The 7 Duties of Great Software Professionals. Really?

There are two reasons I am not a fan of this talk. First, once you saw Anthony Robbins' motivational speech you don't want to see anybody else. He is simply the best!

The second reason is that in this speech the author offers some challenges to developers, he suggest that setting and achieving professional goals is the way a developer should follow to become great.

Well, goals are very popular and well known self-motivation tools, but they sucks. Why?

Setting the Goals

Being driven by goals is endless race from one goal to the next one, and then when your first excitement is behind you, you may wonder: What was actually for?

As Paweł explains (in Polish) achieveing a goal is a desire of more dopamine in our brain. Every time you achieve a goal, you get a reward a in form of dopamine self-injection.

Unfortunately training yourself in achieving goals causes you get more dopamine b-e-f-o-r-e achieving and after that you get just only teeny-tiny injection. You feel not so good as you expected, so you want more dopamine. What you do then? Set next goal.

Desire of goals means constant staring at the difference between your current state (before ticking a goal off) and future state (after getting it done). This difference is Dis-Satisfaction.

However the delta form the structure above is called a resource needed to get the goal done, in fact this is the difference between two emotional states, two dopamine levels. This difference is felt as some discomfort.

The race form a goal to another one is driven by Dis-Satisfaction and the only way to avoid this feeling is more and more dopamine, more and more achieving.

Mindfulness

So let stop for a moment and try to see things as they are...
Mindfulness is a concept moment-by-moment awarness when you try to liberate yourself form the desire of achieving.

Following the mindfulness way you accept reality as it is and observe your relation to this reality. Obviously as human beings we need goals and we need achieve things. Starting it with awareness you achieve goals if needed, but you do it being awaken from the dopamine dream.

Hmmm...it was a little bit off-topic, but who cares...;)