The Neuroscience of Achieving Your Goals

When it comes down to it, getting what you want out of life is just about setting and achieving goals. What you want to be able to do is call your shots: to pick a pocket on the pool table and sink the ball.

So why is that so hard and confusing? 

Well, there are a lot of facets to actually achieving your goals. It’s hard to set goal difficulty. It’s hard to balance between competing goals. It’s hard to know whether to stick with a goal or to change it. It’s hard to stay focused. It’s hard to follow through. It’s hard to stay motivated. It’s hard to know which goal-setting advice to listen to. 

We’re in desperate need of some cheat codes here. And that’s why living in the age of modern neuroscience is such a blessing. The best way to become a master shot caller is to understand your brain. Or, more specifically, the neuroscience of goal pursuit. 

That’s why we were so excited to see that one of our all-time favorite shows, the Huberman Lab podcast, covered this exact topic. In a recent episode called The Science of Setting and Achieving Goals Professor Andrew Huberman—neurobiologist and ophthalmologist at Stanford University—spent two hours breaking down goal pursuit strategies from the latest and most advanced scientific studies available. 

It’s packed with both interesting science and actionable takeaways to help you understand the neuroscience of goals—and how to achieve them. It’s the kind of thing that you wish was written down somewhere, so that you could refer back to it over and over again.

Well, that’s exactly what we did. We listened to it over and over again, tracked down all of the papers that were referenced, and turned the entire episode into this essay. 

In the rest of this piece we’ll go through Dr. Huberman's thoughts on the neuroscience of goals—the mechanisms that underlie all goal-related activity. And then we’ll show you how he boils the science down into actionable strategies that you can use to set and achieve your goals. 

Most of what you read here is informed directly by Dr. Huberman’s show—but there’s also some bonus material that we’ve tracked down to help fill in gaps, and give as much useful context as possible.

Let’s dive in!

Note on Every’s corrections policy: we’re writers and technologists not neuroscience experts. We’re doing our best to convey exactly what we heard from Dr. Huberman and read in the papers he cited in his research. If you find that we’ve missed something we want to know! There’s a feedback form at the bottom of this essay—please use it, and we’ll correct anything we might have gotten wrong. Thanks in advance! 

The Neuroscience of Goals

Dr. Huberman starts the podcast by keying on the most important point:

No matter who you are, and no matter what kind of goal you’re pursuing, there’s a single brain circuit that governs all goal related behavior. The brain circuit that Alexander used to conquer Greece is the exact same one that you use to get to the grocery store! (Although, depending on your driving skills, with less bloodshed.) 

That is fantastic news for us all, because it means that if you can learn to master this circuit, then you can see a stunning improvement in your ability to call and land your shots across the board: from small goals, to large ones. 

This circuit is composed of four key brain areas: the amygdala, the basal ganglia, the bilateral prefrontal cortex, and the orbitofrontal cortex. 

The Amygdala

Like all brain regions, the amygdala does many things, but you’ll usually hear it associated with fear and negative emotion. When it comes to goal pursuit, the amygdala appears to act as an emotional calculator—predicting how rewarding or unpleasant the outcome of different goals and tasks might be.

The Basal Ganglia

In addition to having the coolest name, the Basal Ganglia has two jobs, both of which involve controlling action. One job is to generate “GO” actions: Get out of bed. Go for a run. Say hello to the cute stranger. Start writing. Go, do, act. Job #2 is about “NO GO.”  Most goals also require you to NOT do certain things—to resist or suppress action. Stop eating the cookies. Do not open TikTok. Resist calling your colleague a moron.

The Bilateral Prefrontal Cortex

You’ll often hear your prefrontal cortex described as the CEO of your brain because it plays a big role in “executive functions” like planning and decision making. Like any good CEO, your BLPFC helps you make plans, think across different timescales, and override habitual behavior—essential functions for goal setting. 

The Orbitofrontal Cortex

Your Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC) helps you connect the dots between your behaviors and their results. It keeps track of, “If I do X then Y will happen.” 

