One of the most quoted statistics about goals comes from a study that never took place. In the popular story, the 3 percent of Yale’s class of 1953 who had specific long-term goals at graduation later held 97 percent of the class’s wealth. Yale University Library says no such study occurred: the class secretary had never heard of it, and a search of university records found nothing. The library traced the story to a 1991 Success magazine article whose author relied on the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, who in turn had no concrete source.¹

The real research on goals is less dramatic and more useful. The short answer to how to set goals you will reach: choose one goal you want, make it specific and hard, decide when you will act and how you will handle obstacles, and keep a record of your progress. The five steps, with the best-tested at the top:

1. Choose a goal you want, and make it specific and hard
2. Plan when and where you’ll act, and what you’ll do about obstacles
3. Keep a record of your progress, and let someone see it
4. Set a learning goal while the skill is still new
5. Break a distant goal into nearer targets

Setting a goal helps, by a small and reliable amount

A 2017 meta-analysis of 384 randomized tests with 16,523 participants found that setting a goal changed behavior by a small but reliable amount, and that difficult goals had a medium effect where easy or moderate ones had a small one. The review, by Tracy Epton, Sinead Currie and Christopher Armitage, pooled experiments on tasks ranging from puzzles and sport to study habits and health.²

The study

Moderate evidence

What 384 randomized tests say about setting a goal: Epton, Currie and Armitage, 2017

The researchers pooled randomized experiments that isolated the effect of setting a goal, most often compared with a vague instruction to do your best. Goal setting had a small positive effect overall, a standardized difference of 0.34, which held when extreme values were adjusted and when only adequately powered studies were kept. Comparing across tests, effects were larger when goals were difficult, set publicly or set for a group, and when the goal matched the thing being measured.²

In plain terms, a goal gives a nudge rather than a transformation. Nearly none of the tests described how people were randomized, a test for small-study bias was positive, and the typical test measured results within about two weeks, so the review says little about goals pursued over months.²

The result fits an older body of workplace research. In a 2002 review of 35 years of their own and others’ studies, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, the organizational researchers who developed goal-setting theory, reported that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best, with effect sizes of 0.42 to 0.80 in earlier meta-analyses. Their explanation is that “do your best” has no external reference point, so people define it loosely and accept many levels of performance as good enough.³

How to set goals: the five steps in detail

Setting goals well takes five habits, and the evidence behind them thins out down the list. The first three rest on meta-analyses of randomized experiments; the last two rest mainly on laboratory studies described by the founders of goal-setting theory, and the fifth has conflicting results.

1. Choose a goal you want, and make it specific and hard

Write the goal as a result you can check, set above what you would reach by default: “pass the project management certification exam by 30 April” rather than “study for the certification.” The goals with the larger effect in the 2017 meta-analysis were the ones its authors coded as difficult, meaning beyond what people would typically achieve.²

Choose something you actually care about. Locke and Latham describe commitment as the condition under which goals work best, especially hard ones, and name two things that build it: believing the goal matters and believing you can reach it.³ The experimental record is less tidy: in the 2017 meta-analysis, tests that added a technique to raise commitment had smaller effects than goal setting alone, though only one of them paired it with a hard goal.²

The familiar SMART checklist (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) overlaps with this advice but is not the same thing. A 2023 narrative review of physical activity goals, led by Christian Swann of Southern Cross University, argued that the acronym is not based on scientific theory, is not consistent with the empirical evidence and has redundant criteria.⁴ Whether a goal names a result (“pass the exam”) or a behavior (“study for an hour a day”) made no clear difference in the 2017 meta-analysis, although no study had compared the two directly.²

2. Plan when and where you’ll act, and what you’ll do about obstacles

A goal says what you want; an if-then plan says when you will act on it: “If it is 7 a.m. on a weekday, then I do one practice section before opening email.” A 2025 meta-analysis of 642 experimental tests by Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter Gollwitzer found that such plans helped people act on their goals, with larger effects when the plan took the if-then form, when people were highly motivated to reach the goal, and when they rehearsed the plan. The average effect was small, and smaller still after correcting for publication bias; comparing across studies, plans that people wrote down had smaller effects than plans they did not.⁵ The same plans can name a distraction and your response to it, as the guide to if-then plans for holding your focus shows.

Thinking about obstacles before you plan has been tested as a package. In mental contrasting with implementation intentions, known as WOOP (wish, outcome, obstacle, plan), you picture the outcome you want, then the obstacle most likely to stop you, then make an if-then plan for it. A 2021 meta-analysis of 21 field studies with 15,907 participants found a small-to-medium effect on reaching goals, which shrank after correcting for likely publication bias; sessions run with an experimenter showed larger effects than written materials.⁶

3. Keep a record of your progress, and let someone see it

Tracking progress is one of the best-tested habits in this guide. A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 randomized studies with 19,951 participants, led by Benjamin Harkin at the University of Sheffield, found that prompting people to monitor their progress helped them reach their goals, and the effect was larger when progress was physically recorded and when it was reported to someone else or made public. Most of the studies concerned health goals such as weight, physical activity and blood sugar, so for work and study goals the finding is borrowed.⁷

Pick one number that shows progress, write it down at the same time each week, and share it with one person. The same weekly log sits at the center of a job search run as a weekly plan. Locke and Latham count feedback on progress as essential to how goals work, since people cannot adjust effort or strategy without it.³ Yet in the 2017 meta-analysis, adding feedback did not change the effect of goal setting across 154 tests, and the 25 tests pairing a goal with feedback, a small sample, showed no clear difference from control groups.²

