One day, you will wake up and be 75 years old. It happens to all of us. We blink and life passes. The question is whether it passes us by.
When you do get up on that fateful morning, look in the mirror, and realize you’re not happy, or that you’ve wasted too much time, it’ll be because right now, you didn’t properly answer life’s three big questions.
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I’ve been a minimalist since 2012. At first it wasn’t a choice. When I moved into my 60 sqft room on a US campus, there simply was no space, regardless of how much or how little I owned. So, for the first few weeks of the exchange program, I lived out of my suitcase.
Shortly after, I found The Minimalists and their 21-day journey. Josh helped his friend Ryan pack up all his stuff, as if he was moving, and then he only unpacked what he needed for three weeks. They learned that we don’t need all that much and that trashing, donating, and selling material possessions doesn’t hurt. To the contrary, it’s often liberating:
“Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom.”
From that moment on, I was hooked. “I want freedom,” I thought. And so, to this day, the places I’ve lived in all look somewhat like this:
Some say it’s clean, some say it’s boring, but for me, it’s just normal. Without a doubt, minimalism has added tremendously to my happiness over the years. But not in the way you’d think. It wasn’t the money I made from selling all the excess stuff, nor the money I saved from not buying more.
It wasn’t even the freedom from all the clutter.
Even that only gets you so far.
One of my favorite ways of learning is to watch people who are 2–5 years ahead of me. What challenges do they face? How do they deal with them? Then, I mentally prepare for their current and my future problems. It doesn’t matter if, when, or how I get there. As long as I’m prepared.
The most fascinating thing I’ve observed so far is what I call ‘the void’. It’s the hole people fall into when they achieve financial freedom. Most people never get to the point where they can live indefinitely off the assets they’ve built, so all their lives they’re used to trading the majority of their time for money.
For the few who do, apparently, waking up one morning and realizing they don’t really have to work and don’t owe anyone their time isn’t exactly bliss. It’s scary. Part of the problem seems to be that the tools they used to get there were a means to an end. Once they reach that end and look back, it turns out the means weren’t all that meaningful. Nat Eliason explains:
“As long as I needed an income, it was easy to ignore that I wasn’t working on anything important, but once I stopped needing the money, I had to start asking myself more seriously if that was what I wanted to spend my time on.”
Sometimes, freedom hurts. Free or not, if you fall into the void, you have to claw your way back out. Minimalism is a bit like that. If you only do it so your house is empty, then you might not like what happens once you sit in that empty house.
Maybe that’s why the mega rich sometimes pile up cars, jets, houses, yachts, and lots of other stuff. To counteract the freedom they have. Because it’s too much.
The question, then, is not so much “how do I get more freedom?” It’s about what you’re going to do with that space once you have it.
At the start of the last semester, my roommate came back from his home town, where he’d already done a bit of studying. He wasn’t happy about returning to the study room, where we usually go during the day.
“It’s so narrow and crowded. Back home, our library is huge. If you go to the top floor, you can see the whole city. It has a lot of room. Room to think.”
Remembering all the libraries I’d been in, I agreed I too liked the ones with large, open spaces best, but I didn’t put two and two together. Now I know, it’s also why I like minimalism. Whether you look at a sparsely filled apartment, closet, or contact list, you’re always confronted with the same thing: lots of room.
Room to think.
“What can I do in here?” In my room, I’m limited to sleeping, reading, working, or watching a movie on my laptop. “Who’s the most important person I can call?” “What outfit does this event require?” These are good questions, but without room to ask them, we’ll never come up with good answers.
It’s not just that you can’t walk straight in a room full of clutter. You also can’t think straight.
That’s way more important than freedom.
In an over 30-year-old comedy routine, George Carlin talks about our ridiculous obsession with collecting things:
“That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it? Trying to find a place for your stuff. That’s all your house is. Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much god damn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house.”
Like all great comedy, his monologue is hilarious because it’s profoundly true. However, in this last sentence above, he and I disagree. A house with few items can have tremendous value, because it now offers room for lots of other things. Experiences, memories, but most of all room to think.
Who do you want to stick around in your house? Who shouldn’t come back? When you leave your house, what are you tending to? Is it really important?
Minimalism isn’t about being free like a bird, or at least, not just about that. Rather than providing a path to happiness, it creates the space you need to deal with life’s toughest challenges. Physical separation for mental reflection.
Subtracting stuff only matters if you add meaning, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of history’s greatest thinkers led neither very happy, nor very free lives. Like Epictetus, a slave immortalized for the clarity of his mind:
“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
Something to think about. If you have room for it, that is.
In a very personal TED talk, Tim Ferriss shares the story of his almost-suicide. Struggling with depression more than the average person, he says he’s spent a great deal of his life finding ways to improve emotional resilience.
The best tool he’s found so far also happens to be the source of his best business decisions, he claims: Stoicism.
Right after, he admits: “That sounds…boring.”
How could something that helped one person both prevent the worst kind of death and make millions be boring?
Yeah…how?
I chose Latin as my second foreign language in high school when I was 13 years old. It turned out to be a great choice, not just because Latin holds the roots of many European languages, but because of the history education you get alongside those.
In a German book with the translated title Latin Is Dead, Long Live Latin!, author Wilfried Stroh notes:
“Let’s not forget Cicero, the self-made man who turned from humble beginnings to Consul of the Roman Republic. Understanding him and other ancient philosophers, like Lucretius, Seneca, Augustus, and of course poets and historians, that’s why we study Latin, not in order to decorate ourselves with fancy quotes.”
Isn’t this the exact thing we’re trying to do today? Some of the most popular articles online try to help us understand people like Ray Dalio, Taylor Swift, and Elon Musk. Rome’s emperors, poets and philosophers are our modern day billionaires, singers, and hedge fund managers.
We want to decode their way of thinking, their philosophy, for our success. It is no coincidence, then, that many of the people who are building the future use the same, ‘old’ thinking that worked for our ancestors. Their brain software is Stoicism.
However, because of its origins, we don’t look at it that way. Since it’s hidden behind the intimidating curtains of education and history, most of us don’t look at it at all. We hear the right buzz words, like success, wisdom and living a good life, but then words like virtue, fortitude, and providence enter the picture, and we’d rather flip right back to Youtube.
