Why Is It Important to Set Realistic Goals? 6 Real Reasons

Most of us know the excitement of a new notebook and a long list of goals, and the quiet guilt a week later. So why is it important to set realistic goals? Because a realistic goal fits our real time, skills and resources, so it keeps us working, whereas an unrealistic goal gets dropped and takes some of our confidence with it.

That doesn’t mean we should aim low. A realistic goal can still be an ambitious goal, as long as it is honest about everything it will take. The research on goal setting supports exactly that balance.

This piece belongs to our self-help collection, where we write about the habits, discipline, motivation and sense of purpose that help everyday goals actually stick.

What Is a Realistic Goal?

A realistic goal is one we can reach with the time, skills, money and energy we actually have, while it still demands something of us.

The idea comes from the management consultant George T. Doran, who introduced SMART goals in a 1981 article for Management Review. In Doran’s version, the R stood for realistic, which he described as stating “what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources”.

Notice that nothing in that definition says small. Take a student who managed two chapters of revision a week last term. Four chapters a week this term is a stretch but a realistic one, whilst twenty chapters would only be a wish written into a planner!

○ Realistic Does Not Mean Easy

This is where many of us go wrong, because we hear the word realistic and quietly lower the bar. However, the largest body of research on goal setting points the other way.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarized 35 years of goal-setting studies, and they found that the most difficult goals produced the highest effort and performance. Performance leveled off, or even dropped, only when people reached the limits of their ability or their commitment to a very difficult goal lapsed.

Locke and Latham also found that specific, difficult goals consistently beat the friendly instruction to simply do your best. Therefore the sweet spot is a kind of ‘golden mean’, Aristotle’s old idea of the point between too much and too little. It is a goal difficult enough to draw real effort out of us, yet still within what we can do and remain committed to.

Do you lean towards dreaming or towards caution? Our piece on realist vs visionary is a useful mirror for that question, because the best goals borrow a little from both personalities.

What Happens When Goals Are Unrealistic?

The most likely consequence of setting unrealistic goals is that we give up on them, and then blame ourselves rather than the goal.

The psychologists Janet Polivy and Peter Herman call this the ‘false hope syndrome’. They point out that change often looks far easier and faster than it really is. So we begin full of hope and finish, in their words, in “the misery of defeat”.

The cruel part is what happens next. Each failed attempt teaches us that we are the problem, so the next plan grows even bigger to compensate, and the distance between our plans and our real lives keeps widening.

○ The ‘Monday Reset’ Loop

Many of us know this loop by heart. One evening we feel a rush of motivation and plan every hour of the week, and for a couple of days we feel like a new person. Then one task slips, then another, and by the weekend we are back where we started, with guilt on top.

A trainee accountant described exactly this cycle on Reddit, adding that he already knew the standard advice to make small goals. One reply told him each reset was simply too large. It suggested a ‘boring reset’ instead, with one fixed bedtime, one small tidy-up and one task he could manage even on a tired day.

That is the whole case for realistic goals, really: a realistic goal has to survive our worst day, not only our best day. Discipline grows out of the small promises we actually keep, which is why we believe discipline beats motivation every time.

If the guilt has turned into a low mood that won’t lift, please don’t treat it as a goal problem. The NHS advises seeing a GP (a family doctor) if you have had a low mood for more than 2 weeks. Talking to someone you trust is a good first step even before that.

Why Is It Important to Set Realistic Goals? 6 Real Reasons

Six reasons hold up once we look past the slogans and into what researchers have actually found about goals. Each reason is something we can use this week.

1. You Keep Going While Success Looks Possible

Our effort is not fixed, because our effort rises and falls with how difficult a goal looks to us.

The psychologists Smith and Hess describe how the body’s effort response rises as a task gets more difficult, but only while success seems “both possible and worthwhile”. In earlier work that Smith and Hess discuss, some people seemed to stop trying altogether at the most difficult levels.

That is exactly what happens with an unrealistic goal. Somewhere inside, we have already judged the goal impossible, so our effort goes quietly, however loudly we promise ourselves that it won’t.

2. You Can Measure It, So You Can Steer It

A realistic goal is usually a specific goal, and that specificity is what makes progress visible. Today most of us learn SMART as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, although Doran himself wrote that not every objective needs to meet all five criteria.

Why does measuring matter so much? Well, Locke and Latham found that for goals to work, people need summary feedback that shows their progress against the goal. “Get fit” gives us no feedback whatsoever, whereas “walk after dinner on five weekdays” tells us every single evening whether we are on track.

