“Every result or goal you want to achieve is preceded by a process. The secret to success is to remain unconditionally committed to your (day-to-day) process without being emotionally attached to your (day-to-day) results. Be emotionally engaged, but not emotionally attached.” — Hal Elrod

Almost everything we do in life involves having goals. For this reason, having goals is unavoidable, consciously or unconsciously. For instance, some of us want to make more money, others want to change their careers, while some want to get married and start a family. Some want to change their diets, while others even want to change their sleeping patterns or quit smoking. The list is endless!

What Makes It Difficult to Achieve Your Goals

Setting goals themselves are easy, but the challenge is achieving them. There are many reasons for failure to achieve goals. According to Harvard Business Review, the following are the reasons for failure to attain goals (Yang, Stamatogiannakis, Chattopadhyay and Chakravarti, 2021):

• Not knowing how to pursue the goal.
• Lack of sufficient willpower
• Choosing vague goals
• Encountering unexpected adverse conditions, such as illness, economic downturn, or loss of job, etc.
• Setting goals that are too high for our skills, energy or resources required to make them happen.

An article on Inc.com reports that a study at the University of Scranton, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, reveals that 92% of people who set New Year’s goals never actually achieve them (Schwantes, 2018). This means that only 8% of them achieve their goals. This is an astonishing figure and an alarming situation, when considering that setting goals has become one of the most popular topics today.

The summary of the reasons that enable the 8% to succeed while 92% fail is stated below:

• Beginning with the goal with the end in mind. They write down their goals and know the outcome that they want. In addition, they break the goal down into tasks that must be completed to achieve it, including the resources required and the obstacles they might face.
• Building a support system around them. A goal is not something that should be undertaken alone. Staying connected with other people is essential to your happiness, self-esteem and ability to cope when difficulties arise. While you may recognise the importance of a support system, building that network of healthy, supportive people can feel easier said than done. High performers like sports stars and celebrities understand that they can achieve more and quicker if they engage the help of mentors, coaches, advisers, etc. It is the reason they stay motivated even when things are not going right.
• Setting specific and challenging goals. Research has shown, based on a review of laboratory and field studies on the effects of goal setting on performance, that in 90% of the studies, specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals (Locke, Shaw, Saari and Latham, 1981).
• Recognizing procrastination. Procrastination reduces productivity and the quality of work as people ignore or delay tasks, or even worse, when this becomes a habit because they find the work unimportant, difficult or uninteresting. A goal by nature involves a struggle, as it requires the formation of new skills. As we shall see later, the goal must be what is important to you to ensure commitment.
• Practising the productivity ratio of 52 and 17, now 112/26. Research has shown that the most productive people work for 52 minutes at a time and break for 17 minutes before getting back to the task. The most recent research has shown that this ratio is now 112/26 (Gifford, 2021).
• Listening to music for focus. A study published in the journal Psychology of Music found that when students listened to music in between tasks, they were able to concentrate longer and perform better academically. A 2019 survey of 2,000 Britons found that about half regularly listen to music while working, and two out of five believe that it helps them to get more done. Consequently, some companies now broadcast music throughout entire workplaces. 
• Don’t do task switching. According to Susan Weinschenk, what people commonly refer to as multitasking is task switching, not multitasking (Weinschenk, S., 2013). According to her, there has been a lot of research on task switching and the findings are summarised below:
• Switching tasks takes more time to get tasks completed
• It causes more errors when you switch instead of doing one task at a time.
• For complex tasks, these errors and penalties increase.
• Each task switch might only waste 1/10th of a second, but if a lot of switching is done in a day, the loss can add up to 40% loss of productivity.
• Task switching consumes more brain resources as it involves several parts of your brain. Brain scans during task switching reveal activity in four major areas, such as the pre-frontal cortex, which is involved in shifting and focusing attention, and selecting which task to do and when. The posterior parietal lobe activates rules for each task switched to, the anterior cingulate gyrus monitors errors, and the pre-motor cortex prepares for you to move in some way.

According to available data, only 3% of the population set goals, despite the popularisation of the SMART goals method. We will examine this further in future articles (Kapeleris, 2016).

References

Hughes, A. (2019). Majority of Britons listen to music at work, poll claims. [online] The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/music-workplace-concentration-stress-productivity-a9198726.html.

In-text citation: (Hughes, 2019)

Jimcollins.com. n.d. Jim Collins – Concepts – BHAG. [online] Available at: <https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/bhag.html> [Accessed 3 April 2022].

Kapeleris, J., 2016. Only Three Percent of the Population Set Goals and Objectives. [online] Linkedin.com. Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/only-three-percent-population-set-goals-objectives-john-kapeleris> [Accessed 3 April 2022].

Locke, E. A., Shaw, K. N., Saari, L. M., & Latham, G. P. (1981). Goal setting and task performance: 1969–1980. Psychological Bulletin, 90(1), 125–152. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.90.1.125

Schwantes, M., 2018. Science Says Only 8 Percent of People Actually Achieve Their Goals. Here Are 7 Things They Do Differently. [online] Inc.com. Available at: <https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/science-says-only-8-percent-of-people-actually-achieve-their-goals-here-are-7-things-they-do-differently.html?cid=landermore> [Accessed 12 April 2022].

Shankar K R, A., 2021. 92% of people fail to achieve their goals. Here’s why!. [online] Linkedin.com. Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/92-people-fail-achieve-goals-heres-why-anantha-shankar-k-r?trk=pulse-article> [Accessed 3 April 2022].

Weinschenk, S., 2013. How to get people to do stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivation. New Riders.