It’s funny. Language is the perfect gateway to this incredible area of study, yet today it might also be the biggest obstacle. We’re scared to read texts written in Old English, let alone learn Latin or Greek, so we miss out.
Hence, when people like Tim call Stoicism “an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments; for making better decisions,” what they’re doing is translating to help us pick up the thread.
It’s always the right time for Stoicism, but it’s always wearing the wrong dress. To the outsider, it looks like a raincoat for a sunny day. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, you can find everything you need to know about Stoicism in a single table.
If only we dare to look just a little closer, we can instantly see that Stoicism is, above all, about simplicity — and a philosophy built around this idea can, by definition, not be complicated.
Take its location of origin, for example, the stoa, which you see in the titular image of this post. Nothing more than a walkway with a roof, it was a place for people to gather and exchange ideas, so the first Stoic, Zeno, just stood up and started talking.
Another one of modernity’s great translators, Ryan Holiday, therefore hits the nail on the head when he says:
“Stoicism is a philosophy designed for the masses, and if it has to be simplified a bit to reach the masses, so be it.”
He promptly delivers on said promise at the end of The Daily Stoic, a collection of quotes from famous Stoics, with the following table:
It contains everything you need to know. Everything. Let’s break it down, starting with the labels.
The blue, left column contains, bottom to top, the three parts of the self, which determine how you navigate your life.
The idea is that the better you get at perceiving the world, the faster you become at cataloguing impulses, which, in turn, makes it easier to give in to the right ones and block the rest.
While Ryan described these three elements extensively in The Obstacle Is The Way, the main takeaway here is that everything — everything — starts with perception.
Moving to the green, top row, left to right, we see the Stoics’ three disciplines that shape our perception, action and will.
Once again, while this is technically a chain to work through, it is important to remember that all it takes for the rippling effect to kick in is to start studying.
So far, we learned that good will and good action start with clear perception. Proper practice and training are the consequence of study. As a result, we get a singular starting point for becoming Stoics: studying our perception.
If the goal is to move up and to the right, towards wisdom, then the place to start is at the bottom left, in the realm of physics.
Therefore, you really only need to do one thing to become a Stoic: Learn to recognize what’s in your control and what’s not. Sure, there are specific habits to practice and more to find out, but if you intently focus on this one aspect, the rest will follow.
Epictetus, another famous Stoic, confirms:
“Of these areas, the chief and most urgent is the first which has to do with the passions, for strong emotions arise only when we fail in our desires and aversions.”
Hence, again and again, Stoicism comes down to a single question:
“What do I control here?”
Imagine you looked at every situation in life that way. The weather, annoying people, your mood, frustrations at work, unlucky, even disastrous events, it’d all spin around you like moons orbiting a planet — they’re there, but you don’t mind them. Effort, goodwill and hope, on the other hand, will be at an all-time high. After all, these are fully within your control.
That doesn’t sound boring at all, does it?
Further selling Stoicism to the audience, Tim says it “decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower.” Given it could save a student from suicide as much as it could keep an NBA star from losing his temper, he claims the stakes are very, very high.
But there’s more to Stoicism. A bigger end game. Something…simpler.
Think back to your happiest moments in life. What went through your head, if anything? Who were you with? What did you do or had just achieved? Chances are, they were like listening to a Stoic talk on a sunny porch: simple.
Happiness is rarely the result of pulling off complex schemes. It’s raw, like the events that precede it. Kissing the love of your life, knocking out a great stretch of work, sitting in the grass, feeling the wind.
This is something even fewer people understand about Stoicism than its simplicity: It’s a philosophy of happiness.
It might be just a side effect, but it’s a profound one nonetheless. That’s why it’s no surprise that Tim ends his talk on a note sent to him by one of his most treasured mentors:
“I could not imagine a life more beautiful than that of a Stoic.” – Jerzy Gregorek
Which option do you prefer?
Of course, like any sane person, you’d take the $10,000. But maybe that isn’t so sane at all. In economics, there is this idea of expected value. You multiply the probability of an event by the potential payoff and get how much return you can statistically expect.
In this example, option one has an expected value of $50,000. Option two has an expected value of $10,000. The $40,000 difference is called risk premium. If you’re willing to take on risk, you stand to gain a much larger reward.
The reason most people aren’t is that they spend their entire lives chasing certainty. No matter how big the reward is, their desperate need for security has determined every outcome before they’re even presented with a choice.
In a 1951 book called The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts talks about the benefits of not craving certainty so much:
“I call it the ‘backwards law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it — which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.’”
Today, the world is more uncertain than ever before, which makes the skill Watts talks about — the ability to dance with insecurity — more valuable than it ever was.
The name of that skill is detachment.
It is the art of being okay when life sucks, because you’re removed from the expectation that it pans out a certain way. Detachment enables you to do great things.
Here are 12 ways you can use it to be more successful.
Think of your biggest goal. Now 10x the result. Feels scary, doesn’t it? But notice how you instantly approach reaching it differently? That’s because you can’t get a million dollars with the same thinking that’d get you $100,000.
Of course you don’t need either. When you detach yourself from your goals, you can swing for home runs instead of second base. Regardless of where you end up, you’ll have more to be proud of.
Another good thing about setting huge goals, then letting go, is that you won’t feel pressured to look smart in how you go about attaining them. You are now free to say the three most liberating words in the world: “I don’t know.”
Like a child, you can just look at the world, wonder, and try things.
Detachment also allows you to finally make use of the birth right you have never really dared to claim: it’s okay to say how you feel. Anywhere, any time.
When you’re removed from the imaginary pain of what other people think about you, you can always express your feelings. You’re not worried whether they will offend others, because that’s their problem, not yours.
The only thing more damaging to our self-esteem than other people’s opinions are our own. But nowhere does it say you need to hold on to them.
Set your negative self-talk down in the middle of the room. Look at it. Okay. Can you just let it sit there? The same goes for what you learn. Billionaire Ray Dalio says it took the biggest crisis of his life to figure this out:
“Rather than thinking, ‘I’m right.’ I started to ask myself, ‘How do I know I’m right?’”
The reason you don’t need to worry so much about being right is that you can always be right tomorrow. Heck, you can even contradict yourself. The world keeps turning. No matter if you have a great day or a shitty day.
