Caroline Adams Miller

I was purging on my honeymoon. And that's when I looked in the mirror and said to myself, this thing is going to kill you. It's going to kill you unless you figure out how to overcome it. And the last part of my story I'll just say is I was living in Baltimore at the time and just by the grace of God, and I do mean just sheer luck.

There were 12 step recovery meetings there for compulsive eaters where I found and met people in recovery from bulimia. I just got goosebumps thinking about this. It was life changing. It was February of 1984 and I was sitting there defensive and not talking. And then this woman said this sentence, she said, my name is Betsy. I'm changing her name.

My name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. And I remember I put my needle point down, I looked at her, she was tall, she was blonde, she was an athlete and she was saying sentences I'd never heard anybody speak. And I looked at her and in that moment, I knew if she could do it, I could do it. And that was really when my life began. I learned what joy was.

I learned what grit was. I learned how to cultivate it. I learned about goal setting. I learned what love was. Someone said to me one day, Caroline, it's great that you're getting better, but you can't keep what you don't give away. And that one sentence was what I found brought me joy, that I could sponsor other people, that I could be a role model.

It's something I was proud of, that I could share with other people. I had months, weeks, months, years of recovery. And in positive psychology, we know that's one of the positive interventions is giving. Being a giver brings you joy. And I learned it by hitting the worst bottom of my life. And I'm just so grateful. I was bulimic and it gave me the path to find out what all those things meant.

They weren't just phrases on a wall or speeches I heard. This is when I found out what life was all about. And it's, I don't regret a minute of it.

Thank you. And same to you.

It's so funny. I lived my life in hindsight. When I was at Penn, I'm sitting in Huntsman Hall, which is where Wharton is. I would hear this research and little puzzle pieces would start to come together in my mind. Oh, that's why all those things that I did, those achievements didn't bring me success. the happiness I thought it was because happiness precedes success.

I mean, just that one equation. Oh my gosh. By the way, Sonia is replicating all of that research now. And it's even more robust that happiness precedes success. And she's been looking at other cultures. So I checked in with her when I was writing Big Goals. So I think that's an important thing to note. So another assignment I had at Penn was goal setting theory by Locke and Latham.

And I remember I said out loud, I didn't care who was around me. I just said in wonderment, there is a science to goal setting. I was shocked. I didn't know there was a science. And as much as I'd read about goal setting, I didn't know They didn't know goal setting. I didn't know Locke and Latham existed. And they're still not known well enough, which is why I wrote big goals.

But when they talk about goals, there's learning goals and performance goals. And we can go into that in more detail if you'd like. But one of the divisions, learning goals, is what my bulimia was. I had to learn something I'd never done before. I had to learn how to behave. I had to learn how to eat. I had to learn how to deal with cravings.

I had to learn how to deal with sadness without binging. So they're very careful to say that when you have a learning goal, you have to flatten your learning curve as quickly as possible. You've got to go find the places where you can get the skills and the knowledge that you don't have. in order to achieve this goal. You cannot say, I will be over bulimia in six months.

You cannot do that to yourself. You cannot do that for any goal that's a learning goal. Because when you assign performance goal metrics, and you can only do that if it's a goal that fits on the checklist, you've done it before. You know what excellence looks like. You know what it's going to take. in terms of time, money, energy, people around you.

If you assign that kind of metric or outcome to a learning goal, you're likely to quit because it's just too hard. You don't know how to do it. So that's how it relates to overcoming bulimia. It was a big learning goal. And any learning goal we have, you want to engage curiosity. You want to engage the ability to have a growth mindset. And that's how people stay engaged in the process of

having disappointments, not having the first way they learn it work out. But that's how you persist longer in goal accomplishment is when you correctly separate them and follow the guidelines that I've laid out in big goals, but people still don't know about it.

And the last thing I'll say is if you mix them up, if you mix up learning goals and performance goals, you have the biggest disasters in business history, bar none. It's example after example of people and companies having a learning goal. Lee Iacocca with the Pinto, the Ford Pinto, they'd never made a small car. But in his arrogance, he said, oh, I'll have a 2,000 pound, $2,000 car.

And in one year, he wanted to be like the small European cars. Ford hadn't built small cars. What happened? The Pinto became the death trap. More lives were lost because of the Pinto and the ways in which engineers were pressured to sign off on safety checks and they knew the car was a death trap. So same thing with the Titan submersible.

Skipped all the learning, just wanted to make money and get people down to the Titanic. I mean, I could go on and on. Don't mix them up. It's a simple, elegant theory. It is number one of 73 management theories without ever having a replication crisis. And that's significant. Just learn this simple, elegant theory. And I promise you, all of your goal pursuit is going to be a whole lot easier.

And these two men are still alive. They did the work. They did the scholarship. They just didn't pursue fame. And I'm so grateful to put a spotlight on their work.

So that's a case study I have in the book. I have spent just hundreds of hours looking at Boeing and the MCAS failure, because again, people lost their lives. Because what you see when you mix up a learning goal and a performance goal is companies lose their reputation. Sometimes they never get it back and people lose their lives like they did with the Boeing 737 MAX with the MCAS failure.