Direction over Magnitude

The case for clarifying purpose before rushing to work.

My Search for Meaning

I sense within myself an occasional fault of ambition, which is to focus on magnitude (putting my head down, working hard, and going as far as possible) rather than direction (deciding what to do). But my career is yet to fully begin and I have the time to devote toward making this decision.

I think that many who are similarly zealous could benefit from spending more time deciding on a meaningful career. But meaningful can only refer to the term as deduced by the reader. There is no objectively correct career, or if there is I won't pretend to know. But I am beginning to believe in the great significance of defining meaning deeply and taking the time to form a rigorous conclusion about which path is best. I have yet to pave my path forward completely, but hope to set myself up to do so in a highly intentional way.

The rest of this essay is written as advice basically toward myself. Where it says 'you' interpret that as me talking to myself, but feel free to take the advice you like. Where it says that some people make mistakes, interpret that as me extrapolating to a potential future self, probably one I am looking to avoid.

The Hamming Question

Richard Hamming, a mathematician known for working on the Manhattan Project and at Bell Labs, often asked his colleagues: What is the most important problem in your field? followed by Why aren't you working on it?

This is called the Hamming Question and, from a utilitarian standpoint, there is nothing more important for an ambitious person to think about. The average career includes 80,000 hours. If used well, they have the opportunity to drive profound change.

Ambitious people usually desire to reach great heights by impacting others, but take for granted the need to actually determine which direction is up. Not every career path is made equal, so if the goal is impact, more than a bit of thought should go into optimizing direction.

Direction is not always obvious. There is a disconnect between impactful and celebrated careers. For example, a professional athlete makes millions of dollars per year and is known by many millions of people. A scientific researcher on the other hand will usually make a much more modest salary and will be known mainly within their field in academia. But the contributions of a scientist developing a vaccine are greater than those of an athlete throwing for touchdowns. This isn't to say that athletes who use their pedestal for good aren't making an impact—they just aren't getting payed for that. Fame and fortune are inaccurate indicators of impact.

The North Star

This means that ultimately you have to make the decision of impact on your own. Others can give you data points and pointers, but never can their recommendations definitively tell you the best path.

Even statistics offered by Effective Altruism are blind to what we don't know that we don't know. If you want to have the greatest chance at a great impact, hold on tight to your vision. This is a story of the world that not everyone necessarily knows, but you believe to be true and extremely important. This is your North Star, your Ikigai, your purpose, your angle, and your mission statement.

Set your North Star up somewhere lofty. If you set huge goals, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment, but the alternative is worse: regretting that you never dreamed. And it doesn't have to be treated as an all or nothing goal—you may start a journey that others can finish.

Without clearly defined goals, life is a random walk, so you should write out your long term plan. Be willing to update it, but don't let others directly sway your vision.

Common Priorities

Though everyone's North Star might be unique, there are common ways to maximize impact.

In the beginning, it is important to explore careers. Without taking a large sample of possibilities, you are unlikely to choose the very best option. This should be done a ton early on in life.

In order to do great things, you need to be a great person. This also comes very early on, when habits, interests, principles, skills, and personality characteristics are being rapidly formed. Many highly impactful people have spent significant time on self-improvement because it is such a compounding activity.

"You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally." – Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Once you've done some exploring and have formed opinions on the world, it might be time to draw out a long-term vision. Maybe you envision a world where telepathic empathy is enabled by brain-computer interfaces. Maybe you envision a completely sustainable energy grid and reversal of climate destruction. Maybe you envision cultural tolerance spreading across the globe. Whatever it is, your North Star is the most important thing you can imagine occurring in the future.

Eventually, you must define your goals clearly and be able to measure progress. From here, you can design a path forward. As far as you can think ahead, you should. Write out a specific mission statement and a long-term plan by asking what is necessary to achieve the vision you have laid out.

If you are to stay true to your direction, there will be many times in life where short-term must be sacrificed for long-term. Maybe your ideas hold negative social value, or maybe the work you are doing doesn't yet make a very good living. Maybe people just think you are crazy. Despite all the hard times that might knock your confidence, all the walls that might block your view of the star, don't ever forget its location. In the end, those who follow a straight line toward their vision are remembered by history.

