Goals and Abilities

Random banter here

Most of our lives are not very eventful and have a fixed routine depending on the phase of life we are in. However that does not mean we cannot learn something from our daily lives (refer my previous post on my thoughts on routine). I try to take away something from the daily events in my life, put it into the form of a short thought, many times my original, sometimes borrowed, and send it to people in office, who have subscribed to my mails, in a daily ‘Good Morning’ mail after coming to office the next day.

Yesterday however, was different. I could not extract a single lesson out of my life yesterday. As a result, I had nothing original to share. On these occasions I try to share something I might have read or heard somewhere else. That’s exactly what I did today.

We all come across people who complain about how their jobs are either not challenging enough or too difficult to perform with their current skill set. At some point of time we all have been this person too. Continue this situation long enough and you’ll find your company’s HR department struggling to control attrition rate. That brings us to my today’s mail.

Content related to the topic starts here

During my engineering, in 2004, I attended a workshop on entrepreneurship conducted by MITCON. I shared the thought of one of the instructors in the workshop. It dealt with the topic of a person’s skills & abilities and the kind of goals he sets and the challenges he needs to face. Here’s what he said, if I remember correctly:

“The goals you set for you are like a magnet and your abilities are like iron filings. Consider the tension between the goals and abilities like a magnetic force. If you set your goals higher than your abilities, you automatically will lift yourselves up in striving to achieve that goal thereby improving your skills. Set your goals below your abilities to see a steady decay in your abilities. However, just like magnetic force, the pull here decreases with increasing distance. Set your goals too high for your abilities and you’ll give up without even trying since it is too difficult for you.”

I feel this is a very nice way of explaining the importance of proper goal setting and keeping yourself engaged in the task at hand avoiding the setting in of frustration or boredom. This reminds me of an image a friend had shared. After a brief googling, I found the image that graphically conveys what our instructor in that workshop was trying to say.

(Original Image Source: http://agamesdesignblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/flowexpanded2.png)

You might want to read the entire post where this image appears, ‘Flow – Stating the Obvious’. Though it talks about game design, I believe the takeaways are generic enough to be applied in day to day motivation. Also, the Wikipedia page on Flow makes for an interesting read. Happy reading.

Cheers
Aalok
--Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered and no one was there.