Artful Sabotage: The Perks of Choosing a Cause
I struggle with personal consistency. I rarely fall back on a perfect blend of motives, values or morals to base my decision making and respective thought process on, as I find myself shifting, sometimes even conflicting, my reasoning depending on a situation. It’s one of the reasons I read so much, because it’s as much of a search for bits of personal justification for my actions as it is scavenging novel ideas.
I don’t believe I’ve made any wrong decisions due to this inconsistency, mostly because I’m aware of it. I do, however, sometimes find my time and resources spread thin ineffectively, because I’ve committed to projects that aren’t all necessarily pointing in the same direction of my goals. Not all work is created equal, even if the paycheck tells you otherwise.
In times of professional transition, quality advice is to seek out those you admire, mirror their work ethic and generally make lives easier at no direct cost. I would add the importance of choosing, or at least thinking about, a cause. The sooner you can identify a backbone of personal reasoning, even if it’s temporary, the more efficient your decision making will be.
The most common way to deal with this, or so I’ve been told, is by seeking a mentor’s advice, because a third-party perspective can often be more sensible and less convoluted than our own. However, without sounding too skeptical, I believe the issue with mentors, as valuable as they are and as much as I use them, is that it’s very easy to succumb to their goals, not ours, without realizing it.
We solve this dilemma by choosing a backbone cause, and working forward from there.
If I can attempt to define my cause, I’d say I’m attracted to artful sabotage. Not in the violent way, but in the disruptive way. The beauty of artful, technical sabotage is that it allows you to eat what you kill. It favors creativity and consumer advantage, while avoiding the cherry pickers with their hands reaching into the pot.
Because, a meaningful cause is bigger than a job, and even more grandiose than happiness. It’s what drags you out of bed every morning or doesn’t let you go to sleep at night. It’s what makes you bring a laptop with you everywhere to work in spare time, or keep a pen and paper next to your bed to scribble down notes when you wake up in the middle of the night. A cause is what encouraged Pete Townshend to smash his guitar1 (fast forward to 8:36) after every show, simply because he was so wrapped up in the moment of performing.
Finding a cause doesn’t happen instantly. The best way to get there, I suppose, is to narrow down the high-level problems you’d like to fix. I’ve attempted to break down the problematic business areas I plan to attack at one point by asking myself questions. I’ve referred back to these questions to test any progress I’ve made. This allows you to navigate the steps to take tomorrow–or even better, today–to keep moving in a consistent, cause-driven direction.
- This video is a giant metaphor for everything I want to accomplish. [↩]
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