The diminishing returns of achievement, and the fallacy of the endless hustle
Do you remember the sixties? I sure don’t, I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve recently become intrigued by the film footage I see from time to time of that era on TV. Everything seems so quaint – happy, smiling people, usually a yard with kids, maybe the lawn getting a mow. A dad that looks proud of his family, mom fussing over the children and so on. Obviously a very idealised (and not completely true) vision, but a vision nonetheless. Then I see footage of the 80s – always in cities like New York, people walking busily along to their jobs in power suits and talking on cellphones the size of a briefcase. And now? Now it’s like the 80s times a billion. All the media wants to talk about is how fast paced life is, how connected we are, how there is never enough time in the day.
Check out a business magazine or anything of that nature online. Now, you gotta write a book. No! A bestseller. You gotta go viral, you’ve gotta pivot to the next big thing. You’ve gotta be the founder of your own startup. Have you got investors yet? Bootstrapping is cool, but VC backed has more cred. Have you done a TED talk yet? You gotta do a TED talk, because that’s only by invitation and if you’re invited, man you’re really at the top of the heap. You gotta hustle. You gotta rise and grind. You’ve gotta read non-fiction, because novels are a waste of your time.
If this describes your life, I want you to do something really important. I want you to take your right hand, raise it, and smack yourself across the face. Now, with that stinging sensation still present, I want you to read these words and internalise them:
Slow the fuck down and chill out.
I want to talk to you about something today that’s really important, it’s the thing that’s driving all of these crazy aspirations you have, the relentless drive, the almost breathless anxiety that you haven’t “made it” yet. It all comes down to one little word that most humans right now will never even recognise, and completely deny:
Status.
Everyone (and when I say everyone from now on, I refer to people with the mindset described in the intro) wants status, and right now, status is success and achievement. The reason I talked about the sixties in my introduction was also partly because status had a very different meaning back then: it was more about being part of a family, being an upstanding member of the community (shit, we don’t even have communities anymore) and doing the best you could for your family. “How quaint”, I can hear you all saying. At least that sort of status came with a prize, however, and that prize was the love of your family and the closeness of a community. Being a good father or mother who were respected by the community was a good aspiration to have, because people didn’t idolise every idiot who was famous or every guy who struck it rich in business.
Unfortunately nowadays status has moved away from something community minded and is instead about individual success, which is is so full of problems I could write an entire book on it. Status means standing out from the crowd, which means being the 21 year old kid on the Forbes under 30 list, it means having a million Instagram followers, it means going viral, it means being a New York Times bestseller – do you ever notice how many people lead with that in their bio when interviewed now? The host will ask the guest to tell the audience about themselves, and they’ll say “ok, well I’m a NYT’s bestselling author”. It’s the perfect way of saying “look how awesome I am, I’m not just an author, I was on the NYT bestseller list.” Though with all the dickheads gaming the Amazon bestseller list and using it to promote themselves, it’s hard to blame them from mentioning the NYT I guess.
Back to the topic at hand, basically, if you want status in 2016, you need to stand out from and above everyone else in your field. A well paying job doing decent work and a family that loves you isn’t enough anymore, because that’s normal. That chick flashing almost every inch of her body on Instagram with a million followers (hmm, coincidence?), she’s unusual. She could be living off that protein powder she’s paid to advertise because she can’t afford anything else, but she nonetheless has status above any cubicle worker earning twice what she does just because her apparent popularity causes people to assume she must be raking it in. She gets attention from a million people (even if they are just ogling her bits), which puts her in higher status territory, which means more attention. And that’s what everyone wants now, isn’t it? We’re starved of attention because we spend too much time online, too much time “liking” friends posts instead of actually calling them and asking how their life is. We expect this attention to fill the hole in our souls that was once filled with real life relationships. We chase after status because it means that everyone will be impressed and admiring of us, and a hushed reverence will fill the room every time we walk in, like it must for Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
Right now you’re probably in massive denial of everything I’ve just said, telling yourself that it’s not about status, that you want to change the world, or that you have a passion, or that you love what you do. Ok, that’s cool. Stay with me, I’ve got a few more things to say that are going to pierce that armour you’ve got up. Here’s one:
No matter what you achieve, you’re going to die anyway. And you can’t take any of it with you.
