Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Goals and happiness relate like butter and popcorn.   Too much butter, and the popcorn taste terrible.  Too little butter, and the popcorn is bland.  However, just the right amount of butter makes a treat.  It’s the same way with goals and happiness.

Setting and pursuing goals can have either a negative or positive relationship with happiness. What’s more, the amount of negativity or positivity you add is also highly variable.

For example, a study called Linking Goal Progress and Subjective Well-Being: A Meta-analysis found a difference between goal progress and goal attainment.  This study found that “subjective well-being” (i.e. happiness) was higher during goal progress than with goal attainment.

In addition, an article titled Can Goals Make You Happier points to several studies by psychologist David Niven.  One in particular shows that:

Life satisfaction is 22 percent more likely for those with a steady stream of minor accomplishments than those who express interest only in major accomplishments.

Furthermore, researchers from the University of Rochester found a significant difference between intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals.

• Intrinsic Goal Examples: Personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, physical health
• Extrinsic Goal Examples: Money, job titles, fame, material goods

What these researchers found was simple. Those who attain intrinsic goals are happier than those who only attain extrinsic goals.  In the conclusion of the research it states:

Attainment of the intrinsic aspirations for personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health related positively to basic psychological need satisfaction and psychological health.

In contrast, attainment of the extrinsic aspirations for money, fame, and image was unrelated to basic psychological need satisfaction and related slightly negatively to psychological health. Thus, the importance of providing need-supportive contexts that allow for the development of intrinsic aspirations and the facilitation of psychological health is apparent.

Linking Goals and Happiness – Three Rules of Thumb

In summary, yes we can conclude that there is a link between goals and happiness.  Given that, we know that it’s important to have goals if you want to have happiness.  As shown above, however, all goals are not created equal. Here’s three rules of thumb to remember for your goal setting.

1. Always create small attainable goals that you can hit weekly or monthly.
2. For any long term goal, break it down into the elements of measurable progress. Then track your progress weekly or monthly.
3. For every extrinsic goal you set, make sure it maps directly to a related intrinsic goal.  Then focus on the intrinsic goal as the priority. Let the extrinsic goal be the by-product.

Setting and pursuing goals is satisfying.  If you follow these three rules of thumb, then the amount of happiness that follows will be satisfying as well.