One of the most stress-inducing books I've ever read is called GOALS!, by the management expert Brian Tracy. It's not about football. It's about achieving your GOALS! in life - and those capital letters, along with the exclamation mark, may convey some sense of this book's strange capacity for tying my stomach into a knot, then tightening it. "Living without clear goals is like living in a thick fog," Tracy writes, forebodingly. His readers' sense of inadequacy thus stimulated, he's on hand with a solution: you need to define exactly what you want, then pursue it relentlessly. The only alternative is failure. "Clear goals enable you to step on the accelerator of your own life and race ahead rapidly," he says, and the rest of the book purports to show you how. In fact, it reduces you - all right, me - to a gibbering, indecisive wreck, unable to define my GOALS! in the first place, and sulking resentfully about the shouty man who keeps telling me I've got to pursue them relentlessly or else resign myself to becoming a person of no merit whatsoever.

You'll be familiar with Tracy's approach if you're unlucky enough to work in one of the many organisations where managers make themselves feel useful by requiring employees to define "smart" goals. "Smart" stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bounded, and it's one of those acronyms that ought to make you suspicious from the start, if only because it spells out a slightly too convenient word.

You may also have heard a story about the dangers of not setting goals, which is repeated in numerous self-help books, Tracy's included. It goes like this. In 1953, students graduating from Yale University were asked if they had specific, written-down goals for their lives. Only 3% said they had. Two decades later, the researchers tracked down the students, to see how things had turned out. And guess what? The 3% who had formulated precise goals had accumulated more wealth than the rest put together.

This looks like an overwhelmingly powerful argument for setting goals - a scientific study to settle the matter, once and for all! - except for one problem: it never happened. (The magazine Fast Company was the first to debunk it, basing its conclusions partly on an extensive search of Yale's archives from the 50s.) And so there's still no hard evidence that setting clear goals will make you richer, let alone happier.

Life, Brian Tracy is fond of saying, is like a buffet, not a table-service restaurant: you have to buckle down and work hard now, so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labour in the future. But this is surely exactly wrong - a recipe for storing up all your happiness for a brief few minutes on your deathbed, when you can look back smugly at your achievements. Contrast that with the insight of Stephen Shapiro, whose book Goal-Free Living makes the case that you can have some kind of direction to your life without obsessing about the specific destination. "Opportunity knocks often, but sometimes softly," he says. "While blindly pursuing our goals, we often miss unexpected and wonderful possibilities." That sounds a lot more smart to me.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com