Sharing your goals is the way to go…or is it?

Adam and I on the roof of the Dragon Army office, being ridiculous.

My buddy and fellow entrepreneur, Adam Albrecht, came roaring into the Dragon Army office last week for a visit. Adam doesn’t just enter a room, he joins the room and lifts the energy level to 11. After he left, one of my team members said, “We need to have that guy come to the office more often!” Indeed.

On this visit, Adam, who does everything in his life with tremendous enthusiasm and energy, and mostly publicly (see: his blog and his twitter), surprised me when he disagreed with my sense that it’s better to share your goals than to keep them to yourself.

He realized this when he read my blog post: My 2019 non-resolution New Year’s resolutions. I like to share my goals publicly because it helps hold me accountable. Adam’s belief is that many people can feel a false sense of accomplishment by just sharing their goals, and would rather people share and celebrate actually accomplishing them. Or, as he says in his post:

The problem is that talking about your goals makes you feel as if you are making progress towards your goals. And the more you talk about them with others, the more you feel like they are real and true. Even though there has been no real progress. It is that false sense of progress that undermines many a good, worthy goal.

So we decided to co-write a blog post, each of us explaining why we thought, or didn’t think, it was a good idea to share your goals with others. The end result being Adam’s post: To share your goals or not share your goals? That is the question.

What do you think? Is it better to share your goals upfront, or hold them back and share them once you’ve accomplished them?