At some point, many of us will take on a goal where the odds of success aren’t great. Everyone starts with high motivation, but completion is low. Think: selective careers like becoming a doctor or pilot, or personal goals with high attrition like language learning. Imagine you’re setting out to try to get into medical school, knowing that most people who attempt this path don’t make it.
Almost everyone starts ambitious goals optimistically, believing they’ll beat the base rates and be different. To actually accomplish this, we need more than hope and will, we need strategies. We don’t need a belief that we’ll be different, we need behaviors that are different from most people, like these:
1. Face the Objective Facts
When a goal has high rates of non-success, it can be tempting to push that out of mind.
However, avoidance of reality rarely helps us, and data about failure points often reveals obvious ways to increase our success.
Let’s start with a silly but illuminating example. MOOCs—massive online learning classes have abysmal completion rates, usually under 10 percent. But a significant portion of non-completers are actually non-starters. Typically, around 20 to 30 percent of people who register don’t even start the first lesson. That makes a way to boost your success very obvious!
In general, completion rates improve with each milestone achieved, but some milestones are more predictive than others. For example, among student pilots, getting signed off to fly solo represents a significant hurdle that many never reach.
Identify which milestones are most predictive for your goal. You can break your goal down like this: What actions move you from one statistical bucket to another more favorable one?
2. Swim With the Current, Not Against It
To the extent you can, don’t fight against poor baseline success rates.
People often believe they’ll buck low base rates based on inner drive. Instead, think about the environment you’re putting yourself in. Imagine you have an educational goal. School A has a 60 percent success rate, and School B’s is 30%. You can move yourself into another success bucket by attending School A.
Of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation. If School A’s student population resembles a freshman class at Harvard and School B’s doesn’t, the comparison changes.
Keep drilling down to put yourself into better buckets of success, for example by choosing individual instructors who have better success rates than others.
This point isn’t about guaranteeing your success, it’s simply about increasing your odds. Again, think of yourself as jumping from one statistical bucket to another one.
In general, avoid approaches that most people don’t succeed with, like an online course that very few people complete.
3. Copy the Behaviors of People With Higher Success Rates
Imagine two ways to approach an educational goal: a loosely structured version, part-time, at your own pace versus an intense, accelerated program that’s full-time for a short period. The people who do the intense version practically live at the school for the duration. You find out they have much better success rates (this example is just to illustrate).
Say you’re not in the position to do an actual program like that, but you’re able to access a bunch of the training materials. You map out the key advantages of the structured approach and mimic as many as you can.
Let’s consider another scenario: You can’t replicate all of someone else’s baseline advantages but you can identify which elements of their situation are actually providing the boost. For example, if doctors’ kids succeed at becoming doctors more often, maybe it’s because they have mentors who understand the path, people who can answer questions when stuck, or normalized expectations about what it takes. You can’t become a doctor’s kid, but you can seek out mentors, find people to answer questions, get exposure, etc.
4. Don’t Consider Social Support a Nice-to-Have Luxury
Social support is a dramatically underestimated factor in objective success. There’s evidence that even a tiny amount can make dramatic differences.
For example, Stanford’s large-scale coding course Code in Place utilizes a feature called TeachNow. When students have been struggling with an online puzzle for a period of time, they get a pop-up asking if they’d like a live human instructor to jump onto a video chat and screen share with them.
The preliminary data is very encouraging. Participating in even one short TeachNow session helps students stay engaged and improves success.
Avail yourself of numerous forms of social support, especially to get past key stumbling points where other students wash out. Use social support to help you knock off key accomplishments, and jump into the next success bucket.
Be creative about this. Do it in the way that suits your nature, whether that’s Reddit chats or in-person study groups. This should not be an afterthought.
5. Don’t Quit on Your Worst Day
Whenever you experience a knockback, like a lower-than-expected score on a practice test, and feel demoralized, remember: “Don’t quit on your worst day.”
The emotions of a demoralizing experience will cloud your objective assessment of your progress and judgments.
Don’t make decisions when you’re feeling an acute emotional sting.
Be Smart About How to Improve Your Chances of Success
There’s nothing wrong with not completing everything you start. It’s fine to sample and dabble.
However, when you’re committed to a goal and determined to succeed, you can’t rely on being generally smarter or more motivated than others to carry you to success. People who attempt hard goals are already a very smart cohort. Even if you’re clever and motivated compared to the general population, you’ll need more than that to outperform other ambitious people.
The strategies mentioned here are a starting point for doing that. They provide a mindset of improving your odds, bit by bit, even when you can’t guarantee your success. Use them to help you form a plan, and keep this mindset active during critical or demoralizing moments to help you swim through them.
This article was written by Alice Boyes, Ph.D., who translates principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and social psychology into tips people can use in their everyday lives.