At some point, many of us will take on a goal where the odds of success aren't great. Everyone starts with high motivation, but completion is low. Think: selective careers like becoming a doctor or pilot, or personal goals with high attrition like language learning. Imagine you're setting out to try to get into medical school, knowing that most people who attempt this path don't make it.

Almost everyone starts ambitious goals optimistically, believing they'll beat the base rates and be different. To actually accomplish this, we need more than hope and will, we need strategies. We don't need a belief that we'll be different, we need behaviors that are different from most people, like these:

When a goal has high rates of non-success, it can be tempting to push that out of mind.

However, avoidance of reality rarely helps us, and data about failure points often reveals obvious ways to increase our success.

Let's start with a silly but illuminating example. MOOCs—massive online learning classes have abysmal completion rates, usually under 10 percent. But a significant portion of non-completers are actually........

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