Clearer, Closer, Better

How often do you feel like reaching your goals is a matter of willpower? In Clearer, Closer, Better, psychologist Emily Balcetis argues that it’s not just about grit — it’s about how you see. Literally. Drawing on her research in vision science and motivation psychology at New York University, Balcetis contends that success begins with perception: how we visually and mentally frame the world around us shapes the goals we set, the motivation we feel, and the actions we take.

Through a blend of storytelling, behavioral research, and practical applications, Balcetis shows that our eyes are much more than passive observers; they’re tools that can transform our perception of effort, distance, and possibility. She reveals that the difference between people who thrive and those who flounder isn’t only in talent or discipline, but in how they look at what’s in front of them. She encourages readers to literally retrain their eyes — to narrow focus when goals feel far away, to widen perspective when stuck, and to frame what they see in ways that motivate action instead of avoidance.

Perception Shapes Motivation

Balcetis opens the book by exploring the deep connection between perception and ambition. We like to think that success flows from internal qualities like willpower, but she shows that visual perspective exerts powerful effects on how achievable our goals appear. For example, research finds that athletes who focus their eyes on the finish line actually perceive it as closer, push harder, and finish faster. Our literal field of view changes our sense of possibility, and small adjustments in how we look can recalibrate our motivation.

This basic insight — that we can use perception to design motivation — anchors the book’s central message. Our eyes, and how we use them, affect feelings of effort, temptation, and distance. Just as optical illusions distort what we see, cognitive illusions distort our experience of challenge. The solution, Balcetis argues, is to turn vision into an intentional strategy rather than an automatic habit.

Four Tools for Seeing Smarter

Through stories of athletes, scientists, artists, and everyday pursuits — including her own humorous struggle to master one song on the drums — Balcetis introduces four perceptual tools that reshape how we think and act:

• Narrow Focus: Channeling attention to what matters most while blocking out distractions. This brings distant goals within reach.
• Materializing: Making abstract objectives visible and concrete through vision boards, lists, or tangible progress logs.
• Framing: Deliberately designing what appears inside your visual and mental “frame,” focusing on helpful cues rather than temptations.
• Widening the Bracket: Taking a broader perspective that reveals patterns over time and helps balance short-term impulses with long-term goals.

Each tool offers a different way to change what you “see” when motivation falters or goals feel overwhelming. Balcetis draws parallels between these strategies and camera techniques — focusing sharply on details to propel action or zooming out for creative clarity. She shows that top performers and creative innovators master their success by switching deftly between these visual modes.

Why Vision Matters

Our visual system does far more than record reality; it interprets meaning. Perception filters information through memory, emotion, and expectation — and these subtle biases define how approachable or impossible a challenge feels. For example, when people are tired, hills appear steeper and distances longer. When motivated, they literally see destinations as nearer. If we learn to manage those distortions, Balcetis claims, we gain a competitive edge in both endurance and decision-making.

Approaching work, parenting, fitness, or finances with eyes attuned to opportunity instead of exhaustion unlocks energy. The book’s recurring metaphor — seeing “clearer, closer, better” — captures this transformation. Clarity helps us assess reality accurately, closeness turns distant ambition into manageable progress, and “better” vision aligns perception with success.

From Research to Real Life

Balcetis’s gift lies in translating psychological science into relatable guidance. She moves seamlessly from experiments on optical illusions to stories about goal-setting in music, marathon training, and parenting. The recurring personal thread — teaching herself to drum while raising an infant — grounds abstract science in everyday trial and error. Each chapter peels back a cognitive bias that hides within our sight, revealing how to tweak focus or perspective to improve performance.

Ultimately, Clearer, Closer, Better argues that success begins when you stop seeing effort as fixed and start viewing vision as flexible. You already have within your eyes and mind the power to reshape your motivation. By training your perception, you train your potential. How you look determines what you can do — and perhaps, who you become.

Balcetis explores how choosing the right level of challenge can make or break motivation. She recalls deciding to learn drums as an adult while her husband Pete, a skilled drummer, helped her pick a song. Her first choice — a complex U2 track — turned out to be her metaphorical “Baked Alaska”: too ambitious and discouraging for a beginner. Starting with the easier song “Your Love” by The Outfield positioned her in what psychologists call the ‘sweet spot of difficulty.’

