I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about a 22 year-old tech CEO who built a multi-million dollar company by age 22. Emil Barr, who started Step Up Social from his college dorm room, explains how he sacrificed to achieve his goals. He argues that young people should front load success to seize the future. This means sacrificing work-life balance by prioritizing personal goals. What Barr describes is extreme, but his point about front loading success should be considered by anyone who has personal dreams of the future. It just means investing your time in the future by setting goals and working hard to achieve them. His goals were entrepreneurial, but goals don’t have to be.
Doctoral Students Front Load To Seize the Future
Completing a doctoral program in any field is an intense experience requiring long days and longer weekends. My executive doctor of business administration (DBA) students work full-time at demanding jobs. Many have families in addition to careers. They front-load success by investing three years into a demanding program in order to achieve their personal goals. Some want to transition from the corporate world into higher education. Others want to develop research skills. Others just want the knowledge. Most of my PhD students in I-O psychology were at a different stage of life. For them, the PhD was the beginning to a career as an academic or as a practitioner. The doctoral program was total immersion–4-6 years of focus almost entirely on their studies.
Time As An Investment in the Future
Meeting your goals requires discipline and focus in order to execute your strategy. Front loading is part of the strategy in which you invest time today in order to achieve a longer-term investment. This is not always easy. Some people struggle with state-orientation, which is a breakdown in self-regulation that makes it difficult to begin tasks and stay with them. For others it can be difficult to delay gratification. For them it is hard to front load because they live more in the here and now. There are strategies that can be adopted to help overcome these issues. One is the use of mini-goals–short term daily goals that might require only a few minutes to achieve. This can help overcome procrastination and the tendency to prefer a more fun activity over something less enjoyable.
It’s All About Balance
Barr took front loading to the extreme, sacrificing everything in life to reach his goals. For him, this worked and gave him the success he was after. Most of us, however, are unwilling to sacrifice everything in life for our goals. We might be willing to work hard, but we also want more out of life than just achievement. We are willing to front load success to seize the future, but only by achieving balance between work and other aspects of life. This balance will be better for our mental health, and make us far less prone to burnout. To quote an old saying, when it comes to success, it is more about the journey than the destination.
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