by Adam Alter
For six months, Larson memorized the five winning patterns, playing along with the contestants until he was eating, sleeping, and breathing the magic sequences. He numbered each square and rehearsed the light’s path as it bounced around the board. “Two. Twelve. One. Nine. Safe! Two. Twelve. One. Nine. Safe!” His behavior was eccentric, sure, but Larson was willing to go to great lengths to achieve his potentially lucrative goal.
One day, Larson told his wife he was ready. He gathered every penny he had and traveled from Ohio to the Press Your Luck studios in Los Angeles. He wore a rumpled gray suit on the plane, and then wore that same suit every morning and afternoon as he auditioned twice a day for several days along with fifty other hopefuls. His optimistic energy charmed enough of the casting crew that they invited him to appear on the show on May 19, 1984.
The show began as it did most days. Peter Tomarken, its affable host, asked Michael what he did for a living, and joked that, though Michael had probably overdosed on ice cream as an ice cream truck driver, he hoped Michael wouldn’t overdose on money. When the trivia round began, it became clear that Larson was different from his two competitors. While they pushed their red buzzers casually with one hand, Larson used a two-handed grip and struck the buzzer like a rattlesnake. Here was a man with technique, a man who had spent months planning his conquest.
But Larson’s bid didn’t begin as planned. His first spin turned up a whammy. Apparently the game board took a fraction of a second to react to the buzzer. Larson was briefly dazed, but soon hit his stride and began to amass a mountain of cash and prizes. The show’s associate director, Rick Stern, recognized the determined look on Larson’s face. “I have a fifteen-year-old son who plays video games, and that’s the look on his face when he enters the zone. Larson was looking for his patterns, and he had a lot of work to do.” Adrienne Pettijohn, a production assistant, only half joked that “this guy’s going to walk away with the network.”
With each successful spin, Larson yelped with glee. Four thousand dollars and a free spin. Five thousand dollars and a free spin. A vacation in Kauai. One thousand dollars and a free spin. A sailboat. And so on. On Larson’s left, contestant Ed Long began to cheer as he too was swept away by Larson’s improbable run. On Larson’s right, Janie Litras grew angrier with each spin. Reflecting on her loss two decades later, she remembered, “I wasn’t into it. I was getting madder and madder. I was supposed to be the winner.”
Larson ignored Long and Litras as his winnings soared. Ten thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars. At twenty-six thousand, Tomarken shouted, “Unbelievable! What’s happening here?” Behind the scenes, the show’s executive staff began to panic. A year earlier, while designing the game, they had dismissed the possibility that some enterprising contestant might learn the board’s five pre-programmed patterns. Meanwhile, instead of passing his remaining spins, Larson pressed on—past thirty thousand dollars, and then forty thousand dollars, and then past forty-four thousand dollars, the highest single-day winnings the show had seen to date. Then on past fifty, sixty, and seventy thousand dollars—and past the highest single-day winning total on any American game show with returning champions.
By all rational accounts, Larson should have stopped. One whammy would have ended his run and left him with precisely nothing—a colossal loss of tens of thousands of dollars. Ignoring Tomarken’s gentle warnings, Larson became obsessed with a magic total. “I’m going for a hundred!” he shouted shortly after his thirtieth winning spin. When he reached a hundred thousand dollars, the score board jettisoned its dollar sign; it had been designed to max out at $99,999.
And then the wheels almost came off. Larson was two spins from victory when his concentration slipped. Instead of hitting one of the safe squares, the light stopped on a dangerous square. Larson had allowed the light to move one square too far. On his first spin this square had displayed a whammy, but this time the gods were smiling: seven hundred and fifty dollars and a free spin. Larson was shaken, but he pressed on with his final spin and turned up a trip to the Bahamas. The result: a total of $110,237 in winnings, to this day more than any other contestant has won on a single episode of any game show with returning champions.
