Telling your friends about your goals will have a 50% increase in you achieving it

[charlie cho]

I find this quite ironic. Since my younger days, I was taught not to talk about it, and I did that, but I found myself to not achieve them as effectively when I hid my inner truth from somebody else. This is simply my personal experience. The reason I started talking about my goals to others was because I saw many sports athletes like Muhammad Ali, Allen Iverson, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Larry Bird being honest about their goals. Steve Jobs was also one of those figures for me. He would have no shame in talking about his outlandish dreams to his peers, and he did not care if people called him a crazy douche. 

I know some people advise others to not talk about your goals to your friends because they won't support you along the way. I get that totally. But that premise, to me, seems to cover only half of what is possible with achieving goals when we express them or not. I think there is a strength in expressing our crazy goals to someone however weird it may seem. In one way, we could think of it as the dawn of leadership, right? How can there be a leader when he or she does not have a vision? 

I think this idea of increasing 50% chance of achieving your goals when expressed to friends was first realized with a psychological experiment, where they held two groups that would express their task to their friends and the other not. In conclusion, the study group that expressed their small task to their friends had 50% more results than the other group that did not express their goals. 

This experiment is an oversimplification of our usual immense task that is given to us on a daily basis, yet I cannot express enough how even this small experiment reflects the bigger part of our journey to become enlightened.

[Hanna Luna]

I've often found that when I let others in on my goals/plans, it tends to backfire. Not in the sense that the person I'm telling my goals to rejects the idea, but rather, talking about it gives me a sense of fulfillment, which leads me to slack off on actually putting such an idea into action.

[charlie cho]

@Hanna Luna yes right. I see that in western cultures. Funny thing is in America, everybody talks about their dreams. Here in Korea, nobody talks about their dreams, in my observation. I'm dead serious. Both are extremes. 

Man life is hard sometimes.

[Hanna Luna]

@charlie cho It certainly is. At times harder than others, but that's just par for the course. 

[charlie cho]

@Hanna Luna Did you answer that way because it partly reminded you of your acquaintances talking about their goals but not taking any action on them? Or, those goals look too ambitious in your eyes? I'm just curious to know why you say that. I am reminded of my time living in America, when all my friends would talk lofty ideas after another, then I came to Korea, and my friends were all scared to talk about their ideas. It really was traumatic to me in how different a situation it was for my childhood. 

[Strangeloop]

Well, from my experience telling someone about your goals can be a great way to make yourself accountable. Once you tell the goal to the other person, if it's realistic enough, you can go ahead and achieve it, but with those goals that are kind of vague and doesn't have a real ground in the material world I would withhold it from telling to other people.

Once you tell the people you're kind of obligated to achieve those goals, which can be a good thing. But if you just talk about the goals and don't go and achieve or atleast try to achieve you can be seen as someone who just talks for the sake of talking rather than someone who is congruent with the words you say.

[hyruga]

Only tell those who are likely to be supportive of your goals. 

If you tell just about anyone, some people will laugh at you or spread your dreams like wildfire.