EV-0023
Specific and hard beats "do your best"
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717 · Source
What this entitles us to say
A 35-year summary of goal-setting research reporting that specific, difficult goals consistently produce higher performance than urging people to do their best, with meta-analytic effect sizes ranging from .42 to .80.
What it found
Thirty-five years of empirical work on goal-setting theory: the core findings, the mechanisms by which goals operate, the moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals to satisfaction, and the role of goals as mediators of incentives.
The central result: specific, difficult goals consistently produce higher performance than the common exhortation to "do your best." Meta-analytic effect sizes in the range .42 to .80.
Why it matters here
It completes the chain the Vision dossier assembles. EV-0022 found vision reaching performance through self-set goals and self-efficacy; this is the literature on that step, and it is one of the most robust in the field.
Read together the instruction is unambiguous. Vision creates direction — but direction only becomes performance when it is converted into something specific and hard enough to stretch. The Vision module's practical exercise is that conversion, and the failure mode it should teach against is the inspiring sentence that never becomes a number, a date or a standard.
It is also the natural bridge into the Achievement region, which is why it is tagged to three traits. Vision sets the direction, Commitment is agreeing to pay for it, Discipline is the daily governing that gets there.
The limits
A theory summary rather than a single primary study — it aggregates decades of the authors' own program, so it is not a disinterested review. Goal effects have documented moderators: goal commitment, ability, feedback and task complexity all condition the result, and the effect is weakest on complex tasks. There is also a substantial separate literature on the side-effects of aggressive goal-setting — narrowed focus, short-termism and unethical behavior under stretch targets — which this summary does not foreground and which the program must not omit. Verified to abstract level.
What we do not say
"Set aggressive targets and performance follows." The effects are moderated by commitment, ability, feedback and task complexity, and a separate literature documents real harms from stretch goals — narrowed focus and unethical shortcuts among them. Any module using this must carry that warning, particularly in a program about character.