Choose your fuel wisely
If worrying about paying the mortgage gets you motivated to lean hard into the next project, don’t be surprised if that sort of fear arises every time you have hard work to do.
If your goal is to teach the naysayers a lesson, remember that you’ll need to find people who you want to defeat every time you need to do important work.
If you are measuring a false proxy, a metric you say you don’t care about, it’s quite likely you’ll start caring about it.
When we pick our fuel, we pick our companions for the journey ahead.
Choosing to care about what other people care about surrenders your agency. You’ll find that success feels hollow, because it’s their success, not yours. And blaming the false metrics for losing your way is not as useful as simply walking away from them in the first place.
We thrive when we find a goal and a metric that’s resilient and easily replenished. It turns out that making a contribution is something we can do, again and again, and it never gets old.