Pen{g}sieve Vol. 11: I want to shoot for the moon, but how?

Have you ever asked this question:

Which fundamental beliefs of mine are severely limiting my potentials?

In this post, I will discuss one such limiting belief of mine — I do not believe in setting ambitious long-term goals.

Why don't I set ambitious goals?

In my previous job, one of my responsibilities was to define goals to secure funding from executives who were often laser-focused on business values. Each year we defined a new ambitious three-year vision, and, every time, I felt an aversion to setting goals that I did not believe in. I couldn’t help but felt nostalgic for my job before, an industry research lab, where managers were technical and a lot more reasonable.

To my surprise, at the end of each year, my team often found a way to achieve the “impossible” goals, albeit with some twists. What was not supposed to work actually worked. At the time, I was too busy to give it much thought. So, year after year, I put up with setting ambitious goals at work, not because it worked but because I thought I had to. However, in my personal life, I follow my natural inclination of not setting ambitious goals — I only set goals where I could see a path to it.

Last year, I did an exercise to visualize a day in my life ten years into the future. I found myself unable to imagine a drastically different future. It was a sad moment — if I could not imagine an alternative future, how could I be in one?

I start to question my default behaviors — could not-setting-ambitious-goals be one of my fundamental limiting beliefs? The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it is. I reflected on the impossible goals that we pulled off at work and noticed how setting “reasonable” goals limited the team's creativity. There is a saying that people often overestimate what they can do in a day but underestimate what they can do in a year. Knowing people’s tendency to underestimate what can be done in a year, if I only set goals perceived as achievable, how limiting would be my 10-year goal?

Do not plan the full path, improvise

I was not particularly eager to set ambitious long-term goals because I did not know what to do with them. That is where I used to get stuck. I somehow believed that I needed clarity to the long-term goal to take action. But do we truly need clarity of the future?

The truth is that it is impossible to have the clarity of a concrete path into a long-term future. Goals are ambitious or long-term precisely because there lacks a concrete path at the starting line. Reflecting on my recent growth, I realized that the path to where I am today was only revealed to me in hindsight. The whole journey was like a basketball game, impossible to be pre-choreographed but still beautifully played.

I have learned that when a goal seems impossible to achieve, do not plan the whole path. Instead, focus on doing the next concrete thing that brings one a step closer to the goal and keep on moving. Let me show you a real example.

A case study: my 10-year vision

In 2020, I read “The Second Mountain” and resonated with it deeply. After contemplating the topic for months, I concluded that my second mountain must have a vital element about people. No amount of my engineering work or professional titles would make me feel not alone at the end of my (professional) life.

I challenged myself to set a ten-year goal for the first time. As I was not used to committing to any long-term goals, I half-heartedly set the goal of switching from a high-tech career to a high-touch one in ten years. My whole career and those of all my immediate families have been about engineering. I had no clue which specific high-touch career I can target, not to say how to get there.

With ten years to figure it out, I decided to do one thing that I needed no matter what — rebuilding my network. I started to reconnect with old friends, some of whom I had not talked to for more than a decade. As I worked remotely for a long time outside major metropolitans, I realized the need to create my voice to increase my serendipity surface. So I started to share moments in my social media circle (a small step to making my voice). Then taking the BASB course led to my beginning this newsletter (a big step to creating my voice).

For the months that followed, new opportunities kept on showing up. What I did was being intentional at the moment on what to do with it:

• Last fall, I came across an opportunity to be a health coach. It was as far away from my day job as possible, but I took it on partly because it was the only opportunity so far for me to practice service and sales, two skills that may become handy in my future career.

• Late last year, I joined a big tech company with a strong culture of caring and connection. I was, in part, attracted by the warmth of everyone I interacted with during the interview process.

• Early this year, I took the Personal Annual Review (PAR) workshop and wrote my first annual review. One of my 2021 goals is to “find ten new people who can push me out of my comfort zone.”

• During one monthly PAR check-in meeting, I met Priit Lumi in a breakout room discussion and exchanged our newsletter links. He reached out to me afterward, quoting, “I think I can be one who can push you out of your comfort zone.” That’s how I got my first personal coach ever.

• This spring, I was invited to talk about my recent personal growth in the health coach club. The talk led to creating my first online community of “System of 1% improvement”, a tiny support group — out of my friends and friends’ friends — to help people create their systems.

• A few months into my new job, I became a manager again. It happened much sooner than I had planned, but I said Yes because it aligned with my long-term goal of working with people.

• I took coaching sessions with Pritt. It allowed me to experience firsthand the power of coaching for insights. The idea of becoming a coach of some sort became more real to me.

• I started monthly career coaching with my direct reports at work and volunteered as a mentor in my org and research community. I introduced coaching elements in my 1% group and my side hustle engagement.

• Two weeks ago, I started Art of Accomplishment course, a unique experience of group coaching and cohort-based learning to explore one’s emotions and how to achieve “success” effortlessly.

Looking at the list, I saw how multiple events in the past year seemed to interweave into a perfect path towards my ten-year goal. What’s amazing is that none of these was pre-planned! One thing led to another. All I needed was a strong sense of direction (my goals) to guide my decision at the moment and then act upon it.

Seeing my progress in the past year, I am gradually deviating from my default future. Although I still do not know my destiny in ten years, it is not due to a lack of imagination but because everything seems possible. I am happy to stay in the wonder of my alternative future and enjoy the journey to it.