THE THREE FACTORS THAT SEPARATE SUCCESS FROM FAILURE
The goals we set, the people we spend our time with, and the behaviours we repeat.
What separates success from failure? Not for a group or an organisation — but for the individual within one.
We have been obsessed with team performance for more than twenty years, and central to that pursuit is the contribution of the individuals who make up the team. In our work, three factors have emerged — and stood the test of time.
They are the goals you set, the people you spend your time with, and the behaviours you repeat.
Purpose, people and performance — the same three fights we have asked of the organisation, now turned inward on the person.
None is glamorous. All are within the individual’s control. And how you navigate each of them — and integrate them with your team — goes a long way to determining your performance, and your organisation’s.
OUR GOALS: PURPOSE
“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things — to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.” — Edmund Hillary
When we examined successful individuals, we kept finding something far more powerful than talent: a compelling sense of personal mission. An unwavering drive to be consequential, with extreme clarity on what success looked like.
This is not motivational folklore. The science here is unusually settled. Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory — tested across more than 40,000 participants, on 88 different tasks, across four continents, and over time spans ranging from one minute to twenty-five years — found that specific, challenging goals reliably outperform vague intentions to ‘do your best’, and that the effect is strongest when people are genuinely committed to the goal. The findings held equally in the boardroom and the locker room.
But committing to a goal in your head is not the same as committing to it in the world. The most effective goals we witnessed were written down, prominently placed, and revisited weekly, if not daily. Here too, the research agrees.
When Dr Gail Matthews of Dominican University set out to test the famous ‘Yale study of written goals’ — much cited, endlessly quoted, and, it turns out, never actually conducted — she ran the real experiment with 267 working adults across six countries.
Those who wrote their goals down achieved significantly more than those who merely thought about them.
More striking still: over 70 per cent of participants who wrote their goals, shared them, and sent weekly progress updates to a friend achieved them or came more than halfway — compared with 35 per cent of those who kept unwritten goals to themselves.
I saw it for myself almost twenty years ago, when I met a young athlete of unremarkable talent and an average career to date. In our first conversation he surprised me — startled me, in truth — when he talked about his written goals. Not just his sporting ambitions, but his life: his family, his post-playing career, his finances. Many had timelines. Some he had broken down into smaller short-term objectives.
I was privileged to watch what happened next: multiple graduate and post-graduate qualifications; a happy marriage and well-balanced children; profitable post-playing ventures. As an athlete, through disciplined and consistent effort, he went on to lead his team in scoring, captain the side, and eventually represent his country at the Olympics.
He is not unique. We have walked alongside numerous individuals and witnessed first-hand the transforming power of written and lived goals — and every one of them was, at the same time, a member of a team pursuing something bigger than themselves.
A PERSONAL PURPOSE, HELD ALONGSIDE A SHARED ONE
Which brings us to the tension every team member eventually meets: the team has a purpose, and you have one too, and they are not automatically the same thing.
The individuals who thrive are not the ones who suppress their own goals in favour of the team’s mission, nor the ones who chase their own agenda regardless of it. They are the ones who can hold both at once — who know precisely what they want from their family, their fitness, their work and their finances, and who can then find the genuine overlap between that and what the team is trying to build.
That overlap has to be real, not performed. You cannot talk yourself into believing a team’s mission matters to you if it doesn’t. People can tell. Eventually, so can you.
But when the alignment is real, something changes. You stop showing up because you are rostered on, and start showing up because the outcome means something to you personally.
This is where individual and team pursuits intersect — and begin to compound. No longer running in sequence or in parallel, they multiply: each reinforcing the other, producing results neither could achieve alone.
In practical terms, when an individual’s goals are aligned with the team’s, set for both the short and the long term, stretched, written, shared — or better still, publicised — and lived daily, the odds are stacked so high that success becomes all but inevitable.
Gallup’s research bears this out. In teams with a strong sense of purpose, 87 per cent of employees avoid burnout, compared with 62 per cent in teams without it. More importantly, churn drops dramatically: people stay on the team longer and perform better. And the effect reaches the bottom line — a 4.4 per cent lift in profitability across industries.
It is therefore in the interest of any leader, coach or manager to work with each individual to identify and clarify their personal purpose and mission — short and long term — and align it with that of the team or organisation, for mutual success.
OUR PEERS: PEOPLE
“We are the average of our peers.” — NM
We know this to be true in the formative years.
If your adolescent son’s peer group spends its time playing video games, your son will too. If your teenage daughter’s friends spend their time in shopping centres worried about their looks, boys and Instagram, so will she.
But the trend continues throughout our lives — and the evidence for it has become remarkable. When researchers followed more than 12,000 people across thirty-two years of the Framingham Heart Study, they found that obesity, smoking and even happiness moved through social networks almost like contagion — your odds of each shifting measurably with the people you were connected to, out to three degrees of separation.