Goldilocks Goals

Research confirms that goals work best when they’re moderately challenging but achievable. When goals are too easy, we coast. When they’re too hard, we disengage. The sweet spot creates enough friction to spark learning but enough attainability to conserve motivation. Just as marathoners pace themselves rather than sprint 26 miles, we must calibrate ambition to capacity.

Balcetis compares this principle to 3M’s corporate innovation policy: it sets a rule that 25% of annual revenue must come from products that didn’t exist five years earlier. The target is lofty yet realistic — a motivation engine that drives creativity without burnout. (In organizational psychology, this mirrors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow,’ where challenge and skill align.)

Focus Beats Multitasking

After selecting an achievable song, Balcetis learns the danger of divided attention. Neuroscience researcher Marcel Just’s virtual-driving experiments show that multitasking reduces brain efficiency by nearly 40%. Our parietal lobe — which helps integrate sensory and motor input — simply can’t handle competing tasks effectively. When we try to move in multiple directions simultaneously, motivation shatters like a cymbal crash.

Her point is clear: when you care deeply about advancing, give it undivided visual and mental focus. “Eyes on the prize” is more than a metaphor — it’s a neurological command. Narrow focus sharpens performance whether you’re drumming, studying, or managing projects. Trying to master multiple demanding skills at once only saps momentum.

The Petzval and the Power of Focus

Balcetis illustrates narrow focus through the story of Joseph Petzval, the 19th-century Slovak mathematician who reinvented photography. His portrait lens blurred the background and sharpened the subject, directing attention where it mattered most. The ‘Petzval effect’ became the inspiration for how we should view our goals — crisp foreground, soft distractions.

This focus principle transcends art. Skydiver Luke Aikins applied it literally when he jumped from 25,000 feet without a parachute and landed safely in a net. His team engineered a ring of lights that guided him with a single rule: “White, you’re all right. Red, you’re dead.” Narrowing focus on the white lights turned fatal chaos into calm precision. The same applies to life’s freefalls: when everything feels uncertain, simplifying focus saves us.

From Marathons to Money

Elite marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson uses narrow focus to conquer overwhelming distances. She picks one runner ahead, passes her, picks another, and repeats — chunking marathon-scale goals into micro-wins. This perceptual narrowing transforms 26 miles into a string of victories. The principle extends to everyday endurance: financial saving, exercise, or writing happen step by step, not by memorizing the finish line.

Balcetis even applies this to saving for retirement, referencing Hal Hershfield’s experiments where people saved more after seeing aged photos of their future selves. By narrowing the emotional gap between present and future, people treat their “retired self” as part of today’s identity. Across all examples, focus — not force — carries us forward. Balcetis leaves us with a memorable directive: train your eyes like a lens, and your goals will finally come into focus.

In the next phase of her journey, Balcetis explores how making goals visible transforms effort into progress. She calls this process materializing: turning abstract intentions into tangible, trackable realities. Whether through a vision board, a to-do list, or a meticulously logged calendar, materializing brings accountability into sight.

From Vision Boards to Action Boards

Vision boards get plenty of attention in pop culture — remember Ellen DeGeneres manifesting her wish to appear on Oprah’s magazine cover? But Balcetis cautions that visualization without strategy often backfires. Studies show that merely daydreaming about success can actually lower blood pressure and motivation, as the mind mistakes fantasy for achievement (also echoed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen’s WOOP method).

Instead, she suggests creating visual reminders that depict not the destination but the steps to it. Legendary swimmer Gary Hall wrote his target lap times directly on his kickboard, forcing him to confront his progress daily. Unlike DeGeneres’s wish collage, Hall’s board materialized discipline, not daydreams.

Materializing Success in Real Life

Balcetis applies this technique to her drumming practice through gold-star stickers and time logs. While once a schoolteacher’s trick, the physical act of tracking practice transforms invisible effort into measurable progress. Neuropsychologically, this functions like creating a feedback loop: your brain gets visual proof of improvement, which triggers more motivation.

Entrepreneur Giorgio Piccoli uses the same method with his “list of 10 ideas a day.” Most of those ideas never become reality, but writing them down daily keeps his creative muscle active. Materializing doesn’t guarantee brilliance, but it guarantees engagement. Similarly, ultramarathoner Nathan DeWall tracks every mile of his 2,000-plus annual runs on digital logs to visualize stamina as a narrative of small wins.

