This is a story that pops up at just about every NLP training or personal development course:
There’s one small problem with this story…it never happened!
It was made up in the 1970’s by one of the personal development trainers at the time and it grew into a real myth. There is no record of this ever happening at Harvard or at any other school for that matter. No-one has ever come forwards as one of the 1% or 99%. It is just a nice story that gets people to write down their goals.
The downside though is that recent psychological research has shown that writing down your goals can actually have a negative effect on your motivation and REDUCE the chance of you achieving them! Whoops, perhaps it isn’t such a good story after all.