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It is the end of an idiom for motivational speakers. Instead of shooting for the moon when pursuing life’s goals, researchers say people should be advised to aim a little lower if they want the best outcome.
The tip may lack the punch of uncompromising drive, but aiming for merely above average tends to work out better, according to a mathematical model the team created to explore how ambition pans out.
For those who want more mathematics in their lives, the model provides a guiding principle for situations as varied as knowing what salary to settle for and which flat to rent, to whether it is best to take the first parking space you find or hold out for a better one. It might even help in the dating game.
Matt Burgess, an economist at the University of Wyoming, said the model provided a mathematical basis for conventional wisdom, with some important modifications. “We hear this conflicting advice where on the one hand, we don’t want to settle for what we have, but on the other, we don’t want to chase the unachievable and be disappointed,” he said. “The core insight from our work is that you’re going to be best off, typically, if you try to do better than average, but not infinitely well.”
Burgess and his colleagues delved into the mechanics of ambition after earlier work found that fisheries performed best when boats stopped searching for more fish once they reached higher-than-average catches. They wanted to see if the mathematics supported the strategy in other realms of life, too.
In the model, agents represent people who are searching for a particular reward and have a threshold for what will satisfy them. An example would be hunting for a job with a particular salary. As the model runs, agents reject offers that are below their threshold and accept those that clear the bar.
To explore different scenarios, the researchers played around with the thresholds and offers agents received. In some cases, high rewards were rare – mimicking the odds, for example, of an entrepreneur becoming a billionaire. In others, high rewards were common, akin to searching a bookshop for an interesting read.
The researchers, including Kath Landgren, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and Ryan Langendorf, a theoretical ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, found that optimal satisfaction came from setting the bar above average, but not excessively so. When agents were overambitious, meaning their threshold was far above the mean reward, they fared worse on average than agents that were underambitious by the same margin. In short, being too hard to please was worse than being too easy to please.
It paid to be more ambitious than average when rewards were erratic, akin to flat hunting in a market of dream homes and hovels. The same held when the negative extremes were larger than the positive ones, which could apply to economic policies that aim to drive an economic boom while avoiding a deep recession.
A further finding that will surprise no one on social media is the danger of judging one’s success relative to the highlights people post about. When agents had such a distorted view of the world, they became chronically dissatisfied and missed achievable rewards. Details are published in Physical Review E. Landgren said the findings emphasised the importance of knowing the full range of possibilities, not just those bragged about on social media.
While the model provides some support for conventional wisdom, the authors acknowledge real life is more complex. It may not, then, provide a foundational strategy for finding the best partner. “I hesitate to quantify relationships in that way,” said Landgren.
The late Norman Vincent Peale, a US clergyman and promoter of positive thinking, urged people to “shoot for the moon”, adding, “Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”. The model suggests that advice needs tweaking. “I would say aim a little lower than the moon,” Landgren said. “Shoot for the stars, but make sure that the stars you’re seeing are what’s really out there.”
Peter Ayton, the director of the Centre for Decision Research at Leeds University Business School, said that, while the authors conceded the model was simpler than decisions in real life, it provided “thought-provoking insight into the relationship between ambition and achievement”.
“Our ambitions can be very subtly and capriciously influenced,” he said. “One study of runners in US marathons showed that merely asking runners to provide a goal prior to the race improved their performance relative to runners not asked.” The advantage was equivalent to a 13.5% increase in training or being nine years younger for a 42-year-old runner.
