Luke Burgis:
I have some desires that are like a pile of leaves. When a little gust of wind blows across them, they’re just gone. There’s not a lot of continuity and enduring value in those desires.

Joel Miller:
That’s Luke Burgis. He’s the entrepreneur in residence at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America. He’s also a veteran entrepreneur and the author of the book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. I’m here to say Wanting is actually one of the best books I read in 2022. In fact, it’s why I wanted to have Luke on the show, specifically because he has a really helpful framework for thinking about the goals that we pursue, especially the desires behind the goals, why we want to pursue them in the first place.

Luke Burgis:
If you think of this as how we invest our time and energy, I want to invest in desires that are ultimately going to lead to flourishing. I don’t want to have wasted my time pursuing bright shiny objects that I’m not going to care about in five or 10 years.

Joel Miller:
Hi, I’m Joel Miller. I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus, and today on the Business Accelerator Podcast, we are talking about the mistakes we make as we pursue goals. Our founder, Michael Hyatt, and our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller, are going to talk about five mistakes that people commonly make as they pursue goals. These are so common, in fact, we hear them all the time from our coaching clients. The reality is that these mistakes are so common, you can’t even claim that you’re at fault for them. They’re just kind of the way we operate.
One of the things that Michael and Megan do in this conversation is really give us the freedom to recognize them without feeling bad and instead actually empower us with some countermeasures for those mistakes. Following that conversation, we’ll get to the rest of my conversation with Luke Burgis. I want to hear specifically about how we can get tripped up when we pursue things that in truth we don’t really want. Let’s jump into this conversation with Michael and Megan. Again, these are five mistakes that people commonly make with their goals. You might be making them right now.
They’re so common, in fact, you really shouldn’t feel bad about them. You should just recognize that that can happen and operate differently once you find out the countermeasure.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, it is goal setting season. Whether you’re thinking about that as a business owner and in the context of your company, or you’re thinking about that as an individual leader, you’re probably thinking about goals right now. I know I am. I know we are with our clients. You’re probably putting the finishing touches on your strategic plan and your budget, and maybe you’re thinking about New Year’s resolutions you want to set. This time of year is all about envisioning the future. I love it. I also feel like I’m kind of in two head spaces between the year that I’m finishing and the year that I’m getting ready to go.
I have to remind myself, oh wait, it’s not 2023 yet. January hasn’t happened. But I really enjoy it. But the reality is that there are so many people, in fact, most people who set goals or intentions or resolutions, but they don’t achieve them. We’re going to talk today about some mistakes that we see clients make, that we see people in our audience make with regard to setting and achieving goals. Because we really want to share the expertise that we have with you all about how to close that gap, because it’s heartbreaking when you want something, but you can’t figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Dad, I’m really excited to have this conversation with you today.

Michael Hyatt:
Me too. A few things get me as excited as goal setting or more as I try to say often inside the office, goal achievement. I think our company, we’ve become kind of experts. I don’t know if we’re the leading experts, but we’re among the leading experts on goal achievement because we’ve done so much research. We’ve had so many people go through either our Best Year Ever Program or Full Focus Goals. I think we’ve had about almost 50,000 students go through those courses. It’s a big emphasis every year here at Full Focus, and we’re excited to talk to you guys about this right now.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, the interesting thing about setting and achieving goals is that when we don’t achieve them, particularly if maybe this topic of goal achievement in particular is new, we can think that there’s something wrong with us, that we fail, that somehow we’re just not good at accomplishing goals, or we’re just not good at following through. We can develop a little bit of a complex about it.
We can begin to feel badly about ourselves when what we see is that in reality, it’s not you that’s the problem, it’s that you’re unintentionally making some mistakes that we’re aware of that today we’re really going to dig into, the five most common mistakes that we see business owners make in particular. Once you’re aware of these things, you can avoid them and you can finally become consistently successful, not just at setting goals, which is one small part of the whole thing, but actually achieving the goals that you set, which is the harder and more important part.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, well, let’s dive in. The first mistake that people make when it comes to their goals is they don’t write them down and they don’t review them. We know from the research that if you simply write your goals down, you dramatically improve the odds of achieving them. There’s been a lot of research done about this. I’ve included in my books in the past. But all I can say is that when you set that intention pen to paper and you begin to make it concrete, it’s like the first step that you can take of making that thing that’s in your head real. It forces you to get specific in a way that just keeping it bouncing around between your ears doesn’t force you to do.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You really have to answer the question, what do you want?

