I’ve never had a goal

How to Hit the Target by Missing Completely – Time to Loot

It feels a little like I took a shot at the target, missed, had it ricochet off a tree in the background, whizz recklessly through a crowd of bystanders, hit a car out in the lot, and then come bouncing back to hit the bullseye. Now the judges in my head are conferring as to […]

Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead

Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results

Cherdleys on Instagram: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻"

98K likes, 573 comments - cherdleys on March 29, 2026: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻".

Input goals and output goals

The other week someone introduced me to the idea of “input goals” and “output goals”, by Oz Chen. Oz writes about “personal development and content strategy”, so…

Ambition - An Essay by David Whyte

Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals.

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

Need Some Help Reaching Your Goals? Try These 5 Habit-Tracking Apps

They can help you set — and stick to — your goals

It’s the Effort That Counts: The Effect of Self-Control on Goal Progress Perceptions

Does the amount of self-control consumers must exert to choose a goal-consistent action influence their perceptions of goal progress? For example, if you choose to go to the gym when one of your favorite TV shows is on (vs. when nothing interesting is on TV), do you perceive that you have made a differential amount of progress toward your goal, despite completing the exact same workout? In eight studies (N = 7,515), the authors demonstrate that consumers perceive that they have made more progress on their goals when more (vs. less) self-control is required to choose to complete an identical goal-consistent task. This is because when consumers exert more (vs. less) self-control to choose a goal-consistent task over the goal-inconsistent alternatives, they infer higher commitment to the goal. The higher inferred commitment, in turn, leads consumers to perceive that future goal pursuit will be easier. The authors demonstrate this effect across a variety of tasks and means of exerting self-control, as well as with both hypothetical scenarios and real-behavior studies.

Your Most Improbable Life

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be.

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

A philosophy of games to help us win back control over …

Goals Garden - Goals and Habit Tracker on ATProto

Track your daily goals and habits. Build streaks, stay consistent, and achieve your goals!

OKRs

Goals served up in a fractal manner.

The Ambition Project

A guest post by Jason Brennan

The Benefits of Emergency Reserves: Greater Preference and Persistence for Goals that Have Slack with a Cost

Marketers of programs that are designed to help consumers reach goals face dual challenges of making the program attractive enough to encourage consumer signup while still motivating consumers to reach desirable goals and thus stay satisfied with the program. The authors offer a possible solution to this challenge: the emergency reserve, or slack with a cost. They demonstrate how an explicitly defined emergency reserve not only is preferred over other options for goal-related programs but can also lead to increased persistence. Study 1 demonstrates that consumers prefer programs with emergency reserves to programs that do not have them, and Study 2 further clarifies that consumers' preference for an emergency reserve depends on the presence of a superordinate goal. Study 3 reveals that consumers prefer goals with emergency reserves because they perceive them to have both higher attainability and value than other goals. Study 4 demonstrates that reserves can lead to increased goal persistence in a realistic task that involves persistence over time. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 reveal that consumers persist more with reserve goals because they want to avoid using the “emergency” reserve.