An Existential Crisis
In this episode, Taimur talks about the existential crisis that he's going through. We try and figure out what our real goals and motivations are for the things that we're doing.
We spent much of the podcast discussing a select few articles that Taimur had selected. Here are the links to all those articles as well as the tweet thread which was also discussed.
Here are some of the highlights from our discussion:
If you think of losing as not winning, then when you try to work out why you lost or why you’re a loser, you’ll tend to focus on the things you didn’t do and the qualities you don’t have.
“It seems unlikely that anyone would like to fail until you realise that high expectations are emotionally and mentally expensive. There is a lot more pressure, angst, self-doubt and in general reflexive cognitive corrosion when there is a good chance you’ll win compared to when you think you’re likely to lose”. J.Somers, 2009
We often fall victim to the trap of being satisfied if we have a convincing excuse for why something didn’t work. An excuse of this nature holds us back in the long term because we convince ourself that that was the sole reason for our failure leading to that self-defeating feeling of satisfaction. This stops us from questioning the multiplicity of reasons as to why something didn't work.
It’s important to be able to have a goal but not let your self-esteem be determined by whether you meet that goal. The framing that you either have to ignore goals and focus on the process or you have to have the goal and be sad if you don’t accomplish the goal is just a false dichotomy.
Punching through the target is an apt analogy that can be adapted and adopted to wider life and business. If you are learning martial arts and you want to punch a target, you’re not taught to aim for the target, you’re taught to aim through the target. By aiming to go through the target, you're more likely to properly engage and strike the original target more easily.
The progress that you make is influenced by the size of your goals. Having clarity on what you want dictates the extent to which you need to make changes to achieve your goals.
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