Confusing motion with progress is an all-too-common mistake, and I see countless versions of it in my practice (and in my own life):
- The busy person who craves more free time but feels anxious when they see open space on their calendar. [1]
- The mid-career professional consumed by the sense that they're behind and need to catch up. [2]
- The leader of a growing organization who continues to think that they add value by doing more. [3]
- The leader whose business is succeeding but who nevertheless breaks things in order to "fix" them. [4]
- The former leader who's sold their company or hired their successor and is now struggling to find a sense of purpose. [5]
The challenge is that in the early stages of our career there's often very little difference between motion and progress. Our managers and the organization at large set our strategic priorities and provide some amount of tactical guidance. There's always a lot to be done, and the relative importance of various tasks may not differ all that much, so we need to dive in and keep going. And we have ample room to grow and improve in almost every area, but we may know relatively little about where our greatest strengths lie. Under these circumstances motion is progress, and so we never learn to tell the difference.
But at later stages of our career--and particularly when we're in a leadership role--things often look dramatically different. It's now our job to set strategic priorities, and we may have very little help. There's even more to be done, and even more people are competing for our time and attention, but now there's a massive gap between tasks that are truly important and those that are merely urgent. [6] And we still have room to grow and improve, but at this point, as Peter Drucker has noted, "It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence." [7]
So what can we do? There's no ready-made solution, but there are a few steps we can take in the right direction:
- Slow down. When motion = progress, slowing down feels like an unaffordable luxury. We have work to do! But when that equation falls apart--as it inevitably does--if we lack the capacity to slow down we invariably move with great speed in the wrong direction.
- Do the work. Take the time to reflect. Render our thoughts and feelings more tangible by writing them down in a format that's useful to us. Engage in a candid conversation with someone we trust who knows how to really listen.
- Get ready. Make room in our lives for acceptance, for compassion, for wisdom. When motion no longer automatically translates into progress, these are the qualities that will make all the difference.
This may sound simple, and these steps are certainly easy to grasp in principle. But they can be fiendishly difficult to put into practice, and in my experience most of us look for shortcuts. We don't slow down. We don't do the work. We don't get ready. And we're woefully unprepared when life changes. We just keep racing around the track faster and faster. Plenty of motion, very little progress.
Footnotes
[1] Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care
[3] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
[4] Playing with Matches (On Feeling Needed as a Leader)
[5] You Quit. You're Free. Now What?
[7] Peter Drucker on Excellence, Careers and Planning
For Further Reading
The Importance of Slowing Down
Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)
When We Are Ready, The Practice Will Be Waiting
Photo by Robert Couse-Baker.
