A specific, hard goal beats being told to just do your best

Edwin Locke's 1968 review found that people given specific, difficult targets consistently outperformed people simply told to do their best, even though 'do your best' left more room to succeed. Decades of follow-up work with Gary Latham confirmed the pattern across hundreds of tasks and professions. A vague goal quietly lets you lower the bar without noticing.

— Edwin A. Locke, Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives — Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1968