Tell me this, if you have the luxury of dying in a dignified way in a bed, would you rather be lying there with the smug satisfaction of founding some unicorn startup, or have a loved one there holding your hand? Maybe it doesn’t have to be one or the other, but the price of a relentless grind is relationships, and anyone who grinds relentlessly doesn’t usually stop once they hit their goal, because the satisfaction of reaching that goal doesn’t last long. How many friends do you think these people have? No, respected colleagues and people you send emails to don’t count. I’m talking the kind of people you’ll sit down and have a meal or a glass of wine with on a weekend afternoon. Oh that’s right, you don’t rest on the weekends, do you?
Let me tell you from experience, the whole achievement thing, it’s the proverbial mirage in the desert. What most of you don’t realise is that you think you’re running the 100m sprint, but you’re actually running a marathon. You think that if you just smash yourself in your twenties and thirties that you’ll cash out and relax after that. No, you won’t. People like that don’t, they keep working and working, always with a new goal to replace the last one they just met. That’s the nature of achievement – it’s addictive. Addictive in the worst sense, because when you do it for long enough it’s a compulsion, and it’s not even enjoyable anymore but you have to keep doing it. Achievement offers diminishing returns of happiness until you get to the point where you just think “meh”. And then one morning you wake up with poor (or no) relationships, with a whole heap of money and achievements that really don’t mean anything anymore.
Once upon a time I competed in judo. I trained at a fairly elite club with a lot of champions there and loved every minute of it. Competition, however, never really did much for me. The first competition I won was great, the second, pretty cool. The third? Eh. It certainly wasn’t a bad feeling, but the high was significantly less than the first. In short, my achievement offered diminishing returns of happiness. Going to training and just fighting against all of the guys for the fun of it though, that never got old. Sure, some nights were more difficult and less fun than others, but it was always fun, always satisfying. To take it a step further, I was on the road to my black belt grading when I had a horror ankle injury that took me out for 6 months. When I was able to start training again, my desire to actually get my black belt had faded*. After all, I knew I was good enough to wear one, all the guys I fought knew I was good enough to wear one, why – when I wasn’t aspiring to be a champion or gain Olympic selection (which is the only reason anyone needs a black belt), would I actually want one?
There’s only one reason: to impress people.
Did I need it to impress my classmates? Nope, they could feel how good I was every time we trained. Did I need it for me, to know that I was that good? Nope, I was comfortable with how good I was too. Literally the only reason I would want a black belt would be the status of being able to tell people that I had one. To answer that famous question all non practitioners ask “so what belt are you?” with a smug grin and the simple word “black”, as though it makes you ten times more badass.
That’s the same reason people want to write a bestseller, go viral, do a TED talk etc. They don’t love what they do, they love the idea of being at the top. If you actually love what you’re doing, the idea of those things is nice, but utterly unnecessary.
Want another example? How about the time recently when I went viral, as in, almost a million page views viral. I still remember a few years ago when a blog post of mine did 17,000 views. Man, I was so freaking excited. Like, so excited I ran into the bedroom (it was 630am) and woke my wife up to tell her. She asked me, groggily “so why is that a big deal, what does that mean?” I’ll come back to the wisdom of her question in a minute. My next big one was 25,000 views – very exciting still! That happened a couple more times and it was cool, then 50,000 views. It was always nice, but it didn’t get me jumping up and down anymore. Then I hit almost a million page views. It happened over the space of about a week, and to say I was surprised when I woke up one day, checked my phone and saw that it did 150,000 while I was sleeping would be an understatement. But it never made me feel great. It made me smile, sure, feeling as though I’d hit another level, but it didn’t offer some lasting happiness and eternal validation of my skills.
