MemeMachineGo!

If Your Goal Is Success, Don't Consult These Gurus:

The repertoire of consultants, trainers, and motivational speakers, nothing comes before the power of setting personal goals. And in the annals of personal goal-setting, no story outranks the Yale University Class of 1953.

The story, as told by consultants, goes like this: In 1953, researchers surveyed Yale's graduating seniors to determine how many of them had specific, written goals for their future. The answer: 3%. Twenty years later, researchers polled the surviving members of the Class of 1953 — and found that the 3% with goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth than the other 97% of the class combined!

It's a consultant's dream anecdote: a vivid Ivy League success story that documents the cause-and-effect relationship between goals and personal success. It's powerful! It's compelling! It's also completely untrue.

I'd heard this apparently fictitious study quoted numerous times (usually about Harvard). I suspect now that it was inspired by the Grant Study:

The study recruited 268 healthy men attending one of the United States' leading universities between 1938 and 1942. [...] All of the participants were white males primarily drawn from a socioeconomically privileged group. The academic achievement of the students chosen fell in the top five to ten percent of high school graduates.

Data collection started during the participants' sophomore year in college and continued through senior year. [...] Topics of interest included the participants' social history, intellectual functioning, academic achievement, personality assessment, psychological well-being, physiological and medical information, and biographical data.

This study did not, however, focus on material success and from what I can find on the web didn't seem concerned with written goals.