Most visions will require resources to be carried out. This means fame, fortune, good relationships, and power. This is another point where people often lose track of their North Star. Either they become caught up in the wealth race and forget that resources are a means rather than an ends or they attempt to be overly idealistic and think that they don't have to "drop to the level" of accumulating resources. Your vision will require resources, but as you acquire them, don't forget why you do so. More on this soon.

A group of people can almost always do more than an individual, so if you want to maximize your progress on the vision, you should recruit. This could mean starting a company, a non-profit, a research group, or anything that allows for collaboration towards the goal. At this point, management becomes important. But remember the location of your star and manage as a means, not an end of climbing a bureaucratic ladder. If you can be more impactful as the leader of an organization rather than a front-line worker, then that is the best path.

At some point, you will no longer be around. Your vision, if it is to be completed, needs new champions—people who believe in and fully understand the cause. To continue the tradition, it is important to evangelize [A], fund, teach, or do anything else that helps the next generation carry on your vision. A true visionary plans for posthumous continuation of their dreams.

If you do even a couple of these things, you will make a great difference in the world. If you can do all of them, you will be extremely influential. By staying true to your North Star and pursuing it through the best means, you can make a dent in the story of humanity.

At First, Direction Doesn't Matter

“You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don’t move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my hands are dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is possible to govern innocently?” – Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands

The paradox about having a career plan is that in order to fulfill it, you often have to ride the random waves of opportunity that present themselves early on. Jumping straight to the top of the ladder is almost never an option, so it's more important to search for the rocket ships that will bring you further up. This might be pejoratively labelled "playing the game," but one who is truly dedicated to their vision cannot afford false idealism.

As I mentioned earlier, visions require resources. If you want to bring people to Mars, you need rockets. Rockets are expensive. If you want to be president, you need experience in politics, or at least a well-known background in something successful. If you want to run a very large venture capital firm that will channel money towards what you believe to be the most important problems, you need money to invest. This either comes from yourself, or from other investors, who need past evidence to trust that you are a reliable investor. In short, if you have a big vision, you will probably need to gather connections, wealth, and experience along the way.

Shooting for the top also brings a risk: forgetting your original direction. Whether you accrue connections, wealth, or prestige on your trek to build your personal brand, the success can be blinding if you give it too much attention. Nothing is more important than maintaining your original vision. This isn't to say that you can't change it along the way. Anyone who is truthfully interested in doing the most good will be open-minded to updating their overall worldview. But to allow the industry where you first succeed full reign over your ambitions is to forget what you were originally after.

So, in the beginning don't be afraid to play the game—maximize optionality, accrue resources, and chase general success. But do not forget that it is a subset of the larger game you are playing: aiming for the North Star. Once you have adequate resources to carry out the real plan, don't remain entangled in the sub-game.

Iteration

Your North Star can change. In fact, for it to be stagnant is probably a sign of not thinking critically. There are at least three ways to alter your course: these are method, metric, and vision iterations.

Method iterations should be made as often as possible, following agile practices. This means constantly getting feedback and reviewing your processes and products and updating them to be improved.

It also means cutting through useless actions and aggressively focusing on those that truly matter. Ask yourself: How can I complete tasks more efficiently? Is there a more direct way of achieving the vision or its sub-goals? Am I actually making progress, or am I just being busy for the sake of being busy?

Metric iterations are changes to how you measure your success. Though they leave the North Star intact, they might help you see it through another lens. For example, you might decide to define progress based on a more closely correlated statistic or make an incremental refinement to your mission statement. These are important occasionally but should usually be less frequent than method iterations.

Vision iterations are literal changes to the position of your North Star. Because of the importance of progressing in a straight line, large vision iterations should be exceedingly rare, only prompted by a fundamental and confident change in your worldview—not by external circumstances, not by 3rd party opinions, and not by whimsical doubts or philosophical musings.

All too often, ambition feels the need to dive straight into work, propelling the career early. But spending time in the beginning by pausing to consider the destination can allow ambitions to come to a much greater fruition. By defining your North Star, playing necessary sub-games, being open-minded to iteration, and committing somewhat stubbornly to the path, direction as well as magnitude will help you create meaning in your life and in others'.

Notes

[A] Michio Kaku, cofounder of String Field Theory and probably one of the most intelligent and capable physicists on the planet, has spent much of his time writing books, podcasting, and appearing publicly to advance common interest in science. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has done a similar thing. Both realize that even more impactful than research is inspiring the public.