Page 62 - Hard Goals

Heartfelt 53

• Research, writing about research, and talking about
writing or research (the information that went into this
book, our HARD Goals project, employee surveys,
leadership assessments, and so on).

“You mean you don’t intrinsically love being CEO of your
own company and pushing it to grow bigger and bigger?”
(you inquire as you gasp in horror). The answer is, I like it
well enough, and I’m pretty good at it. However, I mostly do
it because it allows me to create a job for myself where I get to
do the research (and writing and talking about it). I love the
world of ideas. I’m less intrinsically excited with the world of
contracts, budgets, production meetings, invoices, IT security,
and so on. Managing a company on a daily basis is for me the
same thing as eating vegetables (not that I’m particularly skilled
at eating vegetables, but it’s a tolerable means to a much better
end). Running is also in that category for me, as is fi nancial
management and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Now, here’s something really interesting. I do the daily
management stuff because I can make a contribution that leads
to better results, and ultimately frees up more time for me
to do more intrinsically motivated work, like writing books.
Sometimes your extrinsic payoff can actually be more work,
but intrinsically driven work. Do you know about Google’s
“20-percent time”? It’s a workday per week when developers
can choose projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descrip-
tions. They can use the time to develop something new, fi x
something broken, or create Google’s next cool thing. Here’s
how Google describes it: “We offer our engineers “20-percent
time” so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passion-
ate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are