Page 157 - Hard Goals

148 HARD Goals

and third-level musicians have only about 3,400 hours? Well,
when they were fi rst learning violin, many of those practice
hours were spent on learning goals, not performance goals. And
the best kids set signifi cantly more diffi cult learning goals for
themselves; hence the greater numbers of practice hours and the
signifi cantly better performance.

TESTING YOUR GOALS

So now, to get very practical, how diffi cult should we make our
goals? To answer this question, we need to do two things: fi rst,
we need to assess how diffi cult we typically make our goals, and
second, we need to adjust our typical goals up or down to fi nd
the sweet spot of diffi culty.
Let’s begin by fi guring out whether you have a pattern of
making your goals too easy, or in those more rare cases, you
make your goals too hard. To put it another way, you need to
know if you’re an undersetter or an oversetter. Start by think-
ing about the goals you’ve set, or attempted to set, in the past
year or two; the more similar they are to your current goals, the
better.
Now think about the initial goals you set, and then take a
look at what you ended up achieving. For example, let’s say I’ve
set three running goals in the past few years. In case 1, I set a
goal of running a three-mile race but ended up running a six-
mile race. In case 2, I set a goal of running a six-mile race, but
because things were moving along better than I had originally
thought, I ended up running a nine-mile race. And in case 3,
I set a goal of running a six-mile race and I ended up running