Having big goals and stating them proud

Announcing your goal might work for some people, probably the extroverted ones. For me I think it won't work.

Announcing my goals always drains my energy; I will have to argue with people and tell them how full of shit they are, and I have to listen to them ridiculing my ideas, etc. I just hate doing that.

But people aren't probabilities. Our destiny is a matter of choices not random chance. So that doesn't really make sense.

Not exactly. I know that study, and I've seen that Sivers article/talk, and it's good.

The worst thing you can do for goal-setting is to casually talk about your goals like they're inevitable.

Public commitments do help motivate, though.

The best might be publicly committing while acknowledging that you're not there. When I talk about my goals, you'll often hear me say, "This is neurosis-inducing, because I'm behind schedule."

That, of course, leads to lower happiness levels and higher neurosis levels, but I get a lot more done than most people do.

I agree with Derek not to talk about your goals casually to other people. I think public commitments, especially emphasizing that you've still got a lot of work in front of you - I think doing it that way is a net gain.

first, putting the ad after the video is a brilliant idea. :)

now about the talk, I don't believe in controlled psychological/sociological experiments very much, the real world is way too different from a room with 30 people working for one hour, the conclusions just don't scale to the real world.

In the real world, people don't generally accept your goals or congratulate you on them. Like if you tell someone that you want to quit your day job to start a startup, they would think you're crazy.

Also, in the real world, people will call it out on you if it doesn't look like you've achieved anything after a while.

But seriously, does that mean you are actively working towards that goal now? Do you think you can realistically achieve it?