Welcome to mindful manager! Today we’ll explore 2 ideas I’ve been recently pondering / playing with:
An evergreen thought I keep finding everywhere
Why it’s important to start from first principles
Enjoy 🙏
Focus on The Trajectory Instead of The Goal
This is a concept that I have found in many sources, expressed in different forms but pointing to the same truth. Two examples that come to mind are:
Atomic Habits, a wonderful book by James Clear which, despite the title, couldn't be less of a "self-help" manual. Highly recommended.
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, written by William Irvine.
Clear states this by saying that it's far better to focus on our current trajectory than to set an arbitrary goal, even with a specific deadline. Of course, having a destination helps, but often too many variables are tied to our end goals. Our current habits and the direction of the little steps we take every day can be measured much more easily and have the power to compound over time, making us reach levels we didn't think were possible. We are usually bad at understanding the compound effects and where they can lead us.
On the other hand, Irvine explains a similar concept when listing the core principles of Stoicism. One of the most important is to be able to separate the things we can control from the things outside of our control and focus only on the first ones. It may seem obvious or silly to state it as a "core principle," but when I reflected on it, I found myself guilty of being often stressed by things over which I had absolutely no influence. It's easy to understand that the weather is out of our control, but what about the final score of a tennis match? Sure, your effort is a critical factor, but many other variables come into play here, and not all of them depend on you. Reframing your target from winning the match into giving all you have and internalizing the goal makes it much more controllable and makes you way more accountable to the ultimate judge (you 😉).
In summary: set a vision, but then focus on making a small improvement every day in the things you can control. You'll be surprised where you end up in a year or two.
Fundamentals Are Everything
Have you ever heard of the first principles approach? I encountered this concept while reading a biography of Elon Musk many years ago. He was explaining how he came up with the idea for SpaceX - his rocket-manufacturing billion-dollar startup. Musk believed that one of the main obstacles to creating a multi-planetary civilization was the high cost of manufacturing spaceships, which NASA and other organizations were not trying to optimize for.
The usual approach to minimizing costs is to list all current expenses and try to identify areas to cut back. This is called reasoning by analogy - starting from what is already being done and looking for improvements.
Instead, Musk tried a different approach, which is starting from the basics, or first principles. He listed all the individual elements needed to build a rocket, such as the amount of metal and meters of electric circuits needed. When he added it all up, the total material costs added up to only 3% (if I remember correctly) of the average national budget for a space launch. History says the decision to start SpaceX was made that day 🚀
This principle can be applied to almost every domain of life and work. When, instead of memorising all the details, you master the basics of a specific discipline (whether it's physics or managing a sales pipeline), you'll always be one step ahead of those who blindly follow the current expert, method, or framework. It's an incredibly demanding task, though, and it's not necessary for all the things we do in our daily lives (you don't need to understand how Bluetooth works to listen to an audiobook on your wireless headphones). However, I highly encourage you to invest the time needed to master the fundamentals of your chosen area of expertise.