5 Reasons Why You Should Set Goals (Backed By Science)

This article is an excerpt from my book, How To Be A Superior Man

Ask the average man what are his goals in life and you’ll get a blank stare at worst and vague answers at best. The only goals he has ever pursued are probably the goals his parents, teachers, or other authority figures told him he should pursue. He does his best to do what is expected of him and hopes everything else falls in place. Setting clearly defined personal goals is an alien concept for the majority of the population.

In fact, the most dreaded question in job interviews is “what are your career goals?” If the interviewees could answer honestly, they would probably say “What career goals? I just need a job to get by.” While getting a job might not be the best long-term strategy, “getting by” is indeed the correct way to define how most people live because most people don’t live intentionally. They just get by. Lacking clearly defined goals that give them direction, they drift to where life takes them.

Why Most Men Don’t Set Goals

The average modern man is uniformized by conventional wisdom and indoctrination to become an automaton that follows orders. His dreams and aspirations get murdered before he even makes it to adulthood, while he simultaneously gets emasculated by an anti-male climate. As a result, masses of men believe they are either powerless or they have limited power to shape their own destinies which is why they subconsciously find it pointless to set goals. Instead of becoming active agents in their lives and making good things happen, they watch passively as things happen to them which are often not good. They quietly but reluctantly settle for an average life, barely staying afloat.

Furthermore, thinking is difficult and most people avoid it. Setting goals requires thinking and there’s nothing the average man hates more than thinking.

As a result, most men don’t set goals and miss out on the following benefits of a very simple and straightforward yet extremely impactful activity.

5 Reasons Why You Should Set Goals

Most people have no idea that goal setting is a high-impact but low-cost activity. It costs nothing in terms of money and while it might take a few hours of your time at once, it’s time very well-spent considering its matchless benefits that accrue through the years. Goal-setting is a gift that keeps giving for a lifetime.

Scientists who studied for decades the impact of goal-setting on people’s lives have identified goals as key integrative and analytic units in the study of human motivation¹ and validated their theory that the essence of life is purposeful, goal-directed action.² They also discovered that goal-setting effects are very reliable. In other words, goal-setting works and it works reliably.

This is good news for everyone because goal-setting is freely available to anyone who’s willing to just think through what they want out of life. You don’t have to watch passively as life happens to you. You don’t need to be an automaton (like most people) just going through the motions. You have the power to consciously shape your life. The power of your conscious mind grants you the capability to become the prime mover of your own life.

Here are the top 5 ways goal-setting makes your life better:

1. Setting Goals Is How You Gain Direction And Control

Ask people what are their goals and you’ll get vague answers at best. Ask them about their achievements and you’ll get even fewer answers.

Most people don’t achieve much in life which is not surprising because not having goals means you don’t know your destination. How in the world do you find your way if you don’t know where you are going? If you don’t know your destination, you lack direction. If you lack direction you tacitly agree that you are powerless to shape your future to your liking, whether you consciously acknowledge it or not. You’re like a dead leaf that goes where the wind blows. Is it really a surprise for a directionless person to never arrive anywhere or arrive at unintended destinations?

Setting goals is how you gain direction because your goals are the destinations you want to arrive at. Modern life can’t be navigated by instinct. You need the help of your conscious mind to do that. Most people look at the complexity of the world and get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of variables they can’t control. They can’t control the economy, politics, the weather, wars, natural disasters, their genetics, the traffic, what others do or think, mistakes other people make, what life throws at them, where they were born, etc.

By worrying about what they can’t control, they miss out on the vast number of variables they can control. You control your mind, your body, what you learn, what you do in your free time, how you make money, how you spend, save, or invest the money you make, the businesses you build, what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, how you sleep, how you work, your friends, your social circle, your love life, where you live, where you work, and what you produce.

Setting goals summons your focus on the variables you can control. Success happens when you successfully manipulate in your favor the variables you control and ignore or avoid those you can’t control. If you start working with what you’ve got and be willing to play the hand you’ve been dealt, you’ll start to gradually expand your sphere of control as well.

2. Goal Setting Significantly And Substantially Increases Achievement

Setting goals is one thing and achieving them is another. Setting goals makes you gain direction and control but does it necessarily lead to achievement? The answer is a big fat yes. While, obviously, there are no guarantees, decades of empirical research have abundantly demonstrated that setting goals significantly and substantially increases achievement.³,⁴

How does goal-setting lead to achievement? We know that achievement can only happen through repeated action so if goal-setting leads to increased achievement, it should be stimulating action. Scientists who analyzed more than 1,000 laboratory and field studies in the academic, industrial, and business domains have found empirical support for the goal-setting theory that goals are immediate regulators of behavior, and goal-setting theory is among the most, if not the most, practical theories for increasing performance.⁵ Setting goals reliably increases your performance by motivating you to take relevant action.

Behavioral scientists determined that goals affect performance through four mechanisms:⁶, ⁷

1. Goals direct attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities,
2. Goals have an energizing function which leads to mobilizing effort,
3. Goals increase persistence,
4. Goals motivate the discovery and use of knowledge and strategy development.

