Reviewing Our Maps

Steve Jobs, in one of the most popular commencement speeches ever made, noted that we can only connect the dots looking backwards. It is an important part of our life for us to be able to make some sense of things in the hindsight. As important as it is to take a look at life backwards, it is important to introspect on the value systems that we have built over years and to identify our own biases. Without doing so, every single time that we look over the time that has gone by, we would be left wondering where did it all change without ever making any amends, if needed.

At the beginning of every year, a lot of people do sit down and make resolutions, trying to change things. These often fruitless attempts to course correct our lives become an annual ritual where an average person accepts that they will fail, year on year. One of the biggest factors influencing this activity is a lack of understanding of ourselves - whether or not the goals that we set for ourselves even align with our own maps, i.e., our thought processes (conscious and subconscious), our value and belief systems, and most often our "whys"?

Without a solid look at our maps, and where we are headed, we can never identify where we actually should be headed; because where we think we should be headed is a decision that we made years ago with knowledge that we did not have back then but possess now, and biases that we may have developed or over come in the meantime. That is why a lot of people end up feeling empty or sad in life even though they lead a perfectly amazing life. Their maps have changed, but they follow the same course set for themselves eons ago.

These maps could be anything:
- Personal Maps
- Social Maps
- Lifestyle Maps
- Career Maps
- Relationship Maps, and so on.

Think of it as if you were a CEO of an organization that set out a plan for the company 10 years ago, but the technological, structural, organizational as well as the markets have changed completely since then, yet, the organization continues to function without taking a look at their mission statements. It does not sound like a good management, does it?

Tim Urban's - How to pick a career article has a very robust framework to help you out with reviewing your personal maps, even if you are not looking for a career change or running a company yourself. It is a long read, and a much longer thought process requirement. However, these are a day's worth of hours that you would not regret looking backwards a few years down the line. :)