Why goals are made in 3s and not 2s.
I have a theory about goal setting. Please feel free to read and destroy / debate my theory in the comments!
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Introduction
It is widely written, although perhaps not widely known, that people fail to grasp the concept of exponential growth patterns. For example, it is easy to understand that if a bank gives us ยฃ100 each year. In 10 years we will be ยฃ1000 richer in monetary terms. But it is much harder to understand if a bank gives us 10% interest each year. In 10 years we will have what? 100% more? 10% more? It is actually 259% more! I know what you are thinking…ย what bank gives us 10% interest?! I am just using a a simple example to illustrate my point.
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My theory
I would like to go a step further and make people seem even more clueless. My theory is that people find it hard to understand fractions except for halves. It is easy to fill up half a glass but how about a third? Or two fifths? Much more difficult. In fact, the easiest way to pour a third would be to compare a third to a half because we know a third is less than a half. Anyway that is my theory, and it is needed for the next part.
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Goals
So what does all this have to do with goals? Let’s imagine you have one goal and one goal only. You would allocate all your time and energy into achieving that one goal. Time is easy to allocate, but energy / focus is much harder to quantify and therefore measure.
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But now let us imagine you have two goals. How do you split your focus between the two goals? Well if they are both equally important then we would split our energy half on each. But nothing is ever equally important, we all have a favourite child or a favourite parent. So how do we spend more resources on one goal than the other? This is where my theory kicks in. Since we find it hard to perceive fractions, we would lean towards two solutions. Spending 100% of our resources on one goal and forgetting about the other goal, failing to complete the second less important goal. Or, we end up spending half of our resources on each goal, failing to spend enough resources on the more important goal – potentially even failing to complete both goals.
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What happens if we have 3 goals? First, let us assume we have sorted the goals in order of importance, with goal 1 being the most important and goal 3 being the least important. We would either spend all our resources on goal 1 or spend 50% on goal 1 and 50% on the other two. The 50% for the other two goals is similar to the two goals problem. Therefore we would have the following options for goals 1, 2, 3:
100%, 0%, 0%
50%, 50%, 0%
50%, 25%, 25%
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This still has the possibility of focusing on goal one and forgetting about the other two. Alternatively, we successfully identify the least important goal and spend equal resources on goal one and goal two forgetting about goal 3. Or we successfully identify the most important goal and spend 50% of resources on goal one and 25% of resources on goals two and three.
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So why are goals made in 3s and not 2s, because in 3s we can start to successfully allocate our resources somewhat proportionally depending on the importance of each of our goals. In other words, we can start to avoid the 100% problem, neglecting our secondary goals, and avoid the 50/50 problem, not spending enough resources on the most important goal. I don’t know, maybe I am just talking rubbish. What do you think?
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Appendix
There is a swathe of journals regarding ratio processing systems of the brain, both for and against humans ability to perceive fractions. Although I could not find one closely related to my theory. Article examples include:
- Barth H., Starr A., Sullivan J. (2009). Childrenโs mappings of large number words to numerosities. Cognitive Development, 24, 248โ264.
- Percival G., Dana L. (2015). Fractions as percepts? Exploring cross-format distance effects for fractional magnitudes. Cognitive Psychology, 78, 28-56.
