Americans love their soft drinks. They also feel really guilty about it and resolve to drink more water, which means big money for people who make water filters and bottled water.
Edit: to note this relates to the "Health" category I mentioned in another comment in this thread.
I think drinking 2-3 liters of water per day (~100 ounces?) is seen as beneficial for the health. People usually don't drink that much because they don't feel thirsty, but they would like to.
I don't live in the US so I don't know what I'm talking about.
Perhaps some people prefer to excrete more dilute urine?
(As an aside for the curious, your water intake and your sodium excretion are virtually orthogonal - the body is very, very good at retaining sodium while wasting H20 when necessary. Therefore, drinking lots of water will not cure hypertension or reduce your whole-body sodium burden.)
Most fitness or nutrition guides tell people that they should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day.
Considering that the #1 goal is to lose weight, it follows that people listing "drink more water" as one of their goals are doing it as a part of wanting to lose weight.
The last time I went to the dentist he pointed out that I was drinking enough soft drinks that it was causing noticeable damage to my enamel. I found it surprisingly hard to stop drinking them. In fact, I haven't stopped, but I have reduced it substantially.
It's hard at first but it's definitely worth the effort of going cold turkey. After a month or so the next time you try a soft drink your stomach will feel all gassy and terrible and the drink itself will taste pretty bad.
Or at least that's what happened to me. I used to drink 3-4 cans of pepsi and maybe 1-2 of mountain dew every day. I went from that to nothing and two months later I had the above experience. I've had soft drinks maybe a half dozen to a dozen times over the past year and it's never a particularly pleasant experience.
I've quit soft drinks cold turkey on a few occasions. I've gone from drinking them almost exclusively to having none for months at a time.
My experience was that they were even better than I remembered them. The only thing that I can relate to you is that if I haven't had a Coke in some months, drinking a large amount does upset my stomach.
me too. What I've found is that carbonated water is the best substitute when trying to get myself to not drink soda. Safeway sells carbonated water in cans, just like soda pop, so it feels quite similar to drinking a soda.
(I don't know if the acid in the carbonated water would hurt your teeth without the added damage from the corn syrup or not.)
Maybe it is an American thing (I'm American). I've had to very consciously switch my drinking habits from diet soda over to water. I used to literally not drink any water at all.
We could try and combine some ideas. So how about...
Lose weight + get a tattoo = a tattoo which you get that is hidden under your love handles, motivating you to lose them
Write a book + fall in love = a dating site where users instead of writing boring messages, write a love story together
Lose weight + drink more water = A cup that lists the calories and health negatives of different drinks, with water in big happy letters with ZERO calories and no negatives
Seriously, I'm surprised this one very specific goal ranks so highly. I guess I'm in the wrong demographic to understand it. But is there some pop culture thing that makes this more popular than, say, "live passionately"?
My guess is that most of the people who added it to their goals had never thought about it until they saw that it was a popular goal, but they thought "ooh, that sounds romantic" and added it. It's just one of those random runaway successes.
On the upside, unlike "live passionately" it's relatively easy (desert dwellers and the terminally dateless excluded) and well-defined, so you know for sure when you've achieved it.
Although I am sure some bright people here on HN are already working on one or more of the above, these seem pretty saturated already. Maybe the best startups are the ones that solve things for people that they don't even know is a goal yet.
That's because they're not designed to work, they're designed to confirm to what people think will work.
Losing weight is not a mystery: Take less calories in than you burn and you will lose weight (simple, but 99% effective). To do this you need to eat healthy foods and get active.
People don't want to do this. People want to eat crappy foods and sit around watching Grey's Anatomy (#93) and lose weight.
Whomever figures out how to make people want to loose weight, rather than convince them they should force themselves to loose weight are going to make a fortune.
mstevens: I would hazard that most people are fat because of their economic condition. That is, they can only afford cheap foods, which are mostly fatty.
All the offices I've worked in here in America, probably more than half (myself included) of the overpaid nerds were overweight.
Sure if you go to the marketing department, that's probably not the case, but that's just because marketing won't hire you if you aren't pretty. We're not so picky over here in Engineering.
Eating healthy does take time and effort and some knowledge, but it doesn't take that much money. Assuming you have access to a stove, healthy food can be had for cheap. Chicken? cheap. rice and beans? cheap. Vegetables? yeah, those are pretty cheap too.
Historically and for most of the world's population, your economic condition would prevent you from being fat. Poor in the US are so well-off, they can afford to be overweight.
Nice list, but most of these are low hanging fruit and are already saturated with established players. The riches are still in the niches.
Example: instead of losing weight, I'd focus on helping people gain weight. It's a much smaller market, but there are lots of skinny guys wanting to gain weight in a healthy way (me included).
Sure, there's existing solutions for most of these, but they don't actually work very well. Weight-loss websites aren't all that good at helping people lose weight and keep it off. Dating websites aren't all that good at helping people fall in love. And nothing is good at helping people to stop procrastinating. If you can actually make something that works then the market is all yours.
(Not all of 'em though; I admit things like "travel website" are pretty saturated at the moment.)
