How To Set Goals And Actually Achieve Them

Around 1728, a twenty-two-year-old printer in Philadelphia decided he was going to become morally perfect. His name was Benjamin Franklin, and he meant it. He wanted to live without doing anything wrong, ever. He knew what was right and what was wrong, or thought he did, so he didn't see why he couldn't just do the one and avoid the other.

It didn't work. Writing about it years later in his autobiography, he said the job turned out to be much harder than he'd imagined. While he was busy watching for one fault, another one would catch him. Habit took over whenever he stopped paying attention, and sometimes what he wanted was simply stronger than what he knew.

He picked thirteen virtues, things like temperance, order, and industry. Instead of working on all thirteen at once, he gave each one a week of focus. He made a little book with a page for each virtue and ruled every page in red ink, with seven columns for the days of the week.

Every evening he went through the day and put a small black spot next to each virtue he'd failed at. At that pace he could get through all thirteen in thirteen weeks, and run the whole course four times a year.

Most people set goals the way Franklin first did. They decide what they want, they're pretty sure they know what to do, and they expect wanting it badly enough to get them there. Then a few weeks go by, a hard day turns into a hard week, and the goal fades out without anyone deciding to quit.

Franklin's first attempt failed the same way. What makes him worth studying is what he did next. He took a big goal and broke it into one small focus at a time, he wrote it down, and he checked it every single night.

That's what this article is about. Goals get reached in ordinary days: what you do on a Tuesday night when you're tired, what you do after you miss three days in a row, and whether you planned for the things that were always going to get in the way.

The people who reach their goals tend to get a few things right. They pick the right goal, they plan for what will stop them, they build it into their normal week, and they keep track of how it's going. Franklin never did reach moral perfection, and he said so himself. We'll get to what he did reach at the end.

Before going any further, it helps to be clear about what a goal is, because most of what people call goals are really wishes. A wish is something you'd like to happen. "I want to get in shape." "I want to write a book." "I want to save more money."

"I'll run three miles without stopping by May 1." "I'll finish a 50,000-word first draft by September." "I'll have $2,000 in savings by December 31." There's a simple test for telling them apart. When the date comes, could someone else look at what happened and say whether you did it? If they couldn't, it's still a wish.

You've probably heard this story a thousand times. In 1953, researchers asked the graduating class at Yale how many of them had clear, written goals for their future. Only 3 percent did. Twenty years later, the researchers tracked the class down and found that the 3 percent with written goals had more money than the other 97 percent put together. It shows up in books, seminars, and sermons, and sometimes it's told about Harvard instead of Yale.

It never happened. In 1996, a writer named Lawrence Tabak tried to find the study for Fast Company magazine. He contacted people who had quoted it, the secretary of Yale's class of 1953, and researchers who had gone looking for it before him. No one could produce any evidence that it had ever been done. Yale searched its own records and found nothing, and the class secretary, who had held that role for years, had never heard of it.

That matters because a lot of goal advice is built on stories like this one. The good news is that there's real research on goals, a great deal of it, and it's more useful than the myth.

Starting in the 1960s, two psychologists, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, spent more than thirty-five years studying how goals affect what people do. In 2002 they summed up what they had learned.

Their main finding was that specific, difficult goals led to better performance than easy goals or being told to "do your best." Across the studies they reviewed, the difference was consistent and fairly large. As they put it, when people are asked to do their best, they don't.

The reason is simple once you see it. "Do your best" gives you nothing to measure against, so it's easy to tell yourself you did. "Run three times a week" or "write 500 words before work" tells you exactly whether you did it or not.

But the finding came with conditions, and the conditions get left out of most goal advice. Specific, hard goals worked when people got feedback on how they were doing, when they were committed to the goal, and when they had the ability to reach it.

Locke and Latham also found that when a task is new or complicated, a goal about learning, like "figure out three ways to get new customers," often works better at first than a goal about results, like "sign twenty new customers." When you don't yet know how to do something, pressure to hit a number can push you into the same old approaches instead of better ones.