3. A Big Dream Turns Into Steps You Can Start Today

Ambitious goals are fine, and what actually trips us up is an ambitious goal with no near steps along the way.

Locke and Latham describe one business game study where some people got a distant goal plus nearer goals along the way. Those people ended up with higher self-belief and higher profits than people who had only the distant goal or were told to do their best.

The NHS Couch to 5K plan is a lovely everyday example of this thinking. Rather than asking a beginner to run five kilometres immediately, the NHS plan has them running 3 times a week, with rest days in between, over 9 weeks or longer.

The finish line is ambitious for somebody starting from the sofa, and yet every single session in the plan is a realistic goal that they can manage this week!

4. Small Wins Build Real Confidence

We rarely think our way into confidence, because confidence is something we earn, one kept promise at a time. Locke and Latham point out that after disappointing feedback, our self-belief determines whether we raise our next goal or lower it.

A string of small, realistic wins is therefore how we build the self-belief to aim higher next time. Our confidence building exercises work on the same principle, and a winning mentality is largely this habit of stacking wins, repeated over years.

5. Your Plan Fits Your Time, Money and Energy

Willpower is only one of our resources. Our time, our money, our energy and the people around us also decide what is realistic for us, and these resources are different for every one of us.

Picture two friends who both want to learn the guitar. One friend has money for weekly lessons but very little time, whilst the other friend has time every evening but no money for lessons, so learns from free videos. Both goals are realistic, just built differently, and both friends can end up playing the same song.

Whether time or money is the scarcer resource for us right now changes a realistic goal more than talent does, a question we look at in time vs money.

6. Waiting for the Reward Gets Easier

Every worthwhile goal asks us to choose a later reward over an easy reward now, and that choice is far easier when the later reward feels close enough to believe in. A vague goal years away rarely beats tonight’s scrolling, whereas a clear goal at the end of this month often does.

You may have heard of the Stanford marshmallow test, where children who waited for a second treat were said to do better in life, and it’s usually oversold.

Watts, Duncan and Quan repeated the idea with more than 900 children. The Association for Psychological Science reported that the link to later school results was small, and that it disappeared once family background was taken into account.

We read that as good news. Patience looks less like a fixed trait handed out in childhood and more like something our circumstances shape, and a clear, believable goal is one circumstance we can create for ourselves.

How to Set Realistic Goals You Will Keep

Firstly, separate the outcome from the actions. “Get an A in chemistry” depends partly on the examination paper, whereas “do one past paper every weekend and check every wrong answer” depends only on us. So we make the action the goal and let the outcome follow.

Next, ask your past self before you trust your future self. In a classic study by Buehler, Griffin and Ross, students writing an honours thesis expected to finish in 33.9 days on average, but actually took 55.5 days. Even their worst-case guesses were too short, on average.

Before setting any deadline, then, we look at how long something similar actually took us last time, and we plan from that honest record rather than from our hopes.

Then make the goal something to do rather than something to avoid. In a study of New Year’s resolutions by Oscarsson and colleagues, 58.9% of people with “do” goals felt successful a year later, against 47.1% of those with “stop” or “avoid” goals.

After that, write an if-then plan, such as “If it is after dinner on a weekday, then I open my books at the desk”. Researchers call these implementation intentions. A 2021 review by Wang, Wang and Gai reports that earlier research pooling many studies found a medium to large effect on reaching goals.

It also helps to tell one person about the goal, because a friend asking “How’s it going?” every Sunday is often all the accountability we need to keep going.

Lastly, review the goal each week and adjust it without drama. Lowering a target after an honest look is the goal becoming realistic, not a personal failure. Keeping our deeper reason in view helps a great deal here, as we explain in remember your why.

○ Examples of Realistic Goals

Here are a few pairs of goals to show the difference. The unrealistic goal in each pair is never wrong to want, because it simply skips the steps in between.

For school, “top the class this term” becomes “revise one topic every weekday and do one timed paper each weekend”. For work, a performance goal like “be the best on the team” becomes “reply to every customer message on the same working day and ask my manager for feedback once a month”.

For fitness, “run a marathon next month” becomes a beginner running plan with three short runs a week. For money, “save a lot” becomes “move a fixed amount into savings on the day pocket money or pay arrives”. For habits, “never touch my phone” becomes “phone in another room for the first hour of homework”.

Dream as big as you like, and then make sure that tomorrow’s small step is one you will actually take.

Realistic Goals: Questions People Ask