I think this post is a good counterpoint to common adages like ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ or ‘direction over speed’ that often come up in relation to career and productivity advice.
At the risk of making a very tenuous connection, this reminded me of an animal navigation strategy for moving towards a goal which has an unstable orientation (i.e. the animal is not able to reliably face towards the goal) - progress can still be made if it moves faster when facing towards the goal than away from it. (I don’t think this is a very well known navigation strategy, at least it didn’t seem to be in 2014 when I wrote up an experiment on this in my PhD thesis [Chapter 5]). Work is obviously a lot more multi-faceted than spatial navigation, but maybe an analogy could be made to school students or junior employees who don’t get much choice about what they are working on day to day and recommend that they go all out on the important things and just scrape by on the rest.
I think this post is a good counterpoint to common adages like ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ or ‘direction over speed’ that often come up in relation to career and productivity advice.
At the risk of making a very tenuous connection, this reminded me of an animal navigation strategy for moving towards a goal which has an unstable orientation (i.e. the animal is not able to reliably face towards the goal) - progress can still be made if it moves faster when facing towards the goal than away from it. (I don’t think this is a very well known navigation strategy, at least it didn’t seem to be in 2014 when I wrote up an experiment on this in my PhD thesis [Chapter 5]). Work is obviously a lot more multi-faceted than spatial navigation, but maybe an analogy could be made to school students or junior employees who don’t get much choice about what they are working on day to day and recommend that they go all out on the important things and just scrape by on the rest.