Michael Hyatt:
That’s right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think that that is one of the harder questions to answer. Everybody wants something more than what they have, but it’s difficult to bring that into clarity. That’s why a really disciplined goal setting process is important, and that’s why we teach it so rigorously in our coaching program, but also through our courses. But part of this first mistake is also not reviewing goals. This is actually the reason that we created the Full Focus Planner all those years ago because we heard this from our students and our clients that they were struggling with this. We thought, okay, we’ve got to incorporate this into a system so that it’s almost fall off a log easy to make sure you maintain visibility on your goals.
We have incorporated that into the weekly preview process, the quarterly preview process as well. But I think business owners are usually pretty good at writing their goals down, setting real goals as opposed to aspirations or intentions that are just squishier. But where I see clients go off track is that they don’t have a process for reviewing their goals. I think one of the best things you can do as a business owner next year to actually achieve the goals that you set is to make sure that you have a process for regularly reviewing those. At Full Focus, we do that on a weekly basis in our team meetings.
We do that on a monthly basis in our team meetings. And on a quarterly basis, we do a quarterly preview process as an organization and really evaluate if we need to make any adjustments to our goals. But when you have those things and you automate them by putting them on your calendar, that’s how you make sure you don’t lose them in the everyday firefighting of running a business.

Michael Hyatt:
Again, the first mistake is they don’t write them down, meaning their goals, or review them. The countermeasure, the way you defeat this mistake is to write and regularly review your goals. Now, again, we have an entire process for this in your Best Year Ever in our Full Focus Goal Setting course, two different things, but we have a whole process for this. We have our proprietary SMARTER framework where we teach you how to write goals that substantially increase the likelihood of you achieving them.
We go through a lot of process there. But the first step, you got to write them down and you got to come up with a strategy or a process for reviewing them on a regular basis so they don’t become out of sight, out of mind.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, well, that leads to the second mistake, which is that they sandbag their goals, they’re just not risky enough.

Michael Hyatt:
I think it’s easy to try to sandbag your goals, and by that we mean set a goal that doesn’t have any risk in it at all. It represents an incremental improvement of what you’ve already done and already know how to do. Now, what we’re not proposing is that you set your goals in the delusional zone where they’re so out there and so big that they scare you, they terrify, you don’t even know where to begin. But there’s a middle ground somewhere between the comfort zone and the delusional zone that is called the discomfort zone, and that’s where you feel a little bit of discomfort. Some of that fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
You think to yourself, “Oh my gosh, what if I failed at this? Maybe there’s a consequence.” Or what if you feel uncertainty? Like, “I don’t even really know how to accomplish it. Maybe I can visualize the first few steps, but I don’t really have a strategy for accomplishing it,” and then you feel doubt. Usually this shows up in the form of self-doubt where you think, do I have what it takes to pull this goal off? If you begin to feel those emotions, you’re right where you need to be in terms of setting the goal. Now, again, don’t set it too far into the discomfort zone where you drip over or bleed over into the delusional zone.
Again, this just takes some practice, but I like to start feeling those emotions, that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and then I know I’ve got it set just about right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think this is such a breakthrough. Because I think if we check in with our emotions when we’re setting goals and we have that experience of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, usually that in other parts of life is kind of a warning system that’s telling us, “Whoa! Back it up, buddy.” In setting and achieving goals, that’s not the case. I mean, you should also have some positive feelings like excitement, inspiration. I think where you find yourself in the delusional zone is if your emotional response is one of defeat or fatalism or cynicism, then that’s an indication that you’ve probably gone a little too far into the delusional zone.
I think as a business owner, as you’re thinking about motivating your team and getting your team excited about accomplishing goals together, you’ve really got to become a master over time at finding the sweet spot between the comfort zone and the delusional zone. You want to be in that discomfort zone, and that gets easier over time to figure that out. But it starts with really paying attention to the emotions that come up as you consider that goal.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the things that I detail in my book, Your Best Year Ever, is the fact that the research shows that the likelihood of you achieving the goal is enhanced when you raise the bar, when you get it into the discomfort zone. Because goals that are in the comfort zone, honestly, they don’t really ignite our imagination or command our best effort. It’s just kind of like, eh, you shrug your shoulders. An incremental improvement is not that exciting and you lose focus and you don’t work on it. But a goal that’s a little bit bigger, that’s going to ignite your imagination, that’s going to command your focus, that’s going to inspire you to work toward it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s why the countermeasure to this second mistake, they sandbag their goals, they’re just not risky enough, is to set goals outside your comfort zone.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, third mistake, people get focused on what they can’t do. We call these, we’re not the only ones, but people in general call these limiting beliefs. There’s some belief that that often is subconscious that you haven’t excavated, but it’s affecting your results, because our beliefs impact our actions and our actions impact our results. We’ve got to be not focused on what we can’t do, but we’ve got to open the space a little bit and say, “What’s possible?” Next year as you’re thinking about goal setting, it’s a blank slate. It’s a blank canvas. Nothing has happened yet. If you think, “Well, I can’t accomplish that,” that’s the time when you need to examine, what’s the limiting belief that’s leading to that?
Usually the words that we say out loud are a way for us to assess and they actually reveal our thinking behind those words. I often catch our coaching clients in this where they’ll say, “Well, I could never do that.” I want to say, “If you say so. But what if you shifted your thinking? What if it is possible?” Now, that doesn’t mean that everything’s possible. I’m not going to go play basketball in the NBA, probably unlikely. But most things that we approach, there’s a set of beliefs around them. The first battle, the first skirmish, is in getting our beliefs right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think this is one of the biggest mistakes people make, and it’s also one of the most insidious reasons people don’t accomplish their goals, because they don’t realize that their stories are driving their lives because they’re driving their behavior. Limiting beliefs are really just stories. They sound like stories where, I could never do that, or that would never be possible because, and that’s the story. In fact, you and I have a new book coming out in January of 2023 at the end of the month really talking about this called Mind Your Mindset.
We talk about that we really have to become conscious of these stories that we’re telling ourselves, these limiting beliefs, and we have to identify them and then we have to interrogate them. And then ultimately, we have to imagine something that is more empowering, and that’s part of what we walk through in our proprietary goal setting process. But if you find yourself circling around the same goals or you feel like you’re just stuck, it’s probably because there is a limiting belief in play that you’re not aware of that needs to be interrogated and replaced with something that is more empowering.

