It's a Saturday morning in November and you have three tabs open. One promises 150 goals, one promises 101, and the third belongs to an app with a sign-up button halfway down. You copy six into your notes: wake up at 5, learn Spanish, get abs, save for a house, read more, start a side business. It looks fine. It's also, give or take, the list you wrote last January.

Most personal goals examples online are sorted by how impressive they sound. Researchers have spent more than thirty years sorting goals a different way: which ones people keep pursuing, and which ones go with feeling better once they're reached. The two lists don't match.

A personal goal is worth keeping when it's yours for your own reasons, it moves you toward something rather than away from something, and it doesn't fight the other goals on your list.

What are intrinsic and extrinsic goals?

Intrinsic goals aim at personal growth, close relationships, community and physical health. Extrinsic goals aim at money, fame and an appealing image. Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan drew the line within self-determination theory in papers from 1993 and 1996.

The sharpest finding is about getting what you wanted. Niemiec, Ryan and Deci (2009) followed students past graduation, with 164 responding a year later and 147 a year after that. Valuing either kind of goal predicted attaining it. But attaining intrinsic goals was related to better psychological health, while attaining extrinsic ones was not, and went with more signs of ill-being. The sample was mostly white American graduates, and the measures were self-reported.

None of this makes a money goal a mistake. Bradshaw and colleagues (2023) pooled 105 mostly correlational studies covering 70,110 people. Intrinsic aspirations were linked to higher well-being (r = 0.24, a modest effect), while extrinsic aspirations overall had no significant link with it (r = 0.02). When studies scored extrinsic goals by how far they outweighed intrinsic ones, a cost appeared: lower well-being (r = -0.22) and more ill-being (r = 0.23).

In a long-term study of well-educated adults in their late 30s, Nickerson and colleagues (2003) found one cost that didn't fade as income rose: the stronger the money goal, the lower people's satisfaction with family life. Put that next to Bradshaw's numbers above, and the question isn't whether money is on your list. It's what sits at the top.

Personal goals examples by area of life, each with a weaker twin

The six areas here loosely follow two frameworks. Grouzet and colleagues (2005) surveyed 1,854 undergraduates in 15 cultures and found goals arranged in much the same pattern across all 15, running from intrinsic to extrinsic and from self-transcendent (spirituality) to physical (hedonism). VanderWeele (2017) named domains of flourishing including health, meaning and purpose, and close relationships, and treated financial stability as a support for the rest. If you'd rather rate each area of your life before choosing, start with a life audit. Every example below is something you could start this week.

Body and energy

Walk for twenty minutes after dinner on weeknights.
Learn four meals you can cook without a recipe.
Pick a lights-out time for work nights and set an alarm for it.
Try a new kind of movement each month until one sticks: climbing, swimming, a dance class.

The weaker twin: "get abs by summer." It's an appearance goal, and it names a result rather than something you can do on a Tuesday. Anything involving a diagnosis, medication or test result belongs with your doctor.

The people closest to you

Call someone you love during a Friday evening walk.
Host dinner once a month, even if it's soup.
Take each of your kids, or a niece or nephew, somewhere just the two of you.
Write to someone who helped you years ago and tell them what it changed.

The weaker twin: "get more followers." That's a recognition goal, and the monthly dinner is closer to what the follower count was standing in for.

Skills, curiosity and craft

Practice an instrument for fifteen minutes before you open your laptop.
Learn enough of a language to order food and ask directions on a trip you've booked.
Take one evening class in something you expect to be bad at.
Fix one thing at home yourself: the dripping tap, the sticking door.

The weaker twin: "read 52 books this year and post the list." The count is for an audience. Ten pages a night of the book on your nightstand is the same habit without one.

Community and contribution

Learn the names of the neighbors on either side of you and across the street.
Pick up groceries for an older neighbor when you do your own.
Teach a colleague the part of your job only you know how to do.
Go to one local meeting, school board or tenants' association, and stay to the end.

The weaker twin: "be seen as a leader." That's recognition again, and teaching the colleague is what leading looks like from the inside.

Money and the job

Set up an automatic transfer to savings on payday, at an amount you won't miss.
Read your last three months of bank statements once, line by line.
Prepare for the pay conversation you've been avoiding, then book it.
Spend one hour a week on the part of your work you'd do even if nobody checked.

The weaker twin: "be a millionaire by 40." Money belongs on the list. By Bradshaw's numbers, the trouble starts when it sits at the top.

Fun, for its own sake

Spend one Saturday a month somewhere new within an hour of home.
Go to a concert or a film on your own.
Go back to a hobby you dropped at sixteen.
Grow one thing you can eat, starting with herbs on a windowsill.

The weaker twin: "post a photo from every national park." A checklist is a scoreboard. The Saturday trip is the part you'd actually enjoy.

The two-question test: what is the goal, and why do you want it?

Before you keep any example, ask what it is and why you want it. Across three studies, one a year long, Sheldon, Ryan, Deci and Kasser (2004) found that what people pursued and why each made an independent contribution to well-being. "Walk after dinner" passes the first question easily, but if you're doing it because your partner keeps bringing it up, you're carrying their goal.

The second question is what Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot (1999) called self-concordance: how well a goal fits your developing interests and core values. In a later study of first-year students, Sheldon and Houser-Marko (2001) found that self-concordant motivation predicted better attainment, which predicted more self-concordant goals the next semester: an upward spiral, in the authors' words, with limits they discuss.