Lift heavy weights. Eat as much as you can stomach, then eat some more. It isn't rocket science. Seriously just eat 5 huge meals a day and a protein shake before and after you workout. You will put on muscle like nobody's business. It's also the ONLY way to do it...
If it really was this simple as with loosing weight (basically eat less and workout right?) then all dieting courses, pills, books and so on wouldn't sell. But they do and that's why this would sell too.
Next, Mr. Taylor announces it’s time for Multiplication Bingo. As Mr. Taylor reads off a problem ("20 divided by 5"), the kids scour their boards, chips in hand, looking for 4's. One girl is literally shaking with excitement. Another has her hands clasped in a prayer position. I find myself wanting to play. You know you're in a good classroom if you have to stop yourself from raising your hand.
While not surprising, I still find it interesting the number of generic, immeasurable, and fantastical goals at the top of the list like "be happy", "stop procrastinating", "fall in love", etc etc.
Perhaps they're the most frequent because it's much more difficult to measure them and thus harder to fully achieve, or perhaps it's telling the same inherent set of goals that's instilled in us as we grow, or maybe it explains the feelings of a large percentage of people.
Any way you look at, data like this aggregated across a population is always interesting. I love the trend of startups publishing things like this now.
If by "world", you mean the female population of San Francisco, I guess this is pretty accurate... I mean... "Kiss in the rain" in 14th position? Really?
Just did a quick check and found that just 9 of them are available as domain names, while 91 are already booked !!
Those available are :
goonaroadtripwithnopredetermineddestination.com
havebetterposture.com
wakeupwhenmyalarmclockgoesoff.com
decidewhatthehelliwouldliketodowiththerestofmylife.com
spendlesstimefoolingaroundonthenetandmoretimeactuallyworking.com
stopcaringwhatotherpeoplethinkofme.com
figureoutwhatiwanttodowithmylife.com
goonaroadtrip.com
identify100thingsthatmakemehappybesidesmoney.com
When you prefix HowTo you still have around 48 left.
I'd like to see that grouped by country. And another interesting thing, if you click on an item you can see on the right the average time the users needed to check that activity as completed.
That's a little depressing. I'm visualizing most of these people keeping these "goals" at arms length, or further, until their deaths.
Most of the crap on that list I wouldn't consider as "goals." Write a book? I've done that, twice, and am currently writing another. For some reason, I don't register "book" as the goal, even though that's the outcome I expect to eventually reach, after the hundreds of tasks and the mind-bending logic that goes into completing the book.
I did it all and can tell you from my experience most of them are not worth it.
I think it's actually a sad list, lot of things people think will make them happy, but instead of just trying them out the fill lists with goals.
It's actually like a really long business plan ... after reading 20 pages you just start thinking "just do it!".
Take a look at the some of the "How I did it" people (and what they're concerned about 'doing').
This strikes me as a strange (not to mention unappealing (to me) ) population. "Lowest common denominator" comes to mind.
I'd have to see some better-analyzed data and learn something about this population's income, likelihood of following up on their 'goals', etc. before I made any business decisions based on this.
It's 100k people with internet access that speak English. Most likely US and UK based, likely to be using broadband. They clearly have aspirations beyond the basic necessities (read more, run marathons, learn languages), suggesting they perceive a certain level of free time available to dedicate to such pursuits. Heck, Grey's Anatomy is in the top 100.
My point is that this 100k sample is likely to not be representative of the world.
I will agree that the sample is skewed, but I wasn't trying to make the point that the particular 100k people in question constitute a representative sample of the world. I was replying to the sentiment that because the world doesn't consist of 100k people, you can't call 100k people's goals the world's goals. I may not have expressed that as clearly as I could have.
I agree; this represents only a certain type of person in the world, but again, conclusions about the world have been drawn from more specific types.
I just feel it's petty to focus on the title of the article, when the word "world" is consistently applied in narrower senses.
If you're gonna complain about something I'd complain about the fact that people's publically stated goals often differ substantially from their actual goals.
And erroneous conclusions about the world have been made from much larger samples. You could sample 300 million americans and you'd still only end up with a very skewed perspective of what the world is like. You could use statistical sampling methods to find 1000 people through out the world and get a much more accurate picture (though admittedly, still not the greatest picture).
yes, and none of them cares about things like "secure clean drinking water" or "cure [disease ravaging some people/area]" or "be able to [vote, leave the house alone]"
Taking the first ten, for example:
# lose weight 37862 people
- dieting website - exercise website
# stop procrastinating 27741 people
- 8aweek - rescuetime - leechblock - your-own-twist - iPhone app with random advice on meditation and focus.
# write a book 27115 people
- writer's editor. - A way to make money off content without publishers
# Fall in love 25192 people
- dating website
# be happy 22707 people # Get a tattoo 20911 people
- tattoo directory! - Design-your-tattoo online, and book with our range of licensed artists
# drink more water 19639 people
- Subscribe to bottled water deliveries online!
# get married 19348 people
- Dating website - Wedding organiser
# travel the world 19122 people
- travel tips - low cost online travel agency
# go on a road trip with no predetermined destination 19098 people
- Worldwide mobile phone packages - Post-to-email service - travel tips again
etc etc