Michael Hyatt:
The countermeasure to this third mistake is to trade your limiting beliefs for liberating truths. Take that limiting belief, and I would encourage you to write these down, write down the sentences that are occurring in your head, and then transform them. Be intentional about what you’re thinking. Because your thinking is not something that’s outside of you that just happens, there’s things that influence it, but you can take control of your thoughts and you can begin. Like at the gym or learning to play the piano, sometimes at the beginning it feels awkward, but you can think new thoughts and you’ve got to transform those limited beliefs into liberating truths.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, that leads us to the fourth mistake, they don’t make their goals specific or measurable. This is one that is especially important for business owners. If you were to say something like, “My goal is to grow my business this year,” well, how do we know if you’ve accomplished it or not. If it’s not measurable, if you don’t say something like,” I want to go from $7 million to $9 million in revenue,” how do you know if you’ve succeeded?
Or if you don’t put a date on it, if you just say, “I want to generate 100 new leads a month,” but you don’t say when that’s going to begin, well, the difference between generating 100 new leads a month starting in February versus starting in November of next year are going to have wildly different impact on your results.

Michael Hyatt:
Just another example, when I’ve had a goal to write a book, and a lot of people have that goal, just write a book, but again, it’s not specific enough. Which book do you want to write? What’s the deadline for you to complete the manuscript? Or if you frame this up as a habit goal, and we make a differentiation in our proprietary framework between achievement goals and habit goals, but if you made a habit goal and you said, “Okay, I want to write 500 words a day every day for 100 days and I’ll have my manuscript,” that would be how to frame it as a habit goal that’s specific and measurable. You know whether you wrote 500 words a day or not.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Exactly. This is why the countermeasure here to avoid this mistake of they don’t make their goals specific or measurable is to take the time to define your action and make it specific and measurable. Go ahead and put a date on it, put an amount on it, put a frequency on it. We just need to be able to know whether we’ve succeeded or failed. Go ahead and do that to avoid this mistake.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the ways I like to say this is that a goal well conceived is a goal half achieved. Getting it conceived and written out in the right format is useful. Again, I would refer you to our SMARTER Framework, which we have at our Best True Ever Course and also our Full Focus Goals Course. Which leads us to the fifth mistake, people fail at goal achievement because they don’t take action. Now, I would like to believe, Megan, that we live in a world where all we have to do is “put it out there to the universe and we can just wait for it to show up.” Now, maybe for somebody somewhere that works, but I would argue that usually when it does work, it’s correlation, not causation.
For most of us, we have to actually take action. Sometimes it’s small actions, sometimes it’s massive action, but we have to take action that leads toward the achievement of the goal. It’s not just going to manifest itself without effort on our behalf. I think for us to break it down and to make it less scary by indicating the next steps is what’s required here. You got the goal, and this is why we recommend the review, because literally every day I’m quickly scanning my goals for the year or for this quarter and I’m saying, “Is there anything that I could do today to move me in the direction of one of my goals for this quarter?”
Every week I’m doing a deeper dive. Those goals that I have for this quarter, what are my motivations? Can I come up with more next steps? Those steps are the key to making steady progress and actually achieving your goals.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Because I think what happens if you’ve set goals that are in your discomfort zone, by definition, they’re big, right? They’re not delusional, but they’re definitely challenging. There’s some risks that’s baked into them, which depending on how you’re wired and what the other goals that you’ve set look like and how they’re calibrated, it can start to feel overwhelming. You get real excited, but then you feel a little bit paralyzed because all you see is this massive goal, like maybe you’re going to buy a new house, or launch a new product line, or hire several new people, or achieve some very significant growth in your business.
You can just feel shut down by that big goal. I think the antidote to this is breaking it down into next actions. Anytime I start to feel overwhelmed with something, this is a little practice that I do in my own mind and just say, “Okay, well, what’s the next right step? What’s the next right step?” Usually when you think about it in chunks like that, it’s actually not overwhelming. It doesn’t really matter how big it is, as long as you have enough time to get it done. As long as you’re just taking one step at a time, you can dial back the panicky feeling or that freeze feeling of fight, flight, or freeze that sometimes hits us and we start to feel overwhelmed.
But we’ve got to take action, and we can do that by taking something that seems really big and breaking it down into reasonable steps.