While most people expect action to be automatically aligned with self-interest, what actually happens in real life is that, without goals, humans rely on instinct or beliefs that either lead to actions that objectively contradict their self-interests or no action at all because beliefs can and do be limiting. You have a rational mind which you are better off using because consciously set goals are shown to affect action, motivation, persistence, and the desire to educate yourself about how to achieve your goal.

3. Writing Your Goals Increases Achievement Further And Even Improves Health

Scientists who study the benefits of writing state that “the correlation between written goals and a productive life is demonstrated by decades of research.”⁸

While goal-setting research often requires participants to write down their goals, the difference between written and unwritten goals was particularly examined by Gail Matthews, a clinical psychologist at Dominican University in California, who, in a study with 267 participants from various countries, demonstrated that “those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.”⁹

Considering that thinking is what separates humans from animals and puts us at the top of the food chain, it’s not surprising that writing your goals increases achievement further because writing is a derivative of thinking. Writing forces you to organize your thoughts before you put them on paper which requires further thinking hence improving clarity. Naturally, well-thought and clearly defined goals are likelier to be attained.

In addition to helping you organize your thoughts, writing about your goals increases your goal commitment through a psychological process that behavioral scientists call “consistency”. World-renowned persuasion expert Robert Cialdini writes in his seminal book entitled “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” that “There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.” The logic is that once we put our goals on paper, we psychologically want to maintain consistency, which enables us to organize our actions in compliance with our written goals, which in turn makes us likelier to attain our goals.

Surprisingly, researchers who study goal-setting have also found that writing about goals improved the mental and physical health of the research participants. In her paper entitled “The Health Benefits of Writing about Life Goals”¹⁰, Dr. Laura King stated that research participants who wrote their goals reported improvements in mood, optimism, and physical health. Long-term improvements in their psychological and physical health were observed in consistence with reductions in health center visits and immune changes.

4. Pursuing Your Goals Makes You Happier

Some people argue that goal-setting is counterproductive because, first, we won’t feel happy until we achieve our goal, and second, even if we achieve our goal we won’t be happy for long because we will have lost the goal that gave us purpose and direction.

This argument is demonstrably false on both accounts but at least it inadvertently acknowledges that a lack of purpose and direction makes us unhappy.

People do derive tremendous happiness, satisfaction, and pride from attaining their goals¹¹ but you don’t necessarily need to wait until you reach your goals before you can be happy. A large body of research by scientists who have studied goal-setting has shown that the pursuit of goals is strongly linked to increased feelings of happiness and well-being¹², ¹³ and that “well-being conducive to happiness is achievable through self-actualizing processes such as goal-striving, goal-aspiration, and the exercise of reason.”¹⁴

Professor of psychology, Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, upon studying the results of decades of goal-setting research, arrived at the conclusion that “by setting goals and intentionally engaging in positive activities, people can attain greater happiness and well-being.”¹⁵

We previously talked about how discipline is the best way to fight anxiety and increase optimism instead of hopelessness, despair, and lack of meaning. The link between goal pursuit and happiness has also to do with reduced anxiety due to reduced uncertainty and increased optimism as we talked about in the previous section.

Timothy A. Pychyl, a renowned procrastination researcher and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Carleton University, writes that “both philosophers and psychologists have proposed that happiness is found in the pursuit of our goals. It is not necessarily that we are accomplishing anything in particular, but that we are engaged in the pursuit of what we think is meaningful in our lives.”¹⁶

Gunter W. Maier and Hannah J. P. Klug of Bielefeld University’s Department of Psychology studied the findings of 108 independent samples derived from 85 studies and determined a significant association between goal progress (instead of goal attainment) and subjective well-being.¹⁷

It doesn’t necessarily take a scientist to appreciate how making progress towards our goals makes us happier. It’s easy to imagine the happiness of a person whose goal is to lose weight when he hops on the scale and finds out that he lost 2 pounds during the last week. He might still be far away from achieving his fitness goals but the observable fact that he’s making progress fills him up with optimism and improves his confidence. An entrepreneur who gains his first customer or makes his first $1,000 is certainly happy and proud not that his goal was to gain only one customer or make only a thousand bucks but these are the signs that he’s on his way to achieving his entrepreneurship goals which boost his morale and self-belief.

We previously talked about how self-improvement also improves your relationships. Sure enough, a study by California State University psychologists entitled “Pursuit of Goals in the Search for Happiness” found that goal-setting improved relationships by promoting mindfulness, having a positive impact on others, and enhancing communication. They also found that goals fostered meaning-making by enhancing self-actualization with feelings of increased awareness, recognition of self-action, and the discovery of purpose through goals.¹⁸

Setting, pursuing, and achieving goals makes you a better person who is an asset and naturally other people want to associate with people who are assets.

Many people are willing to go to great lengths in pursuit of “finding their purpose,” hoping to randomly stumble upon it. Research has shown that these people would have found their purpose much quicker if they had set personal goals just like the participants in goal-setting experiments who discovered their purpose through goal-setting.

