Page 155 - Hard Goals

146 HARD Goals

the piece, look it up online, and I’m sure you’ll immediately rec-
ognize the tune.) Given such a challenge, you’ll probably stare
at the music for a time, try to fi gure out the notes, and bit by
bit start to cobble together a few phrases. But your technique
will stink, you won’t get the right fi ngerings, it’ll be sloppy, and
even if you make your way through a few lines, you’ll be greatly
undercutting your long-term ability to play piano. If I give you a
goal to play “Für Elise” and you don’t know how to play piano,
a normal human will take every shortcut available to play that
piece, even if it means using lousy techniques and developing
some terrible habits.
If you don’t golf and I give you a goal of breaking 100, you’ll
buy every wonder club, try every swing gimmick, get the biggest
driver, buy all the magazines, and so forth. And not only will
you probably not break 100, but you won’t even learn the funda-
mentals, like a slow backswing, keeping your head down, proper
extension, and so on. The fi rst golf teacher I had when I was a kid
made it very clear to me: no fancy drivers until you’ve mastered a
5 iron. And yet, every 100-plus golfer on the planet has the coolest,
biggest driver available, with which they hit good drives maybe 10
percent of the time (all the while defi ling the fundamental mechan-
ics of a golf swing and destroying their hopes for future success).
Now, in those piano and golf examples, the inevitable fail-
ures are not the result of setting diffi cult goals; they’re the result
of setting performance goals. Performance goals are those that
focus on getting some desired end result, like a golf score under
100 or playing “Für Elise.” By contrast, a learning goal would
mean that you’re less concerned with breaking 100, and more
concerned with learning the necessary fundamentals (so that
you’ll eventually break 100).
When you’re truly starting at ground zero, when you have
absolutely no idea how to do what you’re trying to do, a perfor-