When you don’t expect much from today, you can just do your work and watch what happens, because it’s as good as any work on the way to figuring out what you really want to do.
That said, tomorrow’s a long way away. Who knows what’s going to happen? Chances are, it won’t be as bad as you think. Or as good as you’d like. Like Henry Ford said:
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” — Henry Ford
What you do today needn’t change the world, but you better do something.
Just like we can’t know where we’ll be tomorrow, it makes little sense to look too much at where we were yesterday. What’s done is done, good or bad. The lesson?
Time doesn’t matter. It just is. And it passes either way. There’s never a good reason to worry about it.
Don’t stress over today. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t blame yourself for yesterday. There’s only one place in which we can truly live, because everything happens there: the present.
My great-grandpa delivered curtains — on a bike. He rode 30, 40, 50 miles a day sometimes. Meanwhile, we throw a tantrum when our eyeliner is off. Or we arrive sweating at the office.
Most of us sit and type and walk and maybe carry a shopping bag once in a while. Whatever physical pains you have, chances are, the 100 billion humans that have lived before you would not consider them pains at all.
Can you just let them pass? They’re going to pass.
What’s even more uncomfortable than sweating in a meeting is knowing that you’re sweating in a meeting. That goes back, once again, to people’s opinions. But there’s other mental discomfort throughout the day.
Boring tasks, slow results, alluring distractions, perceived risk, complicated decisions, the list goes on. Our days are full of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when what we want conflicts with what we’ve got to do to get there.
Sitting with this discomfort, instead of hastily giving in to it, is a skill.
In Germany, there’s a law that every homeowner must sweep the small stretch of sidewalk in front of their house. If everyone does it, the streets are clean. Life is like that.
When you’re not thinking about how great you are or how great you want to be, you can focus on taking care of your own shortcomings, rather than pointing out others’ and silently judging them in your mind.
Just keep sweeping.
Take a look at all the aspects of life you want to master: love, money, work, family, friends, health, happiness. There are so many, of course you can’t tackle them all at once! No one can.
Once you accept that life has trade-offs and make them, rather than constantly trying to bypass the fact itself, it becomes a lot easier.
Chances are you can have anything, maybe even everything you want. Just not all at the same time.
All of this might make it seem like detachment is a path towards happiness. It’s not. It’s a way of living life while you let happiness do its thing. Happiness comes and goes in cycles, like seasons. Always has, always will.
The trick is to not be devastated every time it’s not there.
Life is full of choices that resemble our example from the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with a little certainty. Sometimes, you have to take the secure path. But most of the time, we do it because it’s easy.
Every time we play it safe, we take a snapshot of our lives. We frame the status quo, but forever lose what might have been. If you do it too often, you end up with a lot of pictures that look awfully the same. A photocopy of a life, not the real thing.
Ironically, caring a little less helps you get more out of everything you care so much about. Detachment allows you to demand more and not settle.
Ask not for certainty, ask for the best. Detach yourself, then act accordingly.
You only get one life. Swing for the fences.
There’s this pithy quote floating around the web that I really like:
In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.
The one thing I don’t like about it is that it makes it sound like you have to wait to be given the test either way. You don’t. You can decide to take your own test any day of the week and when you do, you’ll learn a lesson instantly.
At the end of 2015, I designed such a test for myself: Learn something from a new book every day, whether that’s a chapter, a full book, a summary, or tons of interviews, and then write about it. Every day for the next year. The day I made the decision I already learned the first lesson.
In Do The Work, Steven Pressfield writes:
“Don’t prepare. Begin. Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.
The enemy is Resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do. Start before you’re ready.”
As I prepared the website I thought “why not start writing also? It’ll be like a rolling start in a car race.” More like flying.
A big part of why 92% of people fail their New Year’s resolutions is that they think the switch is magical if they flip it on January 1st. But the switch is never magical and you can flip it any day. You can start a new year any day of the year. You’re not a calendar.
When you do it in December, you can fail a lot before January 1st and you won’t need pseudo-motivation to start because you can just keep going.
Ever since I learned that lesson, December has become my busiest month of the year. Not with business, but with thinking. “What goals make sense for the next year? How can I make them simpler? What can I do to start today?”
Here’s what I’ve come up with this year.
Talking about cryptocurrency investing with a successful friend, I asked him: “What’s a good goal for me next year?” Without knowing how much I have, he said: “One million dollars.”
He explained: “Look, last year, around Christmas, I set a completely utopian goal. Not because I need the money. Just because. And I completely destroyed it.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The obvious but hard to practice thinking behind this is that you can’t get a result that’s ten times bigger without a radically different approach. While everyone’s clawing for 1,000 more followers, can you sweat behind the curtain until you’re good enough to pop up on Oprah?
The path to bigger goals is always harder, less straightforward and more people will think you’re crazy. But it’s also less crowded.
Higher risk, more return. Speaking of which.
The shrug emoji above is actually quite important. The reason my friend was so comfortable in setting such an insane goal is that he knew he didn’t control even half of it.
“You just do the best you can with what you’ve got, you go all in and then you let go.” Sticking with the one million dollar example, he continued: “You’d need to put in 100k and 10x that. But even if you pull off the first part, 90% of the result is out of your control. That’s fine, but that’s what it is.”
If your first thought is “I want a million dollars,” then your second thought should be “I don’t need a million dollars.” Not now, not ever.
What I like about my friend’s line of thinking is that it doesn’t artificially try to increase the part I control. More control just means more work. If I let go I can aim higher while focusing on less. I’ll probably like where I end up regardless.
Once you’ve placed your target on the moon, you can return to earth, turn your back on it and start digging. For short- to mid-term projects it makes sense to break it all down into small packages. For long-term, life-changing, way-out-there goals, that’s just depressing.
Which activities, if you do them long enough, will get you there? Which of those are you good at? Where have you already built assets you can work with?
Pick 2–3 of your core strengths and find a way to funnel those into your goal. How can you spend more time doing them? What others can you let go? If you’re already going strong, you can just keep going. For me it’s writing, saving a big share of my income and investing that as best as I can.
That’s it. Often, you need to change less of your day-to-day than you think.
