The Surprising Science of Goal Setting (And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong)

B ack in 2010, I set a bold goal for myself. I took one of my websites and decided that I wanted to publish over 100 articles on it that year. I decided that by doing this, my goal was to accumulate more than a million readers by the end of the year.

To do this, I decided to take what, at the time, had been a modestly successful blog, and turn it into a kind of men’s magazine for millennials. I found half a dozen people to write articles for me. I redesigned the site. I created a pipeline of content that would feed directly through me and be posted every other day. In my mind, I was building the foundations of my empire, a new brand to appeal to the sensibilities of the young, internet-savvy male.

It didn’t even take three months for me to shut the whole project down. I deleted half of the new content written by others. I reverted the website back to the old blog. And I continued publishing at a meager pace.

Most would look at my abandonment of my goals that year as an unmitigated failure. But I look back and see that as one of the most valuable goals I ever set for myself. I will explain why later in this piece.

There are a million articles on the internet about how to set goals and how to achieve them. And sure, I will cover some of…