Life as a portfolio of goals

We all choose to live life differently. My philosophy is to live life as portfolio of goals. What that means is that one should think about some near term goals and some far term goals, and one should increasingly think about new and different things as the timeline for the goals increases. This has several advantages.

1. It allows us to gain a sense of achievement by accomplishing things in the short term. This is possible since by definition, the near term goals are in areas we are familiar with. For example - a mountain climber setting goals of climbing increasing challenging peaks. A sales agent setting increasing sales targets.

2. It allows us to believe there is ever changing diversity in our lives, which gives us a sense of hope and a direction to look forward to. It is said that till there is hope, there is life. Longer terms goals allow us to believe in this hope.

3. It allows us to renew ourselves. As I mentioned, the goals further out should be in areas less familiar to us. A sense of renewal, a sense of growth is important to our evolutionary senses. Growing out into new areas also allows us to build a broader network of people, which in turn increases our happiness quotient.

How can one start to think about this portfolio of goals?

Start with where you are. Lay out a couple of areas you are spending a lot of you current time (professional, personal), and lay out 2-3 year goals for yourself. This is your near term portfolio.

Next, think of 3-5 new things you've always wanted to learn or do. Again, these can be professional or personal, ideally both. Some can be related to your current portfolio, but some should be truly new, new things. Ofcourse, consider your skills and abilities as you do this, but remember, more often than not, limits exist in the mind!

Now that you have these 3-5 new things, arrange them in order of complexity, with the least complex closer out, and the most complex thing furthest out.

Determine a way for you to balance how you spend you time between your existing portfolio and your future portfolio. As a rule of thumb, try not to spend more than 80% of your time on your existing portfolio. This is very important so that your portfolio of goals can we progressively achieved and is not something that just remains on paper.

Finally, remember that this portfolio should be updated every 1-2 years (not any more frequent as it can be disruptive and lead to loss of focus).

Life Function

People are unusually programmable.

My work across many companies has convinced me that while we all are born with a free will and some sort of a conscience, we don't always grow up to tap this phenomenal gift.

For example, when companies want to achieve certain objectives, they just have to make sure that the incentive structure is so aligned as to ensure everyone is working towards a common goal. This thought is simple and probably enabling. However, in most cases, metrics are designed in a siloed way so as to maximize local interests without attention to the overall business cause. The examples are numerous - indeed, one has to only spend a day in any company/institution to gain several examples of this. The dealership where the agent is out to sell you the full set of accessories, the restaurant waiter who's quick to recommend the wine and slow to offer advice around what to avoid, the inventory planning groups that are quick to over procure, the enterprise sales teams that are quick to offer unsustainable discounts, etc.. The list is long and prevalent in our everyday lives.

Life Function

I believe the root cause of this is an inherent desire in each of us to maximize our "Life Function". Its inputs are many (food, money, state of relationships, state of people close to us, risks etc). In animals, we call it the "survival instinct". In humans, I think it goes well beyond the instinct to survive (though that is of course a core element). It expands to pleasure, happiness, ambition and perhaps even a little part of charity. People are always trying to increase the output of their Life Function. I suppose its similar to the the world's entropy in some sense. The easiest way to do that is to stay close to what one has been aligned against in terms of performance metrics. Hence the short term attention to one's local ecosystem vs. the broader view of the full ecosystem.

We are unusually "programmable". Unlike many physical phenomena, which take months to years to centuries to change, people have incredibly little change inertia. If we stand to increase our Life Function, we will usually not hesitate to change ourselves immediately. Given the presence of free will and conscience, its clear to me that our mind has a weight/value associated with all things human, and the "self" is greater than the truth.

The implications of what I have just stated are possibly startling, possibly saddening. But that's life, or should I say, the Life Function. But there are examples of people who's Life Function has arguably got modified. The process of how this happens is not clear to me. But the results are. There are many examples of "selfless" acts in our lives. There are many acts of valor. There are many people who have made sacrifices, often times for people they don't even know. Therefore it would seem to be that while we are unusually programmable, there are clearly events in our lives that can alter the otherwise predicable behavior of most people.

Looking up, looking ahead

Think of last 3-5 instances when you had to make conscious choices. Ask yourself what your rationale was. Those that ponder little will believe it to be, "what was good for me or my family/friends". Those that think a little more will likely come back with realization that their actions were trying to maximize a complex desire called Life Function.

Find out what the constants and variables are in your Life Function. Then ask yourselves what you would like it to be. The first step towards change is to know where you are and where you want to go. Good luck.