Seeing Progress, Building Confidence

Why does materializing work so well? Because, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s projects show, humans prioritize what they can see. Google’s “Goals” app, built on Ariely’s research, materializes commitment by finding calendar space for neglected objectives. Externalizing intent — putting it on the calendar or wall — elevates its psychological priority from desire to duty. The physical serves as the cue to act.

Similarly, Balcetis’s research finds that people who visualize their path—writing deadlines, logging time, or photographing progress—perform better because they reduce what psychologists call distance ambiguity. You know exactly how far you’ve come, which quiets the brain’s anxiety about how far you need to go.

Materializing Obstacles, Not Just Success

Balcetis extends materialization beyond goal celebration to foreshadowing failure. Steve Jobs famously claimed that “failure is just another data point.” Likewise, companies like Google X and Procter & Gamble reward teams for identifying their own failing projects early — making setbacks visible rather than shameful. When we materialize failure, we disarm its sting and transform it into strategy.

Ultimately, materializing isn’t just about keeping vision in view; it’s about giving plans texture, form, and rhythm. It aligns your eyes with your effort. As Balcetis notes through her musical metaphor, when you see your own progress charted over time — however clumsy the beginning notes — you start to feel the beat of momentum.

In one of her most visually striking chapters, Balcetis introduces the third tool: framing. Framing means choosing what fits inside your visual and mental field — much as photographers decide what belongs in the picture and what stays out. What’s inside the frame captures your focus, shapes your judgments, and cues behavior.

The Art of Framing

Balcetis recounts the story of artist Lorraine O’Grady, who paraded a golden frame through the streets of Harlem declaring “ART IS…” As people stepped inside, they quite literally became the artwork. By reframing Harlem — a community once maligned by outsiders — O’Grady changed what and who counted as art. The episode demonstrates perception’s power: what we put inside our cognitive frame acquires importance, beauty, and meaning.

Everyday life follows the same principle. What we see most often influences what we crave and choose. Retailers use this by strategically placing products at eye level: soft drinks and candy where people queue, fruit or water where health-conscious buyers look. Michael Bloomberg’s public-health experiments in New York — posting calorie counts and hiding cigarettes under counters — functioned as social framing tools. The eye governs the appetite long before logic intervenes.

From Cafeterias to Companies

Framing isn’t limited to cities or shelves. Anne Thorndike’s two-year experiment at Massachusetts General Hospital proved that simply tagging foods with green, yellow, or red health labels and adjusting their placement changed purchase patterns dramatically — healthy choices rose 12%, unhealthy ones dropped 20%. Similarly, Google cut employees’ snack calories by millions just by swapping clear and opaque jars for candies and nuts.

These real-world examples echo behavioral economist Richard Thaler’s concept of “choice architecture”: our surroundings nudge us subtly toward or away from action. The magic lies not in forcing decisions, but in framing environments that make the better choice the easier one.

Framing Your Focus

On an individual level, we can design our own frames. Balcetis rearranges her home so that her drum kit — not distractions — sits in her daily line of sight, turning every pass to the garage into a visual cue to practice. Psychologist Wendy Wood calls these ‘visual sparks,’ environmental reminders that trigger desired habits. You can craft the same by leaving your running shoes near the door, your gratitude journal open on the nightstand, or your guitar within reach.

Our brains are wired for automaticity — what we see becomes what we do. As neuroscience shows, our dorsal visual pathway links sight to motor action almost instantly. The trick isn’t to resist temptations through willpower, but to manipulate your frame so temptations don’t appear. Out of frame, out of mind.

While framing anchors external focus, Balcetis next examines the social side of perception: reading emotions and reframing feedback. In Reading the Room Right, she reveals how our tendency to avoid negative input can blind us to the data we need most. True motivation, she suggests, depends on interpreting the emotional landscape accurately — not just seeing smiles, but understanding their truth.

Why Positivity Alone Fails

In American culture, we equate confidence with success, but data says otherwise. Roy Baumeister’s review of 200 studies found that self-esteem boosts didn’t improve performance or creativity; they only made people feel good. Balcetis calls this our avoidance of “floccinaucinihilipilification” — rejecting criticism at any cost. Yet knowing where we fall short, like seeing a sharp bend in the road, lets us steer better.

Her example of donors to a charity campaign proves it: when told the campaign was half short of its goal rather than halfway there, donors gave eight times more. Negative framing, when truthful, fuels enthusiasm more than sugar-coating does.

