Answer: False!

 

Have you heard about the study demonstrating that the 3% of college students who wrote down their goals before graduating attained more wealth over the next 20 years than all of their non-goal-writing classmates combined??

 

Although talked about often ... and even written about in best selling books ... it turns out that the study is actually an urban legend. 

 

While there's a lot of common sense behind the idea, no actual data yet shows that if you simply write down your goals, you'll achieve them.  Is that a justification for not setting goals (or New Year's Resolutions!)?  Absolutely not!

 

As evaluators and strategic planners, we suggest a 4-step, cyclical process for achieving goals that looks like this:

 

In the first step, Plan, you write down the goal and your strategy for addressing it.  The next step is to Execute the plan of activities.  The third step, Measurement, is where you evaluate the plan's progress.  That will tell you what's working or not and help you Correct or amend the plan and its execution.  But of course, it doesn't stop there!  Refining the plan puts you back in the cycle of executing, measuring and correcting until you fully reach your goal.

 

So by all means, write down your goals for 2011.  But don't stop at 3:00 if you intend to achieve them!