Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed!

There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953.  (Google it. It's everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down. Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3 percent of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97 percent combined. Isn't that amazing? It would be if it were true, which it isn't. (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.)

I wish it were that simple. To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. It's not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important. In other words, specificity is necessary, but it's not nearly sufficient. Writing goals down is actually neither—it can't hurt, but there's also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.