After Larson’s performance, the Press Your Luck executives revised the game’s mechanics so the board alternated among thirty-two different sequences instead of just the original five. At the same time, they eliminated safe squares—depending on the sequence, any square could contain a whammy. Now it was almost impossible for a contestant to predict where the light might jump next, and what it might illuminate.
And what of the victorious Michael Larson? The CBS team tried to argue that Larson had cheated, but in truth he had done nothing wrong at all. Reluctantly they paid the amount in full, and Larson returned to Ohio a wealthy man. By all accounts, he had exceeded every possible goal he might have had when he boarded the plane to Los Angeles: no other game show contestant had ever won as much on a single day, and he had won more than a hundred thousand dollars. But just as Larson had refused to pass his spins on the show, so he refused to rest on his laurels at home.
Still restless, Larson grew addicted to a goal that destroyed his marriage and left him penniless. A local radio station offered to pay a lucky listener thirty thousand dollars for sending in a dollar bill with a serial number that matched the number randomly called out on the air each day. Serial numbers are eight digits long, so the chances of winning this particular lottery are vanishingly small—roughly one in a hundred million. Larson mistakenly believed it was only a matter of time till he won if he converted the remaining fifty thousand dollars of his Press Your Luck winnings into one dollar bills—a total of fifty thousand chances to win. Each day, as the radio show called out the winning serial number, Larson and Teresa sat for hours and leafed through the pile of bills. Teresa grew to despise him. He was so focused on the game that he became distant and bitter.
One night the couple went to a Christmas party, and a band of thieves broke in, stealing all but five thousand dollars of Larson’s winnings. Teresa was so angry that she absconded with the five thousand dollars, and never saw Michael again. Soon afterward, he moved to Florida, living the remaining fifteen years of his life in pursuit of increasingly dubious schemes. Larson became a tragic emblem for goal addicts everywhere: mountaineers who refuse to stop climbing new peaks even in the face of death, gamblers who refuse to stop betting as their lives crumble, and workers who refuse to go home even if they have no need to work more.
Bob Beamon and Michael Larson differ in so many ways. Beamon overachieved and Larson was a serial underachiever. Beamon is modest and reserved, Larson was flamboyant and naïvely candid. But both of them sacrificed immediate well-being for the promise of long-term success, and were surprised when their immense achievements brought them very little joy. Like the curse that doomed Sisyphus to roll a boulder uphill for eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether major life goals are by their nature a major source of frustration. Either you endure the anticlimax of succeeding, or you endure the disappointment of failing. All of this matters now more than ever because there’s good reason to believe we’re living through an unprecedented age of goal culture—a period underscored by addictive perfectionism, self-assessment, more time at work, and less time at play.
Despite all the drawbacks of goal-setting, the practice has increased in the past several decades. What is it about the world today that makes goal pursuit so alluring?
—
Goals have been around for as long as our planet has sustained life. What has changed, though, is how much of our lives are occupied by goal pursuit. Once upon a time goals were mostly about survival. We foraged for food and preened for attractive mates, and these activities were critical to the survival of our species. Goals were a biological imperative rather than a luxury or a choice. Our species would never have survived had our ancestors spent their time pursuing goals for no good reason. When food and e
nergy were scarce, the guy who climbed the nearest mountain just for fun, or ran a hundred miles just to see if he could, didn’t last very long at all. Today, for much of the world, food and energy are abundant, and you can live a long and happy life while choosing to take on unnecessary hardships like mountaineering and ultramarathon running. And once you’ve finished climbing one mountain or running one race, you can start preparing for the next one, because today goals are far more than just destinations; today we’re fixated on the journey, and often the act of reaching the goal is an incidental anticlimax.
