Confident Goal Setting: How to Pick Up a Cow, Daily

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.
-Helen Keller

There is an old saying that says, "[i]f you can lift a calf every day, when you become an adult you can lift a cow. But don’t ever stop." This saying can be traced back to the legendary wrestler Milo of Croton, who introduced the “calf” workout in the 6^th 20century B.C.

The Calf Workout

It was said that, as a boy, Milo trained for the Olympics by daily lifting a baby calf above his shoulders and carrying it. As the calf grew, so did Milo. By his teens, Milo was carrying a fully grown bull on his shoulders, and he purportedly entered his first Olympic event carrying a bull across the Olympic track.

Although it is quite possible to lift a newborn calf, and strongmen such as H. Mann have been known to lift full-grown bulls, the story of Milo is questionable. Here’s a story that’s not…

Mental Exercise and the Calf Workout

In 1980, a Florida State University psychologist trained an undergraduate with average intelligence (for a college student) to memorize and retain strings of 80 digits, one after another. During the training, which lasted for 3 to 5 hours per week for 18 months, the undergraduate was given random digits and then asked to repeat the digits back. If he correctly repeated the sequence, the following sequence was lengthened by one digit, otherwise, the sequence was shortened by one digit. While 18 months of moderate training wouldn’t qualify someone as an expert in most fields, the undergraduate’s relatively brief training made his memory comparable to people with the best memories in the world. The training was essentially Milo’s calf worked applied to mental exercise.

The Florida State experiment illustrates how the seemingly impossible can happen when we turn "cow goals" into calves and then allow ourselves — like Milo — to grow with our goals.

Setting Unthinkable Goals, Confidently

Setting audacious goals can be intimidating; it can feel like we’re setting ourselves up for failure when we decide to compete in an Ironman, write a Novel, learn to speed read, or save $1 million.  Truth be told, some worthwhile goals can be rife with difficulties. There are, however, two helpful keys for overcoming many of these difficulties: time and goal velocity.

Time

Most goals seem believable if we give ourselves enough time to complete them. You may be setting yourself of for a lot of unneeded stress, anxiety, and perhaps failure if you decide to complete a novel in the next 3 months. But as your target time for completion increases, so does the believability of your goal. Milo gave himself years to develop the strength necessary to carry a bull, and so it should be with your goals.

Goal Velocity

Goal velocity is the rate at which you progress towards your goal. If want to write a 300 page novel in two years, your goal velocity would be .5 pages/day. If, in a year, you want to run a 5-minute mile and you presently run the mile in 12 minutes, then you’ll need to run a mile three times per week and increase your speed by 3 seconds per mile. If you want to save $1 million, you’ll need to save $200/month for 17 years at %10 interest.  You get the picture.

Final Thoughts

Milo’s bull had a natural growth rate, but you’ll most likely need to make a conscious decision about how fast your cow (i.e. goal) will grow, and then you’ll need to "pick it up" regularly. If it’s nearly impossible to devise a velocity for your goal’s growth, chances are it isn’t a good fit for Milo’s approach to goal setting (it might, for example, be unwise to calculate and adhere to a goal velocity for finding a spouse).  Another possibility is that you’ll discover you find no meaning in your goal, and drop it altogether. Finally, you may find yourself getting pulled into your goals and completing them much earlier than expected.

May you lift calves today, and cows in the not-to-distant future,
Clay

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