Recently I read the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams, the inventor of the Dilbert cartoons. This book is kind of an auto-biography with lessons about how to be successful in life.
In the sixth chapter Scott Adams is telling a story from his first airplane trip, where he was on his way to a job interview. In the plane Adams was sitting next to a businessman, who gave him a simple rule for his future career. Adams writes in his book about this advice:
„He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process.“
Shortly afterwards Adams puts this thought into a catchy phrase:
„I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.“
What a genius thought. Let that sink in.
Adams used this story to explain, why it's better to have a system than to have a goal.
If you have the goal to find the perfect job of your dreams you will probably suffer a lot till you reach it. You have to look out for it, hope that the company is hiring for it. If you're lucky, you have to write a job application to get the dream job. But there will be likely tough competition. Then you get rejected or get hired - just to find out that the actual job is not as nice as you expected it to be. So, again you have to look for the perfect job, write applications ... and so on. You're permanently on stress by FOMO.
When you have a system that lets you look out permanently for a better job, you are in much better mental condition. If the actual job is boring, so what? It's just a stepping stone to reach the next one, that is at least slightly better. You are on a permanent track of success.
TL;DR: Have a system instead of a goal. If you're looking for a perfect job, then take the best that you can get and look out permanently for a better one. (And this works for other things in life as well.)
Sources:
- Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, Penguin Random House 2013.
- The meme guy of the cover image and the Think-about-it-Gif is the actor Kayode Ewumi, portraying the character Reece Simpson (a.k.a. "Roll Safe") in the web series Hood Documentary.
- Inspiration for the title of this series was the Youtube-Series Smarter Every Day by Destin Sandlin.
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