Ziglar describes a study (on Harvard grads, I believe) where they asked them about their career goals and then found out how many had done most or all of the following steps (answer: ~20% and ~2% respectively).
State what the goal is.
Write it down.
Write down why you want to achieve it. (I do a brief goal-factoring tree for this)
Write down what potential obstacles are in your way (“if you don’t have obstacles, you’d already be there”)
Write down who can help you reach the goal. (people, groups, organizations)
Make a list of what you need to know to reach the goal.
Develop a plan of action to reach the goal.
Set a date at which you plan to have met your goal (or, I suppose, to reevaluate).
In the study, which was longitudinal, they determined that the people who had done all of these steps were way more likely to have succeeded. Personally, I’ve done this several times and found it very helpful. More on that below.
Random thoughts:
My apologies for not citing the actual study, but my exposure to it is only through Zig, who refers to it in a recording (I had to transcribe the steps as typed here).
Obviously in the aforementioned study there could be selection bias for “who cared enough to do these steps” but I’m pretty sure someone has tested it as an intervention as well.
Any goal for which you can do this is probably also SMART, but the reverse isn’t remotely true.
One of the best parts of these steps is they don’t actually require a lot of work. Now, learning what you need to know to reach the goal may require work, but it’s work that was on your path anyway. Someone complaining about this might do well to revisit the Litany of Gendlin.
Upon consideration, Step 7 looks like it could be a fair bit of work, but I think even having a basic outline/story there totally counts. At any rate, I used the related Pick Four system for my album-recording project last year, and my album plan was about 120 words long and written without pre-planning, yet it revealed several steps that I had left implicit, which if I hadn’t thought about them at the start would have been left too late. One of them was figuring out exactly where I’d be recording. It would have been easy to think I could do that after practising & choosing which songs to record, but it ended up being completely critical to do them in parallel.
My apologies for not citing the actual study, but my exposure to it is only through Zig, who refers to it in a recording (I had to transcribe the steps as typed here).
Baha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s worth noting, for those who don’t click through or who don’t read the whole article you linked, that Sid found a study conducted that does support the model that writing down goals makes you more likely to achieve them.
Since people are listing criteria for goals, I’d like to put forth the “steps” that motivational speaker Zig Ziglar describes (which I believe to be related to, although not necessarily based on, the research summarized in the paper Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation—A 35-Year Odyssey published in 2002).
Ziglar describes a study (on Harvard grads, I believe) where they asked them about their career goals and then found out how many had done most or all of the following steps (answer: ~20% and ~2% respectively).
State what the goal is.
Write it down.
Write down why you want to achieve it. (I do a brief goal-factoring tree for this)
Write down what potential obstacles are in your way (“if you don’t have obstacles, you’d already be there”)
Write down who can help you reach the goal. (people, groups, organizations)
Make a list of what you need to know to reach the goal.
Develop a plan of action to reach the goal.
Set a date at which you plan to have met your goal (or, I suppose, to reevaluate).
In the study, which was longitudinal, they determined that the people who had done all of these steps were way more likely to have succeeded. Personally, I’ve done this several times and found it very helpful. More on that below.
Random thoughts:
My apologies for not citing the actual study, but my exposure to it is only through Zig, who refers to it in a recording (I had to transcribe the steps as typed here).
Obviously in the aforementioned study there could be selection bias for “who cared enough to do these steps” but I’m pretty sure someone has tested it as an intervention as well.
Any goal for which you can do this is probably also SMART, but the reverse isn’t remotely true.
One of the best parts of these steps is they don’t actually require a lot of work. Now, learning what you need to know to reach the goal may require work, but it’s work that was on your path anyway. Someone complaining about this might do well to revisit the Litany of Gendlin.
Upon consideration, Step 7 looks like it could be a fair bit of work, but I think even having a basic outline/story there totally counts. At any rate, I used the related Pick Four system for my album-recording project last year, and my album plan was about 120 words long and written without pre-planning, yet it revealed several steps that I had left implicit, which if I hadn’t thought about them at the start would have been left too late. One of them was figuring out exactly where I’d be recording. It would have been easy to think I could do that after practising & choosing which songs to record, but it ended up being completely critical to do them in parallel.
Motivational speakers quite often refer to a non-existing goal study. http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/fact-or-fiction-the-truth-about-the-harvard-written-goal-study
Baha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s worth noting, for those who don’t click through or who don’t read the whole article you linked, that Sid found a study conducted that does support the model that writing down goals makes you more likely to achieve them.
See some of the data for that here: http://cdn5.sidsavara.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/researchsummary2.pdf
To be exact it makes it more likely that you think you achieve your goals.
In general it’s not hard to find studies supporting any claim. The important thing is whether the studies actually provide reliable evidence.
Someone discovered this old comment and asked about the album. It is here: http://maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/