‘Eye on the prize’ might be cliché, but it is an important principle.
There’s a lot of advice out there on how to achieve our goals. We all need to have something specific and personally relevant to aim our efforts at. Suggestions, approaches, priorities, and perspectives for how to go about it diverge in just about every direction. Making it all the more important to keep returning to the core basics. Goals provide us with a mission and individual tasks are how we make progress towards achieving it.
A great deal of research has been done around goals, goal setting, and the correlation between goals and the achievement of success. In study after study those who set specific goals, form concrete plans, and write them down invariably achieve greater levels of success than those who do not.
The most frequently cited studies are a 1953 Yale University study and Harvard University study from 1979. Both have come under skeptical criticism over the years, even Yale University itself has been unable to find concrete data from the purported study, but just about every researcher who looks into the phenomenon winds up finding very similar results to those purported by both studies. Those who set concrete goals and write them down achieve greater overall success than those who don’t.