Most of us share a strange wiring: once we set a goal, the first setback makes it suddenly feel unachievable, and we are more likely to quit. It’s the first moment when you decide you can’t make it to the gym. It’s that first cigarette you bum after quitting. It’s the night you stay in instead of taking the dog out to get your steps in.
“The problem is that these small failures really derail people,” Marissa Sharif, assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School, said on the Ripple Effect podcast. Sharif calls the setback the “What the hell?” effect. “Basically, when we miss going to the gym one day or miss that weekly budget goal, we kind of completely abandon the goal. And the idea is, you know, ‘I failed today. There’s no way I’m going to be able to reach the goal this week. What the hell? Why would I continue?’”
How to use ‘skip days’ to achieve your goals
The good news is that in her research, Sharif found that if we plan for unexpected slip-ups while pursuing our goals, we’re much more likely to achieve them. To boil it down, if we slip up and miss a day at the gym, we believe we can’t achieve the goal. But if we bake some skip days into the plan, we’re more likely to pick up where we left off after we fall short.
In her research, Sharif tested three goal options for someone whose goal is to get 10,000 steps a day:
A.) Do 10,000 steps 7 days a week
B.) Do 10,000 steps 5 days a week
C.) Do 10,000 steps 5 days a week, with two skip days
“The emergency skip version does better than both seven and five,” Sharif continued. “And that’s because people don’t want to use their emergency skips. But it also helps them if they do have to use them. So it’s kind of combining the benefits of both worlds.”
Skip days are the key to success
A big part of it is that when you bake skip days into the plan, you feel a lot better when you miss a day, so you are less likely to give up. After all, you’re still sticking to the plan. “It kind of takes away these negative feelings about goal failure and allows people to keep going week to week to reach these bigger goals,” Sharif said.
A 2021 study by Sharif and Suzanne Shu of 315 graduate students found that, over the course of a five-week study on achieving step goals, those who had “reserve conditions” or, as we call them in this piece, skip days, reached their step goals on 40% more days per week than those who did not.
It’s comforting to know that none of us are perfect, and the best way to achieve a goal isn’t just white-knuckled discipline. It’s understanding that we are all human, things come up that are out of our control, and sometimes we’re just not feeling up to pushing ourselves. If you’re going to create a system to achieve big things, why not do so with a bit of grace?