Since this approach is so simple, what exactly I write, how much of my income I save, where I invest it, and so on, are all secondary. As long as I do those things, I’ll eventually get there.
As someone who thrives on plans, this is hard to wrap my head around. “Oh, I don’t need an exact portfolio allocation right now? Right, I don’t.” Even if you can follow a rigid, step-by-step plan, chances are you’ll get bored of it halfway through. But besides robbing you of the fun, tunnel vision also blindsides you to new opportunities along the way.
If a faster train to your goal passes you at the 50% marker, you first need to see it in order to jump on. But even before that, you have to buy a ticket.
You don’t feel ready now, do you? That means it’s as good a time as ever.
What’s your goal? Can you make it bigger? Let go? Which activities will get you there? How much minutiae can you get rid of?
Don’t wait for life to give you a test. Design your own. If not now, when ever? It’s a new year, after all. And it starts today.
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” — Pablo Picasso
When Robin Williams died in 2014, the world lost a legend. No scene better encapsulates his brilliance than what must be one of the greatest monologues in entertainment history: the park scene in Good Will Hunting.
After being horribly verbally assaulted by his patient and boy genius, Will, therapist Sean makes one last attempt at getting through:
“So if I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably — uh — throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.”
What Williams’s character is doing, though it may not seem like it at first, is giving Will a chance. A chance to say “I don’t know.” An opportunity to admit that he’s scared and talk about his feelings.
We can see that it’s working, because Will, for an on-screen eternity of four minutes, does not say a word. He just sits there, petrified. Here is a scene in which the main character doesn’t do a thing, yet it is pivotal, not just in the movie, but also for our lives.
Whether you show this scene to someone born ten years before the movie came out, or ten years after, they can relate. We, too, have been given plenty of chances to say “I don’t know” in our lives so far.
But, like Will, we keep missing them. This makes us miserable deep inside.
Why?
Maybe it happened after you graduated college. Or entered. Maybe when you started your first job, or even after high school. But at some point, you had a terrifying epiphany:
“I don’t know anything about life. I have no clue what to do and I can’t see how the hell I’m going to figure all of this out.”
It’s one of those moments where you can feel the metaphorical glass shattering, because your view of the world forever changes. The shattered self is something all humans go through, but, according to Simon Sinek, there is a group that experiences this traumatizing, but important event very early in their lives: millennials.
The reason my generation stands out is not because of our age, but because of how we react to this event.
We choke.
As Sean continues his speech, Will’s expression hardens more and more.
“I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.”
He gulps. He can’t even look at Sean now. In an instant, the house of cards that was his sense of confidence collapsed. For many of us, entering the real world feels exactly the same.
Once we’re burdened with the full weight of responsibility for our own lives, we quickly realize we have no confidence. I see two reasons:
The first cause is normal. A history of achievements needs history as much as it needs achievements. But the second one isn’t. More and more, helicopter parents keep sheltering their children and it turns them into incomplete adults.
I’m not saying those were your parents, or my parents. The point is there are parents who do these things to their children and, worse, they think they’re making the right choice.
Having not had enough time to build it, and with no foundation for our confidence to rest on, it only takes a brief, lonely moment of clarity as we grow up for it to crumble. Faced with reality, we’re forced to unlearn what’s not true and feel like an impostor, mortified at the idea of being found out.
Unfortunately, unlike Will, we don’t all have a therapist to catch us as we fall.
What compounds this suffering of low self-esteem is that we suffer it in silence. Not only did we not learn confidence, we also chose the wrong coping mechanism to deal with the fact that we have none.
Going through adolescence, we untie our self-worth from our parents and attach it more to our peers. This is an important change that helps us integrate in the real world: we learn to rely on our friends.
Enter technology.
When I was 13, everyone in my class started using a service called ICQ. It was the first standalone instant messenger and instantly, we messaged. Outside of school, I spent more time on ICQ than anywhere else. Most of us did.
We chatted more than we called, more than we hung out in person, more than we went outside. Teenagers enjoy chatting less, but because of its dopamine-inducing nature, they get addicted anyway. So no, we did not learn to rely on our friends. We learned to rely on technology.
You can replace ICQ with many other things — Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, WhatsApp — the year changes, the outcome remains the same. Instead of learning to control our mood with serotonin, or what it feels like to be loved with oxytocin, we go on a dopamine-only diet. Gambling, alcohol, sex, most addicts find their drugs as teens. So did we, it just didn’t have the label on it.
Thus, when our self is shattered, we have no one to turn to. We’re alone with our devices. We look at our peers through 4″, 12″ and 50″ screens and all we see is everyone’s highlight reel.
“They’re doing so well and I don’t. I can’t talk about that.”
So we gulp. We swallow. And we remain silent, staring at the letters. ICQ.
You know what it stands for? “I seek you.”
Seeing Will crack, Sean must twist the knife:
“And if I asked you about love y’probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever.
Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term ‘visiting hours’ doesn’t apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.”
The result of all this, the lack of confidence, the false images, the weak technological replacement for true friendship, true love, is that we keep spinning in circles.
As we reach the end of our 20s, and 30s, then 40s, we begin to live in a world in which everyone is too scared to admit that they’re scared and so we all remain lonely and clueless about feeling lonely and clueless.
When we constantly grab our phones, we don’t do it to procrastinate. We do it because we’re terrified of being alone. Every day, every second. We’re not even chatting just to chat, we’re chatting to feel less discomfort.
We fundamentally lack the ability to express our feelings in the company of other people.
The third most common cause of death for people aged 15 to 24 is suicide. One in ten adolescents is depressed. 64% of millennials feel overwhelmed at work every day.
The best way we can express how we feel is a two-word cry for help: “I’m fine.” Our careers, our love lives, our friendships, it’s all fine, and then we die.
What kind of a choice is that?
Social media, digital communication, online entertainment, these things aren’t bad, it’s just our usage that’s off. We depend on devices, not people. It’s not solely our fault either. Technology found us way too young and we could never let go.
What we can let go of is our fear of opening our mouth and speaking our truth. Yes, we still don’t know jack shit about life. That fact will never change. Not at 20 and not at 85. But all the irrational fears surrounding that fact? Those are imaginary.
