Name: Why You Should Write Down Your Goals
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:22:24.000Z
Duration: 2 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

decided to call the year 2000 their Year of Promise.

They held a massive telethon, the Day of Promise,

but to get people to call in and promise... something.

What we want you to do is: we want you to make a promise.

-- And by doing that, you'll make a mark in history. -- Absolutely.

The promises would be held forever, they said,

in registers held up and down the country --

your promise would also be permanently inscribed at a historic site somewhere in the UK.

Historic like the East India Dock basin, here.

A few years later, and there's almost no sign that this ever happened.

The public didn't care about the Year of Promise,

and ITV abandoned the whole scheme as soon as they could.

At least, as soon as they could without losing face.

The Internet Archive has most of their web site,

and the National Library of Scotland seems to have the only available copy

of a CD with all the promises on -- but that's it.

Some of the benches and monuments that are inscribed with promises still exist, like this one...

but a lot of them have been destroyed or moved in renovations or just weathered away over time.

Despite the millions that ITV spent on trying to leave a mark on history -- their words,

Designing something to last is incredibly difficult,

But here's the thing: it might not matter.

that writing down a goal or a promise makes you significantly more likely to do it.

it helps if you get it engraved on a monument somewhere.

But just the act of committing to something in writing,

means that your human desire to stay consistent,

to stay true to what you think your beliefs are,

makes you more likely to achieve it. Or, at least,

more likely to say that you've achieved it

when a researcher calls and asks you about it later.

So I don't know if Kay O'Grady really did overcome OCD,

or Susan Moussa really did learn first aid.

And perhaps the money that ITV spent on their ill-fated Year of Promise

could have been better put to other things.

But I'd like to think that all the promises, all the commitments,

Even if no-one actually remembers them now.

[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why You Should Write Down Your Goals

absolutely

incredibly

massive

matter