Dom Henrique was an industrious man. Born into a family with political connections and money, he was named the Duke of Viseu in Portugal early in the 15th Century. Aside from leisure, his passion was exploring and developing Mediterranean trade routes. He manifested his competitive advantage by designing a lighter, faster ship to cover the expanses between European countries on the north shores to African countries on the south shores. His ship design, the caravel, maneuvered well under a wide array of sailing conditions and changed navigation forever.

In 1419, his father appointed him the governor of the Algarve, the southern-most province in Portugal, where he discovered an inexplicable affection for the peninsular town of Sagres. There he established a school for navigators – to introduce discipline into sailing and navigation – more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus would sail across the Atlantic.

Sailors in the 15th Century, like ancient mariners, navigated by constellations, a favorite being Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper) because it contained the brightest star in the sky: Polaris, the North Star. The North Star was the required first lesson for apprentice sailors because of its obviousness and identifiability in the sky.

While historians disagree on some issues, it was clear that a rigorous academic approach impacted the success of merchant and military fleets for generations to come. History remembers Dom Henrique as Henry the Navigator, the father of modern exploration and the chief proponent of the North Star.

Navigating Your Career

Navigating our career often begins in a similar place: identifying the brightest star in the sky – our values. The “North Star” is an emerging term used to identify what we believe in, and what we hold to be most meaningful. It can be the foundation for how we’ll design strategies and solutions for fair and foul weather throughout our lives.

Too often we confuse values for goals. We set a goal to become a vice president by the time we’re 40 years old. But what we are really saying is that we value influence and leadership. A similar goal might be to own a house by the time we’re 30, but the thing we actually value is a safe and stable place to live. Jim Collins referred to long-term goals like these as BHAG’s (big, hairy, audacious goals). By establishing our BHAG with such ambition, Collins argues we always have something to strive toward. True enough. And at the same time, we set ourselves up for failure because there are so many things that can interrupt our progress on a long and unscripted journey.

The North Star frames ambitious desires differently than goals. Getting back to the BHAG of “vice president by the time I’m 40,” we can’t easily foresee all the challenges we’ll encounter that might deter us from reaching our goal. Nor does it take into account that as we’re approaching the goal, we might decide that either the title or the date don’t make sense to us. By recognizing influence and leadership as our North Star, our career maintains greater flexibility and allows us to set shorter term goals that are likely to be more achievable, more relevant, and usually more manageable than BHAGs.

Defining the North Star

The North Stars in your life or your career (there can be more than one) are values that your life charter holds as dear. Family, friendship, income, leadership, children, passions, values…these are all North Stars that can become more prevalent or fade as eras of our lives come and go. But they are certainly more flexible than BHAGs with specific dates and achievement gates to pedal through.

We use the North Star to navigate by, not navigate to. It’s not the destination, it’s the tool we use to help us measure our whereabouts along our journey. Like ancient navigators, it reminds us of what is our true north, a metaphor of a deeper meaning in your life.

In Bill George’s book titled True North, he shares stories of successful leadership using more than golden parachutes, stock options, and bonuses as measures of success. However, it’s more than a leadership tool, it’s a sanity keeper. By rendering a clear image of your North Star (or North Stars), you prepare yourself for acclimatization in changing altitudes, foul weather gear for impending storms, and sunscreen when the sun gets too bright.

Using Your North Star

I’m a big believer in goals, by the way. Much of my own research has focused on understanding how salespeople can use goals to improve their performance results. And in the course of studying tens of thousands of sales reps in more than 40 countries using goals, it’s clear that goals make a difference; a positive difference, at least for a majority of sales reps. However, there is a large caveat: these goals must be relevant, short-term goals. In other words, for goals to have the greatest impact on performance, they need to reflect a realistic relationship to the current baseline of activity, and they need to have (typically) fewer than 90-day horizons.

Goals absolutely have their place, but they do not fare well in long-term planning because so much of the world (the context or environment) can change and change quickly. A North Star allows you to fine tune your navigation under changing conditions because it helps place you where you are.

Walt Disney’s love for drawing never stopped even after several failed business ventures as an editorial cartoonist, graphic artist, and silent movie maker. His North Star was his love of entertainment through the use of animation. That North Star led to a career filled with many projects that always had two things in common: entertainment through animation. Disney’s ‘failures’ did not disconnect him from his values because they were not referendums on his dreams or insufficient progress toward his BHAGs, they were merely milestones along the way as he navigated by his North Star.

And there’s the story of a guy pursuing an acting career in his early 20’s without a penny in his pocket. Nearly every casting call was a “no” and Sylvester Stallone was running on fumes. To solve his problem of getting a role in a film, he wrote a screenplay that would allow him to take a hold of what he dreamed of doing: being an actor. His North Star was to be an entertainer, but casting directors couldn’t fit this round peg into their square holes. What seemed like a string of failures were merely shrugged off, even to the impoverished Stallone, because his North Star was always in the sky helping him navigate along the route of his passions: to be an actor.

When you consider your own goals – whether personal or business – make sure they are achievable in the short term. And keep your dreams harbored in the navigator’s realm of the North Star, by which you can always plot out where you are and then decide where you want to go.

Life isn’t so much about talent or luck…it’s just about what you care about – your North Star.

REFERENCES

Sagres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagres_school

Henry the Navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Henry_the_Navigator

Polaris (the North Star): https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/polaris-the-present-day-north-star  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Houlihan is the founder and chief behavioral strategist of BehaviorAlchemy, LLC, a consultancy using a behavioral lens for improving the actions of workers, customers and policymakers. He co-founded Behavioral Grooves, a meetup and podcast with listeners in more than 80 countries. Previously, Tim was Vice President of Reward Systems at BI WORLDWIDE where he was responsible for a $300 million global portfolio of reward systems, acted as the firm's thought leader in behavioral sciences and was the chief liaison to research partners around the world. Tim believes people underestimate the role of the unconscious in our behaviors. The application of good behavioral science can remedy that.