It’s okay to say how we feel. Anywhere. Any time.
Even right here, right now. Try it. Say it. “I don’t know.” See? You’re free to express who you are. You don’t need anyone’s permission. The rest of us is just waiting for it too.
This does not make our challenges any easier, just easier to bear. We must remember why we use technology to communicate.
We also need to put boundaries on digital communication.
None of these will be easy, but through all of those trials, you can show us your true colors. We’ll adore you for it like a freakin’ rainbow.
Every time you swallow important feelings, you rob the world of the chance to learn something from you. But that’s the main reason we’re here. We’re all waiting for it.
Even though everything Sean has thrown into Will’s face is true, he’s still willing, still curious, to learn from his fellow human:
“I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.”
Usually, it’s not a therapist sitting next to us on the bench. Just some random dude. Or a young mom with her child. But isn’t that enough? What if, unlike Will, we didn’t let them walk away?
Go back all the way to that moment. Back to that shattered self. How did it feel? What if you hadn’t swallowed it? What if, in that minute, you’d had the guts to reach out and say: “I have no clue. Can we talk about that?”
While that first one may have defined much of who we are today, the truth is that, in life, we all have many of these moments. Again and again, we realize we’re scared, lonely and we don’t have the answers.
Neither do our phones. Or Twitter. Or our coworkers. So in reality, we’re free to admit it any time. We know this is good for us. One of the most popular quotes in the world is a 2,000 year-old line from one of the wisest men ever:
“I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates
Imagine how liberating that must’ve felt. Every single thing you’ve ever been dying to say, but never dared to — every feeling, every thought, every question, every idea — it all starts from here.
You don’t need to look so tough. You can tell us how you feel. Because we don’t know anything either. We have no opinions. We, too, don’t want to be judged.
When you want to be curious, let yourself be curious. Say “nice shoes” or “what’s that mean?” or “how’d you do your hair like that?” If you feel like laughing in the middle of a crowded place, laugh. And when you don’t know what to do, let us know.
The man who taught us this lesson, Robin Williams, lived it both in character and in life. He played jokes on live TV in front of millions and talked openly about his problems with alcohol and depression.
Like Will, he leaves us with three words that carry all the hope in the world:
“Your move, chief.”
One of Gandhi’s most popular quotes is this:
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Once we’ve gotten some much needed distance to whatever our education system forced us to remember, most of us rediscover the joy of voluntary learning at some point. Whether you like to research stocks, tend to your garden, or read books, self-improvement has many benefits.
Beyond satisfying our curiosity by regularly spending time in flow, we can use it to become better people, get what we want and solve problems. It seems so universal a tool that its usefulness feels limitless.
But that’s not the whole story. No matter how much we’d like it to, self-improvement isn’t a magic wand we can wave to cause whatever change we want to see. That’s because no amount of reading, learning, or even discipline can ever change that life still consists entirely of tradeoffs.
It’s like that line: “You can have anything you want, but not everything.” Choosing one thing always means not choosing another, so even if you’re the most dedicated person in the world, you still have to decide what to dedicate yourself to.
No idea highlights this problem better than The Four Burners Theory.
Imagine a stove with four burners on it, which represent the big aspects of your life:
Now, the theory says that in order to be successful, you can only turn on three burners at a time. If you want to be exceptional, it’s just two.
The second you hear this theory, you know it’s true. Take a moment to think. Which burners have you cut off? For me it’s friends and health. If I had to put percentages on it, I’d say work is at 80%, family at 15%, and friends get a crippling 5%. Almost out of oxygen. Ouch.
This theory explains why we’re frustrated, no matter how much we improve. Sooner or later, we find out self-improvement isn’t the universal remedy it is often claimed to be, and we want answers. Why can’t I have everything? Why?
Of course we never could, we’ve just fooled ourselves into believing we can over time.
The Four Burners Theory was originally just mentioned in passing in a New Yorker article, but James Clear popularized it. He also offered different views on what you can do about this problem.
All of these feel like weak attempts at bypassing the problem. If you’re a dedicated self-improvement nerd like me, you want a solution. Luckily, it seems there is one.
James says our default in which burners we turn up is to imitate the inspiring figures in our lives. If your boss is a workaholic, you’ll likely turn into one too and if your fellow students mostly hang out with one another, so will you.
That’s nice if those burners happen to match the ones you would’ve chosen, but if not, you have a problem. Life forces you to choose either way, but if you’re not the one picking, you’ll end up with a lot of regrets.
Besides starting to make the choice, Nathan Barry suggests living your life in seasons. Yes, it sucks to compromise, but no one said you have to stick with one compromise for the rest of your life.
In high school, my friends and family burners were turned up all the way. In college, that shifted to friends and work, then work and health and now, I’m on work and family. Next year? Who knows.
It’s a little tweak to that line from earlier, but it makes all the difference: “You can have anything you want, maybe even everything, just not all at once.”
Right now, I’m laying the foundation of the rest of my working life and spending what little time I have with the people I care about the most. In exchange, I can’t see my friends every day and I might not be in perfect shape.
I can be okay with that. And that’s the whole point.
When you work hard in your career, on your body, for your relationships, you can achieve a lot. You should. But if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Don’t expect your dedication to becoming better to absolve you of all problems. Self-improvement, like all tools, is imperfect. Embracing the Four Burners Theory can make you happier, because it allows you to not fret over what you’re temporarily missing out on.
That’s the solution, I think. We don’t need to look for a bypass. We can just accept the problem and that’ll do.
Half of happiness is being okay with what you don’t get.
Sometimes, it helps to remember that, in spite of what Gandhi said, tomorrow will be another day.
When Batman meets Superman for the first time in Dawn of Justice, you instantly know who’s in charge and who’s in trouble.
After crashing the Batmobile and interrupting Bruce Wayne on his rogue mission, Superman tells him to ‘bury the bat’ and let it go, putting mercy before justice. Of course Batman doesn’t, swearing revenge.
Lately, I feel a lot like Superman in this scene. With a stern look on my face, I swoop in to try and fix other people’s mess, but don’t get much credit for it. This is a cause for concern, but not about those other people, about me.
A lot of us strive to become superhuman, but this pursuit has a shadow. It looms ever closer and if we don’t watch out, it’ll swallow us whole.
