On the infamous ‘Yale Goal Study’
Apparently, in 1953 a team of researchers undertook among graduating students at Yale something that many years later will be called "one of those studies" .They supposedly asked the students whether they had "written down the specific goals" that they wanted to achieve in life. (... oh, boy, does that sound familiar?)
Apparently, this is what they did, and just as apparently, 20 odd years later the "study" authors supposedly "tracked down the same sample"and found that ... wow!, the 3% of people who had specific goals all those years before (I suspect only goals written down on paper qualified) had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97% of their classmates combined.
Wow X2!
Impressive feat, tracking down exactly the same persons 20 years before the internet 1.0., getting them to disclose their worth, then count all those pennies and stocks and come up with stats (remember, no spreadsheets!)
There seems to be another, slightly larger, problem with this – as far as anyone can tell, the experiment never actually took place.
Apparently, in 2006 Lawrence Tabak from Fast Company magazine attempted to track down the study, contacting several writers who had cited it, the secretary of the Yale Class of 1953, other researchers who had attempted to discover whether the study had actually taken place (and failed).
No one could produce any shred of evidence that this questionnaire had ever been conducted, and Tabak concluded that it was an urban myth.
Not that hard evidence like that has ever stopped a consultant. One of these self-help salesmen, "consultant" Brian Tracy sent this hallucinatory two-liner:
"Heard this story originally from Zig Ziglar. If it's not true it should be." (next time try "I've seen it on TV)
Ha!
I know that self-help gurus have always been content citing stuff (err.. "studies") without checking any facts. But now one can despise them with a licence :-P ... at least until it gets revealed that Lawrence Tabak is an invented name or that his tracking down of this study never took place... :-D
