How to Set Clear and Healthy Goals — Learn Anything Off the Internet 1

This is the first article in a series called How to Become Skilled at Anything Just Using the Internet. Read the introductory article here.

Before setting out to learn new skills, it’s worth doing some reflection over what you already know, what you’re trying to accomplish, and how you’ll measure these goals.

Taking Stock of What You Already Know

If you’re reading this, it’s incredibly likely that you already have one skill that you’re proficient or very skilled at. Since this is Medium.com and you’re reading my works, it’s probably something technical. For others, it might be a great understanding of literature or skill in playing the violin. It’s very unlikely that there’s absolutely nothing that you’re skilled at. For the purpose of building a base, being good at anything works well, even if that thing is video games or something that isn’t traditionally seen as valuable.

Now that you have your base skill, we’re going to deconstruct that skill. Deconstructing it will be important in figuring out how you best learn and what the process generally is for you. And when it comes to learning things, self-knowledge will greatly help you in constructing a plan that you can carry out effectively.

Here are some questions that will help you get a good understanding of that existing skill. I’d encourage answering them pretty in depth and keeping the answer stored somewhere:

1. What was my main motivator for getting good at this skill?
2. What did I find easy about picking up this skill?
3. What was my learning progress like over time?
4. What were my plateaus like and how did I break through them?
5. What did I do if I was ever unmotivated in practicing?
6. What were the psychological ramifications of improving in that skill? Did it make me feel proud? Were there unintended negative consequences?

The answer to these questions, while important will come into major use in future articles as we construct mental models of learning for new skills and try to take advantage of the mastery of existing skills. While these answers will be used later, it’s good to begin by thinking about your own history with learning things.

Making Healthy and Well Defined Goals

It’s important to set healthy and well defined goals so that we actually like what we will set out to accomplish and so that we know what we are trying to accomplish in the first place. Too many people start out wanting to learn something but don’t define their end goal correctly and ultimately waffle around for much longer than they would like. And then others set goals that bring out all kinds of personal issues and only find that the original goal wasn’t even worth it.

Well Defined Goals

Here’s an example of a poorly defined goal:
I want to be a good mathematician.

This is poorly defined because we’ve got no idea what “good” means, or even what “mathematician” means. By good, we would ask if that means you’d be able to do computations quickly, or if you’re doing research, or any other possible outcome. And by mathematician, do we mean getting a degree from a university or just studying on your free time and solving problems for fun?

How could you know where to score if there was no net? The same principle applies here.

Let’s fix this goal up a bit:
I want to have an understanding of math that an undergraduate would have and be able to solve challenging problems.

Now, while this isn’t a perfectly defined goal, it’s much better than what we had before. The key difference here is that the actual finish line is much clearer. While we’d have to elaborate on what challenging problems get solved and what kind of an undergraduate education we want to mimic, it should be straightforward to go to any university’s website and just recreate their program and find the corresponding textbooks.

The key to a well-defined goal is one that allows you to clearly know where the finish line is. Imagine if the Boston Marathon were structured with no clear finish line? There’s no way anybody would be able to run it. But that’s also how a lot of people set their goals, with no clear end point for them to work towards. While this end point doesn’t need to be permanent (and likely won’t be), it still allows us to get a sense of direction on what we’re working towards. An easy way to make a well defined goal is to ask yourself, what will it look like when I’ve hit a big milestone? Describe that in detail, and we now have a well-defined goal. For example, say for mathematics a milestone will be my completing all of the problems in Walter Rudin’s book on analysis. Then my goal becomes being able to finish all of the problems in Rudin’s book on analysis. In general, the more specific, the better (to a certain extent).

Healthy Goals

We need to focus on this because it’s crucial to understand what accomplishing something entails. There’s that saying, “be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”, and it didn’t come from nothing.

What is an unhealthy goal? Usually it’s a goal that’s created out of some sort of insecurity and is psychologically damaging. People with these goals are often driven by revenge or some sort of underlying complex which needs to be addressed. I’ll provide some examples of unhealthy goals and go into why they’re unhealthy.

