I'm trying to understand the relationship between overreaching and self-evaluation.
When people are overreaching, they aren’t able to adequately self-evaluate their ideas.
To avoid overreaching, a person would have to incrementally build up his skill of self-evaluation as he incrementally increases the difficulty level of stuff he’s working on.
Imagine that you have self-evaluation-skill-level 20 (using numbers only as a demonstration to help clarify) while you’re doing an activity that requires self-evaluation-skill-level 30. You’re overreaching, meaning that you’re making errors at a rate that is greater than the rate that you are correcting errors. One effect of this is that you won’t be improving your self-evaluation-skill-level. And if you keep increasing the difficulty level of stuff you work on while in this state, then the gap between your self-evaluation-skill-level and the difficulty level of your activities will keep increasing. So you will be overreaching even more with each increase in activity-difficulty-level.
In order to learn effectively, a person should be increasing his self-evaluation-skill-level along side increasing his activity-difficulty-level. With each incremental increase of self-evaluation-skill-level, he incrementally increases the activity-difficulty-level. This keeps the gap between self-evaluation-skill-level and activity-difficulty-level at zero.
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The above description is simplistic. It doesn't differentiate between general skill in self-evaluation that applies to any activities and specific skill in self-evaluation that apply to specific activities.
If your general self-evaluation skill is great, then that means you'll easily create self-evaluation skills for individual activities. In contrast, if your general self-evaluation skill is novice-level, then you'll much more slowly create self-evaluation skill for individual activities.
As you increase your self-evaluation skill for individual activities across many activities, you'll inadvertantly increase your general self-evaluation skill. You can also intentionally increase your general self-evaluation skill by consciously integrating your self-evaluation skill for individual activities into general concepts/policies that can then be reused to create new self-evaluation skill for other individual activities.
I like the overreaching link you shared. I have personally overreached many times. This is why I like working with people who can help me set goals and evaluate my performance. I am good at evaluating performance. But I am not good at imagining all the details of a goal and its sub-goals. I often solve a problem in a way that is referred to as a "hack" in that there is sometimes a solution that a trained person would prefer over the solution I have used. The trained person has usually read about (or previously implemented) the preferred solution whereas I have imagined my solution independently. My hack solves an immediate problem but would not be preferred because it has some hidden cost or risk (or multiple costs/risks) which the preferred solution would better address.
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