When is the right time to let go of a goal?

While going to the supermarket last week (I took the long route to let my thoughts wander), I reflected on last month and stumbled upon a question I still don't know how to answer: When is the right time to let go of your goals? Since it's much easier to set goals than to actually put in the work to see them accomplished, it's easy to set too many goals. Therefore, you will probably have some goals you should just drop. But because dropping goals is also much easier than seeing them accomplished, they are some goals you only want to drop because they're hard at the moment. Furthermore, it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you don't care about a goal anymore because it's hard at the moment. This can make it hard to decide when to actually stop pursuing a goal. I know the dip is about this question, but I haven't read it yet. Time to put it back on the ever-growing list of things to read. Anyway, what triggered this question was the goal I set for myself in the beginning of this month. I wanted to learn parkour.

I love parkour. The first encounter I had with it probably was with Assassin's Creed II when I was about 15. While I nowadays mostly watch parkour videos on Youtube, back then, I set out to learn it. Each week, a friend and me took the train to the next city to participate in a weekly training. For one reason or another, the training wasn't very successful. The reasons why this was the case don't really matter. What's important though, is that, even though I stopped participating in the training soon after, I never stopped talking about wanting to learn parkour. So when I read The first 20 hours I found it a great opportunity to get back into it for a first learning project using the described methods. I decided for a route I wanted to take over some monkey bars in a park near me, broke it down to the moves I needed to learn, and started to train. The goal I set for myself was to put in at least 20 hours.

The first few days went well. I started with learning the Safety Vault, the most basic move to overcome small obstacles (like walls or gates). While it was physically undemanding, it required a lot of repetition to overcome the fear of getting caught with my feet, slipping of, or hurting myself in some other way. But after three days of training for about an hour, I was able to jump over waist-high barriers on the first attempt and without needing to go back to smaller obstacles first. It's still far from instinctual, though. To be able to do it from running would require a lot more practice. And at that point I lost interest. In the three weeks since, I haven't done anything about it.

When I thought about why I abandoned the learning project, I revisited the reasons why I wanted to learn parkour in the first place. Sure, I like watching videos of it, but I also like to listen to Dragonforce and have no particular interest in learning to shred the guitar at 250bpm. The story I told myself around parkour is that it's a great way to prepare for living combined with a great way to stay fit. 80% of parkour is a mind game. Just like with the safety vault, the primary challenge isn't the physical aspect (even though it plays a larger role for other moves), but to push through your fears when attempting a challenge for the first time. I love this kind of mini challenge to stretch my comfort zone. And parkour is full of them. But it also requires a lot of work to do great. When the first 100 safety vaults are pushing through your mental limitations, the next 10000 are repeating the move again and again until it's a fluid motion. When I reflected on why I abandoned the project, I realized that I only wanted to learn parkour for its potential of mini challenges, but not for its own sake. The thing is, I can make mini challenges practically out of everything. Sometimes, when I sat for too long in front of a desk, I do five pushups to reactivate my body. It isn't much, but an amount that already feels like working out, without actually trying to reach my limit. And when I had this realization, I did ten pushups just there, on the sidewalk.

Trying to learn parkour was illuminating. It confirmed my assumptions about the mind-game factor I like so much about it. It also showed me that it (unsurprisingly) takes much more effort to get good at it than I anticipated before. Coming back to the question that motivated this post, I feel comfortable letting go of this goal. The 3-4 hours I invested into it showed me that I'm currently not really interested in climbing walls and running on rooftops. For the first time on about 10 years I'm at a point now where I don't actually want to learn parkour. So try out the things you wanted to do for a long time. And if you realize that you actually don't really want to do it anymore, that's the best thing that can happen to you. All it means is that you have more time to try other things that sound fun.