Goal setting gets highly promoted by many self-development books and programmes. From my experience, I say that it doesn’t work and more than that I would say it has proved a key factor in hampering my progress in life. I can say that in doing this process over and over again I have just about never managed to meet a single one of the far-reaching goals that I set. I have thought a lot about my repeated failure. Initially I put it down to personal incompetence. I kept adjusting and developing but I continuously failed to meet my goals. I was suckered into the idea that if these things didn’t work it was because I “didn’t believe in myself” – superstitious nonsense but a nice get out clause for the failure of a method that I now consider virtually impossible to carry out.

Fortunately, with a couple of interests of mine, I have massively exceeded any original expectation that I started with and with those interests I never once applied goal-setting. This disparity confused me and so set out to think about the difference between the goal setting process that brought pain, frustration and close to zero results and my own personal, accidental process that brought fun, entertainment and outstanding results.

The Process of Pinnacle Goal-Setting and its Faults

The process of pinnacle goal-setting (a pinnacle goal is a very far-reaching goal that goes way beyond what you can currently do) involves the setting of long-term aims to obtain highly valued desires. Most goal-setting exercises advise you to think of your ultimate destinations, of the fabulous possessions that you want to have, of the massive wealth that you want to have, of the perfect body, of the wonderful relationships etc. The more precision you put into the effort, with detailed descriptions of the goal and how long it takes you to get there, the better. You then work backwards and think of all the steps that you need to take in between and then make them happen.

There are several principle faults with this method. The first is that going through this process sets up desires that are far removed from our everyday reality. Whenever we desire things that we cannot have then we set up our nervous system to produce negative emotions. In the extreme, if we continually seek to have things that lie massively beyond our reach and never come near to having them then we set ourselves up to experience depression and despair over the impossibility of things. This is a sad and debilitating state of affairs that sucks the joy out of people. You can read more about the underlying principles of how the difference between desire and reality creates negative emotions in this paper, “how-to-operate-your-brain-perfectly”

Secondly, highly aspirational goals require us to develop many new competencies. Some of those competencies are skilled based and require us to develop our abilities far beyond what we are currently capable of. Some of those competencies are resourced based and require us to have more time, more money, more connections, and other things that we currently do not have. Some of those competencies are process based and require us to apply our skills and resources to developing new experiences. The problem with new competencies is that they often prove unreliable until they become core competencies – things that we have done so often and can control so well that we have near total confidence in such abilities. If we create a plan for achieving goals that depends upon barely formed competencies then we greatly increase the probabilities of failure because we have only a flimsy construction to build upon. Without solid foundations and well built structures, what we build can easily come tumbling down, which is often humiliating and disappointing.

Thirdly, goal-setting sets up an ‘either/or’ judgement of success. If we achieve the exact goal then we have totally succeeded but if don’t achieve the exact goal then we generally interpret that we have failed. Consequently, as we make progress on our goals, we remain on the verge of failure for 99.99% of the time. No matter how far we go or how much time and effort we put into making progress if we don’t reach the destination then we end up calling that failure. That realisation also weighs heavy in our minds. We can work for years and years on something and come incredibly close but just that little 0.01% (or less) makes the difference between success and failure. The perceptions of unfairness and injustice in that conclusion makes the work all that harder. We easily come to a conclusion that the level of resource required for such a low probability of success just makes the whole thing too risky. Most of us have an innate sense of this balance of effort versus reward and it discourages us, meaning that we have to resort evermore to force of character as the means to get us to do impractical or highly risky things.

Fourthly, goal-setting doesn’t take into account those issues of chance over which we have no control. We can plan a future but we cannot forecast a future. We cannot bend or force reality to meet our plan. Setting a detailed progression of intermediate goals with time points of when they must happen is a recipe for creating much negative emotion and perceptions of failure because we will rarely meet any of those targets – especially if we depend upon poorly developed competencies and the action of forces outside of our control.

These four faults create a method of approach with a high likelihood of failure and a low probability of attainment. Goal-setting creates a lot of wishful thinking and a fantasy with a plan but those plans themselves end up as fantastic because they don’t take into account real world results and real world probabilities.

Why Goal-Setting Has Become so Popular

So, if pinnacle goal setting proves so ineffective then why does it get promoted so much? I think that it probably derives from false conclusions and false reverse engineering about the methods highly successful people use. Most people will acclaim heavily their successes and quickly discount their failures. Most people take a great pride in being able to say “This is what I am going to do” and then making those statements a reality. Personal vanity will quite likely clean up the final result to make it look a plan was made and carried out to the letter.

It might well be the case that some highly successful people have written pinnacle goals but how often do they exactly meet those goals as a ratio compared to all of the pinnacle goals that they do not meet exactly or completely fail to meet? Taking it to the extreme, I could sit down and write out ten thousand detailed written goals of varying levels of likelihood and unlikelihood about things that I already do and about things that I intend to do. If I kept on applying myself for the next twenty years or more then a fairly high chance exists that many goals with a ‘high probability of attainment’ will come to fruition and probably even one or two ‘low probability of attainment’ goals too just out of blind luck. If I only look for the results that prove the theory then I can show that it works.

We also have the factor that a deed already completed becomes a fixed and unchangeable event. Consequently it becomes easy to see the hand of destiny at work. This person succeeded because it ‘was his destiny’ to succeed. We totally discount all the other people who applied the same methods and didn’t succeed and we generally discount the failures of the highly successful if on balance they tended to succeed more often than they failed (dying tragically before failure ever occurs also helps preserve mythic status; witness Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Horatio Nelson among others).

Coming back from this extreme, a few highly successful people will luck out and hit their goal exactly and, in even rarer cases, a series of goals. If we take those rare examples and collect them together then we can easily come up with evidence that far-reaching goal-setting proves a factor in the success of highly successful people. However, without considering the attainment rate of all pinnacle goals conceived of and carried out by everyone we cannot deduce whether this method really makes a difference.

From my own personal experience I would say that the method sucks and that even highly successful people probably did not succeed through this method as it is commonly described (although they could make it stick retroactively). Other factors come into play which are either ignored or unwittingly assumed. I have given up on far-reaching goal-setting as I have come up with a much better, easier, more rational and eminently more useful way of making progress in life.

You can read about the only way to make goal-setting work in the follow-up article. The Journey