> "For me, I have greater admiration and respect for someone who has failed majestically at being great, than for someone who deals purely with median or below median expectations. The former will have amazing stories to tell, the latter usually don’t."
This helps give me words to understand my mixed feelings about an old post I found on a language learning forum recently, about a person who shared an ambitious goal that appeared unrealistic to achieve on their proposed timeline of six months. The person aimed to start studying as a complete beginner with a language and achieve a 'C1 level' certification by that time (this is an advanced exam that evaluates for fluency in a spoken debate on a scholarly topic, thorough comprehension of spoken debates on the radio, and the ability to write a timed persuasive essay with a limited number of flaws on a nuanced topic).
The responses to the post at the time were largely discouraging. On the one hand, I quietly agreed from personal experience with the other users that the goal simply wasn't feasible for most people: it would have been ambitious (but doable) to employ the same stretch of time to go from the B2 level (the level just below, which is sufficient for immigration to major countries that used the language officially) to the C1 level. But on the other hand, I did feel sympathetic toward the idea of the person setting an ambitious personal goal. The person even tried to make this concrete by including a plan of intense hours of tutoring and television watching per week. The post was a year old when I read it, so I checked the person's user profile to see if they reported the outcome. But the person never gave a written update (neither a post, nor a comment, nor an edit), though the account was active with recent unrelated comments.
My conclusion is that it's best to be supportive of people with ambitious goals to better themselves, but it's most practical to draw a distinction between goals in the short, medium, and long-term. Ambitious goals for self-betterment on any of these timelines ought to be celebrated. But there are risks with short-term goal that skirt too far outside of realism: this can cause someone to push themselves too much to the point of burnout and quitting (it's unclear, but possible, that this might have happened to that person). In my week-to-week life, I've personally seen beginner's burnout happen with overly-eager novices in martial arts.
A set of attainable short-term goals in service of ambitious goals over a longer timeline would be more sustainable. But if one wishes to pursue an ambitious goal in the short-term, that ought to be okay too—as long as the individual understands the burnout risks upfront, to lower the odds of abandoning their goal if they fall short.
This helps give me words to understand my mixed feelings about an old post I found on a language learning forum recently, about a person who shared an ambitious goal that appeared unrealistic to achieve on their proposed timeline of six months. The person aimed to start studying as a complete beginner with a language and achieve a 'C1 level' certification by that time (this is an advanced exam that evaluates for fluency in a spoken debate on a scholarly topic, thorough comprehension of spoken debates on the radio, and the ability to write a timed persuasive essay with a limited number of flaws on a nuanced topic).
The responses to the post at the time were largely discouraging. On the one hand, I quietly agreed from personal experience with the other users that the goal simply wasn't feasible for most people: it would have been ambitious (but doable) to employ the same stretch of time to go from the B2 level (the level just below, which is sufficient for immigration to major countries that used the language officially) to the C1 level. But on the other hand, I did feel sympathetic toward the idea of the person setting an ambitious personal goal. The person even tried to make this concrete by including a plan of intense hours of tutoring and television watching per week. The post was a year old when I read it, so I checked the person's user profile to see if they reported the outcome. But the person never gave a written update (neither a post, nor a comment, nor an edit), though the account was active with recent unrelated comments.
My conclusion is that it's best to be supportive of people with ambitious goals to better themselves, but it's most practical to draw a distinction between goals in the short, medium, and long-term. Ambitious goals for self-betterment on any of these timelines ought to be celebrated. But there are risks with short-term goal that skirt too far outside of realism: this can cause someone to push themselves too much to the point of burnout and quitting (it's unclear, but possible, that this might have happened to that person). In my week-to-week life, I've personally seen beginner's burnout happen with overly-eager novices in martial arts.
A set of attainable short-term goals in service of ambitious goals over a longer timeline would be more sustainable. But if one wishes to pursue an ambitious goal in the short-term, that ought to be okay too—as long as the individual understands the burnout risks upfront, to lower the odds of abandoning their goal if they fall short.