Finding Fulfilling Work

This is a summary of the book: Dark Horse : Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment along with some of my own interpretation and reflections

Introduction

In the last few years I’ve been wondering… Did I miss a memo? Did I get the formula for success / happiness wrong? I’ve definitely been subscribing to the notion that by working hard, and climbing the ladder that one day I’ll be happier. Now admittedly I’m not the most effective at climbing ladders as there are still many rungs above me. However the rungs that I did climb gave me a good vantage point to evaluate future progress. The ladder that I was on, wasn’t necessarily giving me more fulfillment, in fact, it felt like the pace was getting more frantic, and the expectations got to a point where it felt like I needed to sacrifice other parts of my life to have a chance at hitting these expectations. 

So what’s the solution to this situation? Am I destined to suffer? The book “Dark Horse : Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment” provided inspiration and a roadmap to achieve fulfillment and success. The book describes Dark Horses as individuals who have figured out how to prioritize fulfillment above all else which eventually led to success in their own individual and specific ways. The core message of the book was to encourage us to “Get better at the things you care about most!”. I’ve highlighted what stood out the most in the steps below.

Step 1: Know Your Micro-motives

Even though I consider myself an introvert and someone who enjoys spending time journaling and reflecting, I still don’t know myself well enough.  I’ve always landed on generic motivators (e.g. I like technology, or I like to build apps). The missing ingredient that the book opened my eyes to is the introduction of the term micro-motives. As the term implies, this requires you to really understand the very specific aspects of your motivations, for instance, asking myself what exactly is it about building apps that I like?

A case study presented in the book demonstrates how even birders have different micro-motives. One birder may enjoy visually identifying a bird while another birder may prefer identifying a bird auditorily. As I examine my own situation,  the micro-motive behind building apps might be that I enjoy capturing the key essence from a set of ideas. Maybe that’s why I also enjoy summarizing books, resumes, and website/app copy. 

By having an understanding of your micro-motives, you can start to engineer a plan to build towards fulfillment. This way you can follow the mantra:  “Don’t just follow your passion, engineer it”

Step 2: Know your choices

Now that we’ve made a detailed assessment of our own micro-motives, what’s next? How does this lead to fulfillment?

The key to the second step is to make choices that fit as many of your micro-motives as possible. According to the Dark Horse mindset, when a choice is made that fits with your micro-motives, the risk of failure decreases and the chances of enjoying sustainable success increases. This is a nice contrast to the traditional mindset where we’re told to stay on the established path, suck it up and be the same but better than everyone else.

For example, if my set of micro-motives include building apps with full autonomy along with the ability to contribute to design and development, I’ll need to choose (or create) a job that allows me to match all of these micro-motives so that I have the highest chances of success.

Step 3: Know your strategies 

Now that we’ve made a choice that fits our micro-motives, it’s time to make sure we can actually perform at the highest levels and achieve excellence. One of the examples given in the book describes the process of studying for the Master Sommelier Diploma exam with an incredibly low pass rate of 5%. 

In order to pass the blind tasting section of the test, there are various different strategies the candidates can take to identify a wine back to its origins. Many candidates use a “brute force” strategy in which they may spend 20-30 hours a week tasting as many different wines as possible. Another candidate was documented as using a seemingly unusual approach, relying on their philosophical background to use “philosophical deduction” to identify a wine. I can’t say I understand how this works but it seemed to work well for that individual. The key is to find the right strategy that works best for you as an individual. 

As you can imagine, it’s crucial at this stage to expect failure as new strategies are attempted. The key is to learn from these attempts, make adjustments so that you can reach your goal.

Step 4: Ignore the destination

The final step encourages us to take the focus away from the final destination (since this is out of our control anyways), and just focus on the very next step. Look for opportunities that offer the steepest learning curve and greatest opportunity to build our skills and set our goals to achieve that step.

Once we’ve reached that step, we should reassess our situation and change strategies if needed. Armed with the right information, we’re now ready to look for the next steepest incline and repeat the process until we get to the top of the mountain.

In many cases, this means taking action towards the goal. For instance if you want to become a better writer, the first step is to write to yourself. Once this goal is met, the next goal could be to share writing with a wider audience. Eventually this may or may not lead to writing an entire book.

Key Lessons Learned

It’s comforting to know that there is more than one way (the traditional way) to achieve success. This book provides various examples of people who have achieved fulfillment and success on their own individual terms. 

I’m certainly not there yet, but I’ve come to the realization that I need to consciously prioritize fulfillment first. With a better understanding of my own micro-motives, I’m looking forward to making decisions that fit my individuality to provide the greatest chances of sustainable success.