Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself
Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles
Don’t Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don’t push your luck
Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” which became HBR’s most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each “Thing”? (After all, we’re terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it’s a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.
