find motivation to grow
Growth is what everyone pursues, but few people have thought about why growth is necessary, that is, the motivation for growth is very few people to do deep thinking. When a person's growth rate is similar to or slightly faster than those around him, there is no need to delve into this issue, because everything seems to be going smoothly, and there will be no too much anxiety if you follow everyone's pace. But when you encounter difficulties, challenges, setbacks, or dissatisfaction, revisiting this motivation will allow you to better adjust your mentality to get out of the predicament.
I finally distilled the motivation for my growth into two points: the inner fear is the root thrust that drives me forward, which allows me to quickly gain a foothold; Difficult to move forward.
Fear is the strongest driver of growth
The skills at the beginning of work are completely self-taught, because the majors learned are inconsistent, and the company has certain assessment requirements. So in the first 3 years of the company, I would go to the company on weekends to learn business knowledge, read system code, read middleware documents, DEBUG source code, etc. The reason why I can support my long-term persistence is that if it is really optimized one day, what I have learned now can at least increase the chance of a successful interview. Therefore, with the mentality that learning any trick or style in this way is to increase chips in the future, I have learned core technologies such as message middleware, distributed transactions, and distributed calls very solidly. Later, I also worked as an interface person for Ant-based middleware in the international department, specializing in solving intractable problems about middleware in the department.
The solid basic skills allow me to quickly accumulate the ability and reputation to do things, laying a solid foundation for the follow-up and longer-term development. But this kind of inner fear has not completely disappeared. On the contrary, the road is one foot higher than the devil. It grows up with the increase of working years and levels: When I started to lead the project team to do the structure of large-scale projects in P7 , my heart is full of fear of not being able to fully grasp the technical details; when I lead a relatively large team at P8, my heart is full of fear of losing technical acumen due to management; at P9, my heart is also full of whether I am not worthy , Is the ability magnified by the platform rather than the fear of the real ability... It is also because of these inner fears that I dare not slack off, and I must keep moving forward and making progress.
Desire is the greatest pull of diligence
If the inner fear is constantly chasing me, then the inner desire is constantly pulling me. The desire in my heart is to achieve something. In order to accomplish this task, I turn all the difficulties and obstacles I encounter into problems, increase my experience and improve my ability by solving these problems, and enjoy the happiness of moving forward after the problem is solved. At the same time, in this process, I am constantly revising my own concepts, constantly enriching and perfecting my own cognition and thinking.
In the initial stage of building a global capital platform, the entire team was under tremendous pressure: too much pressure on business projects led to the loss of core members and blood loss to the team, and frequent complaints about funds were the bottleneck of business development; the failure of technical architecture, business architecture, and platform products to truly work together led to The construction of the new platform is unsatisfactory; the relationship between the long-term business development goals and the path of the capital platform is not clear, etc. Whether it is facing external doubts or internal confusion, my heart is not cowardly, but very eager to lead everyone out of this quagmire, and I also firmly believe that if I can't do it, it will be more difficult for others. It is precisely because of the desire in my heart to accomplish this career that I always try to define the dilemma I am facing as a problem. The clearer and more objective the problem is defined, the more efficient the solution will be. By continuously defining and solving problems in this way, and winning a vigorous victory, the team really came out of confusion, and they also gained a greater sense of growth satisfaction.
Find the way to grow
Finding the motivation for growth is only the first step. If there is only motivation but no good methods and skills, it will be difficult to exert energy. If we talk about skills, I believe that there are countless articles or even books to discuss, but I think we must put aside skills to explore the essence. Only when we find the essence can we see the law, and only after seeing the law can we find the right way.
formula for growth
Regarding growth, I think that it must abide by objective laws, that is, growth cannot be achieved suddenly, but must be gradually improved over time. In other words, the best way to grow is to take advantage of compound interest over time. Expressed in a mathematical formula, it should look like this:
In order to allow the formula to be disassembled and executed, I changed the time to the number of times, because the number of times is more capable of doing this ability accumulation action. Therefore, everyone should abandon unrealistic fantasies about growth. The only way to do it is to do a good job in every growth accumulation, and then prove it through a long period of time.
feasible practice
The formula for growth is very simple, but to guide the specific growth process, we need to do a specific dismantling of the single accumulation capacity, that is, how we do well for each growth accumulation. Everyone will intuitively think that it is to strengthen thinking, but how to strengthen thinking is another way of saying that there is no dismantling action. According to my practice over the years, I disassemble each ability accumulation into the following two actions: keen reflection and written summary.
keenly reflect
I liken reflection to the trigger of growth. If this trigger is not pulled, the growth we want cannot be achieved at all. Just imagine, everything you do, you have not reflected on the following content afterwards: "Should this matter be done, whether this matter has been done well, and where can it be done better if you start from scratch." So even if you do 1,000 things, you just repeat the first thing 1,000 times. At most, you are more proficient than real growth.
written summary
But only the reflection of the brain is not enough, because the brain is essentially a lazy guy, and not thinking is his essence (because thinking consumes energy). If you just stay in the brain for reflection, he will make up for you a lot of things that you didn't think clearly, making you mistakenly think that you have thought clearly, but in fact you may really have only a half-knowledge. In order to overcome this defect, my approach must be summarized in writing. Once you start writing, you are actually forcing your mind to think carefully and comprehensively. This action actually guides you to think deeply in a structured and orderly way, which is the essence of thinking. I often use this sentence to describe the importance of writing: only when you write clearly can you speak clearly, and only when you write clearly can you really think clearly.
So the final growth formula is:
There is no perpetual motion machine for growth
The formula is very simple and unadorned, and it only reveals a very basic fact. It is not difficult at all, but there are some people who have been unable to break through and improve for a long time. Because the difficulty here is a bit against human nature, the difficulty is that few people can actively pull the trigger of reflection, the difficulty is that few people can use writing instead of thinking, and can persist in using the compound interest of time for a long time.
But when you find it difficult to execute the skills, think about your motivation, think about why you want this growth, and when you feel the pain, you can add more strength and accumulate forward again. Therefore, there is no perpetual motion machine for growth, and we need to continuously add core fuels such as fear and desire to it. I hope that everyone can continue to improve and enjoy the happiness brought by growth.
Author｜Zhu Chunmao (Zhiming)
This article is the original content of Alibaba Cloud and may not be reproduced without permission.