– Set your target for the Future & Drive yourself to it – but don’t be myopic
– Create your vision but avoid hallucinating!
– Set a bold long term goal, focus on it and evaluate course changing opportunities
I am a firm believer in setting long term goals – setting your focus on a direction 5, 10, 20 years in the future and then being laser-focused on achieving the goal. But – don’t be myopic and inflexible – or you may miss even bolder and better outcomes.
Let me give you and example from my past to illustrate my point here. When I was a senior in college, I took and elective called Creativity in Engineering. One of our assignments wast to look 10 years down the road and picture where we would be in our professional career and write it down. Then focus on the steps it would take to get there.
One of my fellow co-op students did this, but took it to another level. She planned out her career trajectory over 10 years, as well as her personal life – when she would get married and how many kids she would have and when. And you know what? She ended up exactly where she envisioned herself at that point in time. As for me, I took a bit of a different path.
My only real professional experience or information at the time I took that Creativity class was what I experienced at my Co-op job. Nobody in my family had professional jobs nor did they own businesses. Everyone I was around growing up were blue collar working families or farmers or both. So, when I envisioned where I would be in 10 years – when I would be 32 – was to be a Director of Engineering at a medical device or diagnostic company. I didn’t see myself doing the hard-core engineering work by that time, but rather I would be a leader and manager of engineers.
As I graduated and went to work, I focused my energies on doing my engineering work, but also by taking steps to craft my career to achieve my management goal. But here is the divergent part. As time went on, opportunities that I had no previous vision to came up. I evaluated those and readjusted my 10 year goal along the way. I didn’t hold rigidly to that goal when new and promising data and inputs exposed a more challenging and appealing direction.
Ten years later, almost to the date of that class assignment I was not a Director of Engineering. I had actually achieved that title four years earlier. At my 10 year mark I was the President of a $40 million medical device company. This was something I had no vision to while in college, but as opportunities presented themselves, I adjusted my trajectory and gave myself an adjusted goal.
The lesson I learned with this exercise is simply that setting a long-term target is important, but equally as important is to not remain so rigidly focused on the goal as to miss opportunities. Yes, you can still be maniacal about achieving your goal – but don’t be afraid of adjusting or refining your goal or raising the bar. Rigidity and focus to an extent is good, but too much rigidity can significantly reduce your opportunity for growth or to maximize your outcome.