I think most of us have heard about the Havard study how the 3% of successful people are differentiated from the rest of the population just because they have goals.

The number does not lie, but still after knowing this a lot of us still struggling to be part of the 3% population. We follow the steps: figure out our vision, write it down, figure out our goals and all those that come with it…specific goal number and the dateline……buuuut at the end we still fail. When this happen most of us are just clueless….what happened. Where can I improve? We dont know…and I doubt it if any one else also know why you can not achieve your goal.

At first thought we can say there can be thousand of reasons why we fail to achieve our goal - just plain lazy, its too tough, things has changed, death in the family…death in my neighbour family, loss my job…..etc. But….if we just rethink and look at these possible reasons then we can categorized them into main categories below:

1 - set goal too high

2 - not well plan - no back up plan, if something un expected happen

3 - panic, close mind which block creativity needed to solve problem

4 - no support from people around

5 - does not learn from mistake - and try to improve

To stick to the “science” part of the title let us look to item (1) and (5) which are should be injected with element of science into it. Science here means something measurable and has law and procedures.

When we read those goal setting book, the given advice is when setting your goal try to set it to something that high but achievable or reasonable. This advice is not scientific at all. It is full of blurr subjective words as high, achievable and reasonable. So the first step to make goal setting a science we have to figure out clear measurement matrices and how to measure them.

For example in my day job I have to set the “goal” for software development projects. In real world the goals are listed into work breakdown and starting and ending date are tied to each of the task. Before this can be done, estimation on effort needed to complete the project, based on the requirements is done. The estimation is done based on matrices such as how “many” requirements there are, how the software flow expected to be etc. There are numerous researches done on what are the matrices that can be used, and methods to estimate the effort to develop a particular software application.

Not to say that software estimation effort is now something that can be done accurately and easily ….no way jose. In fact it is far from that. Compare to other branch of engineering such as civil engineering, software effort estimation process has a lot to be desired, but the important thing is the awareness of the community that the estimation has to be done scientifically in order to improve it over time. This has been proven in other area of engineering.

Then come back to another world….world of self improvement. And to be more specific area of goal setting - have we seen any research or study on how to set goal, and measure its accuracy - i.e how far our achievement vs. our goal.? I have not seen any. If you have I will be grateful if you can point me and the other reader of this blog to it in the comment.

The fact that we did not have good matrices for goal setting and achievement bring us to the problem stated in item (5) - did not learn from past mistake.

As I mentioned earlier when we fail to achieve certain goal we really dont have a clue why and what can be done to improve our self the next time around. This is because we dont really know anything about the goal that we set in the first place. Does it based on only our “hunches”…or some else “hunches” or we stick it there by doing reverse engineering …When we miss the target we dont really know what to be done.

Well you might think you just waste your time reading this…but my point is that the self improvement community should start to make a move to apply all those scientific knowledge that human being have acquired for thousands of years into this area. It might not be applicable to everything, but I believe it must be useful in some areas. If I get this point across I consider my goal is achieve…100%