What I Talk About When I Talk About Shared Goals
Why I’m Obsessed with Shared Goals: Unearthing The Hidden Opportunity in Our Collective Ambitions
I’m obsessed with shared goals.
I’ve now spent what feels like every waking minute of the last three years thinking, studying, working on or talking about shared goals. I’ve read hundreds of research papers on social psychology, psychological anthropology and everything in between. I’ve talked to dozens of experts in the field, with more Phds between them than you can count. I’ve also achieved dozens of my own personal goals in that time, so most importantly, I know what shared goals feel like; how they helped me rebuild my identity when I was at my lowest, how they nudge me everyday to push my limits, and how much fun it is working on ambitious goals with friends.
In this piece, I’ll merge my personal experiences with scientific insights to provide a holistic understanding of shared goals. By the end, I hope I’ll have convinced you of why shared goals are the greatest technology ever invented, and how they can be used to reshape our world and everyone in it. I’ll also paint a positive picture of the future, and how we can use the second greatest technology ever invented — A.I. — to help us realize this ambitious vision.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Goals, Growth, and a Second-Hand Honda: A Personal Journey of Obsession, Aspiration, and Rediscovery Through the Power of Goals
I grew up on a sheep farm in rural Australia, and my parents were generally supportive of my desire to get a motorbike. But they also believed that if I really wanted something, I had to earn it. As my pocket money as a 13 year old wasn’t going to stretch to getting a motorbike anytime that decade, they proposed an alternative: if I got straight A’s for the entire year and completed a certain amount of farm work, they’d buy one for me. I think they thought consistency was unlikely, and saw it as an opportunity to teach me something about hard work and the importance of education. But I jumped at the opportunity to take on my first ever goal. Fast forward 12 months, and I found myself the proud owner of a second-hand Honda XR100. From the first ride on my motorbike — which felt like a combination of freedom and an ‘up yours!’ to anyone who thought I couldn’t do it — goals became a part of my life.
Since that point, goals served as quiet waypoints, subtly shaping my aspirations like getting into my first choice University, and saving enough to head off on a European adventure to run with the bulls in Pamplona and party in Berlin. When I started work, the terminology changed; objectives and key results, targets, and KPIs replaced ‘goals’, but they were the same. However, despite my long association with goals, it wasn’t until I was abruptly severed from a company that I Co-Founded — my company — that I discovered their true potential.
The company was Respondent, a two sided marketplace connecting researchers and research participants. I’d started the business with my neighbor, and in the space of four years we’d grown the business from a spare room startup into a venture with millions in revenue, an exceptional team of 30-odd employees, and clients who included some of the biggest names in tech. From the outside, it looked like a flawless ascent. But behind the scenes, I was experiencing a painful deterioration of the relationship I had with my Co-Founder.
As the business grew, we couldn’t agree on what its goals should be, and hadn’t developed a method for working through disagreements. But despite months of tension between us, I assumed it would pass. I’d poured so much of myself into growing the business, my identity had become intertwined with it; I was the business, and the business was me.
So when I received a buy-out offer, and subsequently decided to sell my shares and walk away from the business, I was completely lost. I was experiencing a special blend of regret and pain about how things had ended, and frankly, I didn’t know how to deal with it. To make matters worse, I found that by a process of unconscious inertia over the last four years, I’d let all the other parts of my life fall away; my friendships had withered, I had no passions outside of business, no real hobbies to occupy my time, and heartbreakingly, my marriage was under stress after years of neglect. And then Covid happened, and what had been bad got a whole lot worse.
Despite the prevalence of Co-Founder break-ups and Co-Founders leaving companies, every situation is unique — and I found deciding what to do next excruciatingly difficult. What was meant to be a source of celebration — a successful exit to private equity! — felt like anything but. I didn’t want to see anyone. I wouldn’t speak to my family. I bought a playstation and played Assassins Creed until the early hours of the morning. I’d take my dog on really, really long walks. I started making extravagant cocktails in the afternoon — and I don’t even like cocktails.
After months of misery, a casual conversation with a friend was ultimately what helped me. During our short catch up call, he suggested that I set some goals to ‘get excited about the future’. I casually agreed, not suspecting it’d lead me down a rabbit hole I’ve now been exploring for over two years.
Immediately, I was hooked. Some goals were minor, like reclaiming my health by running 80 km a month. Others had more weight to them, like speaking with 10 of my career idols and reconnecting with my wife through regular date nights. Collectively, these early goals served to help anchor me and gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning; I’d found a way forward. And then, miraculously, because I was focused on achieving my goals, my attention to goal related things improved, and I started to notice opportunities I hadn’t before; like a flier advertising a local running club, and a LinkedIn post promoting a company I hadn’t heard of that I was interested in learning more about. I joined the running club, and got in touch with a friend who was advising the company. These small actions sparked a snowball effect of progress. I was back!
Researchers have discovered that simply picturing success can stimulate the brain like real experience, releasing dopamine which can boost motivation and decrease feelings of depression. But it only goes so far. After a while, I began to worry that my goals weren’t right, or that I wasn’t making enough progress quickly enough. What I was missing was feedback on the goals I’d set, and someone to help tell me when I needed to lean in. What I was missing was other people.
