Louis Cares

What's my mission?

I said here that I need to care about the mission. This post is purely a self-help exercise, so feel free to stop reading now. If you're curious, this is what I mean by need.

I'm lucky enough to enjoy a potent cocktail of fear-of-not-being-able-to-complete-things, a compulsive need to fully understand why some task has purpose (including how it fits within and contributes to the mission), and a healthy sprinkling of your standard procrastination-laziness combo.

This puts a decent sized barrier between me and getting started on some task. Once I've started the problems go away, and when things go well, I'll disappear into a flow-state tunnel for a few days at a time before coming up for air. I can be very productive when my brain plays nice.

My kryptonite really always has been getting started. I know, this isn't exactly uncommon, but it seem to paralyse me more easily, and for longer, than most. Anyway, like I said, self-help time here.

I've tried the classics - pomodoro, find the smallest chunk, etc. They don't not help, but they feel like a band-aid on a stab wound. The thing that does work, consistently, is the thought of completing the mission.

It's a fine line. Visualising success in too much detail can shine a light on how far there is to go, and turn a motivational beacon into a crippling and ever-present reminder of how likely I am to fail. But when I get it right, it's rocket fuel.

It's probably time to stop kidding myself I am ever going to be able to fix this flaw, so I'm just going to embrace it instead. It restricts what I can work on, in exchange for being productive and feeling a sense of accomplishment. I think it's a fair trade. Just have to hope I can find enough things to work on.

So, about that.

There have been a couple of recurring themes in my hypothetical "what would I do if I had infinite resources" daydreams over the years, which have remained remarkably constant given how much I've changed as a person during that time.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised these have remained constant given these are basically my own personal values. So, the only missions I want to work on are those that make society adhere more closely to my own values? Does that make me ...a missionary? Not sure how I feel about that. I guess they were a pretty motivated bunch though?

I would like to think that I'd be motivated by any mission that increases quality of life, particularly for those in societies that score lower on the HDI (or some similar metric). My rational brain definitely cares about this, but I find it too abstract a goal to get excited about. Maybe I just need to put myself in a position where I encounter concrete projects that feed into this abstract mission? Definitely worth trying.

Side-note: Lifelong Missions

I think, probably, these are not healthy. The world changes too much for a well-defined mission to remain relevant for a lifetime. And you also change! To remain committed to a single mission for a lifetime seems like it would require you to refuse to adapt, accept new information, or change your point of view. No thank you.