Why most goals fail

Most goals fail in the same few ways, and knowing them is most of the fix.

They are wishes, not goals. "Improve my English" has no number, no date and no way to know whether it happened. A goal you cannot fail is a goal you cannot achieve either, because nothing distinguishes progress from nothing.

They are too many. Six goals in January means none by March. Attention is the scarce resource, not intention.

They depend on motivation. Motivation is a feeling and feelings are unreliable. Anything that requires you to feel like it will not survive a bad month.

They have no first step. "Start a business" is not something you can do on Tuesday. "Register a domain" is.

They measure the outcome, not the behaviour. You cannot directly control whether you earn more. You can control whether you send five proposals a week. Goals set on things you control work far better, because the behaviour is available every day and the outcome only arrives at the end.

Nobody knows about them. A goal written in a private notebook has no cost to abandoning it.

And there is no review. Set in January and looked at in December is not a goal, it is a memory.

The rest of this course is those seven, reversed.