There’s plenty of evidence for this rise in goal culture if you know where to look. You can see it in the rise of the phrase “goal pursuit,” which was absent from English language books until 1950:
The concept of setting one goal after another—of perfectionism—is also quite new. The word barely existed in the early 1800s, but it seems to be everywhere now. In 1900 the word appeared in just 0.1 percent of every book (you’d need to read more than one thousand books to see it written just once). Today roughly 5 percent of all books (or one in twenty) mention the idea of “perfectionism.”
This could just be a matter of language shifts; maybe people had other words for “perfectionism” and “goal pursuit” in the 1800s, and those words have now been replaced. If that were true, you’d expect those phrases to have become less common over time, but none of the dictionary synonyms for “perfectionism” and “goal pursuit” have died out. If anything, most of them have become more common—terms like “quest,” “plan,” target,” “objective,” and “striving.”
Even beyond the world of books, goals have become harder to escape. The Internet has exposed people to goals they barely knew existed, and wearable tech devices have made goal tracking effortless and automatic. Where once you had to seek out new goals, today they land, often uninvited, in your inbox and on your screen. We might get by if we were able to leave those emails unread for hours or even days at a time, but to the detriment of productivity and well-being, we can’t help responding to new emails almost as soon as they arrive.
—
How long do you think the average office email goes unread? I guessed ten minutes. The truth is just six seconds. In reality, 70 percent of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving. Six seconds is less time than it’s taken you to read this paragraph so far, but it’s long enough for the average worker to disrupt whatever he’s doing to open his email program and click on the incoming email. This is hugely disruptive: by one estimate, it takes up to twenty-five minutes to become re-immersed in an interrupted task. If you open just twenty-five emails a day, evenly spaced across the day, you’ll spend literally no time in the zone of maximum productivity.
The solution is to disable new email notifications and to check your email account infrequently, but most people don’t treat email that way. Many of us pursue the unforgiving goal of Inbox Zero, which requires you to process and file away every single unread email as soon as it arrives. And, as Chuck Klosterman wrote in the New York Times, emails are like zombies: you keep killing them and they keep coming. Inbox Zero also explains why workers spend a quarter of their days dealing with emails, and why they check their accounts, on average, thirty-six times every hour. In one study, researchers found that 45 percent of respondents associated email with “a loss of control.” This from a mode of communication that barely existed until the twenty-first century.
In 2012, three researchers wanted to investigate what happens when you prevent office workers from using email for a few days, but they struggled to find volunteers. They approached dozens of office workers at a U.S. Army facility on the East Coast, but only thirteen were willing to participate in the study. The vast majority explained that they couldn’t bear the pain of sorting through hundreds of unanswered emails when the study ended. Inbox Zero never dies; it just grows angrier while you try to ignore it.
The researchers monitored the thirteen volunteers for eight days in total: three days as they continued using email as they usually did, and then five days while they refrained from using email altogether. At first the volunteers felt disconnected from their workmates, but quickly took to walking around the office and using their desk phones. They also left the office more often, spending three times as long outside when they were forbidden from using email. Apparently email kept them shackled to their desks. They were also better workers, switching between tasks half as often, and spending longer on each task without distraction. Most important, though, they were healthier. When checking email, they were in a constant state of high alert; without email, their heart rates tended to vary more, rising in response to brief bursts of stress, but falling again when those stressors passed. With email they were constantly on red alert.
Beyond Inbox Zero, the Internet has also made it easier to stumble on new goals. Even just twenty-five years ago, goals were more remote than they are today. My family moved from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Sydney, Australia, when I was seven. Two months later my grandma visited from South Africa to help us settle in. As always, she brought gifts, and one of those gifts was the 1988 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. After I tore open the wrapping, she directed me to a section titled “Human Superlatives.” There, on the left-hand page, was a picture of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the tallest man of all time. At his peak, Wadlow stood 8 feet, 11.1 inches tall. “I met that man when he visited South Africa,” my grandma told me. “I was a child, but I remember standing next to him as he looked down and smiled.” I was hooked. I read the book over and over. I memorized the size of Wadlow’s shoes (37AA), the weight of the world’s heaviest man (1400 pounds), and the greatest number of lightning strikes survived by one person (seven, by a park ranger named Roy Sullivan). The records were exotic and remote, which is precisely why I found them so fascinating.
