The world's most popular goals | Hacker News Reader

The world's most popular goals

43things.com

90 pointsprofquail79 comments

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Taking the first ten, for example:

# lose weight 37862 people

- dieting website - exercise website

# stop procrastinating 27741 people

- 8aweek - rescuetime - leechblock - your-own-twist - iPhone app with random advice on meditation and focus.

# write a book 27115 people

- writer's editor. - A way to make money off content without publishers

# Fall in love 25192 people

- dating website

# be happy 22707 people # Get a tattoo 20911 people

- tattoo directory! - Design-your-tattoo online, and book with our range of licensed artists

# drink more water 19639 people

- Subscribe to bottled water deliveries online!

# get married 19348 people

- Dating website - Wedding organiser

# travel the world 19122 people

- travel tips - low cost online travel agency

# go on a road trip with no predetermined destination 19098 people

- Worldwide mobile phone packages - Post-to-email service - travel tips again

etc etc

Although I am sure some bright people here on HN are already working on one or more of the above, these seem pretty saturated already. Maybe the best startups are the ones that solve things for people that they don't even know is a goal yet.

The problem with solving problems people don't know they have is that you have to sell the problem before you sell the solution.

I was more inspired by Paul's post today and recent personal musings on the vast supply of ideas floating around the place.

My personal pet notion is doing webmail better than google, which I occasionally scribble down random ideas for.

I was thinking about this in the other direction for books, this explains why weight loss/self improvement/etc... books sell so well.

"drink more water"

This is the most puzzling one for me. How can this even be a goal?

Are all those people chronically dehydrated? Perhaps they drink soft drinks instead of water? Is it a North American thing? Mysteries...

Americans love their soft drinks. They also feel really guilty about it and resolve to drink more water, which means big money for people who make water filters and bottled water.

Edit: to note this relates to the "Health" category I mentioned in another comment in this thread.

The last time I went to the dentist he pointed out that I was drinking enough soft drinks that it was causing noticeable damage to my enamel. I found it surprisingly hard to stop drinking them. In fact, I haven't stopped, but I have reduced it substantially.

It's hard at first but it's definitely worth the effort of going cold turkey. After a month or so the next time you try a soft drink your stomach will feel all gassy and terrible and the drink itself will taste pretty bad.

Or at least that's what happened to me. I used to drink 3-4 cans of pepsi and maybe 1-2 of mountain dew every day. I went from that to nothing and two months later I had the above experience. I've had soft drinks maybe a half dozen to a dozen times over the past year and it's never a particularly pleasant experience.

I've quit soft drinks cold turkey on a few occasions. I've gone from drinking them almost exclusively to having none for months at a time.

My experience was that they were even better than I remembered them. The only thing that I can relate to you is that if I haven't had a Coke in some months, drinking a large amount does upset my stomach.

me too. What I've found is that carbonated water is the best substitute when trying to get myself to not drink soda. Safeway sells carbonated water in cans, just like soda pop, so it feels quite similar to drinking a soda.

(I don't know if the acid in the carbonated water would hurt your teeth without the added damage from the corn syrup or not.)

I think drinking 2-3 liters of water per day (~100 ounces?) is seen as beneficial for the health. People usually don't drink that much because they don't feel thirsty, but they would like to.

I don't live in the US so I don't know what I'm talking about.

The widely accepted notion that we should drink 8 glasses of water per day is apparently an urban legent

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

Perhaps some people prefer to excrete more dilute urine?

(As an aside for the curious, your water intake and your sodium excretion are virtually orthogonal - the body is very, very good at retaining sodium while wasting H20 when necessary. Therefore, drinking lots of water will not cure hypertension or reduce your whole-body sodium burden.)

Some say that disease prevention is the best cure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_stone#Prevention

Most fitness or nutrition guides tell people that they should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day.

Considering that the #1 goal is to lose weight, it follows that people listing "drink more water" as one of their goals are doing it as a part of wanting to lose weight.

This is probably associated with the 'loose weight' theme. It means: "Drink water instead of coke or some other sugary drink."

Maybe it is an American thing (I'm American). I've had to very consciously switch my drinking habits from diet soda over to water. I used to literally not drink any water at all.

I lost a significant amount of weight by doing nothing but transition from drinking Coke and Mountain Dew to water.

The three big things are health, wealth, relationships

- Health

WebMD, diet sites, probably others I can't think of.

Snake oil. Oh, the internet is dripping with snake oil

- Wealth/Career

Careers at LinkedIn, The Ladders, Indeed and many more

Wealth in eBay stores, Etsy, heck even Adsense More wealth in Motley Fool, ScottTrade, etc.

That even goes into affiliate marketing, make $$$ online scams, etc.

- Relationships

Facebook, MySpace

Match, eHarmony, etc.

We could try and combine some ideas. So how about...

