Skill-building goals

Setting goals or resolutions for New Years Eve almost always fails. I haven’t even attempted that in the past years, because I thought that I would last 3 days max. So, I always thought - what’s the point?

But here’s the thing: Regular goals are focused on outcomes. This has the terrible downside that it is very easy to procrastinate on them. And for me, this will happen 100%. There is a way around, namely deciding daily actions, setting milestones and tracking your progress. But what if you procrastinate on your goal for too long?

For example, you set the goal of reading 50 books this year. To do that, you set daily action of reading 30 minutes per day at a night and an intermediate milestones of finishing 4 books each month (yes, it doesn’t add up). But for some reason on January 3, the Instagram feed just seems more interesting. So you scroll until 3 am, and go to sleep without reading. The next day you are too tired and fall asleep, then a work deadline approaches, and so forth. In the end, you only manage to read one book in January and you are three books behind. Now these godforsaken books are on top of your mind, nagging you incessantly.

If you are like me, this nagging is a terrible feeling, accompanied by a self-doubt, fear of failure and self-hatred for not sticking out. So you pull through and read seven books in February. This comes at a cost: To read the books, you had to push other stuff back. To catch up, you don’t read a single book in March. At this point, having experienced the effort it takes to catch up, feeling horrible and thinking all the other fun thoughts about being a shitty person, you decide that it is easiest to forget them. You’ll catch up in a month, when you are a bit more free. And then … it’s October and you realize that you won’t ever be able to read 43 books in the next three months. So, you just give up.

This story could be me. It’s not my goal to read 50 books this year, but the procrastination and giving up behavior sounds very much like me at the moment. The reason for this, is that I am a bit of a perfectionist. I want things to get done right, and I feel terrible if I fail. The thought of not measuring up to my expectations alone makes me want to give up and causes me to sabotage myself on a daily basis by procrastinating.

So, how would someone like me set goals? Mark Manson proposed the concept of skill-building goals. That is, focusing on building the skill required to achieve a goal. The amazing benefit that makes this concept viable for me is that you can work on the skills at any time, without feeling bad or guilty if you miss out. As Mark puts it:

And the beauty of focusing on skills is that it’s never done. The old cliché is that we all set goals in January and give up on them by February. But if you focus on a skill, no matter how bad you are at it, you can still work on it in February, and March, on through the year.

Going back to our example, to actually read 30 minutes per day, you would need to learn to create a reading environment and learn to say no to commitments that may overlap with you designating reading time. Abstracting these gives us two skills: environment-creation and saying-no-to-things. Now getting good at those may help you in a bunch of other ways!

Interestingly, most goals can be boiled down to a few basic skills. Skills that are necessary for achieving anything really. Mansons calls the personal growth skills.

So, in essence, instead of running after a goal that serves as a proxy and that you have convinced yourself will make your life better, why not focus on learning how to be better at life and actually make it better?

Now comes the question: How do you actually measure progress on learning personal growth skills? I have no fucking idea. Mark Manson has courses on developing these skills, which may provide some answers, but they cost money. A monthly subscription, 9.99 USD. I am very hesitant to spend money on this.

However, these skills may be the missing piece that will help me build a more stable foundation for my life. And as I don’t have a framework for measuring them, it may be easiest, cheapest and fastest to buy instead of build.

I have another excuse to buy: I will do the course, document my progress and share my learnings with you (as much as is legally allowed). So this is an investment into a public good.

You can thank me later.