li

Work hard, Play hard... et un peu de déconne!

Quand il n'est pas occupé par son herbier, le petit P sème des pierres blanches dans la forêt... Adepte de vieilles séries policères allemandes, il n'est pas peu commun de le trouver en train de manger la choucroûte devant la télé!


24 décembre 2008

Choices, goals and satisfaction: Short-term, long-term...

I recently received this in my e-mail:

Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson

Chasing after success is like entering a landscape of moving targets: Every time you hit one, five more pop up from another direction. There's always more work to be done, more money to make, a bigger house to buy. Is it any wonder we're stressed?
To get a fresh perspective, think about success in terms of its four distinct components: happiness, achievement, significance (positively affecting those you care about), and legacy (helping others find future success). Unless you regularly hit on all four categories, any one win will be unsatisfying. So instead of relentlessly pursuing one goal (be it making partner by 30 or being the world's best soccer mom), focus on racking up victories in all areas. To maintain a steady flow of wins, however, you'll need to set limits on the time you spend on any one activity. In other words, you've got to figure out how much is "just enough"—the amount you need to accomplish before you feel comfortable putting down one task and moving to another.
Real success is emotionally renewing, not anxiety provoking. By actively making choices and setting limits, you'll be able to reach your goals, tally up more "wins," and truly enjoy all the successes you achieve.

It is very very good!

But I had already heard about that and I think, I truly do, that there are four area pillars where you should be scoring points:
Career
Relationship
Friends
World Discovery

Where every job or activity is a trade-off between the four first areas, the type of success pillars is all about how you set your priorities and more closely linked to the psychological perception of success and happiness. Hence you make long-term decisions about your priorities in life when choosing a direction and this impacts your area priorities...
This is very important because it influences what environment you live in and what kind of challenges you face day-to-day: Curing AIDS in a lab, curing malaria in the field, having a baby with your high-schoool sweetheart, segmenting clients of a major bank, controlling accounts of Coca-Cola across the entire world, blah blah blah you name it...
These are long-term choice influencing what the frame of your possibilities are... At all... A guy changing land every week doesn't build a relationship or a social life but discovers the world. A guy raising his child in Mississauga doesn't discover the world...

The HBR article adds a layer for combination with the type of success pillars:

Happiness (that you could call "carpe diem")
Achievement (that you could call "creation / mastering hurdles")
Significance (that you could also call "impact on truly loved ones")
Legacy (that you could also call "helping others")

... but the short-term focus (the constantly updated focus of your attention) determines whether your day-to-day focus is more on enabling others, helping others, achieving own goals or just enjoying the moment.
This is also very important because, in any choice you make for your
area of activity, it impacts whether you want to be helpful, recognized as a
superstar, slack but live a good life, be the alpha person of your group as
everyone relies on you... and so on...
Think about it, it is very important to choose while considering the long-term trade-offs, but in life it's also really important day-after-day to think of being versatile enough to get all
type of satisfactions!!!

Cheers,
P

Libellés :