You can see this in all kinds of situations. Someone trying to improve their sales might first focus on figuring out what makes a good sales call rather than setting a target for how many deals they need to close. Someone learning to write might focus on understanding what makes a good headline before worrying about how many views their work gets. A person starting a business might spend time figuring out what customers actually want before setting a revenue target. Even in fitness, learning proper technique can come before worrying about how much weight you can lift.

The point is the same: when you are still learning how something works, the first goal should often be to understand the process that eventually produces the result.

Goals can also do damage. In the early 1990s, Sears set a sales target for the mechanics in its auto repair centers: $147 an hour. To hit it, mechanics started overcharging customers and doing repairs people didn't need, and it turned into a scandal across the company.

The chairman of Sears later admitted that the goal-setting process had "created an environment where mistakes did occur."

The problem is not that goals are bad. The problem is what happens when the number becomes more important than the thing the number was supposed to measure. A mechanic who is told to make $147 an hour can start thinking about how to reach $147 rather than how to give the customer the right repair. The target becomes the thing being optimized, even when meeting it means doing the job worse.

A group of researchers who studied cases like this one warned that goals that are too narrow can make people stop seeing everything outside the target, and goals that are too hard can push people toward shortcuts and cheating.

What the research supports is narrower than "set big goals and you'll succeed." A clear, challenging goal is a powerful tool, and it works best when you use it with some care. You need a way to see how you're doing, you need to actually want it, it has to be within reach, and it can't be allowed to crowd out everything else that matters.

A lot of goal advice tells you to picture your success as vividly as you can. See yourself crossing the finish line, holding the diploma, opening the business. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who has studied this for more than thirty years, found something that surprised her.

Her first study followed 25 women in a year-long weight loss program. Before the program started, she asked them how likely they thought they were to reach their goal, and she also asked them to imagine how things would go. The two answers pointed in opposite directions.

Women who expected to succeed did better. But women whose daydreams were full of easy, positive images lost less weight than women whose daydreams included struggle and temptation. The worst results came from women who didn't really expect to succeed but had rosy fantasies anyway.

Later, working with Heather Barry Kappes, she tested this in the lab. In four experiments, people who were led to fantasize about an ideal future showed less energy afterward than people who imagined obstacles or pictured things neutrally, measured both by how they acted and by a drop in their blood pressure.

You can still picture what you want. Picturing it just isn't enough on its own. Oettingen developed a method she calls mental contrasting, and she later built it into a simple four-step exercise called WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

You imagine the thing you want and what it would feel like to have it, and then you turn straight to the main thing inside you that's likely to stop you, and make a plan for it.

In her research, people who did both, pictured the wish and then faced the obstacle, were more motivated to act than people who only dreamed about it.

A clear goal is the first step, but it doesn't make anything happen on its own. Most people who give up on a goal really did intend to reach it. Psychologists call the space between what people intend to do and what they actually do the intention-behavior gap.

An intention is a decision about what you want to do. Behavior is what you actually do on a given day. The gap between them is where most goals die.

The usual answer to the gap is more motivation. A study from 2002 tested that answer directly.

Three psychologists in England, Sarah Milne, Sheina Orbell, and Paschal Sheeran, worked with 248 college students over two weeks and split them at random into three groups.

The first group just kept a record of how much they exercised. The second group also read material about the health risks of not exercising, which was designed to make them more motivated. The third group read the same material and then did one more thing. They wrote a single sentence saying exactly when and where they would exercise in the coming week: "During the next week, I will do at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [day] at [time] in [place]."

Fewer than 4 in 10 students in the first group exercised at least once that week. The group that got the extra motivation did no better.

About a quarter of the students in the first two groups said they simply never got around to it. None of the students who wrote the sentence said that. Reading about why exercise mattered didn't change what people did. Deciding the day, the time, and the place did.

If this, then that - Psychologists call that sentence an implementation intention. The name sounds technical, but the idea is simple. A goal says what you want: "I want to exercise more." An implementation intention says exactly when, where, and how you'll act: "On Monday at 6 p.m., I'll go to the campus gym and run for 20 minutes." It's often written as an if-then plan: "If it's 6 p.m. on Monday, then I go to the gym."

