Priscilla Xu

Key Takeaways

• The goal, milestone, concrete plan, and reward system are the four pillars of achieving your goals.
• Make around 15% errors of the time.
• Multitask to release epinephrine into your system to build momentum
• How to focus on your goal line?: Focus your attention beyond your peripersonal space and hold it for 30-60 seconds.
• Visualize failure as an ongoing motivation for achieving goals because fears and anxiety are related to survival.
• Ensure Specificity of Goals, Weekly Assessment

Tool 1: 85% Rule for Optimal Learning

• You want to make errors for neuroplasticity.
• The state of frustration makes the brain want to change.
• Make around 15% errors of the time.

Brain parts for Goal Setting

• Different types of goals: immediate, short term, intermediate-term, and long term.
• Humans can have multiple goals at once. This is unique to human
  • Humans will juggle many goals at once.
• Amygdala: avoid punishment or embarrassment is for goal-seeking
• Basal ganglia- Ventral striatum: go and no go system. Do or not do things.
• Lateral prefrontal cortex: executive function
• Orbital prefrontal cortex: meshing emotionality with the current state of progress and accessing the value of pursuing the goal.

Determining the values of your goals

• The value of the goal is very important. It determines if you will take action or not.
• Dopamine is how we assess the value of the goal.
• Behavior B or A to help you pursue your goals?

Goal setting and achieving have 3 steps

1. Set the goal
2. Assessment of the goal and planning
3. Execution of the goal by accessing the value of the goal and how to engage.

Peripersonal Space vs. Extrapersonal Space

• Peri-personal space is your skin and within your reach.
  • The inner feeling of you. Using your computer is within your reach.
  • Govern by serotonin
  • We evaluate the feelings of here and now to pursue of goals or not.
• Extrapersonal space is somewhere you need to get to by moving your feet.
  • Govern by dopamine.

Visually Focusing on a Goal Line Improves Performance

• You can multitask.
  • Multitasking helps you to get into the zone.
    • When you jump back and forth between tasks, your body will release norepinephrine to get into action.
    • But later during the goal pursuit, you should not multitask.
  • Three minutes of focus attention before you shift from a Carnegie Melon study.
  • Emily Balcetis NYU. Focus on the goal line.
  • And people will think they have put in less effort.
  • 15 ankle weight and run. 17% less effort. and 23% faster with looking at the goal line.

Low Vision Improves Performance: Blood Pressure

• Changes in the autonomic nervous system produce ner
• Vergence eye movement with Parvocellular will narrow visual perception and allow you to focus.
• Your vision system communicates with your circulatory system.
• Your systolic blood pressure increases so you can focus your vision more.
• Adrenaline also gets you into action.
• If you have that goal in your vision field, then you will take action beyond your peripersonal space.

Tool 2: Use Focal Vision to Initiate Goal Pursuit

• Keeping your goal in sight with the Parvocellular pathway.
• Focus your attention beyond your peripersonal space and hold it for 30-60 seconds.

Tool 3: Use Aged Self-Images to Self-Motivate

• Delay discounting: goal in the future without a reward, and you won’t want it as much.
  • So that’s why investment is complex.
• If you look at yourself with how you will look 30-40 years from now, you will save more money.
• What we see is phenomenal about how we pursue your goals.

Tool 4: Visualisation of Goals is Only Helpful at the Start

• Positive visualization will not work in the long run
• You increase your systolic blood pressure and can generate action

Tool 5: Visualizing Failure is the Best Ongoing Motivator

• Visualize the failure of the goal so you will take action. It is a difference of two times.
  • How dissatisfied you will feel.
• Humans are better at avoiding things they do not like.
• We are using fear in the amygdala to make we pursue goals.
• This is similar to what Charlie Munger says to avoid being stupid and think what you do will make this business fail, then reverse that to what you need to do.

Tool 6: Make Goals Moderately Lofty

• How inspirational?
• The goal cannot be too easy or too hard.
  • If it is too easy, your body will think this is a waste of energy.
  • Too hard being that you think it’s impossible, and it’s also a waste of energy.

Tool 7: Avoid Goal Distraction; Focus on 1-2 Major Goals Per Year

• Limit your goals and not get distracted goals.
• 2 major goals per year are enough.
• If you have more things in your attention field, you will not be able to have strong goal-pursyut behavior.

Tool 8: Ensure Specificity of Goals, Weekly Assessment

• How specific should you go with your goals?
• You have to be a very concrete plan after you set your goal.
• The action steps you will take to get to the very specific outcome.
• Weekly is a good review time for changing the goal plan.
• Dopamine Reward Prediction Error, Controlling Dopamine
  • If you expect something to happen, and it happens, dopamine will increase. But less than unexpected events.
  • The rat that chooses to run has positive benefits. The rat that was forced to run has negative health benefits.
  • The milestone varies. It is top-down and decided by you.
  • The reward is cognitive. Telling myself, I am on the right track.
  • An interval you can maintain consistently.
    • The weekly review is enough. LOL, GTD’s weekly review is scientific-based too.
  • Thinking you are failing is different from visualizing failure.
  • Dopamine is a self-amplifying system with unexpected rewards for pursuing the goal.

How Dopamine Influences Vision & Vice Versa

• People without dopamine have eye movement that is depleted. They have less visual cone focus.
• When you focus on something with your eyes, your dopamine, and systolic blood pressure will increase.

Tool 9: Space-Time Bridging

• View a horizon.
• Close your eyes and focus your attention on the interception of an inner landscape for 3 slow breaths.
• Eliminate the outer sensory stimuli.
• Then, focus on your pam of 90 to 10 ratio.
• 3 breath: Then you move 10-15 feet to exteroception but still focus on your interception and breath.
• 3 Breathe again and focus on the horizon.
• Then move back into your body.
• This helps you with how you carve and batch up time.
• A physiological response like a heartbeat is how the body perceives time.
• Carving up the time of the milestone and how you will reach that goal is related to this space-time bridge.
  • Cognition inlined with the reward system.