Michael Hyatt:
You literally have to break it down where the steps are in your comfort zone. Now, that sounds, “Wait a second, I thought you said our goals need to be in our discomfort zone.” They do, but the next steps need to be in the comfort zone. I’ll give you an example. I had a client that I was talking to recently who needs to hire a CFO. They said to me, “Every time I think about this, it overwhelms me because I really don’t know where to start. I’ve never hired at this level before.” This would be the first executive level position they were going to hire for. I said, “Well, let’s break it down to some manageable steps. What’s the first thing that you think you need to do?”
They’d been through my teaching on our hiring roadmap. They said, “Well, I need a job description, but honestly, that’s even overwhelming.” I said, “What about this? Are there three people that you know who have a CFO that would be willing to share with you the job descriptions for their CFO and then at least you don’t have to start from scratch? You can borrow, modify, and whatever.” They lit up. They went, “Oh, absolutely. I could totally do that,” and it got them off the dime and stopped the procrastination, so they got into movement. If you’re still feeling like it’s too overwhelming, you probably need to break it down even a little bit more.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I love that. I think these emotional cues are so helpful because you want to feel fear, uncertainty, doubt when you’ve set your goals appropriately in the discomfort zone. But when we’re talking about these next actions, you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. You shouldn’t feel fearful. You shouldn’t feel insecure or unsure. It should just feel like, oh, I’ve got to send that person an email, or I’ve got to write that thing, which isn’t that big a deal. That’ll take me an hour or two. Something like that, that is really in your comfort zone.
Personally to me, that makes me feel like I can take on anything because I’m not worried about trying to eat the whole elephant in one bite. I know that it’s going to get broken down into manageable pieces.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s so good. Well, this should be clear from what we’ve already said that the countermeasure is to break down your big risky goal into actionable next steps that are in your comfort zone. Okay, Megan, as we’ve talked about these five mistakes, so let me just repeat them again in case you’re driving and listening to this, I want to make sure that you have these all in mind. First mistake, they don’t write them down or review them. Second mistake, they sandbag their goals.
They’re just not risky enough. Third mistake, they get focused on what they can’t do, limiting beliefs. Fourth mistake, they don’t make their goals specific or measurable. And then fifth mistake, they don’t take action. You have any final thoughts?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I think that, again, like I started talking at the beginning of this episode, it’s easy to get down on yourself or feel like you’re not that good of a leader, or maybe you’re just not cut out for this growth or achievement stuff because you’re not achieving the goals that you set. After working with hundreds and hundreds of our clients, we can confidently say it is far more likely that you’re making some small mistake that you’re unaware of that’s very correctable, that’s really just learning a new skillset that if you master, you will become a pro at setting and, most importantly, achieving goals in the context of your business and as a business owner.
Hopefully that’s encouraging to you. Hopefully that gets you excited about the next year. If you’ve had some misses in the past, rather than falling into one of these mistakes and sandbagging, hopefully you’re willing to try again setting goals truly in the discomfort zone because now you have visibility into where you’ve probably gotten hung up in the past. The problem wasn’t you, the problem was just the strategy you were using.

Joel Miller:
I like to think of those mistakes that Michael and Megan mentioned as practical mistakes. They’re the kind of mistakes that manifest in the way we formulate and pursue our goals. But now I want to shift to this conversation with Luke Burgis and talk about a mistake that’s more foundational. This is the mistake that goes to the very foundation of goal setting, in that a goal is about something we want, unless it’s not. We’ll get to that after the break. Welcome back. It’s time to jump into this conversation with Luke Burgis. Remember, he’s the author of the book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.
That word mimetic may not be one that we hear or think about every day, but it’s foundational to goal setting because it deals with why we want what we want. The reality is that what mimetic desire shows us is that a lot of what we want is really just what other people want. We are mimicking them. We are pursuing the things that they want. If you want to fail in goal setting, like a sure fire way is to pursue something you ultimately don’t want. Luke can help straighten some of that out for us, and that’s what makes me excited about this conversation. Goal setting is all about identifying what we want, but Luke, that’s sometimes harder than we realize. Can you tell us why that is?

