What will you be doing twenty years from now?
This question appears absurd in an environment where the vicissitudes of life regularly overturn well intentioned short term plans. However, it is precisely in this chaotic environment that a long term goal is most useful.
We have long term goals for our children (which may or may not be a good idea). What about for yourself? However productive you may be, your time is finite, and you don’t want to waste it on vacuous pursuits,[1] How does your effort align with your talent and desires. Does it integrate well? Without a good answer to these questions, the effort becomes purposelessness.
Given that your novel writing career, will be characterized not by a dearth of choice, but an abundance of options, you need a yardstick for differentiating the opportunities you’ll accept from the ones to be set aside. Your long term goal serves admirably here, allowing you to appraise whether the choice facing you’ll you closer to your goal.
So, what will you be doing in twenty years? Will you be developing new, patentable technology like novel writing AI? Will you own a publishing company? Will you ultimately be a dean, or a public scientist-politician? Will you be a speaker? A regulator? Will you write?
What would you like to do, and what would be good for you to do? [2]The difficulty with long-term career goals is not their demand of your loyalty. Quite the contrary, once you choose a well-considered goal that nicely aligns with your natural talents and abilities, it is easy to stay focused on it. The difficulty lies in actually choosing it.
Selecting a long-term goal takes time and effort; a perfect thought complex for you to explore during your character sabbatica. It requires the time for you to gauge your talents and weaknesses, separate hope from reality, weigh the direction of the field, and balance what you would like to do with your financial needs.
Also, if you have a family, than its fair to ask what do your loved ones think and expect of you? Decisions about family will often influence, and are influenced by, the long-term goals of you and your partner. This is good work, but it takes effort and time.
If, after much thoughtful consideration, including conversations with your family, your mentors, and your close friends, you develop a vision, then let it capture your focus. A long term vision illuminates the path that you should walk. Keeping your long-term goal close at hand gives you a new, good metric to measure the role that your current activities play in meeting that goal. Furthermore, the development of a distant goal worthy of your pursuit can simplify many short-term decisions that may be confronting you. Decisions about job opportunities, project options, and research group participation can all be simplified in the presence of a long term strategy.
Without a long-term goal, you’re at risk of having your career caught up in the random eddies of opportunity, distraction, and the vicissitudes of life. Together these forces can sweep you up and deposit you on a shore that you may not like, but from which there is no return.
If you have such a goal, then during your sabbatica, to critically reexamine it.[3] Are you still firmly committed to it? Have you learned anything this past year that requires you to modify your plans or your long term schedule for executing those plans? How have the mixture of successes and failures that punctuated this last year affected your strategy? Must your goal be fundamentally altered in the face of new circumstances, or has its arrival been hastened? What new activities have occurred in your career that have become distractions that you must shed?
Develop and then regularly challenge your vision with an open heart. Treat the selection and modification of the goal as a serious life enterprise itself, requiring the best of your talents and contemplative abilities. This investment that will pay handsome dividends for you.
Develop perseverance
The very fact that you’re a novelist attests to your doggedness. Your ability to hammer against obstacles until they give way has helped you to overcome the challenges of the novel’s themes, character developments,literary agent searches, bad reviews, and contract negotiations.
However, as useful as this skill has been for you, it may need your attention. While the ability to work hard against an obstacle is laudable, what do you do when the impediment doesn’t give way?
The heart of the answer to this question lies in the distinction between stubbornness and perseverance. The stubborn individual and the perseverant worker are each focused on a goal. They both work hard, and neither is easily diverted by small distractions. Yet of the two qualities, perseverance is preferred.
As a child on a spring day, I commonly had to wait in the parked family car while my parents completed an errand. Sometimes, a house fly entered the car through an open window, and, not recognizing its surroundings, would try to exit. However, it frequently would spend all of its time trying to fly through the same closed window. It knew its attempts to escape were failing, but time after time it knocked itself against that closed window until it exhausted itself and died. This is quintessential stubbornness—visionless effort.
The obstreperous worker fights to break through an obstacle that, for reasons that are unclear to him, continues to block his path. Like the non-comprehending fly, his inability to understand why his stubborn efforts fail produces not illumination, but slavish repetition.
Perseverance, however, combines persistence and vision. The perseverant worker takes the time to step back and thoughtfully consider the problem. Sometimes repeated exertion in the same direction is required for a solution, while at other times, a completely new effort in another dimension is needed.
For the stubborn, overcoming obstacles is the key to success. For the persevering, the key is continued progress toward a long term goal that has been carefully considered and deemed worthy of consistent, diligent, but not obsessive effort.
Avoid wasting your times on fruitless battles. Don’t splinter your effort into activities for multiple goals, none of which places you where thoughtful consideration suggests that you should be. Recognize that there is a time for activities to be prosecuted in earnest, and a time for that energy to be redirected.
For example, in 2002 I agreed to lead a team in the development of a database that would serve as the repository of the information from a collection of research activities. These activities were designed to assess the effect of new treatments to reduce the damaging effects of strokes.
Our group traditionally used paper forms to collect data. However, in this circumstance, we decided to develop an online internet application that allowed remote data entry with simultaneous “real time” quality control in a heightened security environment.
This was a fine objective, but the technology for these systems then was quite new, and neither I nor the programmer knew much about them. We therefore decided to work on this project together. We would have to start from scratch to learn the technology and then, building ourselves up, would assemble the application that we could hopefully deploy.
This was terra incognita. Like many new and complicated projects, our first efforts were halting and full of aching frustration. We expended a small fortune of our own money on books, spending many hours at work and at our respective homes on developing the programming skills that we needed.
It took approximately one month of painful work to produce the first elementary web portal. Slowly, ideas and concepts became clearer to us, and, several months later, we had a tight, functional application that the investigators could safely and securely use remotely.
In the meantime, the two of us had moved from novices to programmers who were confident in showcasing our work; we were now fully capable of utilizing this technology for new research efforts in different fields. For me personally, this had been a particularly exhilarating experience. I had demonstrated to myself that twenty years spent in research, teaching, and statistical writing had dimmed neither my enthusiasm for, nor my aptitude in, computer programming.
However during a brief break between projects, I found myself plagued by some nagging concerns. I had spent eight months, and approximately one thousand hours working on this project. While this work had not been carried out to the exclusion of my other responsibilities, the press of other professional obligations, including grant involvement and administrative activities was undeniably real.
In addition, my co-programmer, who, like me, started out as a neophyte in this new field, was now able to progress independently. While at first, we relied on each other, she was now able to proceed without my help. In fact, she had now surpassed my skills, and was preparing to share her expertise with other programmers who needed to learn this new technology.
This combination of realizations led me to the conclusion that it was time for a change in my path. Since I could justify my continued deep investment in programming with the new projects coming up, it would have been easy for me to stubbornly argue that I should continue to play a central role in the programming for these activities. However, it was time for me to move on.
My season of programming was fun, but was now over. I would not have recognized this if I hadn’t chosen to stop for a time of self-evaluation.
[1] This does not include time spent on hobbies, vacations, emergencies, or other exigencies of life.
[2] If you cannot decide where you want to be and what you want to be doing, you might reverse the question, asking what you specifically want to avoid.
[3] I have a colleague who annually takes three days at his birthday to both get restored and to critically review his long term career and financial plans for the future. It is sometimes inconvenient for him to do it, but he has never regretted the decision to stop his work and consider these other matters on a regular basis.