Dare for more

"

Vague desires create concrete dissatisfaction.

"

In February 2000, alongside my younger brother, I attended my first day of school. I was at least two years older than most of the children in my class. The nursery school I attended had three classes and each took one year to complete before going to the primary section. After a few days the headmaster spotted me and told my mother we should do something about it.

His plan was simple, instead of spending three years in nursery, I was going to spend only a year being promoted every term and this meant extended coaching and monitoring. We were able to pull it off and in 2001, I started my primary section.

He thought there was more for me to accomplish and not have to do all the 7 years of primary school. In 2005, after a successful first term finishing top of my class in Primary Five, he would instruct me and my best friend to pack our bags and go to Primary Six in the second term.

This meant we had to cover the remaining two terms of Primary Five and the missed first term of Primary Six work on our own and this time there was no coaching but monitoring of our performance and sometimes what we did after school. For the first time, I was one of the youngest pupils in class. By the end of the third term of Primary Six, I managed to finish top of the class.

Looking back at all that, it wasn't because I was smart but someone spotted that I could do better and there was more I could accomplish, defined what more and better meant for me and created incentives for me to accomplish it. This made it easy for me to show up because I clearly knew what was expected of me. Without that guidance, I found myself somehow struggling in my first years of high school.

Thinking about it now, there are areas of my life where I feel like I haven't reached my full potential but if you asked me what reaching my full potential is, I wouldn't be able to tell. What I've figured though is: without defining what my full potential is, my brain assigns it an infinite value. Compared to infinity, my current reality however good it might be -- it always looks like a failure.

Defining what full potential means turns infinity into a finite goal and makes progress measurable. In areas of my life where I've done this, I'm in a position to tell whether I'm on track to reaching my potential or I'm going off track and every action I take towards my goals feels like real progress. In some cases I've felt like it gives me momentum.

To explain this with a visual, consider two people rowing a boat, one doing so in a thick grey mist and could go in any direction but is not sure about which one leads them to the nearest island. Even though he might be making some progress, his progress feels like nothing. Now let's look at another person, rowing a boat but this time there's a single bright beam of light hitting a specific island. Every stroke gets him closer and gives him motivation to keep going. In summary "When more is everything, progress is nothing" but "When more is defined every effort becomes momentum".

There are certain areas of life where I think this is applicable and below I uncover how I think this applies to dating and work.

A couple of weeks back, I was talking to a friend about his on-and-off relationship. I thought they were back together this time for good. He however told me the last time he was with her, he felt that he could do better. When I asked him what better meant, he couldn't define it. There is a big difference between "I can do better" and "our values are not aligned when it comes to relationship type, religion, financial management and conflict resolution and this means a lot to me". If you don't know what you want from your partner, it's easy to jump from one person to the other thinking there's someone better. Dating becomes like a ghost chase where: you're always fantasizing and running towards someone who doesn't exist in your life yet, away from someone you most likely haven't learned to love -- in the pursuit of a better which is unknown.

As for work, I've worked as a software engineer for the last couple of years. There is a firm belief in software engineering that a problem well defined is a problem half solved and I have found this to be true. When you gather the necessary requirements and understand the constraints before jumping into building a solution, there are higher chances that you will come up with a better solution than someone who just dives into solving a problem with vague requirements. A proper definition also acts as a measure of progress and can help establish the definition of done for a particular problem solution. There is a big difference between "I am going to add more functionality to our search system" and "I am going to reduce search time to X milliseconds, implement fuzzy searching, highlight matches in search results and allow users to search posts by content and excerpt".

Defining more is easier said than done. Around mid 2025, I felt like I wanted more out of life and needed to do better. Below are some of the questions that helped me answer what more meant for me in some areas of my life.

1. The "Daily Bread" filter: Answering If I were to live the "more" I desire, how would my day differ from what it is now?. Looking at the day instead of the bigger picture helped me design my days better and gave me concrete actions I can work on.

2. The trade-off test: Every "more" comes with a "less" e.g more time working might mean less time for hobbies. Answering What am I willing to give up or endure to get this 'more'? helped me reduce resources spent on hobbies like chess, traveling, attending standup comedy etc.

3. The anti-goal approach: Answering What are the "X" things in my current life that make me feel the most "stuck" or "less"? helped me understand the effect of online chess and doom scrolling on the top idea in my head. I ended up giving up online chess & uninstalling Instagram for a very long time until I reached a point where I could have it on my phone without checking it.

4. The admiration audit: Answering Whose life do I admire, and which exact part of their day do I want? helped me dedicate more time to my career growth by learning and building things outside work because it's what I admired about some of the people I can look up to.

5. The enough horizon: Answering What is the specific milestone where I will give myself permission to stop searching and start savoring? helps me prevent goalposts from moving. When I start learning or working on something, I start by defining what success would look like and it helps me keep track of my progress in a healthy way.

In the early years of my career, I'd argue that I have achieved way below my potential and it's mainly because life after school is open ended, you can do whatever you want, be whatever you want etc and in most cases there is nobody to define what you want for you but you. I wasn't having a proper definition of what more/better meant to me in some parts of my life after school.

School was easier because what you had to do was predefined, and more had a finite value in terms of the best grades you can get. Now that I started having a clear definition of this, I'm already seeing the impact this is creating and gives me the urge to dare for more. If you have any techniques you use to define more, I'd love to hear them in the comments.