Mission Failure

When Sarah wrote me, she was stuck. She had recently quit her job as a newspaper editor to attend graduate school to study cognitive science. Sarah had considered grad school right out of college, but at the time, she worried that she didn’t have the right skills. With age, however, came more confidence, and after she signed up for and then aced an artificial-intelligence course that would have “scared a younger version of myself,” Sarah decided to take the plunge and become a full-time doctoral candidate.

Then the trouble started. Not long into her new student career Sarah became paralyzed by her work’s lack of an organizing mission. “I feel I have too many interests,” she told me. “I can’t decide if I want to do theoretical work or something more applied, or which would be more useful. Even more threatening, I believe all the other researchers to be geniuses…. What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

Sarah’s story reminded me of Jane, whom I introduced in Rule #3. As you might recall, Jane dropped out of college to “[start] a non-profit to develop my vision of health, human potential, and a life well-lived.” This mission, unfortunately, ran into a harsh financial reality when Jane failed to raise money to support her vague vision. When I met her, she was soliciting advice about finding a normal job, a task that was proving difficult because she lacked a degree.

Both Sarah and Jane recognized the power of mission, but struggled to deploy the trait in their own working lives. Sarah desperately wanted a Pardis Sabeti style of life-transforming research focus, yet her failure to immediately identify such a focus led her to rethink graduate school. Jane, on the other hand, slapped together something vague (a non-profit that would “develop my vision of… a life well-lived”) and then hoped the details would work themselves out once she got started. Jane fared no better than Sarah: The details, it turned out, did not work themselves out, leaving Jane penniless and still without a college degree.

I tell these stories because they emphasize an important point: Missions are tricky. As Sarah and Jane learned, just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn’t mean that you can easily make it happen. After my visit to Harvard, I realized that if I was going to deploy this trait in my own career, I needed to better understand this trickiness. That is, I needed to figure out what Pardis did differently than Sarah and Jane. The answer I eventually found came from an unexpected place: the attempts to explain a puzzling phenomenon.