Charles Duhigg: Pair your ambition with a realistic plan

- Setting the right goals is incredibly important. One of things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they do a really good job at choosing the right goals. Because if you're running towards the wrong finish line, it does not matter how hard your arms are pumping. You're still moving in a bad direction. (light music) So how do we choose the right goals? How do the most productive people and companies decide what to focus on, what they want to chase after? Well, there's no, like, universal principle that these are good goals and these are bad goals. It differs from person to person and setting to setting. But what we do know is that the right process for setting goals relies on tapping into our biggest ambitions and then pairing it with a plan that's realistic. Within psychology, they refer to this as the need to have both stretch goals and SMART goals. So a stretch goal is our big ambition. It's this kind of impossible thing that we…