Category: Wanderings

Fighting the Introspection Principle

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Introspection Principle states that the act of self-reflection is the most important for making big life decisions.

This principle is too ingrained in our psyche and is not the most effective way to build a compelling career. Fighting the principle means accepting that the path of finding compelling work is ambiguous. 

Cal Newport’s advice seems more convincing:

Compelling careers unfold as follows: You choose something. You work hard at building skills. You fail at some things and respond by shifting your attention to other things that work better. Over time, as you become more valuable to the world and confident in your ability, interesting opportunities finally start to arise.

Mistakes and Failures: Why it’s important to differentiate

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

How many times have we looked back at a relatively short period of time (weeks or months) and realized all the things we wronged/failed at and then blamed ourselves for not doing better? I’ve done it many times and every time I’ve felt either miserable or angry.

We often don’t spend the time in differentiating between failures and mistakes and in treating them both as mistakes we lead ourselves on to the path of misery. Seth Godin explains the difference well:

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

Failure is good because there is a lesson at the end of it. We fail and we should learn from those failures so as to not fail again. But when we treat our failures as mistakes, we also inevitably make the mistake of blaming ourselves for all those mistakes. That just ruins all the effort put in to contemplation.

It’s great to have the ability to rush through all that data from the past and cherry-pick that which shows us where we went wrong. We have made great progress because of this ability but only when we’ve also been successful at differentiating failures and mistakes.

(As a side – what makes it hard to do this differentiation is that looking back, of course, we have a lot more data to answer the same questions. A failure might seem like a mistake when it wasn’t at the time.)

No one likes failing or making mistakes but it is definitely easier to deal with the prior than the latter.

It should be about Choices not Goals

Akshat Rathi3 Comments

Previously, I have written about why I was unconvinced with Leo’s philosophy of living without goals and expectations. It was the logic in Leo’s arguments which had a flaw and not the concept. In the light of a new way of looking at the same problem, it seems to me that there may after all be a way to incorporate this way of living without ‘adverse’ consequences.

A Different Perspective

Instead of looking at what you want to do as goals, think about them as choices. For example, instead of considering ‘living a healthy life’ as a goal, treat is as a choice. Or consider ‘writing a book’ a choice not a goal. In doing so, attach value to the whole activity and not the just end point.

It’s a fundamentally different view of we tend to call goals. When we treat something as ‘our choice’, we are able to attach much more value to it. In a liberal society, we value other’s choices because we value our own as much. Even evolution supports giving choices more value because those who are able to make better choices are those who will survive longer.

Goals, on the other hand, don’t seem that personal and thus, less valuable. They seem to be something we conform to.  We should have goals because everyone else has them. We should have goals because that is the only way in which we can achieve great things.

The point I am trying to make is that choosing to do something without it being your ‘goal’ is a much more powerful motivator.

Goals: The Stressful Motivators

The idea of living without goals is scary. We create goals to motivate ourselves to do the work which we deem important. But there is a problem with this kind of motivation, it causes stress.

The stress of not achieving your goals (within the time frame) can motivate you to ‘get on with it’ but that kind of motivation can only last for so long. Where as choosing to do something means that one is doing that only because one derives pleasure from doing it. I think this kind of pleasure is greater than the pleasure of just achieving goals and thus can sustain one to not only complete what they started but also do better work. The pleasure may even help one achieve more than what they would’ve set a goal for.

Philosophically Speaking

Isn’t living without goals a goal in itself?

Unfortunately, the movement of ‘living without goals’ lacks the ability to counter that attack. A better name to this movement would be ‘living only by your choices’. But that’s not controversial enough for it to market well.

People ‘choose’ to live by goals. So what is it that I am claiming people should do that they are not already doing? 

Everyone lives by their own choices, of course. I am arguing for choosing to do something because you like to do it rather than choosing to do something that you do because it’s your goal. Even if people choose goals for the pleasure that they derive on achieving them, it’s a much more powerful motivator if you do something because you derive pleasure in the activity rather than in just finishing it.