Luke Burgis:
I think we often just take our desires for granted and we don’t question them. We assume that we just know what we want, and then we find out later that we really had no idea what we wanted. We were going down pathways of desire for reasons that were totally unknown to us and mysterious to us at the time. I believe that’s largely due to one hidden force in human social relations called mimetic desire. This is the topic of my book.
That means that human beings often imitate the desire subconsciously of other people without necessarily knowing that they’re doing that. This leads to a situation where we’re influenced, our desires are influenced by this network of relationships in our lives, people that are modeling various desires to us, and we might not even know that they’re there or the way that they’re influencing us.

Joel Miller:
You talk about that with the label systems of desire. Can you just elaborate on that some more?

Luke Burgis:
We all grew up in some kind of a system of desire. Our family probably had a system of desire where certain things are modeled as more desirable than other things. It could be you grew up in a family where you’ve got a parent who’s a doctor and going to med school is a really valuable thing. There’s systems of desire in industries. I tell the story in my book of a French chef who grew up in the south of France. When you’re a French chef, the Michelin star system forms a system of desire for you, where acquiring and maintaining a Michelin star for your restaurant becomes something that begins to shape your entire vocation as a chef. The education system has a system of desire.
Just being aware that these systems are at play and are reinforced through social structures, they’re often very systemic, being aware of that is really an important step in seeing where we stand in relationship to that and making sure that we’re not moving through our life and making choices in a mechanistic way, and just accepting the system of desire for what it is and having it dictate to us what it is that we should actually want.

Joel Miller:
Where this comes to mind for me in a very poignant way, as the chief product officer of Full Focus, we’re all about goal setting. We’re all about goal achievement. One of the key things we discuss often is the difference between an intrinsic motivator and an extrinsic motivator. By that we mean you’re internally driven to do something versus externally driven. It seems to me that if you’re not aware of this dynamic you’re talking about, a lot of the things that you think of as intrinsic desires are actually just extrinsic desires filtered through the systems of desire, and suddenly you want things that you don’t actually care that much about.

Luke Burgis:
Oh, I think that’s right. I call that in the book the romantic lie that we tell ourselves after the fact, and we make our desires out to be more intrinsic than perhaps they actually are. We live in a culture where we think of ourselves as very independent and autonomous, and we think of our desires the same way, that I want what I want, and that desire just came out of nowhere. It’s just the product of my authentic self. That’s a nice thing to think. We like to think of ourselves as being totally in control of the things that we want, when in fact there are… We’re social creatures. And that’s not a bad thing.
That’s actually a good, beautiful, wonderful thing. We can be affected by what other people want who are close to us, who model desires to us in extraordinarily positive ways. We talk about role models for children and things like that, but we often think that we outgrow that. As adults, we don’t acknowledge the models of desire that we have in our lives the way that we might for children.

Joel Miller:
You, in the book Wanting, talk about two primary kinds of models. There’s like the celebrity model and then there’s your peer model. Talk to us about the difference between those two and how that shows up in and the kind of things that we pursue.

Luke Burgis:
The celebrity model, I call an external mediator of desire. It’s external because this is a person who’s totally outside of our world. When I was growing up, Michael Jordan was a model for me as a young basketball player. I’m five foot nine. I really had no real chance of making it to the NBA because I also can’t jump very high and I can’t shoot very well. He was outside of my world. There was some kind of an existential distance between the two of us. An internal mediator of desire, on the other hand, is somebody who’s in my world. I can come into contact with them. They could be my colleague.
They could be my own friend. There’s somebody who’s mediating and modeling desires to me from inside of my world. These are the kind that we normally don’t know about. The external models are easy to name because they’re at a distance from us. We tend to almost be embarrassed by the internal models of desire, for better or worse,. I teach a lot of college freshmen. When they describe to me why they chose the majors that they chose, all of them have these highly rational reasons and very few of them will admit that one of their classmates is very likely an internal model of desire for them.
They chose a major and that somehow influenced them. In fact, that was the case for me when I was in college. I changed my major three times. It was only when I looked back at that four years later that I realized that each time there was an influential person who affected the way that I viewed it, even though I had this story that I told myself in my head. The internal models or mediators of desire are the ones that are particularly hidden from us and they can affect us in positive and negative ways. It’s important to just understand that dynamic in our workplace, in our families, in our personal lives.

Joel Miller:
One area where I see this come up negatively in myself, and honestly, reading your book helped expose it for me in a way that not only surprised me, it horrified me and I now am able to notice it when it springs up, and that is I think about a business context in particular, you talk about competition and rivalry coming out of these mimetic relationships between people. I think about a few folks in our industry, for instance, and they start doing something, I’m like, “Oh man, we got to go catch them. We got to go whatever.”
I just feel this competitive urge and then I recognize now that’s totally destructive and pointless. The truth is that’s distracting me from more important goals and instead I’m chasing something that doesn’t make any sense to chase.

