[IceCreamYou]

Performance and goals don't have to mean the same thing. An example of a goal is "acquire 30 new customers by the end of the month" and the relevant performance metric there would be "number of new customers acquired." Better performance in that case might mean 50 customers acquired while worse performance might mean 10 customers acquired.

I agree that "it's easy to get frustrated if you bite off more than you can chew - so content yourself with learning simpler things at first." I don't think that's contradictory to what I wrote; one component of good goals is that they're achievable. In retrospect I can see how you would read that lesson into Dan's post, but what he actually wrote is that what you should do if you want to "build skill in the long term" is "setting firm goals and keeping track of what you're doing is a problem for beginners." I think that is not appropriate advice for most people.