Regardless of age, we seem to morph into those we spend time with. Deep within the human psyche is a tendency to empathise with, and even mimic, the people around us.
Consider how our speech changes when we talk to someone of a different native tongue, or when we speak to infants — our inflection, pitch, modality and tone all shift.
Psychologists call this the chameleon effect. In a landmark set of experiments, Chartrand and Bargh showed that people unconsciously and unintentionally match the postures, mannerisms and behaviours of complete strangers they have only just met — without any awareness they are doing it. If a stranger can reshape your body language in twenty minutes, imagine what your closest colleagues are doing to your standards over twenty months.
Because it is not just language. Our behaviours, our mindset, even our expectations and aspirations normalise to our environment — to our peers.
Where you change direction — adopting goals and behaviours that differ greatly from the rest of your group — a certain tension is created. Dissonance. The only resolution is that you revert and normalise with the group, or you leave it. Similarly, where a husband or wife makes a life-changing decision — to lose weight, pursue a more demanding career, or immerse themselves in a pursuit vastly different from the past — the relationship comes under stress. Eventually, they revert, or they drift apart.
The truth is, over time, your life and lifestyle tend to average those of your peers.
Recently, when we presented this at one of our seminars, a participant challenged us. Rather than defend the argument, we asked him a question: was his income roughly the average of his social group? The answer was yes. We asked him to reflect further — on his car, his house, his holidays, his lifestyle. All of it fell within a band that reflected his friends.
As we talked, we asked whether anyone in his group had ever experienced a significant windfall or a lifestyle-changing event, and what had happened. True to form, that person had soon left the group — because he no longer belonged.
He was not imagining it. In 2022, economists led by Raj Chetty analysed twenty-one billion friendships and found that the single strongest predictor yet identified of a person rising economically was the composition of their close relationships — and, crucially, that it was genuine interaction with those peers, not mere proximity to them, that did the work.
Who we let into the locker room is critical.
‘A’ players want to be on the same team as other ‘A’ players. Allow enough ‘B’ players in, and the ‘A’ players will leave.
It is therefore incumbent on leaders to meticulously shape the environment and composition of their teams, so the individuals in them can perform at their peak. It is about who is recruited, and which aspirational behaviours are normalised once they arrive.
At the Wildcats we put character above everything, even talent. We said no to NBA players — even starters — in favour of less athletic, less charismatic ones. They had to pass the Honesty, Humility, Hard Work thresholds before they were allowed in the locker room.
Once inside, they had to abide by the aspirational environment. Those who didn’t were counselled and coached — but an inability to adopt our values and adapt to our behaviours meant they weren’t allowed back in.
The strictness of the policy gained its own reputation. Some called it the ‘aisle or window seat’ meeting — a reference to the only choice you were offered on the flight home once you had been exited from the organisation.
OUR HABITS: PERFORMANCE
“If you’re not moving forward, it doesn’t matter which direction you face.” — NM
We have all heard the aphorism: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Direction doesn’t matter if you are stationary.
It is not enough to have clarity of purpose and the right people around us if we do not take action.
Results require disciplined effort — a cost, a price paid upfront and at least proportionate to the desired outcome.
The research is blunt about the gap between intending and doing. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues, across a meta-analysis of 94 studies, found that people who converted their goals into if-then plans — specifying in advance exactly when, where and how they would act — were markedly more likely to follow through than those who held the intention alone. A goal in your head is a wish. A goal in your diary is an appointment.
So we must be vigilant with how we spend our time, focus and energy — constantly asking what we should do more of and less of; what we should stop, and what we should start.
We can change our lives simply by changing our habits.
We suggest starting with small routines we actually keep — building a streak of actions that harden into behaviours, and then into habits.
There is an old tale of the strongest man in the village, who could lift a full-grown cow above his head. Asked how he had come by such herculean strength, he explained that he had started by lifting a newborn calf every day — and as the calf grew, so did he.
We often overestimate what we can do in the short term, and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term.
The key is to start — no matter how small — and to not stop, no matter how small the step; and never to miss two in a row.
The streak survives one bad day. It rarely survives two. So when you break it — and with any new endeavour, you will — the secret is simply this: do not fail two days in a row. Get back up and start again, building a new streak.
Just one push-up on the first day, incrementally increased, is the key. And never stop — even if some days it is only that single push-up.
We prefer the term iterations — because over time you can add the weight, add the reps, and improve the technique. The body, like our environment, is constantly changing, and even the best habits eventually become obsolete.
We call it the compounding effect of incremental improvements.
