Priorities

People often talk about setting goals and priorities for life and taking decisions according to them. I think it’s a solid advice and most people believe in it and try to practice it as well. But I feel over time, maybe the meaning behind the advice gets lost or people just forget to use it. It is also at times emotionally hard to put the advice into practice. When a person has multiple goals that require taking conflicting actions, people can end up in an emotional turmoil while trying to balance their goals. And this is where priorities come into play. Ideally, a person should be able to clearly prioritize one goal over the other, which in turn would help when there is a conflict between the goals. However, in my own experience, this is harder than it looks because sometimes you just aren’t sure about your priorities or had never thought about them. I learnt about this the hard way.

During the summer, I interned at Amazon Prime Video in Seattle. When the internship was about to start, I was trying to figure out what do I want out of this experience? As in what goals should I have for myself for the next 3 months? An obvious one was to do really well in the internship and complete my project successfully, another related one was to get a return offer, and the final one was to have a lot of fun.  For fun, I quantified it in terms of hiking because I love hiking and I love mountains. I promised myself that this summer I will hike roughly 100 miles around Seattle in the surrounding national parks and forests. To me that was a part of having a lot of fun. I started the internship with these goals and I remember asking myself, what is the most important goal for me? Here, I made the mistake of not prioritizing goals clearly and putting equal focus on having fun and doing well at the internship.

Over the summer, I tried to balance both of these goals, working hard on my project and hiking every weekend. For a while, things were going well until things at internship became more difficult and required more time. I didn’t mind working hard or on weekends but it was much more difficult when it was against ‘my will’. I liked working on project but I also really liked being outside in the mountains on the weekends. So for a long time, I was constantly under stress, trying to do well at work and making sure I have ‘fun’. To make matters worse, I was also constantly comparing myself to someone else at the internship and their work. Towards the end of internship, I realized that I should have had clear priorities for my goals and just acted according to what I wanted the most. And needless to say, it shouldn’t have mattered to me to a large extent if someone else was working overtime all the time. My actions should have been more or less independent of others and mostly based on my own priorities and goals.

At the end, I did manage to achieve all my goals thankfully. I did well and finished my internship project. I also got a return offer (kind of). And I did manage to hike at least 100 miles over the summer and have a lot of fun! But the process was very stressful and could have been managed well with clear priorities. 

This was a good realization in my opinion. Moving forward, I did promise myself to always have clear priorities for goals because they’ll often collide with each other. Figuring out priorities is also hard but it is something that must be done.