But when there is no authority figure telling you what to do, it's a whole different game. You wonder whether the pain of growing in a certain direction is worth the future uncertain reward. That's what Dan Shipper's article is about -- not letting those thoughts paralyze you and taking small steps in the right direction without putting too much pressure on yourself. Overly-specific goals in this case can be self-defeating because they can often be set without enough knowledge of the territory you're going into. Trusting yourself to explore and learn before getting into specific goals can be important. Big life goals like personal contentment and peace of mind often can't be made very specific anyway. Who knows what is going to make you happy?
The real issue at hand is motivation. If you are consistently motivated to do something to better yourself, then chances are it will lead you somewhere. High levels of motivation for non-essential self-development is not the human norm, so if you can find a way to harness and apply it I think you stand a good chance of being above average. As a computer geek I think there's a very obvious answer for me and a lot of people here, but I wouldn't describe it as the route to success because there are probably as many ways to find focused motivation as there are successful people.
I found Jamie Wong's post on negative social incentives[0] to be helpful in motivating oneself once a specific goal has been set, but I still find myself having trouble figuring out what goals to set in the first place.
[0] http://jamie-wong.com/2011/12/30/immersion-and-schadenfreude...
If you are sitting here thinking "I need some goals. What are some good goals for me?" then you should start by thinking about the things you are good at and the things you enjoy and finding the intersection. Alternatively you can think about things you think you might enjoy that would require learning new skills, or things you might not enjoy as much that could be useful in your life.
Once you have a topic, or a pre-existing non-motivating "do your best" goal, there are a few situations:
1) If you're a complete beginner and need help figuring out what a good project could be, I discussed some some thoughts in a previous post [1]:
Good beginner projects tend to be more or less copies of things people have done before.
2) If you know somewhat more about the topic and you're struggling to get a different, more motivating perspective on a goal, I recommend doing what physicists usually do: putting the hard problem in the context of an even larger problem. To do this, ask why you want to accomplish the goal you're contemplating. (If you don't know why, go to step 1, or maybe you shouldn't be doing it.) I gave an example in the post of moving from "I should work out because that's a good thing to do" to the meta-goal of "I want to look good for beach season." Or you could move from "I want to learn to program because that's a good thing to do" to "I want to build Ticketmaster for my school" (for example).
3) If you just know you're interested in a general topic and are looking for ideas, I have so much to say about this it needs a separate blog post. This is definitely the best place to be.
What other characteristics make a useful goal? Also a topic for another post, but you can probably guess by now that I think one good baseline is whether you know specifically why you're doing it (beyond "it sounds like a good idea") and whether it is measurable enough that you can proudly tell someone specifically what you've accomplished.
[1] http://www.isaacsukin.com/news/2012/08/i-want-learn-programm...
(the theory being roughly that just stating it publicly feels like making progress, so you're less likely to actually make progress.)
See http://sivers.org/zipit for some background info.
There's been more research but I don't have the references to hand ATM.
It's just the idea of getting comfortable with the grip and texture of the rungs at the bottom of the ladder before trying to climb it.
>specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals, "do your best" goals, or no goals.
Note the word "performance". If performance is defined as "achieved certain goals", then this statement reduces to a tautology. Or rather, I'd say that the study (subtly) assumes it's conclusion.
I realize that the author intended the sense of these two words to be different. Perhaps a more careful replacement for the word goal would be "training exercise", and then "performance" would be some sort of standardized test. But even so, the statement still devolves into something that while not a tautology is hardly earth-shattering: "if you practice doing something you'll get better at it."
(As I understand it, Dan's original point is simply that it's easy to get frustrated if you bite off more than you can chew - so content yourself with learning simpler things at first. I agree with that and I'll defend it.)
I agree that "it's easy to get frustrated if you bite off more than you can chew - so content yourself with learning simpler things at first." I don't think that's contradictory to what I wrote; one component of good goals is that they're achievable. In retrospect I can see how you would read that lesson into Dan's post, but what he actually wrote is that what you should do if you want to "build skill in the long term" is "setting firm goals and keeping track of what you're doing is a problem for beginners." I think that is not appropriate advice for most people.
Would be interested in hearing if other people have experienced this issue and had success solving it.
A professional golfer can't control whether he wins a match, but he can control how well he practices.
Don't get too emotional or attached to outcomes you can't control.
Do focus on "doing your best" at things you can actually control.
This is the point Dan makes, and I think you can make decent progress with this line of thinking and preserve your mental tranquility at the same time.
After all, what's the point of setting specific and challenging goals, if you're unable to stick to them?