The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer developed the idea in the 1990s, and it has been tested many times since. In 2006, Gollwitzer and Sheeran combined the results of 94 separate tests. People who made these plans reached their goals noticeably more often than people who didn't, and the effect held for health goals, schoolwork, and other kinds of goals. The size of the effect was medium to large, which is a lot for something that takes a minute to write down.

The reason it works has to do with when the decision gets made. Without a plan, you have to decide all over again every day whether you're going to do the thing. When 6 p.m. comes, you're tired, something else comes up, and "I'll do it tomorrow" wins. With a plan, the decision was made days ago. When the moment comes, the situation itself tells you what to do.

One thing to know: these plans work best when you actually care about the goal. A study by Sheeran, Thomas Webb, and Gollwitzer found that if-then plans helped people whose commitment to a goal was strong, but not people whose commitment was weak. A plan can't make you want something. It helps you act on something you already want.

The ancient philosophers kept coming back to the same picture when they talked about goals: an archer with a target.

Aristotle used it at the very start of his Nicomachean Ethics, in the fourth century BC. Before he said anything about how to live well, he argued that you need to know what you're aiming at.

Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?

Almost four hundred years later, the Roman philosopher Seneca made the same point in a letter to his friend Lucilius, and added a second picture, a ship at sea.

This is the same thing Locke and Latham found in the lab two thousand years later. "Do your best" is a ship with no harbor. You can work hard every day and still have no idea whether you're getting anywhere, because you never said where you were going.

The Stoics took the picture one step further. In a book called On Ends, written in 45 BC, Cicero has the Stoic statesman Cato explain it.

An archer does everything in his power to shoot straight. He picks the right bow, trains his arm, judges the distance, and waits for a steady moment. But once the arrow leaves the string, things he doesn't control take over. A gust of wind can push it off course.

So, Cato says, the archer's real aim is to do everything he can to shoot well. Actually hitting the target is something he chooses and works toward, but it isn't something his peace of mind should depend on. In the Stoics' phrase, hitting the mark is "to be chosen but not to be desired."

You can control whether you apply to twenty jobs this month. You can't control whether any of them call you back. You can control whether you train four days a week. You can't control whether you get injured, or whether someone faster shows up on race day.

If all your attention goes to the part you don't control, every rejection or slow week can make you question what you're doing and tempt you to quit the effort that was actually working.

The Stoic approach is to keep the target clearly in view and put your attention and your daily effort into the part that's yours. Let the goal set the direction, and judge yourself by whether you did your part today.

Around 445 BC, a Jewish man named Nehemiah was working as cupbearer to Artaxerxes, the king of Persia. It was a position of real trust: the cupbearer tasted the king's wine and stood close to him every day.

One day some men arrived from Judah with news about Jerusalem. The people who had gone back there were struggling, the city wall was broken down, and its gates had been burned. Nehemiah sat down and wept. For days he mourned, fasted, and prayed.

What he did over the next several months is a clear picture of a goal carried through from start to finish, and it lines up with the research surprisingly well.

Months later, the king noticed Nehemiah looked sad and asked him why. Nehemiah told him about Jerusalem and asked to be sent to rebuild it. The king asked how long the journey would take and when he would come back, and Nehemiah had an answer ready: "I set him a time."

Then he asked for letters to the governors along the route so he could travel safely, and a letter to the keeper of the king's forest for timber to build the gates and the wall. He hadn't just been praying and grieving. He had worked out what the job would take.

When he got to Jerusalem, he didn't announce anything at first. He went out at night with a few men and rode around the walls, looking at how bad the damage was.

Only after he'd seen it for himself did he call the people together and say, "Let us rise up and build." Then he broke the job into pieces.

Chapter 3 of the book lists who built each section, and many families worked on the part of the wall right next to their own house. It was one enormous goal, split into small sections that each family could see and finish.

