Hi and welcome back. This is the second module in our strategies for professional success course. And this is where we're going to start talking about goals, defining them, and evaluating them and realizing them. And also, since any discussion of goals is also a discussion about actions, were also going to talk about managing your time. Now, I know that we've spent a lot of time in this course so far with introspection, self evaluation, finding your passions, identifying these things. And I hope that you feel that that has been time well spent, because that is the foundation on which everything else is going to be built moving forward. It's the foundation for figuring out how we want to use our music to make an impact in the world. Why we're doing this and ultimately how best to communicate that to the rest of the world. So, I want to start today by talking a little bit more about this question of passion that we discussed in the previous lesson. Now in that module, we identified passion as a motivating force, right? The thing that gives you your sense of purpose. And there are two things to keep in mind when it comes to passion. Two more things to keep in mind. And the first is that it may take us a while to find it, as we've discussed, and the second is that passion is not the same as enjoyment. Okay, let me elaborate a little bit on this. So, in our last section, I talked about the passion within the passions, right? And that for me, the overriding mission, tying everything together all my various professional activities. Was this desire to make a positive influence in the lives of other people, that wasn't an insight that just popped out of the oven, fully baked one day. Okay, it took several years of pursuing those activities before I began to see that there was this common threat. Okay, and while I probably would have come to understand that earlier, if I had engaged in the kind of intentional introspection that we've explored in the previous module. It's still true that it took time for these things to evolve. It takes experience to begin to inform my feelings on this. And so, as with many things, we have to try to find the right balance right. We yes, should be constantly seeking to understand and delve down into these deep questions. But at the same time recognized that they will evolve over time, and then we have to be open to seeing where life leads us some of the things that we learn along the way. So it's about finding this balance between those two things. The second misconception about passion is that it's an emotional state, right? If we say I'm passionate about cooking, we're saying that we love to cook and that it brings us satisfaction, right? We both enjoy the process of preparing the food and the dishes that result. So I love to cook. You could say it was a passion, but it's not the driving motivating force in my life, nor is it in any way tied to the impact I want to make in the world. This is an important thing to remember, because there will be times when you are pursuing your passion. When you are not enjoying yourself all right, and that discouragement or that sense of drudgery or that sense of I don't feel like doing this today. That does not mean that you're in the wrong line of work, okay? Or it doesn't mean that you've lost your passion, it doesn't mean that you don't have what it takes to succeed, okay. So it would be a mistake to interpret those those times as lacking in passion, okay? Or that you haven't found your right passion because sometimes you are not enjoying what you're doing to go back to the cooking analogy. I'm not always necessarily enjoying, selling the peas or doing some fine shopping of something or some other menial task about cooking that I don't particularly enjoy. I certainly don't enjoy cleaning up the dishes afterwards, right? But I still can say that I love cooking. So it's the exact same thing with your music making. Do not interpret or misinterpret passion as equating your emotional state. All right, so, let's look in this fascinating article from the Atlantic by Olga Kazan. And she spent some time citing research by these guys from Stanford University, Dweck and Greg Walton. And it's this idea of fixed versus growth theory of interest, fixed, the rate of interest versus growth theory of interests. And let's take a little bit closer look about what they mean. So first of all, the fixed theory of interest, it more or less sounds like what it is, right? This is the idea that people with a fixed interest mindset operate under the assumption that their personality, their values, their abilities, their skills are essentially fixed at birth, right? And that it's our job to simply unearth those things, to discover those things, to find our passion. Okay, that phrase, if you think about it carefully, I have to find my passion means that it's there, it's just sort of latent until we find it, and we unleash it, right. The idea that we're born with certain gifts and talents. Okay, so that's the fixed mindset. Now, the growth theory or the growth mindset is this idea that our interests and our skills are cultivated over time. And there are not any predetermined elements in play, and it's our job to simply embark on this journey of growth. Now, what's interesting is that they conducted a variety of experiments with, with students at Stanford. And they identified to really serious pitfalls to the fixed theory first, is that students are more likely to, as they say, forgo interesting lectures or opportunities. Because they don't align with their previous stated passions. Okay, so this is sort of the try it, you'll like it over here on this thing, right, is this interests of? I'm not interested in trying something new because I've already decided I'm not interested in that. Okay, so they are operating on a sort of limiting, self limiting mindset that keeps them from experiencing new things that maybe they actually will discover they love, right? The other pitfall, this is perhaps even more serious than the first one, is that if you have a fixed mindset, it