As for the claim that we lose purpose and direction once we achieve our goal, there’s no rule that says we should only pursue one goal. Not only you can and should have multiple goals, but also achieving one of our goals makes us likelier to achieve our other goals and even set more ambitious goals for ourselves. Our goals aren’t set in stone. They evolve, develop, or change. Not only does the achievement of goals usually lead to higher goals but also people have different needs for personal growth and well-being at different points throughout their lifespans. World-renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow famously said that “man is a perpetually wanting animal.” The pursuit of goals helps fulfill the need for self-actualization as people strive to reach their potential to become the best possible version of themselves.¹⁹

Success breeds success. Since there’s always room for self-improvement, you will never wander around without a purpose as long as you keep setting goals. By the time you achieve your fitness goal to get in shape, you might find out that you want to get six-pack abs once you are at it. Once you achieve your entrepreneurial goal to consistently make $3,000 a month from your online business, you can extend it to $10,000 a month and further.

Also reaching one goal in one domain of your life can make it possible to pursue other goals in other domains. For example, once you gain your financial freedom, you might pursue building a family having become certain that you are capable of supporting the financial needs of a family. Even when you achieve all of your personal goals, you might dedicate yourself to helping other people, which is indeed what happens to a lot of self-actualized, successful people. As Benjamin Mays once said, “The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”

5. Setting Goals Helps You Quit Your Bad Habits, Develop Good Habits, And Get Your Life Together

Previously we talked about how scientists who study goals determined that “goals are immediate regulators of behavior” and that they “direct attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities.”

The implications of these are huge. Many people struggle with quitting bad habits, developing good habits, and getting their lives together. If looked closely, it’s easy to see how goal-setting can be helpful in these regards.

Setting goals motivates you to quit your bad habits because bad habits usually get in the way between you and your goals.

For example, if you have a habit of drinking beer and you set a goal to get in shape, you’ll be motivated to quit drinking beer so that you can lose your beer belly. Or if you set a goal to build a business that eventually makes you financially free, you might want to quit drinking because drinking robs you of your time and mental clarity to work on your business and you can’t afford hangovers when you have to work in the mornings to grow your business. If your goal is to get six-pack abs, you will be motivated to quit eating junk food. If your goal is to write a book, you will want to quit playing video games or watching porn for hours on end so that you have the time to actually write a book. And so on.

Setting goals also helps you develop good habits. Fitness goals often lead to better and healthier eating habits. Business goals often lead to better sleeping habits because you need a well-rested mind to work on your business. Relationship goals can lead to better self-care habits because you’ll probably want to be more attractive to the women you want to meet.

If you don’t have goals and thus your life has no direction, you’ll have a hard time quitting your bad habits. When a goalless person quits a bad habit, he will be quickly bored not knowing what to do with the newfound free time in his hands and he will be tempted to just replace the old bad habit with a new bad habit.

Peter is tired of his life. He drinks whiskey every night after he comes back home from his dead-end job in order to unwind. He reasons that drinking is the reason why he has been failing in life so he decides to quit drinking. In order to relieve his newfound boredom in the evenings after quitting the drink, he starts to play video games until bedtime to fill in the void. He no longer drinks but his life isn’t going any better other than that he lost a few pounds due to not drinking anymore.

If Peter had set a goal instead to build a side business in his spare time so that he can eventually quit his job, he would be able to quit drinking without replacing the drinking habit with the habit of playing video games because he would need the freed up time from drinking to work on his side business. Let’s rewrite Peter’s story but this time with the goal of building a side business.

Peter is tired of his life. He drinks whiskey every night after he comes back home from his dead-end job in order to unwind. One day he gets fed up with his dead-end job and decides to build an online side business and grow it until he can afford to quit his job. In order to make up the time to work on his side business, he quits drinking. He’s energized by his goal and works furiously on his side project. One day the money he makes from his online business exceeds the money he makes from his dead-end job so he quits his job and moves to a tropical country with a lower cost of living and sunny weather. He continues to grow his online business until he retires when he is still relatively young. Now that he has plenty of free time on his hands he decides to pursue his hobbies and maintain good health to live longer the life he now enjoys living.

Peter managed to permanently change his life for the better because he set a worthy goal that energized him. It all started with setting a goal which eventually led him to quit his bad habits, develop good habits, and get his life together.

Also, not having goals can by itself lead to bad habits. People who don’t have goals are vulnerable to developing bad habits to fill the void in their lives or relieve their boredom. Moreover, bad habits often serve as an escape from reality. Most people lead lives of desperation and bad habits such as alcohol, drugs, porn, video games, etc. are ways to alter their reality. As we’ve covered in detail, setting goals has the potential to alter your life. If you achieve your goals and manage to build a great life, you won’t feel the need to escape from your reality which no longer sucks. Last but not least, bad habits are sometimes about coping with the volatility of your emotions. Goals regulate your emotions by improving your focus which in turn can prevent you from developing bad habits.

This article is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book How To Be A Superior Man: Master Yourself, Get Leaner And Stronger, Achieve Your Goals, Become The Man You Want To Be. Read more here.

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