Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson and featured at her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

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People can have remarkably keen insights into their own behavior.  Then again, people can also be remarkably wrong about why they, and everyone else, do the things that they do.  And some of those people turn out to be motivational speakers and authors.

No doubt their intentions are very admirable – many genuinely want to help others to reach a higher level of success.  But too often, they simply end up reinforcing false notions (albeit intuitively appealing ones) about how motivation works.   Here are three of the most firmly entrenched motivational myths:

[Here are the first two.]

Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed!

There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953.  (Google it.  It’s everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down.  Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3% of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97% combined.  Isn’t that amazing?  It would be if it were true, which it isn’t.  (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.)

I wish it were that simple.  To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. (Not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important.)  In other words, specificity is necessary, but it’s not nearly sufficient.  Writing goals down is actually neither – it can’t hurt, but there’s also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.

Just Try to Do Your Best!

Telling someone, or yourself, to just “do your best” is believed to be a great motivator. It isn’t. Theoretically, it encourages without putting on too much pressure.  In reality, and rather ironically, it is more-or-less permission to be mediocre.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two renowned organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the difference between “do your best” goals and their antithesis: specific and difficult goals.  Evidence from more than 1,000 studies conducted by researchers across the globe shows that goals that not only spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, but that also set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than simply trying to “do your best.”  That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus and commitment to the goal, persist longer, and make better use of the most effective strategies.

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Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to  contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.