Accomplishing a Goal - Why Writing Your Goal Down Works

Fitzhugh Dodson was a world-famous psychologist, lecturer and writer. He had many strategies for accomplishing a goal. He once said that “Goals that are not written down are just wishes”. I’d like to share with you why writing your goal down works from my life experiences of travelling the world and attending business seminars.

The first ever live speaker I got to see in the flesh was none other than Tony Robbins. Tony is regarded as the world’s #1 motivational coach.

Tony asked everyone in the audience to write down their income goals for the next year on a piece of paper. This sounded so simple. Tony then asked the audience to double that figure. Everyone in the audience got extremely nervous. This was an outrageous goal, so we all wrote it down. I discovered one thing in that lesson from Tony. Nobody had ever really written down their goals before. People looked at each other as if Tony had asked them to do something really stupid. Some people beside me laughed this task off and refused to write down their income goals. They said they already had it in their minds and didn’t need to write it down.

After the seminar, I began to study the art of goal setting in order to understand the importance of simply writing down your goal. In truth, it sounded a little too simple. We sometimes think that highly successful people are complicated and therefore we can’t replicate them. What I found out next, surprised me and shocked me.

I went to more and more business seminars after this and I began to see that learning how to set and achieve goals is the number one thing that separates highly successful people from the rest of the pack. I found out that only 3% of people actually set goals and write them down. Brian Tracy, the famous American personal development guru, says that writing your goals down increases your chances 1000% of achieving it.

The other 97% of people are just wishing and dreaming their life away. Or they simply think that you do not have to write your goals down. I was in that 97% and wasn’t proud to admit it. I felt embarrassed after reading these facts because it is such a basic thing to do. I had heard of it before, in fact I was doing it on occasions but I repeatedly ignored it. That was a major mistake to make on my behalf. It’s amazing what happens when facts like this are brought to your conscious mind. It hurts!

Sometimes our success may be all planed out in our heads, but committing your success statement to paper will make it more tangible. Ultimately, the more you want, the more you can get. So why do the 97% of people who don’t write down their goals fail?

Writing helps clarify things in our minds. If we don’t write things down or keep a log of these things, they get lost. So what happens if you don’t write your goals? Well a very good example of this happened when my best friends and I went on our gap year after our masters. As soon as we handed in our final dissertation, we headed off on a year long journey that took us to South America, New Zealand, Australia (I am still here to this day) and South East Asia. One morning, after a big night out with our tour group, we went for breakfast in a restaurant in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. There were 15 of us in the group, so it was a big group of people. The waiter came over to the table to take our orders. He didn’t have a pen or paper with him. Unusual for taking orders so I was intrigued. Did this guy have an awesome memory? So we started giving our orders one by one. After the third or fourth person, he started to get a little confused. He then kept going backwards and forwards. Some of us were laughing at his stubbornness to ignore our calls for pen and paper. I don’t speak Spanish so I did the universal hand signals for pen and paper, you know the one right? Still this guy kept trying to wing it. At this stage, some of us were getting hungry and couldn’t wait any longer. The waiter finally went to the back room and got a pen and paper and started writing down our orders.

See how complicated we can sometimes make our goals? Without writing them down, we leave things to chance and we don’t have a system to measure and monitor our results. Do you find that writing things down on paper helps you reach it, whether it is a business goal or a personal goal? Please share below…