Page 136 - Marky Stein - Fearless Career Change_ The Fast Track to Success in a New Field (2004)

Fearless Career Change

I want to make sure you get these stories under your belt and really
put the lessons in them to use.
The first story involves the graduating class of an Ivy League uni-
versity in the 1950s. The researchers asked every member of the class,
“Do you have clear, measurable goals?” As the story goes, only 10 per-
cent of the class reported that they had clear, measurable goals.
This study was a longitudinal study, meaning that the behavior,
attitudes, or conditions of a group or individual were examined
first at one time and then again at a much later time. In the case of
this first study, the graduating class was looked at first in one
decade and again (that is, those who could be found and were still
alive) in two more decades.
When the researchers contacted the surviving members of the
class 20 years later, they found that the 10 percent of the class who had
stated that they had clear, measurable goals had, on average, an
income seven times higher than that of the former students who did
not report having goals.
Shortly afterward, another group of researchers from another
prominent university saw this evidence published. The researchers
wanted to try the same experiment with a bit of a “spin” on it. This
time they took the graduating class of their own university and asked
the question, “Which of you have clear, measurable, written goals?”
Only 3 percent this time reported that they not only had clear, mea-
surable goals but they also had committed their goals to writing.
When the surviving members of this second group of subjects
were examined 20 years later, it was found that the minute 3 per-
cent of men and woman who had clear, measurable written goals
were worth, financially speaking, 10 times more than the entire
remaining 97 percent of the class combined.
You may or may not believe in the power of setting goals, but the
studies recounted above strongly suggest that knowing how to set
goals and, especially, writing them down are skills that are closely
related to our performance and achievement.

Almost all truly great achievers have some sort
of system of conceptualizing their future goals
and using methods to bring their desired
objectives about.

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