A topic that came up over lunch last week was the need to set personal limits.
When you start with an opportunity, your natural tendency is to view the sky as being the limit: ideally, the opportunity will sweep you off to fortune and glory. But it might also take you places you don’t want to go, either because you start getting into Peter Principle territory, or you end up in a bad ethical spot, or you’re suddenly just not happy anymore.
Some examples: you see this all the time with programmers. They’re successful and smart at programming, so somebody promotes them to a management position, and suddenly they’re miserable at having to deal with constant “HR issues” and not being able to focus on their skill and passion. The goal was to be successful in the most general sense, and the lack of limits allowed them to be moved into a position where they didn’t want to be.
It’s common for entrepreneurs as well. A guy can be an excellent startup CEO–hires the right people for the first 10 jobs, can wear every hat in the company from janitor to salesman to graphic designer, smooth-talks his way out of liquidity problems when the checks haven’t cleared in time. And that same guy can utterly fail when it comes time to be a 100-person company with all the requisite regulation and formality and procedures. The reverse is also true: the CEO of IBM (probably) wouldn’t know what to do if he didn’t have a huge budget to spend on getting the best consultants and employees to actually do the work. But he knows better than anybody how to do the high-level strategy that’s required for such a massive company.
This doesn’t mean than one person is smarter or better than the other. It simply means that different people have different skill sets, and setting a limit keeps you from ending up in a place where your skills won’t help you.
You need to think about things in terms of both goals and limits. They define your ideal path in opposite ways: a goal says “I want to end up here,” while a limit says “I’m not going any further than this.” Saying “I will program but I never want to manage other people; I will run this company until it hits $1 million in revenue; I will only work for a company of a certain size or geography or industry” is a good way to help you define not only what your goal is, but what your goal is not.
To the extent possible, you want to have some freedom to go with the flow and explore new opportunities as they present themselves–to move between the currents in the stream, as it were. Setting limits allows you to get a feel for when to move out of a given current before it takes you over a waterfall.