will likely mean that you would give up easily, right? You will encounter a difficulty or struggle. Something ends up being harder than you thought it was going to be, and you end up saying, well, I guess I'm not cut out for that. I guess I don't have the skills that I need to do that well, so that's it. I quit, and so they, in fact, specifically addressed this question about pursuing passions. This is very interesting. Students with the fixed interest mindsets were less likely to think that pursuing a passion might be difficult at times. Instead, they thought it would provide endless motivation. So, again, this goes back to that emotional state that we were talking about. They're like, well, if I'm not constantly inspired, I must not be in the right line of work, I must not have family passion. Okay, and that's a real pitfall of having this fixed mindset. So what does this have to do with setting goals? Well, in order to determine your goals, you have to have a sense of where you want to go, right? And that's the mission motivation work that we've been talking about all the way through the country. But goals aren't a static thing, okay. And they're pointless, pointless rather if is they're not followed up by action, right? Just sitting down and making a bunch of aspirational goals is not going to get us anywhere. And that means you have to understand what your own mindsets are. And whether or not those are helping you're hindering you taking the action that you need to take. So let's talk a little bit more about different types of goals and how they can build on each other and help us achieve our professional ambitions. Let's start by recognizing the goals operate in different time frames. So this is a handy little visualization of the way goals break down. And the reason why I like this pyramid approach is that it reminds us that we accomplished long term goals first by accomplishing short term goals, okay. And that those short term things build over time to get us to our hopefully our longer term goals. So let's say that your long term goal is to land a job with the major Symphony Orchestra, okay. Unless you are just some crazy wonder kings, you are not going to go out right out of school, audition for the New York philharmonic and land the job. I have known some people who have done those passed by the way, but they're kind of, there's those, they're unicorns right there. They are very, very rare. And that's not the way most everybody who aspires to be in an orchestra job, how things end up going for them, right? So what do you do? You start to recognize that there is a series of milestones that are going to get you there. You get good training first of all, to start with, right? You find a really good school, a good teacher, you probably are going to have to go to graduate school as well. There's certain summer festivals that you attend, and you continue to build your network, build your craft, get better and better build more experience. Maybe you acquire a better instrument, as you rise through the ranks of the instrument you had in high school and college is not sufficient anymore. So you have to invest in that. Then maybe you land your first professional orchestra job in a regional orchestra or a sort of a second to your orchestra. And you make music, continue to build your experience, build your repertoire. And eventually, maybe you get that chance to begin auditioning for the big orchestras. And even then you probably will audition many times before you land that principle position or that principle of that, that job in the section or whatever it might be. So these things take time and there are steps to get there. Okay, so that's the first thing to realize is that the long term planning is broken down into selectively smaller goals. Related to this idea is this term of goals versus objectives. Okay, now, sometimes you'll hear these terms used interchangeably, but there is an important difference. Okay, so let's say your long term goal is to own home. And so you chart your five-year plan, right? That involves, among other things, saving for a down payment, making sure that your credit is good, right? Those things are going to take time before you're even ready to start looking for a home, right? And, but the home is the long term goal. So if you just say, I've got this goal that in five years, I'm going to own a house, right? You're you're probably not going to get there without addressing those steps along the way. All right, and those are the interim goals of the pyramid. But then what about like right down on the granular level, like weekly or monthly, weekly? Maybe it means that you're going to start spending a little bit less money at Starbucks or going out with your friends. And you're going to start saving a little bit of money every week, right? Maybe it's, you have a monthly goal that you say I'm going to X. Set aside X number of dollars every month, right? Or to go back to the orchestra job story, in addition to each of those goals that I mentioned, what are the day-to-day kinds of things that you need to be doing? You need to be practicing, right? You need to be maintaining your instrument. Maybe you need to be saving some money also to get that better instrument. Those are the tasks and activities that feed the goals and those are your objectives, those tasks and activities. My objective is I'm going to practice X number of hours today or X number of hours this week. My objective for this week or for this month is to save a certain amount of dollars and put that in my savings account for my house that I wanted. Okay, so those are the objectives, the objectives feed the goals both in the short term and in the longer term. So you see how this compass cumulative sort of idea. And that's where we have this idea of moving up the pyramid progressively towards our longer term goals. All of these things are operating at the same time. Now next time it's time to set up some actual goals, and there are more or less effective ways of doing that. So tune in next time, and we'll find out.
