Do written goals lead to more success or do the successful write their goals down

Great Debates
1

I was reading someone’s profile on a message board (not this one) and I saw her say something along the lines of “I am writing down my goals because I heard that those who write down their goals earn 10x more than those who don’t”.

So I did some research and found this which said that. It is an MLM sceme but the idea wasn’t new to me, I have heard other sources say writing down goals leads to accomplishing them.

So does writing down your goals help you accomplish them or is it the fact that those who are goal driven for whatever reason(s) are just more likely to write them down? Are the goal driven just more likely to research things like ‘how to obtain yoru goals’ and discover that writing them down leads to achieving them or does actually writing down your goals manage to turn someone who is indifferent into someone who is more focused and directed?

2

For work I, as most people, have to write my goals down once a year.

I never look at them again until I have to do my self-review. I’m reasonably successful.

I’d guess that writing goals down is good because it makes you think about what is important, but looking at them is bad, because it hinders flexibility.

Along the same lines I heard John Rollwagon, who was CEO of Cray while it was a going concern, say that their policy on long term planning was to make the plan and then toss it. Anything that worked for generation N was guaranteed to not work for generation N+1.