Caroline Adams Miller on Setting and Achieving Big Goals in Life — and Creating Your Best Life in the Process

I went to the library recently and checked out so many books on self-help and self-improvement. It’s really dawning on me that, in just a few days’ time, I’ll have a new name and, while I’ll always be the same person, I am looking at it as a fresh start of sorts. One of the books I checked out was Caroline Adams Miller’s 2009 book Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide, and I enjoyed it so much that I reached out to her to chat about it. Well, wouldn’t you know it, that same month Caroline had a new book coming out — and so today we are talking about both of these books! Caroline’s new book is called Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life, which came out November 27. I found Caroline, both in her books and in this conversation, to be a wealth of knowledge. In Caroline’s groundbreaking Big Goals, we learn about Goal Setting Theory and about goal setting practices for personal and professional goals that will ensure that we make all of our goals a reality. Caroline spent over 15 years researching this book, and it’s packed with data. It connects beautifully with Creating Your Best Life, her 2009 book, which we also speak about today. Caroline is a pioneer in the areas of the science of goal setting, happiness, success, and grit. Creating Your Best Life was the first mass-market book on goal accomplishment that included evidence-based research, and it also connected the science of success with the science of happiness for the first time. It is so popular that it was re-released in 2021. Caroline also wrote many other books, including Getting Grit in 2017, and she is a keynote speaker who has worked with clients like Morgan Stanley, lululemon, Harvard Law School, and many others. Caroline has taught as part of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School Executive Education program and has also taught in NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and the University of Texas-Dallas School of Management. A graduate of Penn and Harvard, she’s been featured in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and other media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, NBC, NPR, and CNN. She’s also a top-ranked Masters Swimmer and even has a black belt in martial arts. She’s clearly pretty good at this whole goal setting thing. We’ve got much to learn from her. Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide by Caroline Adams Miller Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life by Caroline Adams Miller