I see people overreach and do overly difficult activities even after reading my essays about overreaching and claiming that they agree with me. Then they may fail a bunch, get stuck, and give up without ever trying easy enough activities. Why do they do this? Perhaps they don't understand my essays and don't know how to have productive conversations about those topics. Also, many people think they won't get stuck as others did, so they think it's OK for them to do hard, ambitious, complicated stuff without working up to it. Then when they do get stuck, they don't change their attitude effectively, so they stay stuck.
This is somewhat of an incremental progress concept for learning. It has a zone of what’s too hard for the learner to do (similar to overreaching), and an idea of doing things that aren’t too hard and making progress and expanding one’s capabilities. However this model seems focused on making progress with assistance (e.g. from teachers), and doesn’t help explain self-driven learning or innovative learning (learning things no one else already knows), which are certainly possible.
Don’t try to plan out every sub-sub-sub-goal at the start. There’s flexibility, but the most typical or standard approach is to figure out a series of reasonably high level goals from your current knowledge to your goal. Include just enough sub-goals and details for each step to have some confidence it will work. Then fill in more details as you go along . Start on the first sub-goal, and figure out sub-sub-goals for it, and if they are too big then take the first one, that you’re about to do, and divide it up more. Whenever you actually start doing a (sub) goal, divide it up into smaller parts if necessary (and when you start doing each of those parts, divide them up if necessary). Do just-in-time step division instead of planning everything from the start.
I’ve had the idea that planing is mostly done at the start of projects and then the rest is mostly following through on that plan. I’ve started to realize that it’s a good idea to change more parts of the plan while executing, for most projects (especially longer ones.)
I like the idea of just-in-time step division. Start with high level steps and goals (the only worry is that thinking of some lower level steps might make you change your higher level steps into something more efficient. I doubt this actually happens often, and when it does happen it’s probably not worth the effort and not reliably better than what you would have with just high level thinking.) Then plan out what you need in the moment. Going into detail early means you have a higher chance of planning things you won’t need and planning poorly because you don’t know as much yet.