THE VITAMIN HABIT
“Our lives are the sum total of our habits and behaviours: good, bad and indifferent.” — NM
We have always known the importance of discipline and ritual in organisational performance. But introducing it into a team environment requires — as any transformational change does — a compelling purpose, an influencing champion, and clarity of action.
As is well documented, we had already introduced transformational behaviours and habits in 2009 — a no-swearing rule; an unprecedented requirement to perform 350 hours of community service a year; abandoning headphones in public; and many others less publicised, from sleep and food to alcohol management — all in pursuit of our simple mission: to inspire and entertain, through excellence.
But universal adoption of self-improvement habits by the individuals on the team came only when one of our assistant coaches returned from a year at the San Antonio Spurs with a now well-documented concept he called ‘vitamins’.
Following the legendary head coach Gregg Popovich’s ‘pounding the rock’ mindset, vitamins were the disciplined routines each player undertook daily. Individual growth, strength maximisation, team requirements and opposition match-ups — mixed in with self-care — became a daily occurrence.
The science was simple. Identify the unglamorous, repeatable behaviour that genuinely connects individual contribution to purpose, and the gaps to be filled or improvements to be made. Make it non-negotiable rather than aspirational. Then keep taking it daily — long after the novelty has worn off, and long before the results are visible. The crack in the rock always comes later than you would like, and always because of the strikes that came before it.
The purpose, the ‘why’, could not have been clearer. The champion promoting it was an Olympian who had represented Australia many times, and a respected leader within the group. And the timing was impeccable: we had just signed a new head coach who had never won a championship, hungry for success and open to fitting into a high-performing culture.
When both the Wildcats and the Spurs went on to win national championships that year, everyone bought in. How could we not?
That is the quiet logic behind ‘pounding the rock’ — the idea that you can strike a rock a hundred times without a visible crack, and it is the hundred-and-first blow that splits it. Not because that last strike was special, but because of the cumulative effect of every strike before it.
THE MULTIPLYING EFFECT
When our goals, our peers and our habits are aligned, we give ourselves the best chance of success. Each of the three matters on its own. Together, they multiply.
Gail Matthews’ research made the point plainly: a written goal helped, but a written goal plus a chosen person plus a weekly routine of reporting progress roughly doubled the success rate. Purpose, people and performance — all three factors, working in the one discipline.
It is the same lesson the organisation learns in the Third Fight, arriving now at the level of the individual. Get all three pulling together, and performance stops being something you hope for and becomes something you compound.
YOUR TURN: THE THREE FACTORS
GOALS. Take time out to reflect on the 3F framework — Family & Friends, Fitness (spiritual, mental and physical), and Function & Fulfilment (your work and contribution). Where are you right now in each? Where will you be this time next year if you change nothing? Where would you like to be? Write your goals down in each area — the research says the writing itself matters. Then ask honestly: where does my personal purpose genuinely overlap with what my team is trying to achieve?
PEERS. Who are you actually spending your time with inside your team — not who is on the roster, but who is close enough to shape you? Do they reflect your aspirations, or the path of least resistance? What have you quietly tolerated from the people nearest to you this month that you would not want to become your own normal? Then choose one person, share a goal with them, and agree on a weekly check-in.
HABITS. Break each goal into smaller goals with deadlines, and convert them into if-then plans: when and where, in the calendar, not just in your head. Identify one ‘vitamin’ — a small, non-negotiable behaviour tied to your purpose — and take it daily, starting today. Give it the months it needs. And when you miss a day, remember the only rule that matters: never two in a row.
IN A NUTSHELL
- Three factors separate the individual’s success from failure: the goals you set, the peers you keep, and the habits you repeat — purpose, people and performance, turned inward.
- Specific, challenging, written goals beat vague intentions; writing them down, sharing them, and reporting progress weekly roughly doubles the odds of achieving them.
- We average our peers. Over time your standards, lifestyle and aspirations drift towards those of the people closest to you — so choose the locker room carefully.
- Habits, not intentions, produce results. Start small, convert goals into if-then plans, and protect the streak with one rule: never miss two days in a row.
- Aligned, the three factors don’t add — they multiply. That is the Third Fight, won at the level of the individual.
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SOURCES
Locke, E.A. & Latham, G.P. (2002). “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation.” American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717; and Locke & Latham (2006), Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(5).
Matthews, G. (2015). “The Impact of Commitment, Accountability, and Written Goals on Goal Achievement.” Dominican University of California.
Gallup. “To Get Your People’s Best Performance, Start With Purpose.” gallup.com. Gallup (2026). “Purposeful Work Boosts Engagement, but Few Experience It.” news.gallup.com.
Chetty, R. et al. (2022). “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility” and “Social Capital II.” Nature, 608, 108-121.
Gollwitzer, P.M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.