Lose weight + get a tattoo = a tattoo which you get that is hidden under your love handles, motivating you to lose them

Write a book + fall in love = a dating site where users instead of writing boring messages, write a love story together

Lose weight + drink more water = A cup that lists the calories and health negatives of different drinks, with water in big happy letters with ZERO calories and no negatives

# lose weight 37862 people - dieting website - exercise website

aren't there about a million of these?

Yes, and they're not working. That's a great opportunity to build something that does work!

What makes you think all of them aren't working?

Well maybe they work a little, but the number of fat people I see every day (starting with myself in the mirror) suggests they could work better.

mstevens: I would hazard that most people are fat because of their economic condition. That is, they can only afford cheap foods, which are mostly fatty.

I keep hearing this, and I keep thinking it's complete BS.

I would be quite happy to show you plenty of fat folks with above-average incomes. In fact I'm sure I could find a bunch of them on this board.

Historically and for most of the world's population, your economic condition would prevent you from being fat. Poor in the US are so well-off, they can afford to be overweight.

All the offices I've worked in here in America, probably more than half (myself included) of the overpaid nerds were overweight.

Sure if you go to the marketing department, that's probably not the case, but that's just because marketing won't hire you if you aren't pretty. We're not so picky over here in Engineering.

Eating healthy does take time and effort and some knowledge, but it doesn't take that much money. Assuming you have access to a stove, healthy food can be had for cheap. Chicken? cheap. rice and beans? cheap. Vegetables? yeah, those are pretty cheap too.

Because if they were, people wouldn't get so fat?

Whomever figures out how to make people want to loose weight, rather than convince them they should force themselves to loose weight are going to make a fortune.

That's because they're not designed to work, they're designed to confirm to what people think will work.

Losing weight is not a mystery: Take less calories in than you burn and you will lose weight (simple, but 99% effective). To do this you need to eat healthy foods and get active.

People don't want to do this. People want to eat crappy foods and sit around watching Grey's Anatomy (#93) and lose weight.

# kiss in the rain

- Weather forecast - waterproof lip gloss catalog

Seriously, I'm surprised this one very specific goal ranks so highly. I guess I'm in the wrong demographic to understand it. But is there some pop culture thing that makes this more popular than, say, "live passionately"?

My guess is that most of the people who added it to their goals had never thought about it until they saw that it was a popular goal, but they thought "ooh, that sounds romantic" and added it. It's just one of those random runaway successes.

On the upside, unlike "live passionately" it's relatively easy (desert dwellers and the terminally dateless excluded) and well-defined, so you know for sure when you've achieved it.

Nice list, but most of these are low hanging fruit and are already saturated with established players. The riches are still in the niches.

Example: instead of losing weight, I'd focus on helping people gain weight. It's a much smaller market, but there are lots of skinny guys wanting to gain weight in a healthy way (me included).

Sure, there's existing solutions for most of these, but they don't actually work very well. Weight-loss websites aren't all that good at helping people lose weight and keep it off. Dating websites aren't all that good at helping people fall in love. And nothing is good at helping people to stop procrastinating. If you can actually make something that works then the market is all yours.

(Not all of 'em though; I admit things like "travel website" are pretty saturated at the moment.)

> nothing is good at helping people to stop procrastinating

Maybe the golden idea is to help people to stop feeling bad about procrastinating :P

Lift heavy weights. Eat as much as you can stomach, then eat some more. It isn't rocket science. Seriously just eat 5 huge meals a day and a protein shake before and after you workout. You will put on muscle like nobody's business. It's also the ONLY way to do it...

If it really was this simple as with loosing weight (basically eat less and workout right?) then all dieting courses, pills, books and so on wouldn't sell. But they do and that's why this would sell too.

It's simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

That's a saturated market too. :)

There's a much easier market than those:

#93 - Watch Grey's Anatomy

- An online Grey's Anatomy episode streamer and forum. This is the road to millions.

wtf, 100 goals and mine isn't even there...

I want a user "shaking with excitement".

I've had lots of happy users, but I don't thing I've ever had one shaking with excitement to use my software.

I got this new goal after reading this article about patio11's Bingo Card Creator:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.

That is the most inspirational thing I've heard all week, perhaps so far this month!

Thanks for that!

While not surprising, I still find it interesting the number of generic, immeasurable, and fantastical goals at the top of the list like "be happy", "stop procrastinating", "fall in love", etc etc.

Perhaps they're the most frequent because it's much more difficult to measure them and thus harder to fully achieve, or perhaps it's telling the same inherent set of goals that's instilled in us as we grow, or maybe it explains the feelings of a large percentage of people.

Any way you look at, data like this aggregated across a population is always interesting. I love the trend of startups publishing things like this now.

If by "world", you mean the female population of San Francisco, I guess this is pretty accurate... I mean... "Kiss in the rain" in 14th position? Really?

Just did a quick check and found that just 9 of them are available as domain names, while 91 are already booked !!

