Author: Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness

ISBN: 978-0593138793

A book for exceptionally driven people that want to avoid burnout. In my belief, if you read the below excerpts you don't need to read the whole piece.

EXCERPTS

All the greats shared something else in common: An unrelenting drive. An eternal hunger. An inability to be satiated. Passion.

They are people who, simply put, cannot be content. People who thrive on the razor’s edge. Perpetual pushers of boundaries and limits. People who relish giving something their all.

This urge to keep pushing and pushing also has a dark side. Passion often comes at the expense of time and energy spent on family, friends, and other activities, including the simple joys of life. Too much passion, especially without equally strong self-awareness, can completely uproot your life and lead to burnout. This realization, or dilemma, really, is shared by just about every passionate person whom we’ve come to know. There’s no way around it; when you are deep in the throes of a passion, when you’re really going for something, it can seem as if nothing else matters. This can be a good thing, a bad thing, or, more often than not, a bit of both at the same time.

Yes, passion can be a blessing; it’s a hallmark of mastery and a precursor to great success. But if it’s not pursued thoughtfully and handled carefully, passion can quickly become a curse, something that is far more destructive than it is productive. This dark kind of passion is especially prevalent in a culture that conditions us to crave quick fixes and instant gratification, tempts us to judge ourselves by the number of “followers” or “friends” we have on social media, and repeatedly tells us that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”; a culture that is achievement-oriented and compels us to focus solely on results at all costs.

“The reality is great highs, terrible lows, and unrelenting stress.”

Consider just a few of the negative paths that passion can lead you down: You become a slave to external results and validation. Following early success, the desire for more—more money, more fame, more followers—can easily take over. Your initial passion for doing an activity turns into a passion for achievement and results.

Surrendering completely to passion may work for a day, a month, or even a year [or a decade]. But if left unchecked, most passions burn bright and burn short. You become blind to everything but your passion. You throw yourself so fully into a pursuit that you neglect everything outside it. Your marriage falls apart. Your children grow up without you realizing it. You ignore your health. You burn out.

You lose joy. There is also a risk that your passion’s spark will dim slowly over time. A familiar story goes like this: You turn what started off as a wonderful hobby into a job (Blessed!); then you realize that what once was a wonderful hobby soon starts to feel like a job (This isn’t what I thought it would be like); and it’s not long before you start to question how something you once loved can seem like a chore (How on earth did this happen?). Though you never thought such a turn was possible, you come to dread your passion.

There is, of course, a different—and far better—kind of passion. It emerges when you become wrapped up in an activity primarily for the joy of doing the activity itself.

Finding your passion is only half the battle anyway. Knowing how to sustain and channel it in a productive and healthy manner is the other—and equally important—half.

If you don’t proactively manage your passion, you put yourself at risk for: − Becoming a slave to external validation and results. − Burnout. − Regret. − Loss of joy.

Latin word passio, which means “suffering”

Even though your body is at dinner with your family, your mind is elsewhere, fixated on the new product you’re launching or how you could rewrite the second sentence in the fifth paragraph on the thirty-fourth page of your book. Complete tunnel vision. Full-on immersion. Passion’s got ahold of you. This overwhelming feeling of attachment is birthed deep in our brain, where it’s fueled by a powerful neurochemical called dopamine. As dopamine courses through our brain, making its way from the primitive areas to more recently evolved ones, it sets off a cascade of neural reactions that push us toward a goal and create an expectation that a reward will soon follow. We don’t get hooked on the feeling associated with achievement, we get hooked on the feeling associated with the chase. [Therefore: the moment you reach the goal, you set another one to start a new chase.] Unlike other feel-good neurochemicals that are released after you’ve accomplished a goal, the far more potent dopamine is released prior, during the pursuit.

We’re not wired to simply be content. We’re wired to keep pushing.

Emerging science suggests that individuals with ADHD tendencies might be less sensitive to dopamine, meaning they need even more of the neurochemical to feel content. This is liable to predispose them to pursuing activities with relentless fervor, since doing so releases dopamine. Remember, dopamine is released during the pursuit of goals, so it’s not surprising that people who are insensitive to it (and thus need more of it to feel good) embody persistence, demonstrating unwavering determination and relentless drive. The more dopamine someone needs to feel good, the more willing she is to strive for and chase after ridiculously challenging rewards, even if doing so turns out to be detrimental to her in some way.

