The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're talking all about goals and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals. There's a tremendous amount of information on the internet and in books and so forth about how to set goals and assess your progress towards goals and update your goals and so forth. In fact, there's so many programs out there that includes so many different acronyms that it can be a little bit overwhelming. Today's conversation about goals is going to be quite a bit different. Indeed, we are going to talk about setting goals. We are also going to talk about how to assess progress towards goals. And we are going to talk about goal execution. However, we're going to do all of this in the context of neuroscience because it turns out that there are not hundreds or dozens or even several neural circuits in your brain that control goal setting and movement toward your goals. There is one. And while it includes many different brain areas, that one circuit is the same circuit that's responsible for pursuing all goals. And it relates to some very basic neurochemical mechanisms that are understood. So while there's a wealth of information out there about goals and goal setting and goal achievement and so forth, there's comparatively little information that's been available to the public about the neuroscience of goal setting and goal achievement. So that's what we're going to focus on today. I promise that we're going to get into the neuroscience. We're going to touch on a little bit of the psychology and how the neuroscience relates to what's known in the psychology literature. And we are going to establish several, in fact, four specific protocols that you can use for goal setting, goal assessment and goal execution in an ongoing basis, regardless of what your personal goals happen to be. Before we dive into our conversation about goals and goal setting and goal achievement, I'd like to highlight some recent scientific findings that I think are going to be interesting and actionable for many of you out there. In earlier podcasts, we talked about neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience. In fact, neuroplasticity underlies all forms of learning, whether or not it's language learning or learning music or math or a physical skill. All forms of learning involve the reorganization of connections in the nervous system, the brain and spinal cord and body. One of the key principles of neuroplasticity is this notion of making errors as a good thing toward neuroplasticity. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but what the scientific literature tells us is that whenever we're trying to learn something new, if we make an error, we know it feels frustrating, but that state of frustration actually cues up particular brain areas to be more alert so that on subsequent attempts to learn that thing, we have a heightened level of focus and a higher probability of learning the new skill, regardless of what that skill is. And I've talked about this before in various episodes as encouraging people to embrace errors or pursue errors, not as their own end goal, but errors as an entry point for making the brain more plastic. And if you think about it, it really makes sense. Why would the brain change at all if it's performing everything perfectly? When you make errors, well, in the immediate seconds and minutes after those errors, you are in a better position to learn. A common question I get, however, is what should be the rate of errors, which is really just a way of saying how hard should the given task be that you're trying to learn or perform? And it turns out there's an answer. There's a recent paper that was published in a great journal, Nature Communications. This is a paper, a last author, Jonathan Cohen. And the paper is entitled The 85% Rule for Optimal Learning. This paper we will make available by a link in the show note captions. But basically what this paper shows is that when trying to learn something new, you want to make the difficulty of what you're trying to learn such that you're getting things right about 85% of the time, that you're making errors about 15% of the time. And the reason I like this paper is is it really points specifically to some protocols that we can implement because people always say, okay, you want to set a high goal. You want to try and achieve something that's really lofty, but you don't want to make the goal so lofty that you don't make any progress at all. Other people say you really want to start with really small goals and make things very, very incremental, only set out to do things that you know you can accomplish. And that will feedback on your self-esteem and all these positive feedback loops. And then, you know, layer by layer, layer by layer, you'll eventually get where you want to go. Well, it turns out that neither is true. You need to set the level of difficulty such that you're making errors about 15% of the time. And I want to emphasize about 15% of the time, because there's no way to figure protocols for sport or language or math or anything else where you're going to have exactly 15% of errors. So anyway, this paper, the 85% rule for optimal learning, again, we will supply the link, but it really points to the idea of making things pretty hard, but not so hard that you're failing every attempt or even half of the attempts. Failing about 15% of the time seems optimal for learning. Hopefully that information will be useful to any of you that are trying to learn something. Hopefully it will also be useful to those of you that are teaching kids or other adults. If you're teaching, keep in mind that you want to keep the students reaching for higher and higher levels of proficiency in whatever that is that you're teaching and that 15% of the time they should be failing. If it gets to 20%, that's probably okay. If they start failing about half the time, then probably what they're trying to learn is too difficult for them at that point. Now, of course, this is going to be controlled by all sorts of external factors, like whether or not they slept well the night before, whether or not you slept well the night before and you're being clear in your instructions to them, et cetera. But I think the 15% rule, as we may call it, is a good metric to aim for and it can serve both students and teachers. In other words, it can serve both those teaching and those that are learning. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. 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