You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this:

In 1953 a team of researchers inter­viewed Yale’s grad­u­at­ing seniors, ask­ing them whether they had writ­ten down the spe­cific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the 3% of peo­ple who had spe­cific goals all those years before had accu­mu­lated more per­sonal wealth than the other 97% of their class­mates com­bined. The study is used to illus­trate the power of focus.

Prof. Richard Wise­man, Uni­ver­sity of Hert­ford­shire psy­chol­o­gist and self-help myth-buster extra­or­di­naire, says it best:

There is just one small problem… the exper­i­ment never actu­ally took place.

A 2007 arti­cle in Fast Com­pany cor­rob­o­rates the stance, in a slightly more elo­quent (or should that be ver­bose?) manner:

Accord­ing to [Silas] Spen­gler [sec­re­tary of the Class of 1953 since grad­u­a­tion] — who listed his future occu­pa­tion in the Yale year­book as “per­son­nel admin­is­tra­tion fol­low­ing a course of busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion at Har­vard,” and who instead went into the navy and then to law school — he never wrote down any per­sonal goals, nor did he and his class­mates ever par­tic­i­pate in a research study on per­sonal goals.

As fur­ther evi­dence, Spen­gler pro­vided excerpts from the 1953 year­book. No one stated per­sonal goals, but most of the grad­u­ates pre­dicted their future lines of work: Roberto Goizueta, Coke’s CEO, pre­dicted his future would be with Cuba’s Com­pani Indus­trial del Trop­ico S.A.; William Don­ald­son and Dan Lufkin, founders of Wall Street’s Don­ald­son, Lufkin & Jen­rette, fore­cast futures in law. For­rest Mars, Jr., now chair­man and CEO of Mars, Inc., listed “no” for employ­ment possibilities.