I have two kinds of personal goals: minimum performance and accomplishments. My minimum performance goals establish an acceptable baseline and have served me well financially but not done my career any favors. This warrants further explanation.<p>Accomplishments drive me to do ambitious things. These are generally minor short term things like solving for a new software feature, running a 12 minute two mile, or mastering some area of performance in a military school or caring for soldiers.<p>Accomplishments drive me to push myself and do challenging things. The lack of available accomplishments, such as a job repeating beginner things dicking around with frameworks drives me crazy. It makes me want to give up my over priced senior software job and go flip burgers where at at least I can see how many burgers I can flip in an hour.<p>A minimum performance baseline has allowed me to pay off debts and achieve over 800 credit rating even without substantial increases in compensation and shifts in lifestyle, such as military deployments.<p>A minimum performance baseline has been harmful to my software career because software is an unstructured industry. Unstructured industries tend to prefer minimum common denominators in skills and hiring which is contrary to expertise. It appears if I wish to continue to advance in this industry I must do so in either management or not as an employee.<p>I monitor my performance baselines setting personal standards of conduct and performance fitness. I establish rules for behavior and define personal failures. Then I slowly raise the bar over time. As a result I continue to observe improvements in my technical capabilities as a software developer and simultaneously observe failures to progress in my software career.
I've long reached a point where my goals now are to:<p>(a) enjoy my job. I don't enjoy places with lots of stress or difficult people.<p>(b) work in a place where there's some level of technical skill development.<p>(c) earn more money.<p>(a) is easy to track. If I find myself getting frustrated a lot, I set LinkedIn to 'open to opportunities'. (b) is harder, but I find if people start to come mostly to me about technical questions over other people in the team, e.g. "how should I write this?", then I'm probably hitting a point where I should move on. (c) is even easier. I just check LinkedIn occasionally and see if jobs being sent my way are more than what I currently earn. I just got a £15k pay rise by doing this.