Professional Velocity: Speed and Direction

Today, I sat down with a friend and colleague and had a long conversation about his professional growth. In doing so, I ended up realizing that I needed to write down what I mean about "professional velocity", because it's a framework that I frequently use when helping others think through their professional (and personal) development, and it's something that I consistently think about when I reflect on my life.

Unlike speed, velocity is a vector, which means that it also includes a component of direction. For myself and others, it's easy to spend too much time focusing on either speed or direction, to the detriment of overall velocity.

The example that feels the most relevant in my own life is how I ended up choosing a major in college. I remember having a huge argument with my father about why I was majoring in chemistry (not so impractical of a major, I might add) over Christmas break my Junior year. The truth was, I was good at chemistry. I started doing it my freshman year, and by my sophomore year, I was ahead, taking graduate classes and advanced courses that most people took in their junior or senior years. Going back to taking something like introductory economics felt like it would have been a regression, and so I continued to take chemistry courses. It was a particularly unintentional choice - I happened to be a chemistry major because I happened to have taken advanced chemistry in my freshman year.

This was my most egregious example of focusing too heavily on speed. In the race to become a famous chemist, I was ahead. Indeed, I was probably years ahead of people my age. However, I wasn't spending a lot of time interrogating that goal. While I was getting further ahead of the cohort of budding chemists, I was actually getting behind people who wanted to do software development or who wanted to become writers. In fact, when I started working as a professional developer, I found myself paradoxically behind everyone around me!

At other points in life, I've focused too heavily on direction. I spent a lot of time when I started work trying to figure out what I wanted to do - did I want to do testing, development, be a manager, do product work? At the end of the day, thinking abstractly about things without any concrete output doesn't feel great if you don't back it up with action, and paradoxically, it's caused me to be less directed, because it doesn't generate a lot of new information about what you like doing or could be good at.

There's definitely a tension between moving forward and figuring out what the right direction is overall, and that's never going away. Thinking about where you're going doesn't get you there, but it definitely helps prevent you from getting completely lost, and if you can produce dozens of artifacts that other people can consume along the way, then you're not really wasting that time anyway!

When Narratives Lie

As you may know from reading my blog, I’m on a bit of a quantified self binge right now. In particular, I’ve set some relatively ambitious goals with respect to fitness and health. As I've reflected on the first month of the process, I was struck by the way in which I repeatedly attempted to delude myself when I was clearly missing my goals.

One of my goals is to increase my physical fitness, as measured by resting heart rate, body fat, and weight. Because of [insert_list_of_excuses], I’m currently not tracking towards achieving this goal. I certainly need to be better, but I also need to be more honest with myself. With a goal like weight loss, there are inevitably fluctuations around a trend. If I weigh myself every day, there are often natural fluctuations of a couple pounds as a result of differing levels of hydration and how recently I’ve eaten. When I’m behind on my goal, however, I’ve found myself much more loathe to step on the scale when I know I’ve been bad. I don’t want to see the quantitive metric that shows that I’m failing. Even though I know in my head that my weight probably went up, actually stepping on the scale and logging it feels like a failure. Instead, I’m tempted to tell myself that I'll be better the next day and then step on when I’m tracking. Unfortunately, things come up, and all of the sudden I’ve lost 3 days.

On the other hand, I'm ahead of my goal for reading. I'm tearing through books, and keep adding more and more to my list. I know that I'm ahead of my goal, but I still, irrationally, want to read ever more. Having the tracking system in place has helped me consciously slow myself down, allowing me to reallocate time towards some of my other aspirations - writing a simple iPhone app, for example. Having metrics to check in with week over week has provided me with the structure to manage myself, and I think that it has been one more step towards becoming an effective human. 

In reality, just stepping on the scale is the action that allows me to reset. Having that metric, locking in at a new number, that's what forces me to come to terms with my progress, or lack thereof. At this point, I'm tracking 10 discrete goals via Beeminder via a complex network of applications, triggers, and feedback loops. The simple act of looking at my landing page every day gives me the data I need to plan, move forward, and adjust my behavior.