Matt Burgess, an economist at the University of Wyoming, has spent his career studying how ambition actually works—and his latest findings may disappoint anyone hanging a "Shoot for the Moon" poster in their office. Instead of chasing extreme dreams, a new mathematical model suggests people achieve better outcomes by aiming for something more modest: just above average.
The insight emerged almost by accident. Burgess and his colleagues, including Kath Landgren from Stanford University and Ryan Langendorf from the University of Colorado Boulder, were investigating why commercial fisheries performed better when boats stopped searching for fish once they'd caught above-average hauls. The pattern intrigued them enough to ask whether the same principle might apply to everyday human decisions—job hunting, apartment hunting, choosing parking spaces, even dating.
The researchers built a mathematical model where agents search for rewards—say, a job with a particular salary—and either accept or reject what they find based on a personal threshold. They then tested what happens when people set their bar at different heights. The results were striking. When agents were highly ambitious (setting their threshold far above the average reward), they actually fared worse than those who aimed more modestly. In fact, being overambitious by a certain margin left people in worse shape than being underambitious by the same margin. As Burgess explained, "You're going to be best off, typically, if you try to do better than average, but not infinitely well."
The model's predictions held up across varied scenarios. When rewards were erratic—like apartment hunting in a market swinging between dream homes and hovels—aiming above average paid off. The same applied when potential losses outweighed potential gains, a dynamic relevant to economic policies trying to engineer growth while dodging recession. But there was a warning too: when agents only saw distorted information about the world, believing in the inflated success stories people broadcast on social media, they became chronically dissatisfied and systematically missed achievable rewards.
The researchers published their findings in Physical Review E, offering what Landgren describes as a recalibration of conventional wisdom. Rather than Norman Vincent Peale's famous exhortation to "shoot for the moon," Landgren suggests: "Shoot for the stars, but make sure that the stars you're seeing are what's really out there." The math backs up what your instincts may have already whispered—that knowing the full range of what's possible, not just the highlights, changes everything.
Peter Ayton, director of the Centre for Decision Research at Leeds University Business School, praised the model's "thought-provoking insight into the relationship between ambition and achievement," while acknowledging that real life is messier than mathematics. Yet evidence suggests even simple goal-setting matters. One study of marathon runners showed that merely asking athletes to state a goal before the race improved performance by the equivalent of a 13.5% increase in training time, or roughly nine years of youth for a 42-year-old runner.
The lesson isn't to abandon ambition—it's to calibrate it. Better to aim for a star you can actually see than to spend your life reaching for one that isn't there.