Dark Horse by Todd Rose

Author:Todd Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

5.

Every young person knows what it is like to be pestered with the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Compelled to declare a preference, many adolescents dutifully announce, “I want to be an engineer” or “I want to be a journalist.” At first, such a declaration might be put forward reluctantly, but with perpetual pressure from family members, counselors, and teachers to know your destination, this tentative proposal often turns into a resolute plan. But an early commitment to a career is often doomed to failure because it disregards a fundamental feature of reality: the inevitability of change.

Attaining excellence requires that you engineer purpose. Engineering purpose requires that you maximize the fit between your micro-motives and the opportunity you choose to pursue. Thus, there are two obvious problems with pursuing a professional opportunity that lies somewhere in the far-off future. Number one, by the time you finally get there, your understanding of your micro-motives may have changed. And number two, the opportunity itself may have changed.

We’ve already seen how the covenant tends to stifle your understanding of your micro-motives, so coming to an awareness of your true identity is always an uphill climb when you are in a standardized institution. Blindly rushing into the rigid hierarchy of higher education may be more likely to suppress your self-understanding than elucidate it. But even in a world with a highly personalized educational system, it would still require plenty of bold moves and useful failures to gain insight into all the dimensions of your motivation. You simply have no way of knowing in advance whether your mosaic of authentic micro-motives will be a good match for the destination you are aiming for.

And even if you are fortunate enough to arrive at a fair understanding of your motives, there’s no way of knowing how they might change over time. The very process of pursuing success will cause you to grow and develop in unpredictable ways, leading to a different set of micro-motives that will no longer be a good fit for the standardized notion of excellence you decided to chase so long ago. Needless to say, the farther off the destination, the more likely your understanding of your individuality will evolve before you arrive.

But it’s not only you that can change. It’s an iron-clad guarantee that the world will have changed by the time you reach your destination. New opportunities will appear that weren’t there when you first embarked upon the straight path. Ten years ago, there were no social media community coordinators, smart car engineers, brand-experience designers, or 3-D printer entrepreneurs. Who knows what exciting opportunities will arise in another ten years?

Like chess grandmasters, dark horses teach us that you can achieve success without ever knowing your destination. You just can’t reach it without knowing who you are.

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