People pick 'impossible' career goals so that when they fail, they can blame the goal instead of their own talent.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Ambition as Insurance: When Task Choice Protects Self-Belief
SSRN · 6341858
The Takeaway
Common sense says people take on highly ambitious goals because they are overconfident. This research suggests the opposite: failing at an extremely hard task is less damaging to your self-esteem than failing at a moderate one, so people choose the 'impossible' track to ensure that any failure can be blamed on the task's difficulty rather than their own lack of ability.
From the abstract
Individuals sometimes choose highly ambitious tracks despite low success probabilities. This note proposes an informational mechanism: when failure in extremely competitive environments is less diagnostic of ability than failure in moderately competitive ones, ambitious choice functions as insurance against adverse belief updating. A closed-form characterization of the belief-insurance threshold shows that ambitious choice becomes more attractive when the diagnosticity gap between tasks is large