Learning to Read Faces

Balcetis draws from Paul Ekman’s lie-detection research, showing that even trained professionals misread expressions of fear, anger, or disgust. Only U.S. Secret Service agents, trained to attend to micro-muscles like the orbiculares around the eyes, detected truth above chance levels. The take-home? Your interpersonal success — in leadership, sales, or teaching — often depends on seeing what others miss in plain sight.

Framing for Confidence

In public speaking, reframing perception is survival. Balcetis recounts TED curator Chris Anderson’s advice to young speaker Richard Turere: find five friendly faces and look them in the eye. Research shows eye-tracking naturally gravitates toward hostile expressions, heightening anxiety. By focusing on supportive cues, speakers calm their brains and reframe fear as feedback.

Related studies show that learning to frame up happy faces reduces stress in children and boosts sales in telemarketers. Emotional framing, in short, is a practice: train your perception to spotlight opportunity over threat.

Adopting a Growth Mindset

The ultimate reframe happens within. Drawing on Carol Dweck’s research, Balcetis explains how growth-mindset thinkers treat mistakes as data. Neuroscientist Jason Moser’s EEG studies show that people who believe they can improve generate stronger brain signals (Pe waves) after errors, letting them recover faster. From surfer Bethany Hamilton’s comeback after losing an arm to writer Balcetis’s own nine failed manuscript drafts, the message resonates: setbacks are signposts of progress.

In practice, this means seeing constructive criticism as a mirror, not a verdict. With the right frame, even disapproval becomes light you can learn by — not darkness to hide from.

The final strategy, wide bracketing, stretches vision beyond immediate events to reveal long-term patterns. If narrow focus helps you sprint, wide brackets help you steer the marathon. Balcetis argues that those who zoom out — seeing days in the context of months, purchases in the context of savings, or failures in the context of growth — make more rational, resilient choices.

From Spending to Saving Time

Wide bracketing helps overcome “present bias” — the impulse to prioritize short-term pleasure. When the 2009 CARD Act added minimum-payment charts to credit-card bills, it backfired; customers treated the printed example as a suggested amount and paid less. But when researchers expanded their view to show all possible payment amounts (“You can pay any amount between $0 and the full balance”), people automatically chose wider, better options. They bracketed long-term impact instead of short-term relief.

Seeing Patterns, Not Episodes

Balcetis likens this to Robert Burks’s invention of VistaVision in film — shooting horizontally to capture foreground and background together. A wide bracket lets you perceive your life like a panorama, not a close-up. Her class experiment proved it: when students planned their goals week-by-week instead of day-by-day, they invested two and a half more hours per week on meaningful projects and earned higher grades. Zooming out reveals opportunities invisible at eye level.

This principle echoes Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between “experiencing self” and “remembering self” in Thinking, Fast and Slow — the latter sees the big picture and judges life by patterns, not moments.

Wide Brackets for Reinvention

Wide bracketing also makes it easier to pivot when goals demand redirection. Fashion icon Vera Wang failed as an Olympic skater before finding her purpose in design; she succeeded by recognizing that both arts shared her core passion for aesthetic motion. By examining her life through a larger frame, she discovered continuity in change. The ability to widen your bracket when your “Einstein” path ends and your “Marilyn” path emerges, Balcetis says, turns failure into reframing.

Seeing Beyond Today

Wide brackets apply not just across careers but across time. Cesar Kuriyama’s 1 Second Everyday app compiles one daily second into a living memory movie. Reviewing years of footage lets users spot trends, celebrate progress, and learn from bad days instead of hiding them. Psychological studies confirm the effect: remembering both joys and setbacks enhances long-term satisfaction because it grounds emotion in perspective.

Neuroscientist Wilma Bainbridge found that when people watched their own 1 Second Everyday videos, brain regions tied to both memory (hippocampus) and planning (prefrontal cortex) lit up simultaneously. Remembering trains foresight. Wide brackets, then, aren’t nostalgia — they’re neural rehearsal for what comes next.

In the end, Balcetis invites you to toggle your mental zoom. Mastering narrow focus helps you start; materializing fuels momentum; framing directs behavior; but widening the bracket helps you sustain success and reinvent meaning. Seeing “clearer, closer, better” isn’t just about sharper eyesight — it’s about wiser vision.