Do You Really Set Professional Goals?
Why Most New Year's Resolutions Fail at Work
Be honest: do you really set professional goals for yourself? What about your people?
Most of us don’t.
New Year’s resolutions are a cultural ritual—but the data is sobering. Less than a month into 2024, 13% of resolution-setters reported they’d kept none of them (Pew Research Center, 2024).
By early March, YouGov found 20% had mostly or entirely given up (YouGov, 2024).
And in one large survey, the average resolution lasts just 3.74 months (Forbes Health/OnePoll, 2023). This isn’t a willpower problem—it’s what happens when ambition is declared, but structure is missing.
And those who do? Far too many are setting themselves up to fail.
That matters—especially today. Today is New Year’s Day, and the annual season of resolutions, reinvention, and renewed professional ambition has begun.
But if this year plays out as others have, we are doomed to watch the same story play out: bold intentions declared in January quietly dissolve by March.
If this worrisome pattern feels familiar to you, it’s because professional goal-setting at work suffers from the same design flaw...
Why Most Professional Goals Don’t Work
In countless workplaces, professional goals are treated as box-checking exercises—vague statements that look ambitious on paper but evaporate in the daily chaos of work.
The data backs this up.
A 2023 multi-industry survey (with a strong healthcare bias) found that nearly half of organizations rely on “stretch goals,” but these goals are overwhelmingly used to push narrow metrics or reduce errors—not to foster sustainable growth or engagement (PubMed, 2023).
Professional goals often become Herculean in expectation and Sisyphean in result. These are the infamous BHAGs—Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Other times, goals swing in the opposite direction and are created so hollowly and generically that they inspire no real action at all.
Either way, the outcome is predictable:
· Goals that sit untouched in a document somewhere
· A slow slide back into busywork—what I call the Swamp of the Busy
· And a creeping sense that “maybe I’m just not good at follow-through”
This isn’t laziness.
It’s a flawed paradigm.
The Hidden Damage of Bad Goals
Poorly designed goals don’t just fail to motivate, they actively drain energy and erode our confidence.
Every time you set a goal and fail to reach it, your brain takes note. If you miss enough targets—you stop believing you can hit any of them. Over time, this creates a subtle but dangerous cycle of failure and disengagement:
· You set fewer goals
· You invest less energy
· You grow more frustrated
…and the cycle repeats
This isn’t speculation. Harvard Business School researchers famously warned about this in their paper Goals Gone Wild (Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky & Bazerman, 2009). They showed that aggressive, poorly constructed goals can drive:
· Unethical behaviour
· Distorted risk-taking
· Narrow focus
· Cultural corrosion
· Reduced intrinsic motivation
No wonder so many professionals quietly abandon goal-setting altogether.
What Nobody Teaches Us
Most workplaces never teach how to design goals that work with the human mind instead of against it.
Professional goals don’t need to create an us-versus-them dynamic between employees and organizations. Done right, they can—and should—serve both.
Effective professional goals must be:
· Balanced: addressing the vital areas of a professional life, not just output metrics
· Manageable in size, powerful in impact: a laser, not a shotgun
· Mutually beneficial: advancing the individual, the organization, and ultimately society itself
This isn’t about lowering ambition.
It’s about designing ambition intelligently.
A Better Way Forward
Here’s the good news: there is a better way.
It isn’t about grit or willpower—It’s about structure.
Over the coming weeks, this blog will explore how professionals can build goals that are:
· Small enough to start today
· Structured to grow this week
· Powerful enough to compound this month
This is the core philosophy behind Professional JetPack: helping professionals enjoy their work and excel at it—without burning out or disengaging along the way.
The Journey Starts Here
As the New Year begins, consider this a challenge—not to set bigger resolutions, but to set better-designed ones.
Follow along. Ask questions!
As The Professional Jetpack book nears official release, I will be gently nudging you to learn more about not only goal-setting done right, but providing you a wealth of insight and advice that you can implement immediately to help you win at work.
Your next professional goal doesn’t need to be audacious.
It just needs to be well-built.
When you apply goal-setting properly, success is not ephemeral or fleeting – it is guaranteed.
Commit to making 2026 the most successful year in your professional life!
Sources & References
- Pew Research Center (2024). About a third of Americans make New Year’s resolutions — most say they’re difficult to keep. https://www.pewresearch.org
- YouGov (2024). New Year’s resolutions: how long do they last? https://today.yougov.com
- Forbes Health / OnePoll (2023). New Year’s resolutions survey. https://www.forbes.com/health
- Oscarsson, M., et al. (2020). A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: approach-oriented goals are more successful. PLOS ONE, 15(12). https://journals.plos.org/plosone