Essentials: Tools for Setting & Achieving Goals | Dr. Emily Balcetis

Do you often feel that there isn’t enough time to finish all the projects you’d like to get done? Does it seem that when you try to concentrate, your attention gets pulled in a thousand directions? Many authors agree that the ability to focus—to concentrate on an individual task—is key to success and fulfillment, not just in your career but also in your personal life. They also agree that focus is a skill you have to learn through practice, deliberate repetition, and strategies to minimize distractions.

In Shortform's Master Guide, we’ve gathered the best strategies from the experts—including psychologists, productivity gurus, and business consultants—to help you harness your attention to achieve any goal. We’ll talk about what focus is (and why it’s so hard to do) and provide a step-by-step process for improving your focus, from removing distractions from your environment and disconnecting digitally to maintaining your motivation and refining your approach. Whether you’re a student, an entrepreneur, or a professional, you’ll find practical and effective techniques for honing your concentration in any area of life or work.

Daniel Goleman argues that attention is a complex and underappreciated cognitive resource in our modern society overrun with distractions. In Focus, he explores how you can understand, strengthen, and effectively use your attention to lead a more fulfilling and productive life, as well as to connect better with others and have a positive impact on the world.

A renowned psychologist and New York Times science writer, Goleman is the author of international bestsellers on emotional intelligence and leadership. In this guide, we’ll explore his theories on how harnessing the power of inner, other, and outer focus can help you excel in everything you do. We’ll look at actionables he recommends to help, including mindfulness meditation and digital attention training games as tools to improve habits, skills, and overall success. We’ll also provide additional context to help you better understand the book’s concepts, and we’ll compare the author's insights to those of other psychology and neuroscience experts.

The Miracle Morning presents best-selling author and speaker Hal Elrod’s antidote to living the kind of mediocre life that most people accept as normal. Elrod argues that everyone is capable of achieving their dreams in every area of life, including relationships, finances, career, health, spirituality, and happiness. The answer is committing yourself to personal development by getting up early and following a simple daily routine of silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, and writing, which can empower anyone to transform any area of life in a surprisingly short time.

Could positive thinking actually be sabotaging your goals? In Rethinking Positive Thinking, psychologist Gabriele Oettingen draws on decades of research to challenge the popular belief that positive thinking leads to success. Instead, she reveals how positive fantasies can drain our motivation and energy—and offers an alternative that combines optimism with a clear-eyed view of reality.

Our guide explores Oettingen’s “mental contrasting” technique and how to apply it: a method called WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan). You’ll learn why visualizing success isn’t enough, how to identify the real barriers holding you back, and how to turn your dreams into achievable goals. We’ll examine how Oettingen’s findings connect to recent research on habit formation, decision-making, and motivation science, showing you how to avoid the feel-good trap of positive thinking and start making real progress toward your goals.

Does it sometimes feel like everybody else has life figured out except you? Rachel Hollis, author of Girl, Wash Your Face, wants you to know that’s a lie. Life is messy and complicated for everyone, but once you understand that you are in control of your life, you can begin to live with passion, joy and confidence.

Aimed at women who feel overwhelmed and unworthy, Girl, Wash Your Face examines 20 lies that can hold you back from becoming who you were meant to be. Hollis details her own mistakes, traumas and life lessons, and shares with readers the strategies she used to overcome these lies and find true happiness.

If you’ve ever felt your stomach turn in a moment of anxiety or felt like jumping up and down with excitement, then you’ve experienced the mind-body connection firsthand. In The Mindful Body, Harvard psychology professor and “mother of mindfulness” Ellen J. Langer argues that you can use this connection to take control of your health. By approaching your health mindfully—instead of mindlessly accepting labels from doctors and society—you can heal your body, reduce your pain, and live a longer, fuller life.

In this guide, we’ll explore Langer’s assertion that the mind and body are inextricable and discuss how this link manifests in health outcomes. We’ll also examine three limiting beliefs that shape health, including the view that health is a finite resource. Finally, we’ll touch on two research-backed strategies for approaching your health mindfully. In our commentary, we’ll dive into the philosophical and medical underpinnings of Langer’s work, and we’ll discuss further methods for achieving good health.

In virtually every domain—be it corporate jobs, athletic pursuits, or even college admissions—top performers are pushing the boundaries of human possibilities. But this relentless quest for excellence often leaves us suffering from chronic exhaustion and burnout, harming our performance and even our health. In Peak Performance, human performance experts Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness attempt to remedy this situation. They argue that sustainable elite performance is possible by implementing cycles of stress and rest.

In this guide, we’ll break down Stulberg and Magness’s formula for maximizing performance into two sections. First, we’ll discuss their formula for growth and highlight optimal strategies for subjecting your body to stress and recuperating afterward. Next, we’ll examine their recommendations for converting this growth into maximal performance by developing a consistent routine, intentionally structuring your time, and harnessing your purpose. We’ll also supplement Stulberg and Magness’s recommendations with other works on self-improvement and discuss actionable steps to implement these recommendations.

Many people assume their ideal life will never be more than fantasy, but in reality, you have the power to create the life you dream about. In this book, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and strategies to help you take control of every aspect of your life, from your emotions to your focus. In many cases, you can make transformational changes to your life through small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary.

In this guide you’ll learn how your bad habits are wired in your brain, how to decode your negative emotions to find solutions to them, and how to create your destiny.

This guide compares and contrasts Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some alternative methods for taking control of your life.

Whether you’re in school, starting a job, exploring a new hobby, or keeping up with an ever-changing workplace, the need to keep learning is a basic fact of life. However, you may have self-defeating attitudes that stop you from achieving everything you can. Thankfully, research shows that you can learn anything you want at any point in life. More than that, it’s now widely established that learning itself is a skill that can be learned.

In Shortform's Master Guide, we’ll draw from the work of 13 educational experts to lay out how to master the skill of learning. This begins by adopting a healthy mindset, adapting your schedule to facilitate mental focus, and making the best use of educational tools such as memorization, comprehension, learning from mistakes, and self-testing. We’ll also use illustrative examples to show how the principles of learning can be put into practice.

The Miracle Morning presents best-selling author and speaker Hal Elrod’s antidote to living the kind of mediocre life that most people accept as normal. Elrod argues that everyone is capable of achieving their dreams in every area of life, including relationships, finances, career, health, spirituality, and happiness. The answer is committing yourself to personal development by getting up early and following a simple daily routine of silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, and writing, which can empower anyone to transform any area of life in a surprisingly short time.