Luke Burgis:
It happens from company to company, imitating one another as rivals and using other organizations as measuring sticks, which I think negatively impacts innovation and the journey that each of us is on within our organization. If you have a clearly defined mission, it’s important to not be distracted by the negative forms of rivalry that this mimetic desire can often lead to. Because if we’re taking somebody else as a model of desire, we’re competing with them for the same things. We value what they value because they value it. That naturally leads to rivalry and conflict. This happens within organizations all the time.
You could have somebody who’s perfectly happy in their role. They have a lunch meeting with somebody else in the organization one day. That person tells them about some opening that they really want. They go home that night, and all of a sudden they begin wondering if they too shouldn’t want to pursue that opening or change their role, whereas the thought never crossed their mind that very morning. These things happen a lot when people don’t have a strong sense of personal mission. We begin to look to our right and our left and we can get pulled in a thousand different directions.

Joel Miller:
Well, you talk about some countermeasures to these impulses that we have, especially the negative side of things. Talk about what separates what you call thick and thin desires.

Luke Burgis:
Desires fall on a spectrum of mimesis. Some things we pursue, we do for highly mimetic reasons. Other things we do for less mimetic reasons, because we’ve carefully discerned, we’ve gone through more of a thoughtful decision-making process, rather than just purely following it because somebody else wanted it. A thin desire is just on the high mimetic end of the spectrum or the scale. That’s a thin desire because odds are, it’s something that we want today that we’ll look at a week from now or a year from now and no longer want and actually wonder why we were so obsessed with it in the first place.
It’s thin in the sense. The image that I use is a pile of leaves. I have some desires that are like a pile of leaves. When a little gust of wind blows across them, they’re just gone. Those are desires that don’t have a lot of solidity. They’re not really grounded in anything that’s core to who I am. There’s not a lot of continuity and enduring value in those desires. A thick desire, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. It’s a desire that has been cultivated and built up over a long period of time. We can think of virtues as being thick desires, a lot of spending time with my family, investing in relationships.
These are desires that usually are… We don’t have to worry about them getting blown away when a new model of desire comes in our life because there’s something enduring and consistent there. Those are the kinds of desires that I like to invest in. I mean, if you think of this as how we invest our time and energy, I want to invest in desires that are ultimately going to lead to flourishing. I don’t want to have wasted my time pursuing bright shiny objects that I’m not going to care about in five or 10 years.

Joel Miller:
This obviously intersects with this topic of goal setting in that a lot of times if those external models are telling us, “Hey, pursue this thing, pursue that thing,” and that’s what we’re fired up about sometime in December or early January as we’re setting goals, we could end up setting goals around things that are purely external to us. They’re thin desires. Come June, honestly come February, but come later in the year or whatever, as we are facing the struggle of pursuing that thing, we just give up, because we realize at that point it never mattered. But we’ve wasted all that time.

Luke Burgis:
Well, in full disclosure, I’ve been a Full Focus Planner user for several years, and one of the things that I do is I question my own goal setting all the time. We tend to just take goal setting for granted. My goal is my goal. It’s what I want and so be it. But I actually try to track the way that my desires evolve over the course of the year and the influences that are at work in my life at any given time. Let’s say I wake up one morning, I’m having a bad day and, I don’t know, I want to quit my job. I make it a goal that I want to quit my job within three months and transition to a new company or something like that.
And then the next week, I may have no desire to leave. Just actually tracking the way that my relationship to my own goals, it’s almost a second order level of thinking, like thinking about why we set the goals that we set in the first place and then looking at the influences that have been in my life. I could go back and say, “Oh, well, it’s interesting because I didn’t even realize it that the day before I woke up with that idea, this thing had happened, or this person came into my life, or I read this in the newspaper. It stoked this intense feeling in me that went away after 24 hours.” But at the time, it seemed really real, right?
This is about a process of discernment and actually testing our desires, not taking them for granted and being able to discern the difference between a thin and a thick desire, in my words.

Joel Miller:
Frustrated wants. We reach a point where we have desires that are potentially self-canceling or they compete with other important things. How do we think through navigating those dynamics?

Luke Burgis:
Competing desires internal to us, in other words, like things where it’s got to be one or the other. That’s a tough one. I think oftentimes we think that two desires are competing when in fact they’re not. Just building a sense of priority in terms of what we want in our life, which I think has to do with a sense of mission, a sense of vocation, and having some understanding of a hierarchy of values in my life. This is also important for an organization to have a hierarchy of values. To give you an example of this, this is a true story.
I had a friend of mine decide to hold a bachelor party in Las Vegas, where I used to live for a few times, right before Easter, which happened to be on Good Friday Now I have these two competing values. That’s a very important day for me. It’s a very solemn, solemn day and I take it very seriously. But I also value my friend in that relationship and I have a desire to be there and support him. Now I have two competing desires. I really do want to be with the guys, but it’s also very important to me. My faith is very important to me.
For me, there was a very clear hierarchy of values in that situation and just a very relatively easy conversation to have about, “Hey, I look forward to the wedding. But in this particular situation, that’s a bad day. You could have picked probably 362 days of the year when I probably would’ve been there.” Establishing that. Because we often talk about having values and we can name our values, but we don’t know how they stand in relationship to one another or what’s more important.
I don’t know, I’ve never drawn a pyramid for myself, but I have a pretty good idea of the way that my values stack up. When it comes to discerning desires, I can check them against a framework of values that have some hierarchy to them.

