Successful People Have 2 Types of Goals, a Stanford-Trained Mindset Expert Says. Without Both, You Won't Reach Your Potential. Eduardo Briceño says that ambitious people often fall into a mental trap that prevents them from achieving long-term success.

There are two kinds of goals, and if you focus too much on one kind, you may find yourself running in place — stuck in the mud of your unrealized potential.

Mindset expert Eduardo Briceño knows this firsthand. When he was young, he set ambitious goals and achieved them: He went to an Ivy League school, then got a high-paying venture capital job on Wall Street. But as the years went on, he wasn't sure what he was moving toward. He was chronically stressed and empty, and even developed a distressing condition called myofascial pain syndrome.

He decided to go back to school to figure out what he really wanted to do — simultaneously completing a master's in education and an MBA at Stanford — and during that time, he met the famous psychologist Carol Dweck. She introduced him to a concept she'd developed called "growth mindset," which focuses on effort over achievement.

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As Briceño learned more about growth mindset, he began to understand that his early life goals had actually prevented him from reaching his potential. In 2007, he and Dweck cofounded a company, Mindset Works, which collaborates with public schools — engaging students, teachers and parents — to help kids cultivate a growth mindset. Briceño is now a public speaker, and has a book called The Performance Paradox coming out in September.

Too often, Briceño says he sees ambitious people lose sight of the fact that to be successful, you have to set two kinds of goals:

Performance goals — These goals focus on the outcome and result. When trying to achieve something, what are you getting done by accomplishing this goal?

Learning goals — These goals focus on development and acquiring new skills. When trying to achieve something, what are you learning in the process?

Focusing more on performance goals than learning goals is common because we're hardwired to seek out immediate affirmation.

"We as humans have what's called present bias, which means we overvalue the present and undervalue the future," Briceño explains. "We want immediate rewards, and performance goals are the way to maximize short-term results." But focusing only on performance goals can hamper long-term gains.

Briceño says, "There's a lot of value in wandering and exploring, in learning about things that are very distant from our domain. It enables us to connect ideas that were previously disconnected, and that's how some of the most revolutionary breakthroughs and innovations come about."

So how do you set new learning goals? Since most of us don't have time to block off hours for exploring and learning, Briceño recommends paying more attention to the activities you're already doing in a day and trying to find insights and improvements from the way you do them.

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Operating this way means opening yourself up to the possibility that you might be wrong about certain things. But this is a good thing — Briceño says it helps to view your modus operandi as a hypothesis that you are always testing.

"As BIZ Experiencess, we have certain processes. We have certain beliefs," he says. "It's important to make sure we don't convince ourselves of something that might not be true. If we identify these practices and views as hypotheses, we can ask, how will we test our hypothesis? And as we are getting things done every day, we're also experimenting, and asking questions, noticing what surprises us, noticing mistakes. We're soliciting feedback from customers and colleagues. Those things are really quick, but they keep us from treading water in the same place."

To show how all of this plays out in real-life business decisions, here are three examples from real companies that prioritized performance goals over learning goals at critical moments — and paid the price.

The following anecdotes are from Briceño's perspective:

General Mills

General Mills is a big food packaged goods company, and they developed a yogurt that was very innovative. The team was really excited, and wanted to test it with consumers.

But they realized that to make this yogurt, it cost the same to produce a little as to produce a lot. So they said, "If we have to manufacture a lot anyway, rather than waste it, why don't we just do a big experiment and try it out in like 20% of the U.S.? If it works, then we'll get a bigger market share faster."

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So they put out the yogurt in 20% of the U.S. And in a small percentage of the markets, it worked great, but in most markets, it wasn't. They realized why pretty quickly, and it was a change they could make.

But because they were all over the place and they had a lot of relationships to manage, it took longer to make the change, and their retail partners lost confidence in the product. It was taking up shelf space they could have used for other products that would have sold better. So they actually had to kill the whole product, because they tried to scale it too quickly. What they lost sight of was the whole goal of the experiment was to learn. They made it too performance-oriented.

Luke's Lobster

Luke's Lobster — a lobster restaurant chain — wanted to grow. What the food industry experts advised them was, "You want to open up more restaurant locations in the same city, rather than in new cities, because then you can concentrate your marketing spend in those markets, and all the restaurants in that market will benefit."

This is a common strategy in the food industry, and that's what they did. But they didn't do it in one city; they did it in several cities at the same time. So they spent a lot of money opening new restaurants in areas they were already in. But it turns out that people don't eat lobsters like they eat, you know, burritos. They eat lobsters more on special occasions, and people who like lobsters are willing to travel a bit further.

So when they opened new restaurants, they didn't didn't expand their customer base proportionally. They just got closer to where people who would already have gone to the other restaurants lived. It wasn't a great decision, and because they tried to scale too quickly, they spent a lot of capital they could have spent opening restaurants in other cities, which would have worked a lot better. So again, what they lost sight of is that if they focused the experimentation on learning, and figured out what works — and then scaled, rather than making the experiment too performance-oriented, then they could scale faster when the time comes.

Mindset Works

The final example comes from my own experience, and some mistakes I made when starting Mindset Works. When Carol and I were first starting out, I think we focused too much on performing — as in getting customers. We thought that we would learn by doing. But we grew too quickly and were trying to serve too many customers. We were using all our time and resources trying to put out fires, which meant we didn't learn how to actually serve our customers as quickly as we would have.

This got us into trouble because we hadn't developed our offering in a way that best suited our customers. So we relied too much on experimentation and learning through experience. But looking back, we could have learned a lot more if we had engaged advisors and people who had done things similar to what we were doing in public schools. We could have tapped people who already knew some of the answers we were trying to find out. So our goals were a bit off. We thought we could learn by growing quickly, but being more deliberate about how we were learning would have allowed us to achieve our growth goals even better.