It’s the start of a new year, and once again, I set goals for the year. These are different than “resolutions” because I fully intend on meeting them. Some of these goals are the same from year to year. Get in better shape, spend more time with my family, work smarter (not necessarily harder), decrease expenses, increase revenue, be the change I want to see in the world, end world hunger, get a super power… and this year I added a new goal to the list: I will walk 1,000 miles in 2011.

Instead of approaching this goal rationally, like I’m prone to do for any project, I wanted to apply the ideas in the book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Crown Business, 2008) by Ori and Rom Brafman. If I behave irrationally naturally, as the authors point out, I may as well behave irrationally in a way that helps achieve my objectives. 

Several years ago, when I first read the Brafmans’ book, I created the summary mind-map shown in figure 1 to better harness my own irrational behavior:

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