Don’t let anxiety be your motivator
Do you desire to escape or create?
Do not aim for big goals from a place of anxiety and frustration. Often, the need to escape from an undesirable situation triggers the desire to do something really big and audacious. For instance, people in a boring job think the way out is to start a business, rather than take the easier route of looking for a different job.
When you are in a frustrating place in your life, you should first aim to improve your immediate situation so that you can get your head in the right place. A desperate or anxious mindset is not conducive to the kind of thinking that is needed to come up with good ideas and push through obstacles.
In his bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes about how we start to display risky behaviour when all our options are bad. According to Kahneman, we do this because in a hopeless situation the possibility of a miracle seems higher than that of any further loss. This observation points to the fact that fanciful (and erroneous) notions of what constitutes success are more likely to take root in an anxious and frustrated mind.
Therefore, we should probably not pay heed to the mantra of ‘Think Big’ before we fix the most pressing problems in our life. Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs, even though widely misunderstood, still provides a useful guide to ordering our goals in a realistic value hierarchy. Definitely have big ambitions, but don’t have them only because you are frustrated with your mind-numbing job.
The more wholesome way to determine which goal to pursue is to pay attention to your own interests, or deep fascination with a specific problem. The road to success is long and arduous, and if you’re driven only by a desire to escape your current situation you’re not going to get too far.
More importantly, we must learn to distinguish between the desire for an end state versus the willingness to make the journey to that end state. Frustration leads to a desire for the former, whereas genuine interest leads us to choose the latter. Only one of these can lead us to what we truly want.
