Pursue Mastery, Not Status

  • If we use salaries as the measurement of progress, it washes away all the color of their experiences and reduces everything to a comparable number.
  • The more you peg your work to some standardized metric, the more you use that metric to determine your position amongst others.
  • Anytime progress is standardized, a status game is reinforced.
  • Mastery is the quest to improve yourself as an end in itself. Comparisons are not made with other people, but only with prior versions of yourself.
  • The evidence of Envy
    • If envy is a recurring problem for you, that means you’re always gauging your progress in relation to the advertised positions of others.
    • If you use a metric to gauge what you work on next, then you’re allowing the validation of others to dictate your intellectual interests.
    • If you base the quality of your work on its performance – and not how you felt while creating it – then you will never be confident in your own judgment.

References

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