Five Proven Principles for Effective Goals

Self-help books and psychologists often recommend goal setting as a powerful strategy for self-improvement and personal growth. One study in particular, the “Yale Study of Goals,” is frequently cited by self-help gurus and motivational speakers to illustrate the power of goal setting. As the story goes, researchers found that 3% of the 1953 graduating class at Yale had written goals; two decades later, that 3% was worth more financially than the other 97% combined. There’s only one problem: the study was never conducted. Attempts to find the original study have been unsuccessful, and Yale University itself is convinced that the study is a myth. This is a great example of what I call a “self-help urban legend,” a false story passed from one self-help guru to the next until it is uncritically accepted as being true.

Urban legends are often based on fact, and although the Yale Study of Goals was never conducted, many other studies showing the power of goal setting are quite real. But not just any goal contributes to enhanced performance; instead, psychological research shows that the most effective goals have five key characteristics in common.

1. Challenging
Obviously, people who set challenging goals for themselves tend to accomplish more than those who set more modest goals. As Emerson said, “We aim above the mark to hit the mark,” or as Robert Kennedy put it, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

2. Specific
The biggest boost in individual performance from goal setting comes when goals are not only challenging, but challenging AND specific. Well over 100 published studies have demonstrated that specific, challenging goals result in better performance than easy goals, no goals, or people simply trying to “do their best.” This is one of the more frequently replicated findings in psychology, and has been documented in brief laboratory studies as well as multi-year field studies, across business functions like sales and customer service, and in people as diverse as elementary school children and highly trained engineers.

3. Set with daily progress in mind
Laddie Hutar once wrote that “Success consists of a series of little daily victories,” and effective goals are ones that encourage steady progress, day after day, week after week. Avoid thinking in black-and-white, success-or-failure terms. Doing so makes you vulnerable to the “snowball effect,” suffering a massive setback and giving up on your goals after just one slip. Instead, think of your goals as objectives that you’ll move toward daily; some days you’ll make strong progress, and some days you’ll make less progress. Building a sense of momentum is crucial. Even creative efforts benefit from an approach of steady, daily progress. Professional writers, for example, tend not to go on writing “binges,” but rather commit themselves to daily writing goals. Ernest Hemingway wrote six hours each day, and Joseph Conrad, whose novel Heart of Darkness inspired the movie Apocalypse Now, wrote eight hours per day.

4. Controllable
It seems completely obvious that you should set goals in terms of actions that you have some control over. Yet this is one of the commonly violated principles of goal setting. Can you wake up in the morning and say “I will lose weight today?” Probably not, yet losing weight is perhaps the most commonly set goal. But you can wake up in the morning and say “I will exercise today” or “I will eat healthy food today,” and those are much better goals to set. Take a lesson from top college football coaches. They rarely set the goal of “winning the national championship” because such a goal depends on uncontrollable factors like the performance other teams; instead, they typically set controllable goals that focus on winning their conference and going to a post-season bowl game.

5. Positive
Success comes when we focus on striving toward positive outcomes, rather than avoiding negative outcomes. Fortunately, most people understand this intuitively, and only about 10-15% of the goals set by most people are avoidance goals such giving up smoking or avoiding alcohol. And that’s a good thing, because those with many avoidance goals tend to less happy, less satisfied with life, and more anxious than others. Positive goals put us in a positive state of mind, and are mentally associated with positive memories and experiences, whereas avoidance goals are typically associated with memories of failures and accidents.