Despite our best intentions, self-improvement can make us worse.
Over the past three years, I’ve gotten really good at noticing things. Not just about myself, but others too. In fact, I now can’t not notice things.
I notice when 10 out of 10 people on the subway are on their phone, when the dude in front of me is switching only between his sports betting account and Tinder and when the guy four seats over wastes all his time instead of working. I notice people who are always late, always behind and always broke and I can pinpoint exactly what needs fixing.
Now, I finally noticed that all this noticing is driving me nuts. I’d love to say “I don’t mind” and mean it, but it’s never true. I do mind. I mind everything.
Mindfulness is a gift when it’s directed inward, but outward? Not so much. It’s a good thing to realize you’re biting your nails, but constantly observing other people’s behavior? That’s a curse.
Why?
Mark Twain remarked that “comparison is the death of joy.” But, and this is worse, it’s also the birth of misery.
Comparing ourselves is an instinct as fundamental as survival itself. If Gronk can outrun the bear, pick the right berries and get the pretty neanderthal lady, maybe you should be more like Gronk. In a modern society built mainly on and for individual freedom, however, this is useless.
And yet, every notice is a new chance to compare. He eats well, I should eat better. She wastes time, I’m more productive. Even if we rationally estimate our own abilities, comparing still hurts us, an Oxford study suggests:
“The findings potentially have implications for social interactions in the workplace as well as clinical disorders such as depression.”
Interesting, right? Confidence and clinical depression can have the same source: comparing yourself to others. Most of the time, the results of your comparisons don’t even matter.
You’ll land in a bad place anyway.
Most people make poor choices. They don’t want to worry about money, or getting up early, or if what they do matters. They, however, would never consider these choices poor. That label is pure judgement on my part.
The problem is that with so much mindfulness, millions of mini comparisons, judgement itself becomes a habit. This is a common side effect of self-improvement. Since it’s all about getting better, you’re left with only two opinions of other people:
Whichever one you settle on, you lose. This is self-improvement’s dark secret.
When you constantly compare yourself and decide you’re worse, you spiral into depression. But what happens when you think you’re better?
Imagine you’re Superman. You don’t need to compare, you have actual proof: you can’t die, you know everything and you’re physically stronger than anyone. You’re the ultimate success in self-improvement.
Unlike most of us, Superman didn’t choose his superiority, but he paid the same price: loneliness.
Sebastian Marshall perfectly described it in an essay 6 years ago:
You know what I think it is? You won’t be understood once you step off into the abyss. The more you do it, the more people won’t understand.
The second guy I mentioned, the effort guy? He’s got coworkers right now he can commiserate with who understand him. The business idea I mentioned to him doesn’t exist right now and there’s a demand for it. His income is such that even with a low price point he could still make 2x-3x what he’s making now and fulfill a market need.
But then what? Then he’s the only guy doing this thing. No commiseration. People won’t understand him as much. And the more you do that, the more people don’t understand. If you keep taking all those edges that no one else will, pretty soon your neighbors don’t understand you, can’t understand you.
It’s just you.
The higher you climb on the mountain, the thinner the air gets. More success, fewer fellow climbers, until you’re left with only one truth:
You’re the best, but you’re alone.
The internet is full of posts telling people how they can become the best. Be more creative, more productive, more aware. But once you achieve that, once you’re better, faster, stronger, how do you blend back in?
Even if you become superhuman, you’ll still spend your life among mortals. How do you deal with that? I see no posts about this issue.
We’re so worried about acquiring power — over our minds, our bodies, our time — that we forget learning how to use it responsibly to serve the world we live in.
And so, often, by the time we get it, we’re victims of our own success.
It all happens slowly, of course. One day you opt out of binge drinking, the next you tell your friends to get their shit together and two years later, you run your own dev shop while they extended yet another semester.
You notice, you compare and through the years, you silently collect millions of judgements until you conclude you’re alone. You might succeed in self-improvement, but fail in being human.
This is the dangerous path many of us are on. I know I am. I must find a way to turn off my comparison machine, because it’s been running too long already. That’s the big, wicked twist of the story.
In that scene from the beginning, I’m not Superman. I’m Batman.
A lot of us are. The frustration from the loneliness of our path makes us bitter, impatient, and angry. So we abandon our true mission, one comparison at a time, until we can retreat only into our lonely cave of judgment. Not despite, but because we come out on top.
You may feel you’re ready to pay the toll of self-improvement, but you still might not like who you turn into. We think we’re improving ourselves, when actually, we’re becoming the villain of our own story.
If you run away from mediocrity, but right into malice, what good does it do?
For Clark Kent, the option to compare went out the window when he was a child. The moment he pushed the first school bus out of the river, any doubts were gone: if he goes rogue, we all die. Lucky for us all, before putting on his cape, Superman turned his powers inward.
That’s what we must do and it’s much more important than how much power we have. The problem is neither other people’s indifference to, nor our obsession with self-improvement. It’s the comparison that stinks.
Be better for the sake of being a better you, not better than everyone else.
There’s not much to gain from Pomodoro timers and dollar cost averaging for the people who enjoy their lives precisely for the lack of those things. It just so happens that because I care about self-improvement, I care about you-improvement too. Because then we could nerd out together. But we can’t and so I feel lonely.
It is my duty to deal with that loneliness and make sure it doesn’t drag me down. There is no ‘other people’s mess’. Just my mess. Nothing to swoop in for. The dirt is in front of my own doorstep, waiting for me to sweep.
You have a dirty doorstep too. Only if we all sweep will our streets be clean.
When the world asked him to, Superman turned himself in. When the world asked him to, Superman appeared in court. Knowing full well the rules did not apply, he abided by them anyway, for the sake of the greater good.
In a sick twist of fate, meeting the renegade bat led to his doomsday. As the ultimate of human evolution, Superman paid the ultimate price. It’s what makes it so hard to get out of the trap: You can be a saint and still lose.
That’s why the movie is beloved by hardcore fans, but commercially, far from the success it should have been. We don’t want to see the hero do everything right and then die. We know life’s not fair, but we hate to be reminded of this reality.
And so, as he tries to build a new team of heroes in a post-Superman world, Batman is too late when he realizes it was never his turn to judge:
Alfred: “You’ve got a team here!”
