If you find yourself setting goals — particularly financial ones — and failing to achieve them, you’re not alone. Among Americans who made resolutions in 2024, 70% abandoned their goal altogether, per a survey from the Harris Poll on behalf of Original Financial.
“The gym memberships gather dust. The savings plan falters. The manuscript remains unwritten,” Charles Chaffin, co-founder of the Financial Psychology Institute and a professor at Iowa State University, writes in his recently published book, “The Goal Standard: The Psychology of Defining, Pursuing, and Achieving What Matters.”
“The reality is that we fail at our goals far more often than we succeed,” he writes.
There are two main reasons we tend to fall short, he says. One is that we set the wrong kinds of goals. “That could be anything from, we set goals that are too big, we set goals that don’t match with our identity or we set too many goals,” he tells CNBC Make It.
The other is that we don’t put ourselves in environments to succeed. “That often means that we don’t have the social support network to help get us there,” he says.
