To reach a goal, look towards it

Inspiration/Source: Book Giant Steps by Tony Robbins, lived experience

It's Friday, I have an hour before I meet friends. I open the address, I start working out the route, and I spot the name of a bar on the way. The name reminds me of a place I went to in India.

So I look it up. The bar leads to the town, the town leads to a memory, and the memory leads to me in satellite mode on Google Maps, dragging across a remote valley to find the exact spot I stayed in.

Fifteen minutes gone. I still don't have the directions to my friends. If I'd been running late, I'd have found the bar and left. Give me room and I'll wander into it.

I'm curious by nature. I love to discover things, and most days that pays off: I pick up bits from a dozen fields, I level up in places I never planned to. The same engine that makes me knowledgeable across a lot of subjects is the one that drove me into a valley in India when I was supposed to be finding a bar in my own city.

Curiosity points me everywhere. So I go everywhere. And "everywhere" is rarely where I planned to go.

Here's the thing I've come to believe, though. There are two modes, and both are fine. Sometimes I know exactly where I'm going. Sometimes I don't, and that's ok too. You just have to be conscious of which mode you're in.

Tony Robbins mentions this in Giant Steps: "if you want to achieve something, you must direct your mental and physical momentum toward your target. Where focus goes, energy flows." Look at the goal and you drift toward the goal. Look at everything else and you drift toward everything else. Your attention is the steering wheel.

I know the other mode well, because I've felt it, and it's night and day.

When I run, something narrows. My mind goes quiet and clean, and if I'm carrying a problem, all of me points at it. No bar names, no India, no tabs. Just the question, turning over, until ideas I didn't have at the start show up on their own. Same thing with pen and paper. No infinite library one click away. Just my own ideas and a place to put them down. The walls of the page are a feature. They keep me looking where I meant to look.

The screen does the opposite. It hands me a thousand exits, every one dressed up as discovery, and I take them, and I call it curiosity. Sometimes it really is. The trouble is I can't tell the difference in the moment, because I never stopped to ask whether I was aiming at something or just roaming.

It's not that wandering is bad and focus is good. It's that you have to be conscious of which one you're doing. Explore mode is a real, useful mode. You go forward without the full map, you learn things along the way, and at some point the road shows you where it was heading. That's how most of what I know got into my head. There's no shame in not having the goal from the start. The problem, if any, is in thinking you have a clear goal while you don't. Then the zigzags frustrate you. You think you're heading somewhere, you're not, and your self-esteem takes the hit because you keep "failing" to reach a place you never actually aimed at.

Not knowing your mode shows up at work too, and it costs more. I've seen several teams where the product never ships because every nearby idea looks better than the one they were asked to build. They thought they were in execute mode. They were actually in explore mode and nobody said so out loud.

On a personal level I've done career moves that left me empty, not because I explored, but because I never admitted I was exploring. I acted like I had a destination and judged every road against a goal I didn't really have.

So I'm not trying to kill the curiosity. It's one of the best things I've got. And I've stopped trying to force a goal on the days I don't have one. What I want instead is to be honest about which mode I'm in. If I'm exploring, fine, explore, and accept the zigzag that comes with it. If I'm aiming at something, I build the run. Close the tabs. Pick up the pen. Point myself at one thing and let the walls do their work.

The valley in India wasn't a mistake. I had the time, I knew I was wandering, and I enjoyed it. The mistake is only ever the day I think I'm headed for the bar and end up in the valley instead.