4. Set a learning goal while the skill is still new

When a task is new or complex for you, a hard performance target can backfire, and a goal to learn may work better. Locke and Latham describe how a performance goal can make people so anxious to succeed that they try strategies haphazardly and fail to learn what works, and cite a 1996 experiment in which a specific, difficult learning goal, such as discovering a set number of strategies, produced higher performance on a complex task than urging people to do their best.³

Familiar taskNew or complex taskPerformance goalLearning goal

Performance goal, Familiar task: Works wella specific, hard target lifts effort

Performance goal, New or complex task: Can backfirepressure crowds out learning

Learning goal, Familiar task: Time to switchonce you know the strategies, a hard target helps you use them

Learning goal, New or complex task: Works wellfind and test new strategies

They add that goal effects in general are smaller on complex tasks than on simple ones, and that once people know the right strategies, a specific, hard performance goal makes them more likely to use them.³ The 2017 meta-analysis, though, found no difference in effects by task complexity.² A learning goal for a new reporting tool might be “try three ways of building the monthly report and note which is fastest”; once you know, switch to “build it in under an hour.”

5. Break a distant goal into nearer targets

For a goal months away, set checkpoints along the way, but know the evidence is thin. Locke and Latham describe a business-game experiment in which adding near-term goals to a distant one raised players’ confidence and profits compared with the distant goal alone or a do-your-best instruction.³ In the 2017 meta-analysis, though, near and distant goals had similar effects.² The practical case rests on feedback: a monthly checkpoint tells you sooner whether your approach is working, which Locke and Latham tie to near-term goals on fast-changing tasks.³

1. The goal: one result you care about, specific and harder than you would reach by default
2. The likeliest obstacle: an if-then plan decided in advance: if this happens, then I will do that
3. The record: progress written down each week, where someone else can see it
4. Nearer targets: checkpoints on the way to a distant goal; the evidence for them is thin

Put together, the five steps fit on one page, and the checklist below is that page.

WiserHours

One goal, on one page

• One goal, written as a result you can check
• A level above what you would reach by default, but within reach
• An if-then plan for when and where you will start
• An if-then plan for the likeliest obstacle
• One number to record each week, and one person who will see it
• A learning goal first if the skill is new to you
• Checkpoints for any goal that is months away

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/goals/how-to-set-goals/#checklist-how-to-set-goals-steps

Writing goals down and going public: what holds up

Writing a goal down has little direct evidence behind it as a habit on its own, while sharing goals and progress with other people has more, with one exception from experiments on identity goals. The Yale study that made written goals famous does not exist, according to Yale University Library.¹

Myth

People who write their goals down are far more successful, as the Yale study of 1953 graduates showed.

Fact

Yale's library says no such study took place, and in a 2017 meta-analysis of randomized tests, goals written by participants showed no clear difference from goals spoken or written by someone else.

Writing is still a sensible way to make a goal specific and to keep the record in step 3. What it lacks is evidence that the act of writing, by itself, does much: the 2017 meta-analysis found no clear difference between goals participants wrote down and goals someone else spoke or wrote.²

Going public has stronger support. In the 2017 meta-analysis, tests with goals set publicly showed larger effects than tests with private ones, and group goals larger effects than individual ones.² In the 2016 monitoring meta-analysis, progress reported to others or made public had larger effects than progress kept private.⁷

The exception comes from four experiments reported in 2009 by Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues on identity goals, such as becoming a lawyer. When other people took notice of someone’s intention to act toward such a goal, the person acted on it less intensively; one experiment found this only among people strongly committed to the identity, and another suggested that being noticed gave a premature sense of already having it.⁸ One way to reconcile the findings is to share what you did this week rather than who you are becoming.

Further reading

• 

  Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation

  by Gabriele Oettingen

  The researcher behind WOOP explains why picturing the obstacle before you plan helps, the method in step 2 of this guide.

• 

  Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

  by Heidi Grant Halvorson

  A social psychologist's plain guide to specific, hard goals, if-then plans and learning goals, the core steps of this article.

As an Amazon Associate WiserHours earns from qualifying purchases.

When goals backfire

Hard, narrow goals have side effects, and management researchers disagree about how much weight to give them. In a 2009 critique titled “Goals Gone Wild,” Lisa Ordóñez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky and Max Bazerman argued that the benefits of goal setting have been overstated and listed its side effects: a narrow focus that neglects everything outside the goal, riskier choices, unethical behavior and reduced intrinsic motivation.⁹

Some of their evidence is experimental. In one study they cite, people with a specific, challenging goal were more likely to overstate their performance than people without one, especially when they fell just short. Other examples are company cases, such as Sears’s auto repair centers in the early 1990s, where hourly sales goals were followed by staff overcharging customers and doing unnecessary repairs.⁹

Locke and Latham replied the same year that the critique drew its central theme from anecdotes rather than research, and that almost all the pitfalls it named had already been published by them.¹⁰ Neither side argues that goals are harmless. In practice, name what a hard target could crowd out, such as quality, safety or honesty, and treat a near miss as information rather than something to hide.

Goal-setting advice, sorted by the strength of its evidence

The strongest evidence on goal setting supports specific, difficult goals, if-then plans and progress monitoring, each backed by a meta-analysis of randomized experiments. Advice on learning goals and near-term targets rests on fewer studies, and the evidence on going public and writing goals down is mixed or indirect.

The bottom line

Choose one goal you care about and set it high enough that you would not reach it by default, then decide when you will work on it and what you will do when something gets in the way. Record your progress each week where someone else can see it. Expect a steady nudge rather than a transformation: in the best evidence, goals improve behavior by a small, reliable amount, and hard goals by more.