Most education systems across the world help young children become a part of the society while contributing to the GDP. Although there are local nuances to the methods adopted, most of them teach us to follow the rules and acclimatize us towards being evaluated by a higher authority. However important these two characteristics may be, these kill in the creator and administrator in most.
When it comes to following the rules, as an integral part of the society we all have to abide by certain rules. But as an extension to this characteristic one starts to think only about methods and avenues that have established rules. For instance, while choosing a career most of us gravitate towards well structured career paths that have ground rules. Like attending an university, working for a few years to get the hand of work culture, then attend some relevant masters program to get a salary hike. And this is disregard to the discipline and orbit, from acting to wall street.
In contrast only a handful gather the courage to venture in the unknown and become entrepreneurs or founders. It takes a lot of courage and creativity as there are no guidelines, no structures and no rules. But most importantly, one has to make their own! And here I am not talking merely about entrepreneurs but about founders who discover completely new things or as Mr. Peter Theil would put it, go from Zero to One.
Although there are many other factors such as risk of failure and contextual factors of ones own life, the primary reason most do not even think of it is that over the course of their academic training they become habituated and comfortable to follow rules and structures rather than creating any.
Next is the dependency about being evaluated along with an adjacent characteristic of being constantly compared in a limited pool.
Being compared within a limited pool drastically diminishes the horizons. Statistically speaking, limited talent pools have lower standard deviations and no or negligible outliers. What I mean is that one class may have two outstanding students who attend an ivy league college. While the rest end up in usual careers and everyone in comparison stays content being mediocre, as more or less everyone has a similar boat.
The root cause of maybe our dependency of a third party evaluation who is also entrusted with selecting the scale of comparison. When it comes to the real world, there are no third party evaluation. Even the government asks you to self assess for your tax payments. Fundamentally, there are two reasons, first that there is just not enough bureaucratic machinery to evaluate each and every citizen and second is that honestly speaking nobody cares about evaluating your performance.
In absence of self evaluation, ones progress becomes highly dependent on external interventions. It maybe your friends or family calling an intervention for some toxic trait, your boss conducting a performance appraisal to ensure that you are worth you pay-grade and finally the government ensuring that you are paying your share.
At the end of the day, we are all running our own races. And if we do not pause and evaluate ourselves from time time-to-time, how will we improve! Forget performance improvement, one might also lose track on how far they have come until they reach ‘somewhere’!
One way to do it is to have a coach who not only guides you but also holds you accountable for yourself!
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Savvy Munshi 