The Neuroscience of Achieving Your Goals

When it comes down to it, getting what you want out of life is just about setting and achieving goals. What you want to be able to do is call your shots: to pick a pocket on the pool table and sink the ball.

So why is that so hard and confusing? 

Well, there are a lot of facets to actually achieving your goals. It’s hard to set goal difficulty. It’s hard to balance between competing goals. It’s hard to know whether to stick with a goal or to change it. It’s hard to stay focused. It’s hard to follow through. It’s hard to stay motivated. It’s hard to know which goal-setting advice to listen to. 

We’re in desperate need of some cheat codes here. And that’s why living in the age of modern neuroscience is such a blessing. The best way to become a master shot caller is to understand your brain. Or, more specifically, the neuroscience of goal pursuit. 

That’s why we were so excited to see that one of our all-time favorite shows, the Huberman Lab podcast, covered this exact topic. In a recent episode called The Science of Setting and Achieving Goals Professor Andrew Huberman—neurobiologist and ophthalmologist at Stanford University—spent two hours breaking down goal pursuit strategies from the latest and most advanced scientific studies available. 

It’s packed with both interesting science and actionable takeaways to help you understand the neuroscience of goals—and how to achieve them. It’s the kind of thing that you wish was written down somewhere, so that you could refer back to it over and over again.

Well, that’s exactly what we did. We listened to it over and over again, tracked down all of the papers that were referenced, and turned the entire episode into this essay. 

In the rest of this piece we’ll go through Dr. Huberman's thoughts on the neuroscience of goals—the mechanisms that underlie all goal-related activity. And then we’ll show you how he boils the science down into actionable strategies that you can use to set and achieve your goals.