The traditional wisdom says that publicly committing to a goal is a useful technique for accomplishment.  It creates pressure to fulfill one's claims, lest one lose status.  However, when the goal is related to one's identity, a recent study shows that public commitment may actually be counterproductive.  Nyuanshin posts:

    "Identity-related behavioral intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that had been ignored. . . . when other people take notice of an individual's identity-related behavioral intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity."

    -- Gollwitzer at al (2009)

This empirical finding flies in the face of conventional wisdom about the motivational effects of public goal-setting, but rings true to my experience. Belief is, apparently, fungible -- when you know that people think of you as an x-doer, you afffirm that self-image more confidently than you would if you had only your own estimation to go on. [info]colinmarshall and myself have already become aware of the dangers of vanity to any non-trivial endeavor, but it's nice to have some empirical corroboration. Keep your head down, your goals relatively private, and don't pat yourself on the back until you've got the job done.

This matches my experience over the first year of The Seasteading Institute.  We've received tons of press, and I've probably spent as much time at this point interacting with the media as working on engineering.  And the press is definitely useful - it helps us reach and get credibility with major donors, and it helps us grow our community of interested seasteaders (it takes a lot of people to found a country, and it takes a mega-lot of somewhat interested people to have a committed subset who will actually go do it).

Yet I've always been vaguely uncomfortable about how much media attention we've gotten, even though we've just started progressing towards our long-term goals.  It feels like an unearned reward.  But is that bad?  I keep wondering "Why should that bother me?  Isn't it a good thing to be given extra help in accomplishing this huge and difficult goal?  Aren't unearned rewards the best kind of rewards?" This study suggests the answer.