Today, records and goals are everywhere, and anyone can participate in the act of record-setting—a symptom of the age of information. The Guinness World Records homepage features a button labeled SET A RECORD. Follow the link and you’ll see the smiling faces and medaled chests of recent record-setters. Gunnar Garfors and Adrian Butterworth visited five continents in one calendar day. Hiroyuki Yoshida and Sandra Smith got married 130 meters underwater. Steve Chalke has raised millions of pounds for charity while running marathons, more than anyone else in history. And so on. It’s never been so easy to concoct a goal—and, much to our detriment, we’re coaxed along that complicated path by devices that are meant to make our lives easier.
—
Katherine Schreiber and Leslie Sim are experts on exercise addiction who believe that tech advances encourage obsessive goal monitoring. Schreiber and Sim loathe wearable tech. “It’s the worst,” Schreiber says. “The dumbest thing in the world,” says Sim. Schreiber has written extensively about exercise addiction, and Sim is a clinical child adolescent psychologist at the Mayo Clinic. Many of Sim’s adolescent patients have twin exercise and eating disorders, which tend to go together.
Wearable tech is a catchall term that describes clothing and accessories with electronic computer-based functions. Websites like Guinness World Records made goals more prominent, but they have nothing on wearable tech. Schreiber and Sim were particularly critical of watches and trackers that present wearers with instantly updated fitness metrics. Many of these devices either give you goals or ask you to nominate your own. The gold standard is step milestones, or the number of steps the wearer walks each day. Reach the goal—ten thousand steps, for example—and the device emits a reinforcing beep. I’ve watched friends and family members respond to that beep, and it’s hard not to think of Pavlov’s dog.
Schreiber and Sim both recognized that smartwatches and fitness trackers have probably inspired sedentary people to take up exercise, and encouraged people who aren’t very active to exercise more consistently. But as experts in addiction, they were convinced the devices were also quite dangerous. Schreiber explai
ned that “focusing on numbers divorces you from being in tune with your body. Exercising becomes mindless, which is ‘the goal’ of addiction.” This “goal” that she mentioned in quotes is a sort of automatic mindlessness, the outsourcing of decision making to a device. She had recently sustained a stress fracture in her foot because she refused to listen to her overworked body, instead continuing to run toward an arbitrary workout target. Schreiber has suffered from addictive exercise tendencies, and vows not to use wearable tech when she works out.
I use a watch that tracks my progress when I run outdoors, and I hate to stop until I hit a predetermined number of whole miles. Occasionally the watch won’t work, and those runs, untethered to numbers, are always my favorite. In a New Yorker piece, the humorist David Sedaris described how owning a Fitbit changed his life.
During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.
“But why?” [my husband] Hugh asked when I told him about it. “Why isn’t twelve thousand enough?”
“Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit thinks I can do better.”
I look back at that time and laugh—fifteen thousand steps—Ha! That’s only about seven miles! Not bad if you’re on a business trip or you’re just getting used to a new prosthetic leg.
Numbers pave the road to obsession. “When it comes to exercise, everything can be measured,” Sim says. “How many calories you burn; how many laps you run; how fast you go; how many reps you do; how many paces you take. And if you went, say, two miles yesterday, you don’t want to go less than that today. It becomes fairly compulsive.” Many of Sim’s patients experience this constant need to check in. A ten-year-old boy who visited her clinic in Minneapolis was known for being a fast runner, and he wore his speed as a badge of honor. His biggest concern was that he might slow down, so he constantly checked by moving all the time. “He would drive his parents crazy. When they visited Minneapolis for their evaluation, he kept the entire hotel awake at night. They were getting complaints because he was running around his room.”