entire approach needs to change to one of focusing on sustainable results and permanent changes.
As Janet Polivy asks in her paper, “Do those who succeed on their sixth attempt succeed by using, once again, the same strategy that failed on the previous five attempts? Or do those who succeed on the sixth attempt do so because they have adjusted their strategy to make it more realistic and therefore more likely to succeed?”
If you repeatedly fail with the same goal, it’s possible you set unrealistic expectations and are stuck in the false hope loop. Here are three principles to avoid chasing impossible goals:
Ignorance is the culprit of the false hope syndrome. A person who wants to make a positive change in their life will exhibit overexcitement and a readiness to start as quickly as possible — usually at the expense of doing proper research.
Note that this usually happens to a person who doesn’t know much about the goal they want to reach. Elon Musk can say that he’ll send people to Mars within a decade because he’s already an extremely accomplished entrepreneur and knows a lot about the space industry. Your neighbor Joe is an unlikely space pioneer, unless he happens to be a billionaire astrophysicist. He would make a better start in the business world by building an e-commerce store or a landscaping company.
To avoid failing due to unrealistic expectations, make sure to carefully research the feasibility of your goals. Can you really lose 10 pounds a week? Does an average entrepreneur build a six-figure business in six months? Has any world-class performer become one after a mere year of training?
Explore different strategies to reach your goal, primarily focusing on the ones that have been proven to work for numerous people before. A revolutionary system to become a golf star within six weeks might sound exciting, but it’s the plain old regular practice — day in, day out for years — that delivers real-world, sustainable results.
(Side note: I cover in great detail how to do proper research and choose a winning strategy in my book The Ultimate Focus Strategy: How to Set the Right Goals, Develop Powerful Focus, Stick to the Process, and Achieve Success.)
If you’ve already failed a couple of times and want to try again, consider completely changing your approach, rather than trying the same approach again and expecting different results. Perhaps the approach you’ve taken isn’t founded on healthy principles or doesn’t work in your unique situation.
When you close your mind to alternative approaches, you can get stuck in the failure loop forever. It’s like trying to dig a metro tunnel with a trowel. No matter how hard you work, you won’t accomplish it in your lifetime. What you need is professional machinery, not more energy to dig with a trowel.
I used to follow the traditional bodybuilding method of bulking up to gain muscle and then going on a diet to shed excess body fat. I was so set on this strategy that I wouldn’t even consider that there was another way to improve my physique — even when the approach clearly didn’t work for me, no matter how strict I was about it. Fortunately, multiple failures later I finally saw the light and decided to completely change my approach.
I spent over five years launching one business after another. The process was virtually the same every time — a new idea, a lot of enthusiasm, first steps, first problems, failure, depression, another new idea, another failure, rinse and repeat. Instead of picking one solid business idea and sticking to it no matter what, I gave myself failure after failure. Once again, —if I hadn’t opened my mind to a new approach, I wouldn’t have reached my goal.
If you’ve had similar experiences, drop all of your preconceived notions and try again with a completely different approach. Don’t be afraid to experiment with a strategy that is opposite to what you’ve been sticking to until now. Being flexible is one of the most powerful traits for success.
Peter Drucker once said that most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Before the construction of the countryside house for my parents commenced (I’ve previously mentioned that financing this project was one of my most important reasons to build a successful business), everyone told me that in construction, everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much. I didn’t believe it. After all, if you hire the right team and budget properly, it’s impossible that such a thing can happen, right?
How wrong I was. Everything did cost much more and did take much longer. It made me realize that even with the most careful calculations, you’ll probably still overestimate how much you can achieve in a given period of time. If you refuse to accept this reality, say hello to the failure loop.
When setting a new goal and deadline, remind yourself that ultimately even if you don’t achieve something by your self-imposed deadline, you’re still farther ahead. It’s illogical to quit because during 3 months you’ve lost just 10 pounds instead of 20. Yet, that’s precisely what many people do. They assume that since things didn’t go exactly as planned, they failed. Then they get frustrated, turn to junk food to reassure themselves, and a few weeks later, the 10 pounds they’ve lost are back.
To sum up, to avoid failure due to unrealistic expectations, focus on two key actions:
1. Ensure that your expectations are realistic by performing thorough research. Putting on rose-colored glasses and living in the world of happy ignorance is not a good way to reach your goals. There’ll be time for moonshot goals once you become an expert and can accurately estimate the probability of reaching those big dreams.
2. Develop patience and accept that even if you’re the greatest project manager in the world, you’ll still fail to account for every surprise, delay, and setback. What’s important isn’t reaching the goal by a given deadline — it’s reaching the goal, period.
EMPOWERING STORY #2: PETER DIAMANDIS
Upon discovering that Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927 to win a $25,000 prize, engineer, physician, and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis came up with an idea to offer an incentive prize to build and fly a reusable private spaceship.
In May 1996, without the prize money in hand, Peter went onstage under the St. Louis Gateway Arch and announced the $10 million XPRIZE to build and fly a reusable private spaceship carrying three people into space on two flights within two weeks.
He thought that he would easily find a sponsor. Moreover, the prize was to be paid after the spaceship successfully completed both flights, and you don’t exactly build a spaceship in a few weeks so there was plenty of time to find the right benefactor.
Except it didn’t work out as Peter expected. Between 1996 and 2001 he would pitch to over 150 sponsors — and get rejected 150 times.
Fortunately, his persistence and grit eventually paid off when in 2002 — six years after announcing the prize — he met the Ansari family who ultimately funded the $10 million prize. The prize was paid out on October 4, 2004 to the SpaceShipOne team led by American designer Burt Rutan.
Today, the XPRIZE Foundation has awarded over $300 million in XPRIZEs designed to encourage technological development and radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.
As Peter said in his article about his breakthroughs, “If I had to name my superpower, it would be persistence (or grit) — i.e. not giving up, even when everyone is telling me that it isn’t going to work.”[17]
1. The second common type of failure is failure due to unrealistic expectations. Some people get stuck in a cycle in which they set unreasonable expectations, fail, try again, and fail again due to being unrealistic with what they can accomplish.
2. To prevent this failure from happening, make sure to do proper research before setting a goal. Ignorance leads to unrealistic expectations, which leads to failure. Be particularly careful when you’re a newbie. Assume you’ll achieve average results and focus on proven strategies instead of seeking magic pills.
3. Be open to changing your approach if your current strategy isn’t working. Being stubborn when your approach isn’t effective won’t magically make it work.
4. Accept that things rarely go as planned. It might take you longer to reach your goal than you’d like, and you’ll probably overestimate what you can achieve in a short period of time. Be patient.
