-ER Goals: What, why, and how?

It seems like everyone has at least one goal to get fitter, healthier, smarter, better, etc. In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke calls these -ER Goals, (all the above aims ending in -ER). She points out the key difficulty lies not in choosing the goal, or even in the knowledge of how to achieve it, but in the "executing all the little decisions along the way to our goals."