The single act of writing down your goals really does help you become more likely to achieve them. Believe it or not, telling people about your goals actually does you more harm than good. Now, maybe this is confusing to you at first but after all accountability and stuff, right? Won't telling my friends about going to the gym everyday make me accountable to them?

Unfortunately, that’s usually not how it works out. Here’s the thing, most of your friends wont care enough to actually keep you accountable. They will occasionally give you that pat on the back and congratulate you on achieving some of your goals but most of them are too busy dealing with their own lives to show up at your house and wake you up playing “Eye of the Tiger”.

More importantly announcing your goal widens your intention-behavior gap which is the disconnect between knowing you should do something and actually getting to do it. The intention-behavior gap has been studied by psychologists since the early 1920’s, learning that we humans LOVE to dream a lot!

We’ve all got tons and tons of dreams, aspirations, fantasies, and goals. Moreover, we’re usually smart enough to know what the first step is in order to achieve that goal. Awkwardly, we often have trouble taking that first step and end up falling into this loop of not getting anything done.

Being aware of this fact, I heard about a study in a TED Talk given by the entrepreneur Derek Sivers. That study in 2009 involved a group of researchers at NYU that decided to study how the intention-behavior was affected by people telling others about their goals. The experiment consisted of two different groups divided into a group that announces their goals to the room and a group that didn’t. Both groups were given a 45 minute task to work on and what the researchers found was surprising. The group that said nothing tended to work for the entire 45 minutes on average and when asked about their progress, they were pretty realistic. They tended to say they had a lot more work to do before they’d be done. On the other hand, the people who announced their goals, quit after only 33 minutes of work. When that group was asked about their progress, they tended to say they were pretty close to completion though they weren’t even close. These latter groups made significantly less progress, since announcing their goal gave them a fake sense of accomplishment.

See, when you announce your goal to somebody and they affirm it, you feel good. You almost feel as if you’ve actually taken a step towards achieving that goal, giving you a small sense of satisfaction. This is called a social reality which is the affirmation of your goal by somebody who’s respect actually makes you feel like you’re close to achieving it. After presenting the research findings, Derek ended his TED Talk with some words of advice saying:

“Resist the temptation to announce your goal, delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings and understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing”.

Now, I totally agree with this because it has really changed my outlook on achieving future goals like never before. I do encourage everyone to write their goals and I hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to pass the message along and share your ideas and thoughts!

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