in the 5+ years I worked for my ex-boss Dinesh, he constantly, casually-yet-intensely would ask me about my goals & desired outcomes

"what do you want to get out of this?"

"how will you measure your progress?"

"what's the next step?"

"what's the limiting factor?"

I've since internalized that stuff so thoroughly, and found it so useful, that I now almost struggle to remember what it was like *before* I installed Dinesh's instrumental thinking module into my mental suite

(I do have old journal entries I can read to simulate it)

the wack thing is, once you internalize this, or a version of this, you look at the world in a completely different way than people who haven't internalized this. and you look around and you see that very few people really internalize this. you can get whiplash from the contrast

1. lots of people don't know what they want, don't really try very hard to figure out what they want, don't really believe it's possible, if they try they aren't very systematic about it, or they try too hard and agonize about it unproductively, many ways to fail on this front

2. suppose you don't fail too hard on (1)- you have some sense of what you want, cool. lots of people then aren't very persistent about translating this into manageable projects and actions. some might come up with a big grand plan that's insurmountable, like "write epic novel"

3. suppose you did ok with (2)! people will always find ways to fail they're like, ok, "become good writer, by writing a lot, write some tweets everyday, a blogpost every week" – pretty good... but then they struggle with managing their psychology/emotions and get jaded

managing your psychology is basically THE HARD PROBLEM in LIFE. (h/t Ben Horowitz's the hard thing about hard things)

everything else is pressing buttons and pulling levers. a novel is one word after another. a marathon is one foot in front of the other. but how to keep going?

to keep going you have to know your motivations. you have to know your WHY. WHY are you doing this? what is it all FOR? it helps to examine your own life to see what are the things you've cared about in the past. ask your friends & family what got you passionate riled up the most

because we are each a bundle of competing motivations, competing interests, there's a whole game of thrones going on inside your head every day (ppl are diff, YMMV). in a way you are like the boss of your brain. or maybe not even THE boss, but like, the SVP of your brain or sth

so like, a lot of people are shitty managers of their own brains. i'm sorry its true. it's not even really your fault, you weren't taught better. this species is a fractal of shitty management all the way up and down.

and all the cliches of bad managers apply internally as well

"my manager doesn't listen to me, keeps making promises of me he can't keep, drives me too hard, never gives me a break, doesn't praise me when I DO get things done, infinitely critical, is somehow both paranoid and clueless, is no help at all, keeps increasing my workload..."

here's an old transcript from 2015 – the central metaphor here is a self-parenting rather than a self-managering one, but it's basically the same idea

(I've made a ton of progress in general, but I actually still don't do daily reviews... going to change that)

:'-)

this was after I handled THE most difficult, painful conflict in my personal life, in part with skills I learned from him

he has my loyalty for life

master thread of most of the times i've talked about him https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1148301796311355392