# 16 Actions to Help You Reach Your Goals - URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/16-actions-to-reach-your-goals/ - Published: 2023-07-31 - Updated: 2026-09-29 - Category: Personal growth - Publisher: Girişimci Kafası On 8 August 1900, at the Sorbonne in Paris, the German mathematician David Hilbert took the podium at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He had chosen to greet the new century not with a celebratory speech, but with a list. He opened with a question: who would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden? Then he asked the real question: which goals would the brightest mathematicians of the coming generations strive towards? At the congress he presented only ten of his problems. The full list of twenty-three was published later. That list became mathematics' roadmap for a century. Some of the problems were solved, some were shown to be unsolvable within the existing rules, and some remain open. What made the list powerful was not just the problems themselves but the criteria for choosing them. In the same speech, Hilbert explained what a good problem should look like. It should be clear and easy to understand, because what is clear attracts us and what is complicated repels us. It should be difficult enough to entice us, yet not completely inaccessible, so that it does not mock our efforts. And it should be a signpost on the winding paths to hidden truths. ## A good goal is like a good problem Goals written on New Year's Day often do not make it to February. The reason is usually not a lack of willpower but the goal itself: it is either too vague, too easy, or too far out of reach. Hilbert's criteria from more than a century ago still apply today to a business goal, a career plan or a startup's roadmap. The 16 actions below fall into four stages: choosing the goal, planning, doing and reassessing. ## 16 actions to reach your goals ### Choose: find the right problem 1. **Look at the big picture.** Before you start on a new goal, think about what you want your life to look like. Does this goal fit that picture, or did it come from other people's expectations? Without a "why" that comes from within, your motivation will run out at the first hurdle. 2. **Write it clearly and precisely.** Hilbert's first criterion: clear enough to explain to the first person you meet in the street. "Being healthier" is a wish; "walking for half an hour three days a week" is a goal. 3. **Pick something hard but achievable.** If a goal does not stretch you, it will not excite you; if it looks impossible, it will put you off. The right goal sits just beyond what you can do today. 4. **Put the goal in writing.** Gail Matthews, a psychologist at Dominican University, ran a four-week study with 149 participants from different countries. Those who wrote down their goals achieved significantly more than those who only thought about them. ### Plan: put the signposts in place 1. **Brainstorm.** List everything that needs to happen for you to reach the goal, in no particular order. 2. **Break it into milestones.** Split the big goal into small pieces you can finish. Let each piece be a signpost to the next. 3. **Make it measurable.** Set a measure and a date for each step. You cannot see progress you cannot measure. 4. **Make an "if-then" plan.** Decide in advance what you will do, where and in which situation. Why this technique works is explained at the end of the article. 5. **Weigh up your skills.** Which steps are you equipped for, and for which do you need to learn something or get help? 6. **Delegate the less important work.** Big goals are not carried alone. Surround yourself with people who complement you, and hand out the work you do not need to do yourself. ### Do: take action 1. **Start today.** The perfect moment may never come. The first step can be small, but it should be taken today. 2. **Hold yourself accountable.** In Matthews' study, the best results came from those who shared their goal and action commitments with a friend and sent them a weekly progress report. Matthews also points out that the famous "Yale or Harvard study", which claims the 3 per cent of graduates who wrote down their goals were earning ten times more than the rest years later, never actually took place. 3. **Build a mindset that learns from mistakes.** A success mindset is not about never being wrong; it is about drawing lessons from being wrong. 4. **Protect your energy.** Sleep, food and rest are part of the plan. An exhausted mind cannot carry even the best plan; for more on this, have a look at [6 ways to recover from a mental breakdown](https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/blog/6-ways-to-recover-from-a-mental-breakdown/). ### Reassess: redraw the route 1. **Get feedback and review the plan regularly.** The people around you see angles you cannot. Stop at regular intervals and ask: is the plan working? 2. **Reset the goal if you need to, and celebrate every milestone.** Circumstances change, and so can the goal. Noticing every waypoint you reach, meanwhile, fuels you for the rest of the journey. ## Hedef, goal and "if-then" The Turkish word for goal, "hedef", comes from the Arabic "hadaf": the place you aim at, a target. The origin of the English word "goal" is uncertain; in the 1530s it was used to mean the end point of a race. In a 14th-century poem, "gol" seems to mean a boundary. In one language a target board, in the other a finishing line: in both, a goal is a point you can see. In psychology, one of the most robust ways of making a goal visible is what Peter Gollwitzer defined in 1999 as an "implementation intention". "I want to read more" is a goal intention. "After dinner I will leave my phone in another room and read twenty pages" is an implementation intention: it answers the questions of when, where and how in advance. A meta-analysis published by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran in 2006, bringing together 94 independent tests, showed that plans like these have a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals. The same study found an interesting side effect too: these plans also made it easier to give up on an approach that was not working. ## A final word Thirty years after his Paris speech, on 8 September 1930, Hilbert gave a speech in Königsberg and ended it with these words: > "Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen." We must know. We will know. Those words are now inscribed on his gravestone in Göttingen. And here lies the irony of history: the day before, in the same city, during a round-table session at a conference, the young Kurt Gödel had quietly announced the first version of his incompleteness theorem. The theorem shows that every consistent mathematical system that covers arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved by that system's own rules, and it shook Hilbert's grand plan. Hilbert's list still guided a century, because a good goal lights the way even when it is not reached. Which goal on your list is genuinely showing you the way, and which is only there because you wrote it down one day?