Joel Miller:
Establishing that hierarchy of values would seem to be really important for just understanding how your goals relate to each other. You may have some goals that are more important than others. Having clarity about that on the front end would enable you to see how they align or don’t.

Luke Burgis:
I have remote goals and I have proximate goals. Some of those proximate goals are connected to my remote goals. How am I going to get there? And then I have a series of sub goals under that. I think that also factors into this hierarchy of values. That remote goal, that’s my telos, that’s where I ultimately want to be. And then evaluating some of my smaller goals in terms of how they’re in relationship to the ultimate goal.
Because I found myself at various points in my life creating to-do lists and checklists and checking off goals and accomplishing goals without actually asking myself why, because it feels good to get things done, right? Seeing how that ties into a broader mission has really, really been important for me.

Joel Miller:
That enables you to envision those smaller or proximate goals as being strategies towards the more long-term goals.

Luke Burgis:
Exactly. Strategy for me helps me decide what to say yes to and what to say no to, because I only have so much time on this earth. That’s a framework and a heuristic for good goal setting for sure. My goals affect my desires and my desires affect my goals. I think just understanding that this relationship between the two is a way to go one layer deeper from the way that we traditionally talk about goal setting.

Joel Miller:
That’s a natural lead in to a question that comes actually out of your newsletter, Anti-Mimetic. I saw this when this showed up and I instantly hit on it and saved it to my Apple Notes to come back to at a later date. I thought, oh, I have a chance to talk to you. I’m going to ask you about this. But you had a reader that talked about life debt for and life investment, and they talked about the relationship in software, like debt is the load that a thing has to undergo, a piece of software or whatever, but lives are like that too. These thin and thick desires have that same effect on us. Tell us a little bit more then about life debt versus life investment.

Luke Burgis:
I have some awesome readers that put comments to newsletters like that that really make me think for weeks and months on end. I thank Anish for that. You build up technology debt when you take a shortcut. You build an easy piece of software that will not scale, for instance, and you’re going to have to invest a lot later to fix it and to go back and to redo it. You build up that debt. He put this in the framework of thin and thick desires and he said, “It seems like many of us build up a lot of life debt from the pursuit of thin desires.” Now, I don’t think it’s feasible and I’d probably be pretty miserable if I spent my entire life only investing in what I call my thick desires.
I think that thin desires, maybe I need to differentiate a little bit because they’re not entirely negative. I think play is very important for a person. I like to play. I like to get together with my buddies and watch football on Sundays. Is that this serious thick desire? Well, the watching of football is probably a pretty thin desire. I probably care about whether or not the Detroit Lions win or lose way more than I should. I always regret it about three weeks into every season, but I do it anyway. There’s a sense of play and camaraderie, and I think there’s probably a thick desire underneath that, which is us building bonds of friendship together.
It’s not either/or. I certainly don’t mean to make it sound binary, like we have thin desires and we have thick desires. When I’m together with the guys on the weekends, I think there are both things happening at the same time.

Joel Miller:
That enables you then though to have a rationale that’s deeper if you can see how those two things work together. Because it’s not the football that matters, it’s the relationships that matter. You could fulfill those relationships in other ways potentially.

Luke Burgis:
Absolutely, yeah. It’s about finding meaning in what we’re doing. There are different layers to us getting together. There are different layers of desire. Sure, watching football might be relatively thin one, but I think we can understand many of the things that we do in terms of these various layers. If we find out, if we look at the layers and we find out that, wow, there is nothing at the bottom that I really care about or that I’m going to want to have invested in when I look back at this,” then perhaps it is falling more on the thin side.

Joel Miller:
Let’s chat about business owners and how mimetic desire shows up in their strategy, in the kind of goals that they set for their business. We’re at the end of strategic planning for most businesses. They’re wrapping up their budgets. They are looking forward into next year. How can they check this problem in their own strategies here before they get started in January?