Survival of the Friendliest: The Power of Shared Goals and the Untapped Potential of Cooperation
My inclination to share was tapping into something deeply ingrained, which is a remnant of our evolutionary past. Evolutionary biologists are now finding neural and genetic evidence that humans are fundamentally predisposed for cooperation. Our genetic predisposition for wanting to have a chat about things was pivotal in our ancestors developing a skill scientists now call ‘cooperative communication’, which is a literal superpower that allows us to fend off predators and hunt together, ensuring the specimens — our ancestors — who were good at it, lived to pass on their genes. In contrast, Neanderthals, who had bigger brains and were stronger than Homo Sapiens, couldn’t manage the same sort of co-operative behavior and met an untimely extinction. The irony of this situation is that it isn’t survival of the fittest, but in fact, survival of the friendliest. While in today’s world, we might not be hunting animals or warding off predators, the fundamental principle persists — we’re hardwired to be better together.
If you’ve ever found camaraderie in a team sport, felt the communal pulse in a Peloton class, or endured working through the night with colleagues on a particularly thorny task, you understand the potency of collaboration. And if that’s not enough, science has joined the chorus.
Literally hundreds of research studies now reveal that team goals not only enhance outcomes but also internal processes.r Groups with clear objectives triumph over even the most gifted individuals. Having others around while working towards a goal can elevate both the likelihood of success and self-regard. And finally, and this is probably the best bit, it doesn’t matter whether it’s money, fitness, relationships, or career goals, shared goals prove proficient across the board. There’s clearly something to them. What the evidence, both empirical and anecdotal, all converges to is a striking conclusion: collaboration doesn’t merely nudge our chances of success upwards — it massively increases it. One good example of this effect can be found in Duolingo — the language learning app — which reports that users who participate in ‘friend quests’ (a process of sharing your learning goals) are 5.6x more likely to finish their language course. That’s a 560% surge in success, tucked into an otherwise ordinary feature added years after the app’s debut.
So there I was, having made some progress on my goals but beginning to stall, looking for people to share them with. But who to ask? And what would they think? In the end, I decided the juice was worth the squeeze, incurred the social costs of asking for help and floated the idea with friends from University. Since our university days, we’ve scattered to far-flung locations — Portland OR, Dubai, Melbourne, and rural New South Wales — so I was surprised when everyone responded enthusiastically.
For me, the selection criteria really boiled down to people I could be open with. While the need for transparency isn’t mentioned in the research, who you choose to partner with on goals does matter quite a bit. While most people choose to share goals with people they know well, their friends and acquaintances, a 2019 study found that shared goals are most effective when shared with people whose opinions you value. In my case, I was lucky — my friends ticked this box too.
With a group in place, I discovered that with a small investment in software, and a large investment of time and energy, it was possible to create a setup to share personal goals and updates on a weekly basis. The mechanics of actually sharing the updates were a bit clunky, but the results were instant and my goal performance immediately improved — more than that, I also found huge value in feeling valued, through the opportunity to provide feedback and encouragement to my friends on their goal progress as well.
This good feeling is more than just good vibes, it has roots in neurobiology. When you receive recognition for helping someone, research has found that you get little blips of oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine delivered, which light up the same areas of the brain as food and sex. This is now known as the ‘helpers high’. It’s this chemical reward which explains why we like working together so much. But most intriguingly, the social aspect that ties all this together is a reciprocal relationship between giving help, and receiving it. The more you give, the more you receive as well, which is proven to help you get ahead.
As our goal-sharing experiment matured, I realized that progress on my goals and the little bursts of chemical enhancement I was getting were secondary to something else — which was re-establishing a deep connection with some of my closest friends. The goals had grown in importance beyond personal ambitions to a source of connection and meaning. My experience mirrors the findings of psychologists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, emphasize the bond-forming power of shared tasks — serving to deepen and enrich the connections between those involved. But what the literature neglects to mention, that I now think is true, is that the process of sharing goals is more valuable than the outcome of the goal itself. And I don’t think I’m alone in that feeling.
What’s particularly exciting / sad about the opportunity for shared goals at this moment in time, is that 36% of Americans are grappling with ‘serious loneliness’, 12% of Americans confess to having no close friends and the traditional avenues of finding friends — church and work — are falling apart. So while friendship development might seem secondary to the goal-boosting benefits of shared goals, the cultivation of relationships that shared goals promote could actually become the main thing. Only time will tell.
So given their potential for enhancing connection, increasing success rates, and fostering community, to me, shared goals seem to be a profoundly promising response to the human quest for improvement and fulfillment. Everybody wants to improve something, so the TAM for this opportunity should roughly be the size of the internet.
What makes this opportunity even more promising, is that outside of b2b applications, only Strava (fitness) and Duolingo (learning a language) are using shared goals well — the territory of shared goals remains a wide-open field, awaiting pioneers.
And that’s a challenge I want to take on.
More on this in my next post.
PS. Thanks to Murakami for the inspiration for the title of this article.
PPS. If you need a nudge to start setting goals, watch this, then visit www.thefinalcountdown.life
