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Should you have a huge mission? Or are moonshots more often (confusing) marketing?
I am now reading "Radical Candor", one of the best books on management, leadership, and company culture.
Among the many great quotes, this made seemed relevant to how people see entrepreneurship oday:
There’s nothing wrong with working hard to earn a paycheck that supports the life you want to lead. That has plenty of meaning.
A wise man once told me, “Only about five percent of people have a real vocation in life, and they confuse the hell out of the rest of us.” Trying to describe a job in lofty, save-the-world terms is often going to make you look like the ridiculous Hooli CEO Gavin Belson from the show Silicon Valley.
I think that "finding meaning" in life is important.
But it also consuses the hell out of a lot of people, indeed.
It's not like a thunder strikes you and then suddenly you have a meaning. And it's not like your life is not complete if you are just "OK doing what you're doing".
Some books and entrepreneurship podcasts would like you to believe otherwise, but I'm pretty sure that Elon Musk does not up every morning with the single-minded idea of conquering Mars.
Sometiems he just wakes up groggy and it gets even worse when his girlfriend tells him to takes his paws off of her.
The second part of that quote is also important.
Forcing a "deeper meaning spin" into everything you do can make you sound pompour -or ridiculous-.
And if you're not that driven, it's OK if you "just" want to make good work, provide a good standard of living to yourself or your family, and go up the corporate ladder, but without caring of becoming the CEO and "making a dent in the universe".
Another quote from the same book:
In current-day Silicon Valley, inspirational slogans run more along the lines of “putting a ding in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it. But motivations are highly personal. Although I admire Jobs, it seems to me that the universe, or at least our world, is plenty dinged up already.
