A couple of years ago, I set out an ambitious goal to fly the Singapore Airlines Suites. I spent a year reading blogs, optimizing my credit card spend, and researching ways to hack the system. After a lot of effort, I managed to do it. It was an amazing experience, but something felt missing. I’d worked so hard to achieve this goal, but in the end, my life didn’t change very much, and no one besides myself really cared.
I was thinking about this experience as I was reflecting on my goals for next year. I love this time of the year because we get an opportunity to slow down, read and relfect. It’s the time of the year where we make plans and resolutions to get fitter, get promoted, and publish that book. It’s the time of the year where we can allow ourselves to dream a little and get inspired.
This week, I came across an article that particularly inspired me, titled Choose Good Quests. The authors, Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner, argue that “quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around”. However, not all quests are created equal because there are good quests and there are bad quests:
In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn’t improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.
The article is focuses on those at the top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy: The engineers and founders and VCs that change the world. However, reading it also made me wonder: What types of quests do regular people embark on? How can we avoid a quest that leaves us unfulfilled, like by SIA Suites goal? How can we pick better quests?
Why Most People Pick Bad Quests
According to Stephens and Wagner, almost all of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds are on bad quests:
Today, we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on bad quests. Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.
The tendency to embark on bad quests isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. We all have a tendency to pursue bad quests. Here are some examples:
- Becoming the 202,287th lifestyle influencer
- Full-time investing or trading
- Spending more time posturing to get promoted than doing real work
- Launching a copycat NFT or cryptocurrency
Why do I think these are bad quests? Because they solely benefit the person embarking on the quest, and no one else. Like my quest to fly Suites, I wanted it solely for the bragging rights. Another reason why they are bad is because they are undifferentiated.Becoming yet another lifestyle influencer or starting another T-shirt company doesn’t add anything to the world, but simply competes for the same attention and financial resources.
(You could argue that growing your net worth through these quests can help you to provide for your family and donate more to charity. But I don’t buy this argument. If we’re being honest, people who pursue these types of quests tend to be primarily driven by selfish motives and not by some wider, nobler mission).
Why do so many people pick bad quests? Because we are often driven by self-interest and mimetic desire. It’s often easier to copy what has been successful before, than to truly reflect on and pursue an original, good quest.
Changing Your Corner of the Universe
So if these are bad quests, what are some examples of good ones?
The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete: semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, natural resource discovery, next-generation energy production, low-cost and low-labor construction, new modes of transportation, general artificial intelligence, mapping and interfacing with the brain, extending the human lifespan.
Okay, these are insanely out of reach for 99% of us. I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to discover the next generation of energy production in my lifetime. But at the same time, I believe that good quests aren’t limited to the paradigm-shifting pursuits like these.
We may not all be as well-resourced, “massively leveled heroes”, but we can all seek out good quests. Let’s go back to the original definition of what a good quest is: To make the future world better than today. To that regard, I believe that a good quest simply means changing your corner of the universe. A good quest improves the lives of the people around you, and not just yourself.
What are some examples of good quests which change your corner of the universe?
- Becoming the best spouse or parent you can be
- Creating truly helpful or inspiring or beautiful content
- Connecting yourself and others to something bigger than yourself
- Fighting for sustainability / mental health / human dignity / any wider cause
- Starting a company that’s truly innovative and useful
Beware Bad Goals Masquerading as Good Quests
A quick note of warning: Good quests can sometimes manifest themselves into bad goals that take your further away from your good quest.
For example, many people (especially men) deceive themselves into working 80-hour workweeks or putting their life savings at risk “for the sake for their family”. I know, because I’ve fallen into this trap myself. While working hard and taking on risk are often essential steps on a good quest, we can sometimes become so focused on the goal that we forget the quest.
So never forget what the quest is about, and don’t mistake the intermediate goal for the quest itself.
2023 Is A Blank Page
It might seem strange to talk about quests at the end of 2022, when the world is such a scary place. There are wars and crazy inflation and looming recession. The market might crash next year. We could see more mass layoffs. Who knows?
But at the same time, the upside of this turmoil is that it gets rid of a lot of bad quests that people might have otherwise pursued. The tech layoffs of 2022 were certainly painful, but many of those laid off would undoubtedly find jobs in truly gamechanging startups that they would otherwise not have taken on. The crypto crash hit the wallets of many investors, but it diverted resources away from the 10-millionth copycat NFT and into something more useful.
As Packy McCormick says, we now have an opportunity to reset on a blank page. It’s a chance for us to turn the page and reflect on what good quests we’d like to embark on. I’m going to take a break from posting till the start of 2023 to do the same.
What’s yours going to be?