Have you ever wondered why 92 percent of people fail at their goals? Because we tend to set goals that are foolishly optimistic. Scientists call this “planning fallacy,” a concept first studied by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They described this problem as “a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.” Study after study has confirmed that we are prone to fall prey to planning fallacy, but one of my favorite examples involved college seniors working on honors theses.
