Overshoot

You can’t always hit a ball with both accuracy and distance — there’s a trade-off. Same with amplitude and frequency. (Image by zhaofugang1234)

In his classic book The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss points out that it unrealistic and unreasonable goals are easier to achieve than realistic and reasonable ones.

As he memorably put it, “I’ll run through walls to get a catamaran trip through the Greek Islands, but I might not change my brand of cereal for a weekend trip through Columbus, Ohio.”

There are a few reasons for this. Tim points out the adrenaline and passion involved that can drive you toward an especially enticing result, along with the lack of competition one might find in going for something particularly difficult.

I see a third factor, which is that a big goal forces us to recalibrate. Instead of trying to hit our target perfectly, we can deliberately overshoot the mark. In the process, we may discover that we can get double, triple, or quintuple the impact with less effort than it would have taken us to do the same boring thing we always do.

Many of us get a bit too precise. We’re looking for just the right paint color, essay topic, prom theme. We want to find the most elegant solution to a problem, the ideal words to say to resolve a conflict, the exact joke to put everyone at ease at the start of a talk.

In our efforts to find the perfect fit, we’re overlooking lots of possibilities that come close but aren’t quiiiiiite what we want. We’ll consider and reject a bunch of ideas, or we might even get completely stuck and come up empty.

When we overshoot, we intentionally aim for more than is reasonable or realistic. In doing so, we trick ourselves into making the best of the available options. Then, we discover that these options had more potential than we realized.

Recently, I was struggling with what to write about. I felt no urgency because the day’s article was already written; I knew I didn’t have to write an article that day. So I decided to overshoot. I asked myself what I would do if I had to write five articles in one day. Suddenly, I overcame my block and the ideas started to flow. The writing progressed quickly and easily.

I didn’t actually write five articles that day, but I didn’t need to. In letting go of trying to uncover the one idea that would solve my problem, I found an abundance of them to keep me going. The prospect of a big, almost unattainable goal delighted and inspired me.

Some websites have those impossible sliders that move again once you’ve clicked your mouse away. You go back and try again only to have it happen again. Go too far and pull back, and then you will land where you’re trying to go. Life is kind of like that, too.

We can do the same thing with band names, products to sell, vacations we might take (someday), side dishes for a dinner party (someday). And even if we can’t take advantage of all of the options (sadly, you can only go on one vacation at a time), we can still break out of our stuckness by seeing the alternatives. So many decisions seem so hard to make when they’re a choice between A and B; it might be that G is the option for us. And when in doubt, we can go with all of the above.