Not everyone wanted the wall built. Two local officials, Sanballat and Tobiah, mocked the work. Tobiah joked that if a fox climbed onto their stone wall, it would knock it down. When mocking didn't stop them, the opponents started planning to attack. Nehemiah's response is a single line that holds two things together:

They prayed, and they posted guards. From then on, half of Nehemiah's men worked while the other half stood guard with spears, shields, and bows. The builders themselves worked with a weapon close at hand.

There was discouragement from inside too. The people of Judah said the workers were worn out and there was so much rubble they'd never be able to finish.

Nehemiah didn't pretend that wasn't true. He reorganized the work, reminded them what they were building for, and kept going.

Near the end, his opponents tried a different approach. They invited him to a meeting in a village some distance away, and he understood it was a trap, or at least a way to stop the work. His answer is worth writing on the wall of anyone trying to finish something:

They asked four times, and four times he gave the same answer.

Look at what Nehemiah did in the order he did it.

He was specific about what he wanted and how long it would take. He looked at the problem up close before he started. He split a huge job into small pieces people could own. He expected opposition, and he planned for it with both prayer and guards.

And when distractions came, he said no, because he was in the middle of something that mattered more. It's hard to find a better summary of what the research recommends.

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus uses a building project to make a point about following him:

In context, Jesus is talking about the cost of being his disciple, and he's warning people not to start without understanding what it will ask of them.

But he makes the point with an everyday example that everyone listening would have understood: a sensible person doesn't start a big project without sitting down first and working out what it will take.

That's the same thing Nehemiah did before he ever spoke to the king, and it's what the next section is about, because most of us are much worse at counting the cost than we think.

In the 1970s, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who would later win a Nobel Prize, convinced Israel's Ministry of Education to create a high school course on judgment and decision making.

He put together a team of teachers, some of his students, and Seymour Fox, the dean of the Hebrew University's School of Education and an expert in building school curricula.

After meeting every Friday afternoon for about a year, they had an outline, a couple of chapters, and a few sample lessons, and they felt good about their progress.

One day Kahneman asked everyone to write down, privately, how long they thought it would take to finish a complete draft. The answers ranged from a year and a half to two and a half years. Then he asked Fox a different question: think of other teams you've seen that were at this same stage, building a new curriculum from scratch. How long did they take to finish?

Fox was quiet for a while. Then he said that about 40 percent of those teams never finished at all. Of the ones that did, he couldn't think of any that took less than seven years, or more than ten.

A moment earlier, his own estimate for their team had been about two years, just like everyone else's. They talked about it for a few minutes and then kept going as if they hadn't heard it. The project took eight years.

By the time it was done, Kahneman had left Israel, the Ministry had lost interest, and the textbook was never used. Kahneman later called this the planning fallacy.

It happens to almost everyone. In a 1994 study, 37 psychology students were asked how long it would take them to finish their senior thesis. On average they guessed about 34 days.

They were also asked how long it would take if everything went as badly as it possibly could, and they guessed about 49 days. The actual average was about 55 days, longer than their worst-case guess, and only about 30 percent finished within the time they had predicted.

This matters for goals because running late feels like failing. You set out to lose twenty pounds by summer, or finish the degree in two years, or save a certain amount by December.

When you fall behind the schedule you set, it feels like proof you can't do it, even if the only real problem was a schedule nobody could have kept.

Plenty of people who quit a goal were doing fine on the goal itself and only losing to a deadline that was never realistic.

Kahneman's answer was to take what he called the outside view. Before you trust your own estimate, look at how long it usually takes people like you to do the same thing. Ask someone who has done it. Look at your own track record with similar goals. Then plan around that number. Nehemiah counted the cost before he asked the king. Most of us need to count it, and then add more.

Everything in this article is only useful if you put it to work. The five practices below take what Franklin, the researchers, the philosophers, and Nehemiah figured out and turn it into things you can do this week. To make them concrete, we'll follow one person through all five.

Picture a woman named Dana. She's 34, works full time, and has two kids. Twelve years ago she left college a year and a half short of her degree, and for most of the time since, "go back to school" has been at the top of every New Year's list she's written. It has never made it past February.

"Go back to school" is a goal with no harbor. There's no way to tell on any given Tuesday whether you're doing it. Locke and Latham's research says the goal needs to be specific enough that you can tell whether you hit it, and hard enough that it asks something of you, but still within reach.

