Having options
We should always have options. If Plan A doesn’t work, you can jump onto Plan B. Having backup lets us get things done at all costs. Need to travel from Hyderabad to Bangalore? Book a train. If that doesn’t happen, you’ll have bus as a backup. Last call, though costly, flight might work. You can achieve the goal of reaching Bangalore through many ways.
But what about the location itself. You don’t seem to have a backup for Bangalore! What if COVID comes back in Bangalore and the city borders are blocked. What then? You can go one step higher to think why you wanted to go to Bangalore in the first place, and prepare a backup for that. What if that step’s cracked? You go one more step higher? How far can you go? I always have this question regarding options. Isn’t having backups a lazy way to achieve a goal?
On the flip side, if you don’t even plan on options, you just have to travel to Bangalore by train at all costs. Though the prospect feels lame, you will focus all your energy into getting that one task done in a specific way.
Think the same about something you truly care for. You wanna earn money? Well, you can work at a company and try for higher packages. What if there’s a layoff? No jobs. What then? You get into some business? What if market’s too bad for that? You see the point right! The whole paragraph is me playing through devil’s advocate to your goal.
I had this problem while choosing which technology to learn. Java? Looks like Python’s booming. Data science seems interesting. Future is AI. In this confusion I tried learning everything. You know the drawback of learning everything; Learning nothing. I tried too much but mastered too little. That is when I went into the core of my goal. Is my goal to learn any technology, or do I love a specific one? Do I want to earn money in any means or through a safe job? Am I ok not earning too much for a bit of comfort? The realisation hit hard. Believe it or not, every skill is needed in this world. Could be as old as C programming or as booming as Python. It moulds into something different but remains the same at its core. I have started to understand to find which core I love. Do I love Java for just its name or do I find something interesting in it? Do some other coding language has the same core? I understood where I need to have blind focus and where to still have options.
The answer doesn’t seem to be that having options is bad. But having blind focus isn’t great too. There was a company which tried to build a product with laser focus. It didn’t find traction however hard they tried. CEO had to accept defeat and had to announce to the employees that most of them had to be let go. He was literally crying not able to accept the fact that he had to dissolve his company where everyone put their blood, sweat and tears. But, from those ashes comes the biggest enterprise product of all time. Slack
That CEO had laser focus on one thing but was able to bring in another option when things didn’t work out. He didn’t have the option from the beginning, but was able to pluck out of thin air in desperate times.
We all are in the same process of finding options when needed and sitting down on one goal when necessary. Don’t hold onto either having options or having focus. Pick the one necessary for the job.