Those available are : goonaroadtripwithnopredetermineddestination.com havebetterposture.com wakeupwhenmyalarmclockgoesoff.com decidewhatthehelliwouldliketodowiththerestofmylife.com spendlesstimefoolingaroundonthenetandmoretimeactuallyworking.com stopcaringwhatotherpeoplethinkofme.com figureoutwhatiwanttodowithmylife.com goonaroadtrip.com identify100thingsthatmakemehappybesidesmoney.com

When you prefix HowTo you still have around 48 left.

I can't even fathom having "watch grey's anatomy" as a goal. I don't even...

no doubt, how does this make the top list???

Poor sample size/selection?

How dare you crush my dreams.

Oddly enough that list seems to correlate with: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

I'd like to see that grouped by country. And another interesting thing, if you click on an item you can see on the right the average time the users needed to check that activity as completed.

This seems to be very heavily skewed towards US.

Also something wrong with average completion times:

Get a tatoo - This goal takes 6091 years to complete

Learn mandarin:

On average: This goal takes 345 years to complete

Ouch.

I'd love to learn that... maybe i should reconsider it :)

Yes, another repost, another classic essay:

"Why Chinese is So Damn Hard"

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Probably b/c people think it would be cool and then decide it's not and never do it.

Yeah, apparently it takes 9 years (avg) to fall in love but it takes only 8 years to get married.

http://xkcd.com/310/

And 7 years (avg) to divorce.

That's a little depressing. I'm visualizing most of these people keeping these "goals" at arms length, or further, until their deaths.

Most of the crap on that list I wouldn't consider as "goals." Write a book? I've done that, twice, and am currently writing another. For some reason, I don't register "book" as the goal, even though that's the outcome I expect to eventually reach, after the hundreds of tasks and the mind-bending logic that goes into completing the book.

I did it all and can tell you from my experience most of them are not worth it.

I think it's actually a sad list, lot of things people think will make them happy, but instead of just trying them out the fill lists with goals. It's actually like a really long business plan ... after reading 20 pages you just start thinking "just do it!".

Aren't many of these goals vague, aspirational and banal? I would like to take this as evidence that setting goals simply doesn't work.

Better is to try to identify one's mistakes. That's how progress is truly made.

Take a look at the some of the "How I did it" people (and what they're concerned about 'doing').

This strikes me as a strange (not to mention unappealing (to me) ) population. "Lowest common denominator" comes to mind.

I'd have to see some better-analyzed data and learn something about this population's income, likelihood of following up on their 'goals', etc. before I made any business decisions based on this.

uhh, someone care to tell me the diff between 15. take more photos and 99. take more pictures?

also doesn't anyone find it ironic that people wan to write books more than they want to read more books?

Photos are composed, planned, things you would frame and hang on the wall. Pictures are random things that might end up on facebook.

Kiss the rain???????

That list is hilarious, and not just because of the title. The world that is made up of 100,000 people? Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_%28statistics%29

100k people is quite a large sample. Conclusions about the world have been made from much smaller samples.

It's 100k people with internet access that speak English. Most likely US and UK based, likely to be using broadband. They clearly have aspirations beyond the basic necessities (read more, run marathons, learn languages), suggesting they perceive a certain level of free time available to dedicate to such pursuits. Heck, Grey's Anatomy is in the top 100.

My point is that this 100k sample is likely to not be representative of the world.

If you're gonna complain about something I'd complain about the fact that people's publically stated goals often differ substantially from their actual goals.

I will agree that the sample is skewed, but I wasn't trying to make the point that the particular 100k people in question constitute a representative sample of the world. I was replying to the sentiment that because the world doesn't consist of 100k people, you can't call 100k people's goals the world's goals. I may not have expressed that as clearly as I could have.

I agree; this represents only a certain type of person in the world, but again, conclusions about the world have been drawn from more specific types.

I just feel it's petty to focus on the title of the article, when the word "world" is consistently applied in narrower senses.

And erroneous conclusions about the world have been made from much larger samples. You could sample 300 million americans and you'd still only end up with a very skewed perspective of what the world is like. You could use statistical sampling methods to find 1000 people through out the world and get a much more accurate picture (though admittedly, still not the greatest picture).

Representative sample of this size would be something. But that's just some visibly skewed sample.

yes, and none of them cares about things like "secure clean drinking water" or "cure [disease ravaging some people/area]" or "be able to [vote, leave the house alone]"

Out of all the goals, the only one not worth pursuing is getting a tattoo.

Parenting is failing somewhere.

Most popular languages to learn on the list: #1 Spanish #2 Japanese #3 Sign language

Actually, French pops in at #24, right before Japanese at #30.

Hence #1 Spanish, #2 French, #3 Japanese, #4 Sign Language.

Lose weight? Maybe someday, after I finish my book and fall in love..

I can think of a more efficient order to get a romantic partner.

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