Reflection:
The ability to design your life and your career often places you in the position of being able to seize opportunities as they present themselves, as you’re more likely to plan and prepare for your future. To illustrate the point, imagine yourself as a college graduate with a technology degree. You know that you’d like to design games, but the only job offered to you is in network security. Someone who has created their life strategy – who has outlined their personal goals – may take that job in the spirit of learning, creating, and gaining experience. This individual will work hard, give their all, learn the business, and make contacts knowing that with patience and hard work, they will eventually find the position in game design that they’re looking for (or use their downtime to create and design their own games – without the help or sponsorship of a parent company).
The other individual – the one without a strategy or well-thought-out goals – will instead take the job offered and end up being fired from, quitting, or retiring from the position miserable, performing well below their capabilities, creativity and intelligence, and responding to opportunities and crises without any direction at all. This individual is less likely to seek direction when needed, rarely takes initiative, and is often described later in life as “retired in place”.
When building a strategy, it’s often the case that you have to commit to a course of action – often at or near 100% of your resource expenditure. One drawback of committing so much energy, emotion, resources, or time to a chosen strategy is the possibility of making a wrong decision or failing altogether. Most often the fear of failure is the obstacle that people have to overcome in order to even articulate their goals – let alone to work towards realizing them.
One example of this might be to imagine someone getting a degree in engineering – even though she wants to be an artist. She is reacting to his environmental pressures rather than setting and achieving her chosen goal for fear of not becoming a famous artist or not making a sufficient salary to care for a family. Another example could be someone “wanting to become a writer” but having no idea if they want to write romance, non-fiction technical manuals, or advertising copy – thus not even writing that first word on the blank sheet of paper.
Application: How to Make the Shift from Tactics to Strategy
Strategy defines the important, and tactics informs the process of getting there. Without the first step of outlining and defining the goals, you become reactive. Regis _______ calls this the “ping-pong effect”. To avoid this, you can define clearly-articulated goals and use them to inform the rest of your career and life.
There are two methods one can use to think strategically, both hybrids of creative and analytical thinking. All strategy must start with a creative thinking process, to eliminate our natural human tendency to discard those ideas we think of as impossible. To begin either method, start with visualizing the end goal. What does it look or feel like? What is the accomplishment? It doesn’t matter if the end-state relates to life, business, or health; the process is to just visualize where you see yourself and what you have achieved. Once the overall strategy has been defined, you are then able to set the goals to achieve the overall strategy.
Method 1 (Interrogation Method):
Envision your 5-, 10-, and 20- year life. Then ask yourself why? at every step.
Example:
Let’s imagine your first outlined goal is to “become a professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota in 20 years.” This is a pretty concrete goal for 20 years, and it is easy to neglect the work it might take to get to it. To make this a strategy, you must know why you want to become a professor, why University of Minnesota, and why in 20 years as opposed to, say, 10 years.
Breaking it down, you realize that
- You want to teach people, adults specifically, on cultural and human evolution;
- You want to teach specifically at UMinn because
THIS is your life strategy. Now you can set the goals and milestones to get yourself there. Putting it down on paper is the final step of the planning process. Now you can set the smaller, tactical goals to help you get there.
Challenges
Often clients find it difficult to visualize the end goal, often because they have forgotten, lost, or never developed the ability to define their values and life mission. If you are finding this a difficult exercise to complete, you may want to first complete a values and life mission check.
Method 2 (Project Management Method):
List the “impossibilities” that you have always wanted to do, but have been told –whether by others or by yourself – that you could never achieve them. Anything from “climb Mount Everest” to “save at least one African child from becoming a child soldier” is acceptable; do not limit or judge at this point, even if your list includes things that are beyond the limits of physics or time (for a good look at what the future has in store, and what is really within the realm of the possible, please see Michio Kaku’s book listed under Resources). Prioritize the projects in a Johari window; on the vertical scale should be “possibility”, and on the horizontal scale should be “desire.”
Arrange projects in order of priority:
- high possibility/high desire,
- low possibility/high desire,
- high possibility/low desire, and
- low possibility/low desire.
Once arranged in order of priority, also judge the possibilities based on their similarity to one another. If you have “become an artist” in sector one and “become a teacher” in sector two, judge how easily you can expend effort to train or obtain education in both at the same time, and research the ability to combine the two into a viable career – part-time, full-time, or on a volunteer basis. Once the prioritization has occurred, define the projects by deadline, and construct a timeline for each sector. This is a time-consuming process initially, but easier to do once you’ve finished the first timeline.
Challenges
With this method, some clients find their projects are highly unrelated and indicate a scattered mind. To clean up the sectors, this is also a good time to complete a values and life mission check, or use the method one to ask why you want to complete each project. If you can’t answer, this is the time to put that project on hold until you can define the underlying desire.
Avoiding the “100% Rule of Failure”
You nearly never have to commit to a path 100%; there are times when you can “dip your toes in the water” and try something out before you dedicate years to education and training, or before you permanently quit your job. Research and explore these options before committing yourself to a path to
1) prove to yourself that you are able to accomplish those big goals by “eating the elephant a bite at a time” and
2) to conquer the fear of failure that often keeps us from setting goals to achieve that which we most desire in life.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it. Robert Heinlein
References
Owens, M. T. (2007). Strategy and the Strategic Way of Thinking, Naval War College Review 60(4). .
Resources
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
By: Simon O. Sinek (2009, Portfolio Hardcover)
Why Success Always Starts with Failure
By: Tim Harford (2011, Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
Physics of the Future
By: Michio Kaku (2011, Doubleday)
[1] Owens, M. T. (2007). Strategy and the Strategic Way of Thinking, Naval War College Review 60(4). .