Luke Burgis:
I think there’s a couple ways that business owners can do this. I’m a business owner myself, so I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Think about the way that decisions that you make and the way that you model desires affect the desires of people within the organization. The things that they actually want. What’s valuable? Are we creating totems of status within the organization that people are going to fight over rather than work towards there a clearly defined sense of personal mission?
I think just connecting on a personal level, a person’s sense of mission with the mission of the organization, can avoid some of the mimetic rivalry and conflict that can spread in an organization when people don’t have that sense. It’s worth investing in those kinds of conversations over and over again. It’s certainly once a year at least. I think it’s really important for any business leader to have some kind of a transcendent goal that unites all of these smaller missions within the organization. A story that I recently heard about this, I was talking to the leader of a small school in Arizona that serves a very poor, mostly immigrant community in Arizona.
The whole goal of the school is to try to educate these students, help them get into good colleges, get good jobs, and eventually lift them out of poverty and their families so that their kids won’t necessarily have to go to a school whose job it is, who identifies its mission as helping lift kids out of poverty. This principal said, “If we do our job well, then our school will not exist 20 or 30 years from now in its current form.” The whole model is it’s a work-study program where the students go work at a company on Fridays and they’re in school the other four days. He said, “If we do our job well, there’ll be a form of creative destruction and we’re going to have to reinvent our mission.”
It just occurred to me that this is a leader that has a transcendent desire that goes beyond the immediate. There’s the proximate goal, but it’s connected to this goal. If we do it well, we’re going to have to evolve. To me, as I went through the school and I talked to teachers, I talked to the faculty, they were united by this long-term belief, and most of them thought that they were going to be there for 20 years because they wanted to see it through. It was incredibly powerful to hear that transcendent goal articulated. Most principals that I’ve ever talked to just care about that year’s graduation rate and college acceptance rate.
This person was talking about what would happen 20 years in the future if they do their job well. That long-term thinking about the way that they would affect the desires of all of the students and families in that entire community was something that had reverberated through the entire school.

Joel Miller:
We’re coming to the close of the conversation with Luke, but I wanted to hit one more topic. He talks about several tactics that we can use against the negative influences of mimetic desire, and one of those that he says is finding sources of wisdom that can withstand it. I thought I’d ask him, what does that really look like?

Luke Burgis:
I’ve found that the kind of knowledge that I pursue, I often pursue in mimetic ways. I’m just imitating what everybody else is telling me to read, what I see on Twitter or so forth. Ideas are kind of like fashion. There are ideas that are fashionable and then they’re unfashionable and they come and go. I reached a certain point in my life, for me, it was in my late twenties, where I realized that I was just pursuing fashionable knowledge. I bought every book as soon as it came out, and I had a debt in my life for… I didn’t know a lot of classical knowledge, like the kind of ideas that have been around for a very long time, that have withstood the test of time.
A lot of your readers I think will be familiar with the Lindy effect, right? It’s like you can reasonably predict how much longer something’s going to be around by its current age, or how long it’s already been around. This is not a new idea, but I think reading older books, books that are more than 25 years old, is something that I started to do. There’s a chance that those are the kind of knowledge contained in those books, I don’t know, call it thick knowledge. They’ve been around for a while. People have kicked the tires. I found a lot of satisfaction in doing that. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong whatsoever with pursuing the newer things.
I mean, my book is brand new. I hope you read it. But I will say that Gerard, who’s the influence for the book, said that he was just going back to the classics. Aristotle and Plato talked about the role of imitation in human life. It’s just a little test that I’ve done for myself and asked myself, how do I want to invest my time and attention? There’s this whole body of human wisdom that has been built up over centuries, thousands of years, in fact. I don’t want to be ignorant of it. As I’m pursuing a course of knowledge, just like I would a desire, I just check myself and try to understand the mimetic forces that might be acting on me as I’m pursuing one thing or another.

Joel Miller:
Luke Burgis, thank you so much for being here today.

Luke Burgis:
Thanks so much for having me, Joel. It’s a real pleasure.

Joel Miller:
If you’re looking to be successful with your goals next year, you have to think about two kinds of potential mistakes and how to avoid them. The first is the practical stuff. The way you formulate a goal, the fact that it may not be specific or measurable enough, for instance. Beyond that, you have to think of the foundational errors that we make, really these errors of desire where fundamentally we’ve almost misled ourselves into believing that we want something that we truly don’t. If we can’t formulate those goals in a structurally sound way, we will be much further towards achieving those goals, goals we want, than if we hadn’t done that.
If you want to pursue those ideas at a further level, I recommend Luke Burgis’ book, Wanting. It’s a really powerful read. And that’s it for this episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. If you’re a business owner and you’re interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator Coaching Program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful, but overwhelmed small business owners just like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. And if that sounds interesting to you, you might dismiss it as a mere mimetic desire. I suggested it, therefore you want it. But don’t be too quick.
What if that’s really your authentic desire to experience the double win to be able to win at work and succeed at life? If that’s true, go to businessaccelerator.com and book a free call with one of our business growth consultants. That’s it. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help accelerate your business.