Should You Target the Minimum?

I really like this article by Scott Young about different approaches to goal-setting (minimum, average, and maximum). I think this is a useful mental model for setting effective goals in different areas. E.g. I’ve found minimum goals work really well for scripture study, where the default is zero output—scripture study is not something that just happens. Right now my scripture study goal is rendered for myself as: “each day, read something in the standard works and write about it.”

Average goals work nicely for physical activity, where the default is some output, from just living life, and goals in this area typically aim to push this output upward. Right now my physical activity goal is “use my treadmill desk and monitor my average activity levels over time using a fitness tracker app.” (The monitoring probably needs to be adjusted, though—having to keep my phone on my person during the workday has been detrimental to my work output; I want to go back to what I did before and leave it in another room.)

But in my experience there’s an interesting gotcha with this mental model, which the author doesn’t touch on: it’s substantially harder to be gracious with yourself in struggling to hit a minimum goal than in struggling to hit an average goal, and harder to be gracious regarding average goals than maximum goals. This makes sense, because maximum goals seem more ambitious, and we give ourselves more grace with that ambition. But I think overall it’s detrimental to the success of minimum or average goals.

Maybe having this mental model in mind can help with that? Maybe when we set a minimum goal, we can recognize it as being valuable because of inherent difficulty in the goal domain. For example, consistent, meaningful scripture study is hard. Reading something every day and writing something about it is hard (and I should give myself grace in it) but still worth striving for because the returns (closeness to God, spiritual perspective amid the secular day-to-day of life) make it worth it.

Feb 13, 2025 · No comments yet