Goals: Awareness
Understand what goal-setting means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Goal-setting is one of the most validated interventions in behavioural science. Locke and Latham's research across over 1,000 studies shows that specific, challenging goals improve outcomes by 10 – 25% compared to vague intentions or "do your best" instructions.
Yet the gap between knowing goals work and actually achieving them is enormous. 92% of goal-setters never reach their goals, and 80% of New Year's resolutions are abandoned by February.
The difference is almost entirely about practice, not willpower. Writing goals down increases achievement by 42%. Monitoring progress weekly significantly promotes attainment across a wide range of domains. Simple, well-evidenced practices dramatically shift the odds – but only about a third of goal-setters use any of them.
Goal-setting also shapes your sense of direction and meaning. People with clear goals report higher life satisfaction, greater sense of purpose, and more resilience when facing setbacks.
People approach goal-setting for different reasons. This site scores every goals intervention across three core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these three values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Follow-through
Consistently completing what you set out to do – turning goals from intentions into accomplished outcomes. Maintaining momentum, tracking progress, building accountability, and developing the discipline to keep working when motivation fades. People who lean towards this value measure success by completion rate.
Clarity
Defining goals with enough precision that you know exactly what success looks like and can tell whether you are on track. Specific, measurable targets, clear deadlines, and unambiguous criteria for completion. People who lean towards this value believe that vague goals produce vague results.
Adaptability
Maintaining the ability to change course, adjust timelines, reprioritise, or abandon goals as new information emerges. Treating goals as hypotheses, running regular reviews, and developing the skill of strategic retreat without emotional cost. People who lean towards this value believe that adapting intelligently is more important than persisting stubbornly.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each goals value:
Chris Nikic became the first person with Down syndrome to complete an Ironman triathlon in 2020, at age 21. He trained for over a year using a system he calls "1% better every day" – small, trackable daily improvements toward an audacious goal. He has since completed multiple Ironmans and a marathon, each time following the same methodical, incremental approach to follow-through across multi-month timescales.
Samuel Thomas Davies is a behavioural scientist and author who publicly documents his goal-setting methodology, including specific measurable targets, weekly progress reviews, and annual retrospectives published in detail. His system treats goal clarity as a discipline – every goal has explicit success criteria, a deadline, and a tracking mechanism. He has maintained this practice consistently for over a decade.
Sara Blakely spent two years developing Spanx while working full-time as a door-to-door fax machine salesperson. When her initial patent strategy failed, she rewrote the patent herself. When major retailers rejected her, she demonstrated the product in person at Neiman Marcus. She has spoken about treating each setback as information rather than failure, adjusting her approach without abandoning the goal. Spanx reached $400 million in revenue with no outside funding.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Follow-through
Clarity
Adaptability
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data on goal-setting behaviour among adults. All items in this area are scored.
You now understand why goals matter, what different people get out of goal-setting, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about follow-through, clarity, and adaptability. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Goals. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
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