Regarding “Going too Big too Fast”, I always feel the need to constantly remind myself that for any given skill I need to go from “bad” to “average” to “good” rather than just from “bad” to “good”. This seems to be related to certain psychological theories regarding the ego. For whatever reason, my mind is okay with “I am physically weak, but I will eventually put in effort to remedy this condition”, and “I have worked incredibly hard and it has paid off and now I am super-strong”, but “I have put in a significant amount of time and effort and now I am about as strong as the average person” seems kind of pathetic.
In writing this I’m noticing similarity to SMART goals. Perhaps adapting that would be better since it’s already nice and memorable.
SMART goals are kind of dumb. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-constrained. The problem is that specific, measurable, and time-constrained basically just mean “specific”, and attainable and relevant basically just mean “realistic”. So it’s redundant, but it’s also missing two other key characteristics. A better four-point criteria for goals is:
Specific—clear success/failure condition
Realistic—“write a book”, not “write a New York Times bestseller”
Challenging—the goal should reflect the upper bound of your capabilities, this is because people rise to meet whatever expectations they give themselves
Motivating—you should feel emotions when you think of your goal, and it should be tied to your long-term goals and abstract values
This is all directly out of some book I read, by the way, but I can’t remember which one.
Regarding “Going too Big too Fast”, I always feel the need to constantly remind myself that for any given skill I need to go from “bad” to “average” to “good” rather than just from “bad” to “good”. This seems to be related to certain psychological theories regarding the ego. For whatever reason, my mind is okay with “I am physically weak, but I will eventually put in effort to remedy this condition”, and “I have worked incredibly hard and it has paid off and now I am super-strong”, but “I have put in a significant amount of time and effort and now I am about as strong as the average person” seems kind of pathetic.
SMART goals are kind of dumb. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-constrained. The problem is that specific, measurable, and time-constrained basically just mean “specific”, and attainable and relevant basically just mean “realistic”. So it’s redundant, but it’s also missing two other key characteristics. A better four-point criteria for goals is:
Specific—clear success/failure condition
Realistic—“write a book”, not “write a New York Times bestseller”
Challenging—the goal should reflect the upper bound of your capabilities, this is because people rise to meet whatever expectations they give themselves
Motivating—you should feel emotions when you think of your goal, and it should be tied to your long-term goals and abstract values
This is all directly out of some book I read, by the way, but I can’t remember which one.
If anyone knows a source for this (or related research), I’d appreciate it.