Does anyone else see the tautology here? Consider this quote:
>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.)
Performance and goals don't have to mean the same thing. An example of a goal is "acquire 30 new customers by the end of the month" and the relevant performance metric there would be "number of new customers acquired." Better performance in that case might mean 50 customers acquired while worse performance might mean 10 customers acquired.
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.
>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.)