So Dana sits down and makes it specific. She'll finish her business degree through the state university's online program, taking two classes a semester. That's hard, with a full-time job and two kids, but it's not impossible, because plenty of people in her program are doing the same thing.

She also notices that she's out of practice. She hasn't written a paper or taken a test in twelve years. So for her first semester, she sets a learning goal alongside the bigger one: figure out how to study with a job and kids, and find out which times of day actually work. Grades matter, but that first semester is mostly about building the routine that will carry her through the rest.

Finally, she asks whether the goal is really hers. She isn't doing it to impress anyone. She wants a better job, and she wants her kids to see her finish something she started. Locke and Latham found that commitment is one of the conditions that makes a hard goal work, and a goal you've been handed by someone else is much easier to drop.

This is Oettingen's mental contrasting, and it's what Nehemiah did when he rode around the broken walls at night before saying a word to anyone. Picture what you want, then look hard at the main thing likely to stop you.

Dana walks through Oettingen's four steps. Her wish is to finish her degree. The outcome she pictures is walking across the stage while her kids watch, and getting the promotion she's been passed over for twice. Then comes the obstacle, and she makes herself be specific.

It isn't really her job or her kids, since she can't change those. The real obstacle is what she does at 8:30 at night. She gets the kids to bed, sits down on the couch "for a minute," picks up her phone, and the evening is gone. She's done this on every attempt to go back to school so far.

Seen that clearly, the plan almost writes itself. On class nights she won't sit on the couch at all. She'll go straight from the kids' bedroom to the kitchen table, where her laptop is already set up. Like Nehemiah's builders with one hand on the work and the other on a weapon, she plans on the obstacle showing up, because it always has.

Until a goal has a time and a place attached, it's easy to keep putting it off. Psychologists call the fix implementation intentions: plans in the form "if this situation comes up, then I'll do this."

In 2006, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pulled together 94 separate tests of this approach and found that people who made if-then plans were substantially more likely to follow through on their goals.

The plan links the moment directly to the action, so when the moment arrives you don't have to decide anything.

Dana writes hers down. If it's Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday at 8:30, then she goes to the kitchen table and studies until 10:00. If it's Saturday morning, then she goes to the library for two hours while her husband takes the kids to the park. If she gets home late from work and misses a weeknight, then she adds an hour on Sunday afternoon.

This only works if you commit to the plan and stop reconsidering it every time something goes wrong. When 8:30 comes, Dana doesn't ask herself whether she feels like studying tonight. She just goes to the table. The first time she tells herself "I'll skip it just this once," the plan stops being a decision she already made and becomes something she's negotiating every night.

This is where most goals go wrong without anyone noticing. Dana's first thought is that she'll be done in three years. Remembering Kahneman's team, she takes the outside view first. She asks her academic advisor how long it usually takes working parents in her program to finish the credits she needs.

The advisor tells her that most take longer than they planned, often a semester or two, because life gets in the way. So Dana plans on three and a half years, and she's ready for four. If it goes faster, good. If it doesn't, she won't be behind a schedule she made up on her best day.

Then she breaks it down the way Franklin broke down his thirteen virtues and Nehemiah broke down the wall. Three and a half years is too big to think about on a Tuesday night.

A semester is about fifteen weeks. A week is about eight hours of study. Tonight is ninety minutes at the kitchen table. That's the part she actually controls, like the archer's aim, and it's what she measures herself on.

Whether she gets a B or an A on a particular test depends partly on things she can't control. Whether she sits down at 8:30 is up to her.

Franklin checked his little book every night. The research says he was onto something. In 2016, Benjamin Harkin and his colleagues combined 138 experiments with almost 20,000 participants and found that getting people to monitor their progress more often helped them reach their goals.

The effect was larger when people physically recorded their progress, and when they reported it to someone else or made it public.

But there's a catch worth knowing about. In a separate set of experiments, Gollwitzer and his colleagues found that when people told others about an identity goal, like "I'm going to become a lawyer," and those other people took notice, they then worked less on it than people who kept it to themselves.