Goal: I want to be better than Joe at mathematics.
Explanation: The person here is setting beating a rival as their bar for success. While a bit of healthy competition is good, creating a goal like this one is competitive to a point that it becomes toxic, and is likely borne out of resentment.

The reason people often succeed is a desire to be “better” than others, but rarely is this truly satisfying

Goal: I want to improve my social skills so that I’m the most popular person in any group setting.
Explanation: This goal is one that would be borne out of insecurity. A lot of people pick up learning social skills for this reason unfortunately, often because they were snubbed when they were younger. What would be best for this person is a bit of reflection and accepting that having a healthy social life with some close friends is probably all they need, and anything more is likely going to be a bit harmful.

Take your answer to question 1 from reflecting on your base skills. Was your main motivator hyper-competitive or created from insecurity? If that was the case, were those underlying mindsets ever addressed? If not, it would be worth thinking about any thoughts that lead to unhealthy goal setting before trying to create new ones.

It’s also worth noting that goals will shift over time, which is fine. Sometimes they will completely change, sometimes they will be slightly modified, and sometimes we’ll have a list of goals and can only actively pursue one at any time. This is all fine and to be expected. The beginner usually doesn’t have much of an understanding of how complex and vast a field is, so the goals they set almost always reflect this constrained view. There usually is a stage at which one has attained some proficiency in the skill but realizes just how vast and expansive a field is. It is during this time that a multitude of new goals or interests begin emerging.

When you reach the valley of despair, you’ve probably accomplished that first goal you set out to finish and are left daunted by how much more there is to learn. The truth is, this is a great place to be

Metrics

Your metrics are HUGE; they determine whether or not you’re improving and will give you direction as to how to improve. Let’s discuss how to figure out the metrics you use now that you’ve figured out what your goal is.

First, you should be able to tell when you’ve achieved your goal based on your metric. Specifically, you should one day be able to use your metric and say “I’ve achieved my goal” without any doubt. Here, the goal defines the metric.

Let’s start with an example that’s super obvious. Say I want to bench press 225 pounds. The metric I’m using for progress is simply the weight that I move. It’s clear when I’ve achieved that goal because the day I load up 225 pounds on the bar and press it successfully, my metric will show that I’ve succeeded.

Let’s move to a more difficult example and show how to create an effective metric. Take our example goal of having an understanding of undergraduate mathematics and being able to solve challenging problems. In planning out this course of study, we’d find a list of courses and books to read and problems to do (how to find the right materials will be discussed in a later section). After having a list of topics to study and problem sets to do, the metric becomes progression on this list of books being read and success on the problem sets.

The base idea to creating a good metric is to ensure it is quantifying progress. This means turning progress into some sort of number where it is very clear if you are moving forward or backwards. I’ll give more examples to really drive this point home.

Goal: be able to play “Master of Puppets” by Metallica
Metric: metronome speed on each section of the song

Goal: build a great physique via lifting
Metric: bodyweight, bodyfat, and tape measurements

Goal: become a popular writer
Metric: frequency of releasing content and total number of reads per article

With each of these goals, we have a metric that we want to optimize which always allows us to figure out if we’re improving or plateauing. The best part about all of this is that the metric will allow us to define a plan of action, which will be covered in a future article.

Conclusion

In the first part in this series, we discussed how to understand what you’re already good at, how to make healthy and well-defined goals, and how to pick useful metrics to quantify progress. In the next part of this series, we will discuss finding mentors and figuring out where to get information/principles that will detail how we go about improving in our skill. We’ll be using the ideas presented here in that article as well.

Let me know what kinds of goals you’re working on and what you think about the ideas in this article. I’m interested in hearing how other people go about getting good at things.

If you enjoyed this article and want to read more by me, be sure to follow my Medium page and leave a comment! I write mostly about fitness, learning, and personal philosophy, along with random other things I learn as I go about my life.