Bobby Hart was listening to the radio in 1966, trying to study the competition, when he heard Paul McCartney sing a line that wasn’t actually there. He liked it anyway. By the time he realized his mistake, he’d already decided to write a song around it. That song hit number one on the Billboard chart dated November 5, 1966 — sixty years ago this week.
The Mistake That Became a Number One Hit
The Monkees were built in a studio, not a garage. Television executives assembled four young performers to star in a show modeled on the loose, jokey charm of “A Hard Day’s Night,” and tasked songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart with giving the band a debut single that sounded like the Beatles records already on the radio — “Paperback Writer,” “Day Tripper,” “I Feel Fine.”
While working through “Paperback Writer,” Hart thought he heard the line “take the last train.” He found it urgent, almost cinematic. It wasn’t there — McCartney never sang it — but Hart wrote the song anyway, chasing a lyric that existed only in his own head.
He built the rest around it with a line that gave the song its weight: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home,” a quiet nod to young men being drafted into Vietnam. Hart pictured a town called Clarksville in Arizona. There’s also a Clarksville a short drive from Fort Campbell, straddling the Tennessee-Kentucky line — and whether he meant it or not, that coincidence gave the song an edge that outlasted its origins.
Mickey Dolenz was the only Monkee who actually sang on the track; the music behind him came from Hart’s own band, the Candy Store Prophets. The guitar riff still sounds borrowed from George Harrison. But Dolenz’s tired, unhurried voice gave the song something the imitation couldn’t fake, and “Last Train to Clarksville” became the group’s first hit — and not its last built on a mishearing. A few years later, singer John Fred misheard “Lucy in the sky” on the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as “Lucy in disguise,” and turned it into “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses).” John Lennon, Fred said later, “thought it was great.”
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The Two-Habit Trick That Actually Makes Goals Stick
Setting a goal is the easy part. A 2016 review in the journal Psychological Bulletin went looking for what actually separates people who follow through from people who don’t. The researchers combed through 138 separate studies covering nearly 20,000 participants, comparing people who were prompted to track their progress against people who weren’t.
Two things stood out, and neither required an app or a system. The first was writing it down — a physical log, a calendar with boxes checked off, any record that didn’t rely on memory. Studies where people kept that kind of record showed bigger improvements than studies where people simply tried to remember how they were doing.
The second was telling someone else. Studies where participants reported their progress to another person, or made it visible in some way, also tended to show better results. The researchers were careful to note this doesn’t mean broadcasting a goal to everyone you know — a single person seems to be enough.
A more recent study, published in Computers & Education in 2025, followed 84 college students over five weeks. Students who got help tracking their progress reported more success reaching their goals than students who were only asked to reflect on their effort — though the study didn’t find a difference in their actual grades, a limit the researchers were upfront about.
Put plainly: a plan is “exercise three times a week.” A tracked goal is checking a box each time it actually happens. The researchers couldn’t promise that combining both habits works for everyone, but the pattern across 20,000 people and nearly a decade of research points the same direction — write it down, and let one other person in on how it’s going.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
A song and a study, sixty years apart, land on the same quiet idea: pay close attention, and don’t go it alone. Hart caught a lyric nobody sang and followed it anyway. Thousands of people, it turns out, do better at their own goals once someone else is watching, even gently. If something in your corner of the Boro is going right this week — a habit that stuck, a small win worth naming — tell us about it.