Stop Trying and You’ll Succeed | Law of Paradoxical Goals

What if pursuing what you want actually prevents you from getting it? As we all know, there are many things in life you can pursue directly. If you want coffee and you already have some in your kitchen, then just go make yourself a cup. But other things in life seem to work paradoxically. Pursuing them too directly seems to undermine them. For instance, if you really want to be happy, should you try hard to be happy? Many people think that the answer is no.

That trying too hard to be happy will make you less happy or at least that it will fail to make you happy. Let’s call goals like this paradoxical goals. Unlike regular goals, pursuing paradoxical goals head-on isn’t the way to achieve them. Paradoxical goals are like Chinese finger traps. If you’ve never tried a Chinese finger trap, here’s how they work. Someone, usually a friend, trying to play a prank, tells you to stick your fingers in each end of

The trap. Once you do so, however, you find that your fingers are stuck. The natural inclination to free yourself is to pull your fingers out. But, oddly, the more you pull your fingers apart, the more the trap appears to tighten and you feel even more stuck. The way to free yourself from a Chinese finger trap is not to try to pull your fingers apart. Instead, you should push your fingers towards each other. Doing so loosens the trap so you can easily

Escape. So, pulling your fingers out of a Chinese finger trap is a paradoxical goal. But what other paradoxical goals are there besides getting a cat to like you, of course. And why is it that they’re paradoxical in the first place? That is, why does pursuing these goals directly not usually work? Well, let’s return to our example of happiness. Does trying really hard to be happy work to become happier? For most people, no. At the micro scale of a minute or an hour,

This usually doesn’t work because happiness is an emotion. Most people don’t know how to suddenly make themselves feel a particular emotion of their choosing. So, simply trying to feel happy usually doesn’t work. If we consider the macro scale, that is being happy in our lives more broadly over months or years. Simply trying hard to be happy also usually doesn’t work. This is for much the same reason that simply trying really hard to be good at chess

Doesn’t work for someone who hasn’t played chess before. Being good at chess involves developing a lot of skills. While making an effort matters in chess, that effort has to be directed in the right ways. A new player who has no chess skill can’t play well no matter how much effort they put into beating their opponent. This leads us to the first reason that goals can be paradoxical. To make progress on certain types of goals, you have to direct

Effort in very specific ways that only lead to the goal indirectly. For instance, if you want to beat your friend Sally at chess, it will help a lot if you throw a ton of effort into practicing learning before the match. What doesn’t work is merely making a tremendous effort to beat Sally once the match has already begun. So, to beat Sally, your effort has to be applied indirectly towards skill building rather than directly towards trying to

Annihilate her during the match. Happiness works the same way. If you want to be happy over the next hour, don’t apply tons of effort directly trying to feel happy. apply it indirectly by spending 5 minutes thinking of an activity you can do that’s both enjoyable and meaningful and then simply go do that activity doing the activity which is what will actually make you feel happier may require no effort at all the effort will come into play figuring out what the activity is

And avoiding falling into some other activity instead like doom scrolling on your phone being happy for a month or a year works similarly just making a lot of effort to be happy doesn’t work the effort has to be applied indirectly towards things that set you up for happiness rather than trying for happiness itself. For instance, if you’re a highly social person, but your social life is not fulfilling, you can direct that effort into going to a lot

Of events in your area and then make an effort to talk to a lot of people when you’re at those events. This effort increases the chance that you make more friends, which improves your social life, which causes your social needs to be fulfilled, which has the ultimate effect of making you happier. Attempting to pursue happiness directly can also have an undesirable rebound effect. By focusing on being happy, you may become more aware when you’re not feeling

Happy, which can make you feel even worse. So, direct attempts at feeling happy can backfire. But happiness is not the only type of paradoxical goal. Let’s consider another goal, like meeting the love of your life. Imagine what it looks like to pursue this goal directly when you’re going on a date. You’ll be evaluating throughout the date, could this person be the love of my life? The questions you ask them will help you sus out if they’re love of your life

Material? And if they don’t strike you as life partner or material, you may end the date early. What’s the problem with this? Well, the problem is that it’s likely to undermine your own goal. This is a counterproductive attitude to bring to a date. First of all, it raises the stakes to the sky. If this might be the love of your life, what if you make the wrong impression? What if they don’t like you? The higher the stakes you make

The date in your mind, the more nervous and unnatural you’re likely to act. Second, by focusing on trying to find the love of your life, you’re approaching the other person with an attitude of evaluation. It doesn’t feel good when a person is trying to size us up and see whether we meet some hidden bar they’re comparing us to. Instead of simply being yourself and enjoying getting to know this other person, you’re trying to assess if this person

Is good enough, and they may well pick up on that. Third, by coming into this date with the attitude of finding the love of your life, there’s a risk that you come across as desperate, trying too hard, or overly intense. One of the best ways to hit it off with someone is simply to have fun spending time with them. Desperation, overexertion of effort, and excessive intensity can actually turn a person off or even freak a person out when they don’t know you

Yet. Dating illustrates the second reason that a goal can be paradoxical. Sometimes pursuing a goal directly puts us in the wrong mindset to be effective at achieving that goal. Another domain in which this comes up is meditation. teachers sometimes tell their students not to make too much of an effort to meditate well and not to focus too much on the goal they’re trying to achieve while meditating. The reason? Well, much like the dating scenario, trying too hard to meditate well or

Trying to achieve a specific goal while meditating can actually take you out of the mental state that you need to be in to actually meditate well. So rather than telling you to try hard, a meditation teacher may give you a simple set of instructions like the following. Focus your attention on your breath and each time you notice that your attention is no longer on your breath, non-judgmentally note that your attention has drifted and then gently return your attention to your breath

Again. Stepping back, what are the takeaways here? Well, while some goals such as getting coffee can be effectively pursued directly, we have to watch out for paradoxical goals. By pursuing them directly, we may actually undermine our own efforts. We’ve also seen that goals can be paradoxical for two different reasons. Sometimes to achieve a goal effectively, our effort has to be applied indirectly towards the things that ultimately bring the goal about rather than going straight toward it. We can’t win a chess merely by

Making a huge effort during the game. That effort has to be applied before the game towards skill building. It’s also hard to become happy merely by trying really hard to be happy. We have to apply the effort towards diagnosing why we’re lacking happiness right now and work to correct the underlying factors that will eventually indirectly lead us to feeling happier later on. But other times, goals are paradoxical because trying to pursue them too directly puts us in the wrong state of mind towards

Achieving them. On a date, it doesn’t serve us to be constantly evaluating if the other person is the love of our life. And when we’re in the midst of meditating, it’s counterproductive to be focused on the reason why we’re meditating. So the next time you have a big goal to pursue, you may want to ask yourself, is this a paradoxical goal? If you found this video interesting, I’d love it if you’d subscribe and hit the bell icon. You can also find a ton more

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