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The Yale 1953 goals study is a myth. Here's what the research actually says

By Cam Slater · 13 October 2026

You've probably heard it. In 1953 researchers asked Yale's graduating class who had written goals for their future. Only 3% did. Twenty years later the 3% were worth more than the other 97% put together.

Sometimes it's Harvard. Sometimes it's 1979. Sometimes the 3% earn ten times as much. Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar have all told a version of it.

It's a great story. It isn't true.

What Yale says

Yale's library has a standing answer to this question. It says: "It has been determined that no 'goals study' of the Class of 1953 actually occurred."

The library says the long-serving secretary of the Class of 1953 had never heard of it, and nor had the classmates he asked. Yale administrators checked the records of various offices and found nothing, "nor did anyone recall the purported study of the Class of 1953, or of any other class."

Where the story came from

In 1996 Lawrence Tabak at Fast Company tried to find the source. He followed the trail from a consultant's book to Tony Robbins's Unlimited Power. Robbins's company sent him to Brian Tracy. Tracy sent him to Zig Ziglar. Ziglar's office suggested he try Tony Robbins. The trail went round in a circle.

The secretary of the Class of 1953 told Tabak no such survey was done. Yale's library has given the same answer about a 1991 Success magazine article: the author's source was a Zig Ziglar tape, and Ziglar said he'd only heard the numbers over the years.

The Harvard version has the same problem. No one has produced a Harvard study either. The psychologist who ran the real study (below) says her own review of the literature, and one by Harvard social psychologist Steven Kraus, found no such study at Harvard or Yale.

The study that does exist

The myth bugged Dr Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University of California, enough that she went and tested the idea.

She recruited 267 people from businesses, organisations and networking groups in the US and overseas. They were aged 23 to 72. 149 finished the study. Each was randomly put in one of five groups for four weeks:

  1. Think about your goals (don't write them).
  2. Write your goals down.
  3. Write your goals and action commitments.
  4. Write goals and action commitments, and send the commitments to a friend.
  5. All of that, plus send the friend a weekly progress report.

The results, from her published summary:

  • People who wrote their goals did significantly better than those who only thought about them.
  • People who sent their commitments to a friend did better again.
  • People who sent weekly progress reports did best of all. Their average achievement score was 7.60, against 4.28 for the group who only thought about their goals.
  • Dominican's press release put it this way: more than 70% of the weekly-update group reported success, against 35% of those who kept their goals in their heads.

Matthews summed it up herself: there is now a study showing that writing down a goal helps, "however, it was not done at Harvard or Yale, but at Dominican University."

The fine print

Be fair about what this study is. It's a small study, about 150 people over four weeks, and it was presented at conferences (2007 and 2015) rather than published in a peer-reviewed journal. People rated their own progress. So treat it as good evidence for a simple idea, not as proof of a magic number.

There's a much bigger body of research behind goal setting in general. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's work over decades found that specific, hard goals beat vague "do your best" goals. That's the solid ground. The Yale story was never needed.

What to do with this

Don't just write it down. The real lesson from Matthews is the stack: write the goal, write the next actions, tell someone, and report in each week.

That's how Your Goal Setting Plan is built: written goals, dated steps, and a seven-minute daily page. The free companion book, Faith, Prayer & Goal Setting, tells the Yale story, says plainly that it's a myth, and walks through the Matthews study in full. See both books.

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