Styles of Growth

Setting Goals vs. Loving What You Do

I felt the first signs of the impostor syndrome towards the end of the ninth grade. It was the end of the academic year, and I had ranked #1 in class like every year before that. Yet this year was different. At fourteen, I was learning that everything happened for a reason, but I couldn’t find the reason I did better than other bright, hardworking students of class IX B, FAPS, Bangalore. Finding this reason was as important as survival itself.

In those simple days, life’s goals were well defined. All my father expected was to see his daughter rank #1 in class. Unfortunately, pretty soon, my father’s hopes were no longer as clearly defined, and neither were my goals. I meandered through the acceptable, safe journey (CS engineering, software developer, MBA), and like every freshly minted MBA graduate, I figured that one must work backwards from dreamy goals, often set way out into the future. These goals were inevitably based on peer-influenced fancy, trendy or financially attractive ideas.

This style of goal setting fell apart pretty soon. It did not offer any guiding light in the dark hours of disillusionment (with venture capital in India) or when waking up to keyword arbitrage every day (for e-commerce marketing). So, I took some time off to do simple things again: I built websites, learnt new programming languages, wrote iOS apps, re-learnt the joys of writing software to solve problems, ran longer distances, and learnt to play squash.

For two years, I imagined that as long as I loved what I was doing, I’d get somewhere, right? Wrong. This style of goal setting didn't work either. Doing what you love will keep you exactly where you are.

If maximizing happiness is the goal, then this is just what the doctor ordered. But let’s for a second consider that the goal is not happiness but growth [1].

Loving what you do is a necessary but no longer a sufficient condition. For example, why do so many people who love what they do (artists, authors, engineers, craftsmen, etc.) not grow to become the Van Goghs, J.K. Rowlings, Steve Wozniacks, or Michelangelos of the world? What separates the ones who love what they do from the ones who outgrow the rest?

Some say practice. Long hours of lonely practice fueled by the desire to get better at what we love to do.

Others say deliberate practice. Some don’t even know what that means because long hours of deliberate practice require not just a deep hunger, but also the ability to sacrifice, focus, and persist. Few experience the magical tipping point of known incompetence to practice deliberately.

Known incompetence — an awareness of one’s current skill, knowledge of the strengths that need grooming and of the weaknesses that need caring — itself comes from long hours on the job. From quantity, not bursts of quality. From deferring judgment and keeping the ego in check. From thinking with your hands.

And then comes the hard part: practicing deliberately outside of one’s comfort zone.

I find a certain rightness about this style of growth: Working, stubbornly and persistently, to get better at what I love to do, with the awareness of what better means. It feels right because it is challenging and rewarding, and best of all, it doesn't matter whether I win or lose. There are no goals.

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Notes

[1] By growth, I mean the explorative path of exceeding past achievement.