What's your next mountain?
Next few days are the perfect time to pause and reflect: Are you doing the highest impact things you can?
A few years ago a reader wrote in to say:
I used to follow you from a previous company's email address.
We had a discussion together on climbing to the next tallest mountain. Back then, my next tallest mountain was increasing my daily freelancer rates.
Since then, Shopify reached to me and offered me a senior engineer role, fully remote from France, with a €€€ TC, which is higher than even some of my peers in France who are CTO or VP of Eng are getting.
I've already applied your "next tallest mountain" mental model to think about my next mountain to climb, which is now attempting to reach staff level at Shopify, and €€€€ TC.
Thanks again for the inspiration.
These days I see them tweeting about working directly with the Shopify CEO on impactful projects. It's a joy to behold. Stories like these are why I write this newsletter.
The next tallest mountain framework
Life is a multi-variate optimization problem – you have multiple variables to optimize for (work, family, health, ...) and you're looking for the optimal solution. A perfect solution does not exist.
The best way we know to solve these problems is a hill climbing algorithm. That's what they use to train all the fancy AI models we hear about.
Reaching the peak
Here's a super fancy gif I made to describe this in 2016. I love this thing.
- pick a direction
- listen to feedback
- adjust course
- do the work
- repeat until success
At first, you go up that hill like a rocketship. Big strides with huge gains. As you near the top, your progress slows. There's nowhere left to go and every step has to be small enough that you don't overshoot the peak.
This is where people burn out. Burnout happens when sustained effort yields no reward.
Seeking the next mountain
But a beautiful thing happens once you've conquered your mountain – you have a new vantage point.
From the top of your hill you can look around. There are new mountains in the distance. Some taller, some shorter.
You have a choice to make: Stay in your lane, stick to the local maximum, or go climb the next tallest mountain you can see. Either is fine this is all up to you and climbing mountains is exhausting.
Just know that if you choose to stay, don't expect your actions to yield big changes. Don't burn out running circles around the summit.
My next mountain
Here's my next mountain.
I have 10 days to finish this stupid manuscript in the same year that it started. Then gotta find a publisher, get beta readers, do lots of editing.
The other huge, likely bigger, mountain is that in August I lassoed a unicorn and we been flyin. I'm now responsible for ~50% of the tech stack. No pressure 😅
What's your next mountain? Hit reply
~Swizec