Success breeds success. The rich get richer. That's not news. What may surprise you is what it means to get off to a good start. Here's a study that demonstrates how goal attainment and project progress leads to an upward spiral of happiness and success.

I'm a big fan of the work of Ken Sheldon (University of Missouri - Columbia). He and his colleagues have made some important contributions to our understanding of goal pursuit and happiness. In addressing these issues, they also speak directly to the issues I have been discussing in this blog about the costs of procrastination and the important role of living authentically and autonomously if we want to reduce our procrastination.

Sheldon and colleagues have extended the work of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci who have proposed that we have three, universal basic needs: autonomy (the feeling that one endorses and owns one's behavior), competence (the feeling that one is successfully completing tasks requiring skill), and relatedness (the feeling that one is close to and contributing to people who are important or significant). Building mostly on the notion of autonomy, Sheldon has defined the notion of self-concordant goals - goals for which we feel ownership.

Self-concordant goals can be truly intrinsic goals. The kind of goals we engage in purely out of interest. They can also be goals that may be assigned by others, not self-generated, but goals which we internalize and identify with, thus making them our own.

Where this work speaks to the problem of procrastination and well-being is when we are unable to fully accept and internalize the goals in our lives. I've written about this before as inauthentic ways of being or bad faith. Sheldon and Linda Houser-Marko write about it this way, "In short, a person's inability to fully accept and internalize his or her own stated goals may significantly impede that person's attempts to effect positive change in his or her life" (p. 153).

At the heart of self-concordance is the extent to which our goals align with our needs, values and identity. To the extent that they do, Sheldon and colleagues have demonstrated in previous research that progress on or attainment of these goals leads to enhanced well-being. (Interestingly, this research also indicates that success on our non-self-concordant goals has little impact on our happiness.)

The question raised in the study that I want to discuss briefly today is whether goal-related gains in well-being last over time and whether these goal-related gains in well-being influence later performance. Essentially, the hypothesis is that the initial "good start" and success on a self-concordant goal may enhance well-being that in turn increases goal-concordance leading to even greater success, and this all results in a "happiness spiral." The answer this research reveals is - sort of. In fact, Sheldon and Houser-Marko summarize the overall answer to this question by noting, "You can hope to make yourself happier, but it will take hard work to get there and more hard work to stay there" (p. 161).

Ok, so there's no surprise in that. It takes work. The thing is, their research is still intriguing as the basic finding was that in fact getting off to a good start by choosing self-concordant goals and making some initial progress does result in further success. It's just that this can be undermined by failure, and their research was limited to only two time periods, so we can't address to what extent this can be perpetuated over time.

Their research
Sheldon and Houser-Marko conducted two studies. Both are much too complicated both in terms of design and their analyses to describe in this blog (I know that you won't read these details). The strength of their research is in their careful, thoughtful design, and it's one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Sheldon's work. In any case, the gist of it is that they collected data from undergrad students over two terms so that they could examine changes in project progress, well-being, ego development, adjustment to college and GPA over time. They even had the students enlist their parents' participation to get ratings of the students by others who knew them well.

Their analyses were conducted in many ways to get at the nature of the goals the students had (e.g., whether they were self-concordant or extrinsic) and how the students' goal progress and attainment was related to achievement, well-being, adjustment and personal growth over time.

What they found
In Study 1 they found that "those who began the semester with goals that matched their implicit values and interests were better able to attain those goals over the semester, which in turn led to increased adjustment. Goal attainment yielded an additional benefit in that high-achieving participants felt a greater sense of self-determination in their second-semester goals, which in turn predicted even higher levels of attainment during the second semester" (pp. 160-161). So, getting off to a good start did show a spiraling effect on attainment and well-being over the year. That said, few participants were able to increase their well-being scores further in the second term. In absolute terms, they maintained a higher level of well-being than initially reported, but no more.

In Study 2, "the results again indicated that ‘success may breed success,' in that those who did well during the 1st week reported stronger engagement and identification with their goals following the 1st week, a fact that predicted even better goal attainment and thus enhanced well-being following the 2nd week" (p. 162). Ah, the rich do get richer. This also harkens back to my writing about student engagement and lighting the fire for learning. That initial spark of success can be the tinder for a great fire of engagement!

This paper has much more in it worthy of discussion, but I'll stop here and emphasize three messages that are clear (all excerpts from page 163 of their paper):

1. "Early success in goals tended to carry over to influence later positive outcomes."
2. "Success was necessary at each step of the way, if the prior gains were to be maintained."
3. "It is possible to become happier through one's striving pursuits, if one picks the right goals and does well at them; furthermore, such changes should last and perhaps conduce to even more positive change."

Concluding thoughts . . .
Although, as Sheldon and Houser-Marko conclude in the final paragraphs of their paper, ". . . it is probably impossible for a person's well-being to ‘spiral upward' indefinitely, no matter how successful he or she is in life" (p. 164), I think it's fair to say, let's worry about a ceiling effect when we get there. ☺ In any case, that's an empirical question that remains to be answered.

Instead of lamenting that this "happiness spiral" may not truly be a perpetual motion machine, let's focus on identifying those goals that are deeply congruent or concordant with our sense of self, our values and our needs and pursue them in earnest. To some extent, our happiness depends on it. So, let's "just get started."

References
Sheldon, K. M., & Houser-Marko, L. (2001). Self-concordance, goal attainment, and the pursuit of happiness: Can there be an upward spiral? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 152-165.