Bruce Wayne: “Superman could bring this team together better than I ever could. His strength…”
Alfred: “Doesn’t matter how strong you are or what abilities you
might have…”Bruce Wayne: “He was more human than I am.”
— Silence —
Bruce Wayne: “He lived in this world. Fell in love, got a job. Despite all that power. The world needs Superman.”
Finally, Batman learns a true hero is not defined by the superiority of his power, but by the times he chooses to wield it. This moment is called a Harajuku Moment. Coined by Chad Fowler, Tim Ferriss defined it in The 4-Hour Body:
“It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. There is no point in getting started until it happens. No matter how many bullet points and recipes I provide, you will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.”
We all need such a moment in our quest for self-improvement. You have to acknowledge you’re not a hero to start acting like one. I had mine when I read this quote in The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday:
“When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults, rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others.” — Seneca
Superman is dead. We must become our own heroes, or his sacrifice was in vain. I don’t know where you’ll find your Harajuku Moment, but you need one. Until then, until we learn to use our powers, the best we can do is ask:
What would Superman do?
Most of the time, he would probably just keep sweeping.
Note: This guide is for iPhone users, but all optimizations are transferable to other brands and operating systems.
If your phone was more like your toothbrush, your life would be a lot better.
Your toothbrush is the greatest tool of all time. Why? You only use it when you’re supposed to, for as long as you need to and never forget what it’s for.
A great tool serves only one purpose: to put control in your hands at all times, whether you’re wielding it or not.
That makes your phone a lousy tool at best. It constantly clamors for your attention and, once it has what it wants, never lets go. According to the latest Nielsen report, we spend 2.5 hours on our phones, every single day. I can’t see why anyone would need to use their phone 17.5 hours a week, unless they work part-time at a call center. Can you?
Your phone is your toothbrush’s arch enemy, trying to suck as much energy out of you as it can. Today, we’re going to change that. In a few easy steps, we’ll turn your phone into a mindfulness enhancer, making it the useful tool it was always meant to be.
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It was almost dark. The white Chevy was rattling along the road. I don’t remember who was driving. In the dusk, two road signs emerged. One said ‘Cancun,’ pointing straight ahead, the other ‘Aeropuerto,’ directing to the right. For some reason, we took the right when, actually, we needed to just drive on.
“Sh*t, we have to turn around. And our gas is low.”
In Mexico, there are few exits off the highway. Hence, they have something called a ‘Retorno.’ It’s a U-Turn, right on the highway. But they only show up every few miles.
Not sure whether we’d make it, we kept driving until we found one. We turned around, and, after a 25-mile detour, barely made it to the next gas station.
What’s the lesson here? We occasionally miss the forest for the trees and get lost. That’s okay. But it also means that sometimes, we have to turn around 180 degrees to get to our destination.
Today is about making such a turn, but one that’s much more important than the one I made five years ago in Mexico. It’s a turn that, once you make it, will fix the relationship you have with your passion and your work.
From 2010 to 2014 I was extremely passionate about entrepreneurship. I also made zero dollars as an entrepreneur. I generated hundreds of business ideas.
There was the lunchbox that heats up your lunch, the site that matches self-made lyrics with self-made beats from different people and the bakery that’s open nights. The vitamin popsicles for babies, the How I Met Your Mother sightseeing tours and of course the restaurant that runs on iPads.
Sometimes, I even took the next step. Like when I asked Milka if they let me resell the broken chocolate that never makes it out of the factory.
They didn’t.
What was the problem? Besides passion, I had not much to act from. Always enthusiastic, never productive. I made the same mistake — the only mistake — all people driven solely by passion make:
I stopped. Over and over, I stopped.
Seth Godin calls this “thrashing” in Linchpin:
“Thrashing is the apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops. Thrashing might mean changing the user interface or rewriting an introductory paragraph. Sometimes thrashing is merely a tweak; other times it involves major surgery. Thrashing is essential. The question is: when to thrash?”
When it comes to projects, any project, really, thrashing early is a good thing. You argue until every detail is set. Then you work until the deadline comes and ship. Thrash too late and you’ll never ship on time, sometimes not at all.
“The habit that successful artists have developed is simple: they thrash a lot at the start, because starting means that they are going to finish. Not maybe, not probably, but going to.”
There’s only one problem: You can’t thrash your way to your passion.
It’s just an idea we’ve been sold on so much that we never dared questioning it. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport calls it “the passion hypothesis:”
“The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.”
This is a great problem to spend your time on, because you can do it forever. Unlike the user interface design for your food scanning app, it’s unsolvable. There’s no passion meter in our brains that tells us “yup, I’m 7 degrees more passionate about this abstract idea than this one.”
That’s why so many of us spend years, in my case four, being stuck in passion, and it slowly drives us insane. Ryan Holiday calls it “the passion paradox” in Ego Is the Enemy:
“If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation — deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re stuck at work too.
Throughout my four years of passion thrashing I didn’t just not make progress, I also paid another, more subtle, but even more severe price: I was constantly unhappy with what I was doing at the time — studying for college.
“This isn’t what I want to do. I need to find my passion or I’ll be stuck in this career path forever,” I would tell myself. Of course it’s exactly this self-induced pressure that kept me stuck.
That’s what makes the passion hypothesis so dangerous, Cal says:
“The passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.”
The result is Resistance, as Steven Pressfield labeled the invisible force that keeps us from getting things done in The War of Art. Constant Resistance against our current stop in life, against the people we work with and against the jobs we’re tasked with right now.
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes we’ve long found our passion, but are so busy thrashing that we can’t see it. We don’t hear our calling and so no work gets done. Take George R. R. Martin, for example. Brilliant guy, but, talking to Stephen King, he can’t help but admit his capitulation to Resistance:
“How the f*ck do you write so many books so fast? I think, ‘Oh I’ve had a really good six months. I’ve written three chapters.’ And you’ve finished three books in that time.”
This particular manifestation of Resistance is one of its meanest tricks. It tells us we’re the victim. Steve notes in the book:
“A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.”
That way, we can continue complaining about the misery of our current line of work, without really having to do anything about it. “Yeah, work sucks, but…gotta pay the bills, right? I hope I soon find my passion.”