The ability to understand the link between actions and outcomes is vital for identifying effective strategies, and to flexibly update and refine your strategy as you learn and get closer to your goal. 

Assessing Value and Controlling Action

Dr. Huberman tells us that if you zoom out a little bit, what you’ll find is that these four brain areas are responsible for two kinds of primary functions: 

1. Assessing value
2. Controlling action

When your brain is assessing value it is calculating the rewards and punishments associated with taking or avoiding a specific course of action and ultimately decides which actions are worth pursuing. 

For example, if we asked you to fight a tiger for ten dollars, you’d probably decide that it’s not a valuable goal. If we asked you to draw a tiger for one million dollars then you might reconsider. A huge part of goal pursuit is keeping your brain convinced that your long term goals are highly valuable uses of your time and energy. You also need to keep it convinced that shiny objects and distractions aren’t as valuable as they seem—so they don’t pull you off what’s most important. (For more on this see: Why You’re Not Doing Creative Work.)

After assessing value, the other most important function of goal pursuit is controlling action. When your brain is controlling action it is determining which actions you’ll need to take in order to accomplish your goals and which actions you need to avoid or resist. 

In practice, this might be where you map out the series of steps necessary to raise money for a new venture. Or it could be identifying the things you need to not do, like not checking email while you’re doing focused work or resisting soft drinks to meet your health goals. 

Once you’ve identified those steps, your brain needs to successfully initiate or inhibit those actions. For example, this is where you close TikTok and start working on your fundraise.

Making the Neuroscience Actionable 

Now that we understand the underlying mechanisms for goal-related activity in the brain, it’s time to look at what the science says about how we can most effectively use these brain areas to achieve what we set out to.

Dr. Huberman lists 8 specific actionable science-backed strategies for achieving our goals. They can be broken down into three main categories:

1. Goal Setting: how do we set the right goals?
2. Goal Execution: how do actually do the actions required to achieve our goals?
3. Goal Persistence: how do we stick with our goals?

Ready?

Let's roll!!

PART I — GOAL SETTING 

The 85% Rule

So. You’re about to set a goal. One of the first decisions you’ll face is how high to set the bar. How challenging should your target be? Well, according to a 2019 study published in Nature Communications, you should set your goals so that you achieve them 85.13% of the time. 

In other words, you should be failing about 15% of the time despite your best efforts. Why? Because it’s at this level of difficulty that you unleash peak motivation, focus, and growth. 

Dr. Huberman explains that when you’re working at your edge of competence, you prime your body for action. Your systolic blood pressure increases (in a good way) and you start pumping out adrenaline. The resulting physiological state is colloquially known as “carpe diem bitches”. 

This state has been proven to have a huge impact on your odds of success. Dr. Huberman explained what happened when study participants set a goal at this optimal difficulty. They experienced “a near doubling of that systolic blood pressure” and “a doubling or more of the likelihood that they would engage in the ongoing pursuit of that particular goal.” 

For certain goals and skills, knowing how to use the 85% rule to achieve an optimal rate of improvement is straightforward. It’s working at a level of challenge where 85% of your code is clean, 85% of your darts, pucks, and balls hit their targets, and perhaps you get one word wrong in every sentence of a new language. 

But this rule also plays a key role in determining your success at higher-level goals on longer time horizons. Like when you’re planning a new project or starting a side hustle. Straying too far away from the 85% rule in these cases can cause you to abandon the goal setting process entirely. 

Whenever you think about setting yourself a goal, whether it’s changing your diet, improving a skill, or planning a project, think about the 85% rule. And rather than setting it and forgetting it, use it as a guideline to consistently check in with. On any given day, week, or quarter, ask yourself if you’re working at the edge of competence. If it’s too hard or too easy, try adjusting the target. 

Make A Plan

You’ve probably heard that your goals should be specific rather than vague. 

“I will have a magical date night with my spouse every 2 weeks” is much more effective than “Don’t get divorced”.