That’s where my wife’s question, however little she might have realised it, was so insightful. Why is going a viral a big deal? It isn’t. What does it mean? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. If it gets you paid work that’s great, but aside from that, the only thing it does is provide you with a surge of dopamine from the attention you just got. And every single subsequent time after that, the dopamine release gets smaller and smaller, to the point where you’d better have a deep love of doing it, because the dopamine surge isn’t going to replace that. To quote Cool Runnings:
“Derise, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
It doesn’t matter if your flavour is writing, singing, being an entrepreneur, or any other field where people seem to have insane work ethics. If you don’t love the work for its own sake, if you’re always just trying to reach the next goal just so you can feel successful, just so you can have that status, you’re going to end up empty inside. If you can’t honestly answer why you’re trying to hit the next goal, it’s time to take a look in the mirror and ask what all the grind is for.
It’s funny how many people idolise Gary Vaynerchuck. His intensity, his candour, his relentless drive. People look to him like he’s the messiah. The more I see of people like Anthony Bourdain, however, the more I realise that they’re the ones who have it figured out. Check out his shows. He has such a casual, relaxed demeanour. I even saw him across the street in New York once and he looked much the same: relaxed, just chilling out and hanging. You don’t hear him talk about the need to be working insane hours (which he did as a young chef), jumping from this platform to that one, personal branding and so on. Nope, he just meanders around living the good life – eating, drinking and being merry with people. Writing books every few years. You can tell he has a perspective that most people lack, that he knows the importance of having a good time on this Earth, because we’re only going to be here once. Hell, the guy only just took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu in his late fifties. Not for some kind of self improvement goal or to win or anything so prosaic, nope, he started because a friend talked him into it. Now he loves it and can’t get enough. He trains multiple times a week, just because he can, because it’s fun and because why the hell not?
Compare this to many of the self improvement gurus of the world who won’t even read a novel because “why would I waste my time reading stories when I can actually learn something?” Tai Lopez, Mr I read one book every day, I’m looking at you. I bet you didn’t take in a third of what was in those books, but good job on getting that TEDx talk.
This status that so many of us seek (yes, I was guilty of it at one point not so long ago), it doesn’t actually do anything for us. Your family and friends won’t love you any more for it, because they already love you as much as they can. If you needed to have some kind of status for them to love you any more than they already do, you really wouldn’t want to be around them anyway would you? All those adoring followers, fans, hangers on and gushing articles about you that come with success and status generally aren’t worth chasing after either, because the second you don’t have that status, they’ll stop caring about you and you’ll be Mr or Mrs Nobody again.
To reiterate, you’re going to die one day. When you do, you’re likely going to be forgotten in a couple of generation’s time, just like everybody else is. Sure, there are a few whose memories have stood the test of time, but I guarantee you that the people so many look up to right now such as the Gary Vaynerchucks, the Tim Ferrisss, the Sheryl Sandbergs, they’re going to be forgotten in a generation or two, just like all the other “nobodies’ of the world. Their current status isn’t going to buy them immortality in the literal or the “this is my legacy” sense. What, do you think the history books are actually going to include Facebook and Zuckerberg is going to be remembered alongside Einstein?
So chill out and stop trying to be an achievement whore. Spend some time with your family. Enjoy a meal with friends (assuming you have any left close to you). Enjoy an entire weekend. Go on vacation. Just go and do something besides work.
*Just to expand on the judo black belt thing, the jump from brown takes a shitload of work for anyone with normal responsibilities. You have to earn competition points, which means driving long distances on Sundays or going interstate multiple times a year to compete with people of a high enough level to gain points from wins. You’ll see a lot of older guys (older being 30+) staying at brown for years, or maybe forever, because the time cost just to wear a different colour belt isn’t worth it.
