Do you mean someone who wants to be ‘the strongest’ compared to others. I don’t think that’s ever a good goal, because whether or not it is achievable doesn’t depend on you. But ‘be the strongest’ is also an incredibly non-specific goal, and problematic for that reason. If you break it down, you could say “right now, my weaknesses are that a) I’m out of shape and can’t jog more than 1 mile, and b) I’m insecure about it” then you could set sub-goals in both these areas, prioritize them, make plans on how to accomplish them, and evaluate afterwards whether they had been accomplished...and then make a new list of weaknesses, and a new list of goals, and a new list of plans. You’re doing a lot more than just trying to be as strong as you can, but you’re not specifically holding back or trying not to be as strong as you can either, which is what your comment came across as recommending.
No not compared to others. Just someone whose goal is to be the strongest. It is the fact that it is an “est” based goal that makes it damaging to itself. I suppose if I were to take all the poetry out of the above mentioned statement I would say that any goal that involves “ests” (fastest, strongest, smartest, wealthiest, etc) involves a degree of abstraction that signifies a lack of true understanding of what the actual quality/ state of being they are targeting encompasses, and that until said person better understands that quality/state they will never be able to achieve said goal.
Note that all your examples take my goal and rewrite to have incredibly practical parameters. You define reachable objectives as targets for your examples, but the point of my example was that it was a goal that lacked such empirically bounded markers.
OK. Makes sense. As I said in this comment, apparently my brain automatically converts abstract goals into sub-goals...so automatically that I hadn’t even imagined someone could have a goal as abstract as ‘be as strong as I can’ without breaking it down and making it measurable and practicable, etc. I think I understand your point; it’s the format of the goal that is damaging, not the content in itself.
Yes, exactly. And if you do convert abstract goals into sub-goals you are abnormally brilliant. I don’t know if you were taught to do that, or you just deduced such a technique on your own, but the majority of people, the vast majority, is unable to do that. It is a huge problem, one many self-health programs address, and also one that the main paradigms of American education are working to counteract.
I think it comes from having done athletics as a kid… I was a competitive swimmer, and very quickly it became an obvious fact to me that in order to achieve the big abstract goal (being the fastest and winning the race) you had to train a whole lot. And since it’s not very easy for someone who’s 11 or 12 years old to wake up every morning at 5 and make it to practice, I turned those into little mini subgoals (examples subgoal: get out of bed and make it to all the practices, subgoal: try to keep up with the fast teenage boys in my lane, subgoal: do butterfly even though it hurts).
So it just feels incredibly obvious to me that the bigger a goal is, the harder you have to train, and so my first thought is ‘how do I train for this?’
Do you mean someone who wants to be ‘the strongest’ compared to others. I don’t think that’s ever a good goal, because whether or not it is achievable doesn’t depend on you. But ‘be the strongest’ is also an incredibly non-specific goal, and problematic for that reason. If you break it down, you could say “right now, my weaknesses are that a) I’m out of shape and can’t jog more than 1 mile, and b) I’m insecure about it” then you could set sub-goals in both these areas, prioritize them, make plans on how to accomplish them, and evaluate afterwards whether they had been accomplished...and then make a new list of weaknesses, and a new list of goals, and a new list of plans. You’re doing a lot more than just trying to be as strong as you can, but you’re not specifically holding back or trying not to be as strong as you can either, which is what your comment came across as recommending.
No not compared to others. Just someone whose goal is to be the strongest. It is the fact that it is an “est” based goal that makes it damaging to itself. I suppose if I were to take all the poetry out of the above mentioned statement I would say that any goal that involves “ests” (fastest, strongest, smartest, wealthiest, etc) involves a degree of abstraction that signifies a lack of true understanding of what the actual quality/ state of being they are targeting encompasses, and that until said person better understands that quality/state they will never be able to achieve said goal.
Note that all your examples take my goal and rewrite to have incredibly practical parameters. You define reachable objectives as targets for your examples, but the point of my example was that it was a goal that lacked such empirically bounded markers.
OK. Makes sense. As I said in this comment, apparently my brain automatically converts abstract goals into sub-goals...so automatically that I hadn’t even imagined someone could have a goal as abstract as ‘be as strong as I can’ without breaking it down and making it measurable and practicable, etc. I think I understand your point; it’s the format of the goal that is damaging, not the content in itself.
Ahhh I am a moron, I did not even read that. I read dave’s post prior to it and assumed it was irrelevant to the idea I was trying to convey. X_X
Yes, exactly. And if you do convert abstract goals into sub-goals you are abnormally brilliant. I don’t know if you were taught to do that, or you just deduced such a technique on your own, but the majority of people, the vast majority, is unable to do that. It is a huge problem, one many self-health programs address, and also one that the main paradigms of American education are working to counteract.
It really is no small feat.
I think it comes from having done athletics as a kid… I was a competitive swimmer, and very quickly it became an obvious fact to me that in order to achieve the big abstract goal (being the fastest and winning the race) you had to train a whole lot. And since it’s not very easy for someone who’s 11 or 12 years old to wake up every morning at 5 and make it to practice, I turned those into little mini subgoals (examples subgoal: get out of bed and make it to all the practices, subgoal: try to keep up with the fast teenage boys in my lane, subgoal: do butterfly even though it hurts).
So it just feels incredibly obvious to me that the bigger a goal is, the harder you have to train, and so my first thought is ‘how do I train for this?’