Having others acknowledge the goal seemed to give them an early sense of already being that person, and that feeling did some of the work the actual effort was supposed to do.

Put those two findings together and you get a simple rule: report what you actually did, and be careful about announcing who you're going to become.

Dana doesn't post "Going back to school!" online to collect congratulations. Instead, she keeps a paper calendar on the fridge and marks every study session with an X, so she and her kids can see the week fill in.

And every Sunday night she texts her sister two numbers: the hours she studied that week, and the assignments she turned in. Her sister's job is simple. She asks about it when the numbers are low.

You will fall behind at some point. Almost everyone does, and the planning fallacy makes it very likely. What matters is what you do next.

Franklin fell behind too. He wrote that he kept up his little book "with occasional intermissions." After a while the pages filled with holes from scraping out old marks to make room for new ones, so he moved his charts onto the ivory pages of a memorandum book, where he could wipe the marks off with a wet sponge and keep going.

After a while he went through the whole course only once a year, and later only once every several years. Eventually, with voyages and business abroad, he stopped going through the courses altogether, but he wrote that he always carried the little book with him. He changed how he used it to fit his life, and he never got rid of it.

Midway through her second semester, Dana's youngest gets sick and spends a week in the hospital. Dana misses three weeks of study and falls far enough behind in one class that she has to drop it. It's the exact moment every one of her earlier attempts ended. This time she has a plan for it.

Researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis found that people are more likely to start working on their goals right after what they called temporal landmarks: the beginning of a new week, month, or semester, a birthday, or a holiday.

Gym visits, searches for the word "diet," and sign-ups to pursue goals all jumped after those dates. Their explanation is that a new start date helps people put past failures in a previous chapter and look at the bigger picture.

So when you fall behind, you don't need to wait for New Year's. Pick the next Monday or the first of the month, and treat it as a restart. Dana picks the first Monday after her daughter comes home.

Kahneman's team heard that projects like theirs took seven to ten years, and they kept planning as if it would take two.

When you fall behind, the worst thing you can do is keep chasing a schedule that's already broken.

Dana sits down with her advisor again and moves her graduation date back one semester. The goal is the same. The date now fits the life she's actually living.

Locke and Latham found that performance dropped off when people's commitment to a very difficult goal gave out.

When a goal starts to feel impossible, it's tempting to drop it altogether. The better move is to make the next step small enough that you can start again right away.

Dana's first week back isn't eight hours of study. It's three sessions of 45 minutes, just to get back to the kitchen table. The week after, she's back to her normal schedule.

It also helps to know what missing a stretch actually costs. When Phillippa Lally and her colleagues followed people building new daily habits, they found that missing a single opportunity didn't meaningfully set back the habit.

A lost week does less damage than it seems to at the time, and far less than quitting over it would.

In 1784, Franklin sat down to write the part of his autobiography about his little book. He was 78 years old. By then he had become one of the most famous people in the world.

He had run a successful printing business, done pioneering experiments with electricity, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and represented the United States in France. And he looked back at the plan he'd made at 22 with no illusions about how it had gone.

He admitted that there was one virtue he had never gotten under control. He was, in his own words, "incorrigible with respect to Order," and now that he was old and his memory was bad, he felt the lack of it. He had never reached the perfection he'd set out to reach. He said he fell far short of it.

He compared it to people learning to write by copying the beautiful engraved samples in a penmanship book. They never write as well as the engraving, he said, but their handwriting gets better from the effort, and it stays clear and readable.

When he first began marking his book, he was surprised to find he had many more faults than he'd imagined. But he also had the satisfaction of watching them become fewer.

That's worth remembering when you set a goal. Franklin's goal was impossible, and he said so himself. The system he built around it still changed his life, because it put his attention on something specific every day, gave him a way to see how he was doing, and kept him coming back after the stretches when he'd let it slide.

Dana is in her third year now. She's a semester behind her original plan and right on schedule for her new one. There's a calendar on the fridge full of X's, with a few gaps in it. Her kids have started doing their homework at the kitchen table next to her.