A goal you want also tends to feel easier. Across four studies, Milyavskaya, Inzlicht, Hope and Koestner (2015) found that "want-to" goals came with less pull toward derailing temptations and fewer obstacles, while "have-to" goals came with more of both. The advantage came from facing fewer temptations, not from having more self-control.

To use this on the list, finish the sentence "I want this because..." for each example you're drawn to. If the honest ending is "I have to" or "someone expects it," cross it off or find a version you'd want anyway. Put bluntly: a goal copied from a stranger's list is a chore you volunteered for. Making it SMART won't fix that, for reasons covered in why SMART goals don't work for you.

Is it better to set goals to start something or stop something?

Start, on the evidence we have. Oscarsson, Carlbring, Andersson and Rozental (2020) tracked the New Year's resolutions of 1,066 members of the Swedish public. Among those who responded at one year, 58.9% of people with approach goals (toward something) rated themselves successful, against 47.1% with avoidance goals (away from something). Success was self-rated and only responders counted, so treat the gap as a signal, not a promise.

Earlier work points the same way. In two semester-long studies, Elliot, Sheldon and Church (1997) found that people with a greater share of avoidance goals reported lower well-being across the semester and a decline from start to end, and the link ran through how much progress they felt they were making. The finding is about the mix, so one "stop" goal among several "start" goals matters less than a list made of them.

A stop goal also has no first move. You can't do "not scrolling" at 11pm, but you can pick up a book.

Stop goal	Start goal
Stop ordering takeout	Cook dinner at home four nights a week
Stop scrolling in bed	Charge your phone in the kitchen and keep a book on the pillow
Stop snapping at the kids after work	Take five quiet minutes before you walk in the door
Stop wasting weekends	Plan one thing for Saturday morning by Thursday night
Stop avoiding the paperwork	Open the paperwork folder for 25 minutes every Sunday

Some habits really do need to stop. Even then, write down what you'll do in the moment the old habit used to fill.

How many goals should you have at once?

None of the research we found names a right number. What it measures is whether your goals fight each other or feed each other.

Goals that fight get more thinking and less doing. Emmons and King (1988) had 88 undergraduates list 15 personal strivings each and rate the conflict between them. Conflict and ambivalence went with more negative mood, depression and psychosomatic complaints, and over three weeks of random sampling, people acted less on conflicting strivings and thought about them more. The samples were small and the findings correlational.

Riediger and Freund (2004) found interference and facilitation between goals to be distinct, not opposites. Interference, where goals compete for the same time and energy or need incompatible strategies, went with lower well-being. Facilitation, where one goal serves another, went with more involvement in pursuing them. The Friday walk-and-call above is a movement goal and a relationship goal sharing one evening. In fairness, a 2015 review by Kelly, Mansell and Wood found the evidence weakest for goal conflict itself.

Dalton and Spiller (2012) found that detailed when-and-where plans help one goal but usually not several, because planning them all highlights how hard the load is. In lab studies, Freund and Tomasik (2021) found that prioritizing one of two tasks went with more conflict when people were told to do both equally well, but not under a more lenient instruction.

Our suggestion, and it's a suggestion rather than a finding: keep fewer goals than feels ambitious, check each pair for a clash over the same evenings or money, and decide now which one is allowed to go badly in a hard week.

What are your top 3 life goals?

Three is the number the question asks for, not one the research gives you. What Koestner, Lekes, Powers and Chicoine (2002) offer instead is a reason to end with a plan. In their study of New Year's resolutions, tracked monthly, self-concordance was related to progress, an if-then plan alone gave no direct benefit, and the two combined synergistically. Progress, in turn, went with better mood over time.

Circle up to five examples, from this list or your own (a working shortlist, not a target).
Run the two questions on each and cross off anything you're carrying for someone else.
Rewrite every stop goal as a start goal.
Check the rest in pairs. Drop one of any two that need the same evenings, and look for two that can share time.
Write an if-then plan for the first move: "If it's Friday and I've closed the laptop, then I call my sister." Our post on how to set goals covers writing each goal well.

If nothing here fits, read about life goals versus life direction if you're unsure what you want at all. The whole process is in our goal-setting guide, and if you'd rather think it through out loud, you can talk a goal through with an AI companion.

Frequently asked questions

What are 5 good personal goals? One from each of five areas: walk after dinner on weeknights, call someone you love during one of those walks, practice an instrument before work, learn your neighbors' names, and set up an automatic savings transfer on payday. Each is something you do, and the first two can share the same twenty minutes.

What is the difference between personal and professional goals? Professional goals are about your work: role, skills, pay and output. Personal goals cover the rest of your life, and the line blurs, since a pay conversation is both. The two kinds draw on the same hours and energy, so keep them on one page.

How do I answer "What is your personal goal?" in a job interview? Name one real goal you're already working on and the first step you've taken, such as the evening class you started this term. A specific goal in motion tells an interviewer more than a grand one you haven't begun.

Sources and further reading

A list can't tell you which goals are yours, but a conversation can get you closer. In ILTY you can bring the goals you kept and talk through why you want each one, and if you suspect a few are borrowed, Mr. Relentless, the most direct of the five companions, is the one to pick. Every conversation ends with two to four concrete action items, and the next time you talk, the companion asks how they went. ILTY remembers what you've told it across sessions, and the What ILTY Remembers screen lists every fact it keeps, each one deletable. It isn't therapy, it doesn't diagnose, and it isn't a crisis service. Start the 7-day trial.

Personal goals examples: 24 goals you could start this week, and how to tell which ones are yours