Damn. That’s one giant quagmire we’ve maneuvered ourselves into here. How the hell do we get out of that?
Maybe, like me and my friends, driving on that lone road in Mexico, all we have to do is turn around. Take the retorno. Drive in the opposite direction.
What if, instead of thrashing through different passions, you just picked one and treated it like a profession? What if, instead of moaning at work, you just pretended it’s your dream career?
What if you made a U-turn from passion to profession and vice versa? A P-Turn, if you will.
The great minds we learned from so far think it’s a great idea. And so do I.
As we’re thrashing through our passions, we inevitably reach a point of confusion with each one. Welcome to The Dip. At this point, we’ve done all the brainstorming, the convincing and maybe even some planning or other busywork.
But then, we look at what lies ahead…and we poop our pants.
That’s why most of us are serial quitters. It’s like constantly switching lines in the supermarket: with each switch, you lose time and start over, ultimately taking longer than whoever just stuck with their queue. Seth says this isn’t limited to grocery shopping:
“There are queues everywhere. Do you know an entrepreneur-wannabe who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better opportunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere.
He never gets anywhere because he’s always switching lines, never able to really run for it. While starting up is thrilling, it’s not until you get through the Dip that your efforts payoff.
Countless entrepreneurs have perfected the starting part, but give up long before they finish paying their dues. The sad news is that when you start over, you get very little credit for how long you stood in line with your last great venture.”
But what’s the opposite of serial quitting? Turning Pro, if you ask Steve Pressfield.
“When we turn pro, everything becomes simple. We now structure our hours not to flee from fear, but to confront it and overcome it. This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up and it changes what time we go to bed. It changes what we do and what we don’t do. It changes the activities we engage in and with what attitude we engage in them.”
The distinction is so clear that even the choice itself turns into a vivid memory, Steven says:
“I can state absolutely that the term of my life can be divided into two parts: before turning pro, and after.”
What’s more, we’re all pros already. Where? At the very same jobs we now hold and despise so much. How so? Steve made a list:
1. We show up every day.
2. We show up no matter what.
3. We stay on the job all day.
4. We are committed over the long haul.
5. The stakes for us are high and real.
6. We accept remuneration for our labor.
7. We do not overidentify with our jobs
8. We master the technique of our jobs.
9. We have a sense of humor about our jobs.
10.We receive praise or blame in the real world.
Imagine what might happen if you just picked one of your many ideas, just one thing you like, and treated it like your paycheck depended on it. How much more likely would you be to finally make it through the dip — any dip — that brings you closer to your goals? A lot.
You might even start to like your job.
The attitude of a detached professional is in stark contrast that of the passionate amateur. Cal Newport calls it “the craftsman mindset”:
“I’ve presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.”
This mindset is exactly what you teach yourself when you work on your passion like a pro. And with it comes motivation. Lots of it. Daniel Pink knows why. In his TED talk, he explains why the carrots and sticks approach to motivation is dead:
“Our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources — it’s built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That’s actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn’t work, often doesn’t work, and often does harm.”
It’s true. We don’t like our jobs if all they do is pay the bills and that’s why we chase passion in the first place. We. Want. More. But what more? Dan knows that too. He proposes a new model, which he calls “Motivation 3.0,” in his book Drive:
“That new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.”
What makes these three elements so powerful? Well…
Besides annual hack-a-thons and Google’s 20% time, companies embracing a ROWE — Results Only Work Environment — really take autonomy to the next level, Dan says:
“In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.”
What happens? According to Dan:
“Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down.”
If you’ve ever played a mind-numbingly simple video game, you’ve experienced the power of mastery firsthand within minutes. Take Tiny Wings, for example:
The only thing you have to do is tap and hold the screen. And yet, the first time you lose, you must get better. To the pro, attempting to achieve mastery feels as natural as breathing, Steve notes:
“The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.”
The reason purpose overpowers passion is that passion pertains to what you want, while purpose emphasizes what you’re willing to give up for it. Ryan makes the distinction clear:
“Passion is about. I am so passionate about ______. Purpose is to and for. I must do ______. I was put here to accomplish ______. I am willing to endure ______ for the sake of this. Actually, purpose deemphasizes the I. Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.”
Since purpose knocks out our ego, it allows us to approach our work with a sense of realism, some distance and a healthy dose of intimidation from what we’re trying to do. In a nutshell:
“Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.”
This is it. The foundation of the work ethic we all want so badly. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are what help us push through the dip — and part of the reason why we’ve fallen for the passion hypothesis in the first place. It dangles autonomy and purpose right in front of us, but it hides the most controllable aspect: mastery.
Mastery is a gateway to autonomy and purpose.
The assistant who masters scheduling may soon join business meetings. If she keeps doing well, she’ll get promoted. Suddenly, she has a team to care for. A task bigger than herself. Autonomy and purpose have naturally followed from mastery.
Did you catch it?
While this new model of Motivation 3.0 is built-in when you chase your passion like a pro, there is something else about it worth noting: None of these things indicate the type of work you choose. It doesn’t matter what you work on.
Autonomy, mastery and purpose are all about how you work, not what you do.
In Cal’s words:
“Working right trumps finding the right work.”
Or, in Seth’s:
“Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.”
Since no job will magically shower you with passion and motivation can be found entirely in how you work, not what you do, you can find autonomy, master and purpose not just in your favorite job, but in any job. Even the one you have right now. And you can use mastery to unlock those you don’t already have.
As it turns out, turning pro works. Everywhere and always. Chances are, you don’t need a new job. You just have to do the one you have like you really mean it.
I don’t remember the day, but I remember the decision. “I’m going to write at least 250 words each day.” I did that for six months. Then I wrote 1,000 words every day for a year. And then some more.
It was only when my passion for entrepreneurship degenerated into a daily writing habit that I finally started making progress. What’s more, it allowed me to stop complaining about college and take responsibility. Not just for studying, but for whatever my task is. No matter how menial.
When you’re a craftsman, all work serves a purpose.
Passion, profession, it all blurs together, because you always see work for what it truly is: an opportunity to get better. That’s the real power of making the P-turn. Unlike me in Mexico, you can turn around whenever you want to.
So why not make it right now?
