About

Hello everyone, I’m Carolina, the autotelic project manager. Welcome to my blog.

I might call myself “autotelic” but, really, it’s more of an objective. This blog is to explore becoming autotelic in my own life and work. I recently learned about the philosophy of autotelism, where an entity has within itself its own meaning or purpose. It’s doing an activity for the sake of the activity, not the result you’ll get out of it or because you owe it to someone else. I believe a sense of competence and fulfillment, and so happiness, can be found in striving to become autotelic. 

I’ll be writing posts going into this along with book reviews, drawings, and what I call “Extra Points for Effort.” I like the idea of celebrating effort put into an objective, regardless of how good or bad the result is. In my case, it means doing something I’m probably just bad at, and accepting it as part of the journey.

Since I am a project manager, I would also like to evaluate the concept of autotelism in project execution. The point of being a project manager is to fulfill an external objective that someone else requires. I believe you can find fulfillment from doing this work just by doing it, even if it’s for someone else. You see, a lot of what a project manager produces does not belong to them in the end, we give the new baby back to their proud parents (or project sponsors) and we walk away into the distance, looking for the next challenge. This kind of makes project management autotelic, don’t you think?

Thanks for hanging out with me, I hope it’s fun!