Although we like to think that personality traits like persistence result from hard work or how we were raised, that’s far from the whole story.

The more someone repeats an activity—especially ones that yield positive feedback, be it winning gold medals, achieving promotions, or luring in romantic partners—the more they crave dopamine. Each time we pursue such endeavors, dopamine is released, increasing our arousal, attention, and motivation. Over time, and in a process similar to other addictive substances, our brains become less sensitive to dopamine, meaning we need more of it to feel good. This craving, if you will, leads us back to the pursuit, which triggers the release of yet more dopamine. And so a cycle of longing, and one that is inherently resistant to contentment, persists. It’s worth reiterating that this cycle is a natural one. It results from our evolutionary programming, which pushes us to become addicted to the pursuit of rewards, not the achievement of them.

Gibson believes that passion may be rooted at least partially in something that Sigmund Freud long ago called ego fragility.

Athletes who make it to the highest level of their respective sports, for example, tend to have a greater number of siblings (increased competition for their parents’ attention) and are significantly more likely to have divorced parents. Out of this body of work came the increasingly popular phrase “talent needs trauma.”

Though this isn’t always the case, some kind of perceived past trauma is common among passionate individuals, and not only for the biological reasons we discussed earlier in this chapter. In addition to triggering a cycle of dopamine dependence and the ensuing feeling of ceaseless yearning, the relentless pursuit of an objective can also serve as an escape. Throwing ourselves wholly into a passion shrinks our world, overshadowing whatever inner struggles we may be facing and making us feel comfortable and in control.

Passion and addiction are close cousins. Love and addiction are alterations of the same brain circuits.

Some of us may be born with a biological profile that makes us more likely to fall under passion’s spell, but with enough repetition of an activity we view as meaningful, anyone can get hooked.

It is very much an all-or-nothing approach, and far too often leaves people on a never-ending search for some sort of illusory perfection.

There is an expectation that the initial alchemy, the feeling we have when we start a new hobby or job, should send a clear signal as to whether we’ve hit the mark: We should be excited, enthusiastic, and energized. If we don’t experience these positive emotions from the get-go, best to keep on searching. While this mind-set may be the most prevalent one, it’s not necessarily best. Individuals who adopt a fit mind-set of passion tend to overemphasize their initial feelings. They are more likely to choose pursuits (and especially professions) based on preliminary assessments, not potential for growth—even though the latter is generally more important than the former for lasting fulfillment and satisfaction. People with fit mind-sets for passion are also more likely to give up on new pursuits at the first sign of challenge or disappointment, shrugging their shoulders and thinking, I guess this isn’t for me.

A better approach to finding your passion is to lower the bar from perfect to interesting, then give yourself permission to pursue your interests with an open mind. Embracing exploration is so important because the path to finding your passion can be long and circuitous, with many wrong turns in the direction of activities, jobs, or other opportunities that initially appeared exhilarating yet proved to be something else. But have the courage to keep on exploring. This doesn’t mean you should pursue just anything and everything, but it does mean you should nurture an open mind, and not move on so swiftly from the activities and ideas that capture your attention.

Deci and Ryan found that, contrary to common wisdom (both then and, to a large extent, now), one’s drive to pursue activities is not predominantly reliant on external rewards like money, fame, or recognition. Rather, enduring motivation comes from satisfying three basic needs: competency, autonomy, and relatedness.

• Competency is about having a sense of control over the outcome of your efforts and the ability to make progress over time.
• Autonomy, also sometimes referred to as authenticity, is about acting in harmony with your innermost being. It means you’re connecting what you do with who you are. Your work should reflect your core values and beliefs; you should express some part of your innermost self in your activity.
• Relatedness: The final component of self-determination theory is one that binds us to others: the need to feel connected to and/or like you are a part of something larger.

If you want to do something entrepreneurial—in essence, attempting to monetize a passion—are you better off keeping or quitting your day job? After interviewing thousands of entrepreneurs, they found that those who kept their day job while pursuing a personal venture on the side—or what the researchers called “hybrid entrepreneurship”—were 33 percent less likely to fail than those who quit their jobs altogether. As the Harvard Business Review put it, “Going all-in on your start-up might not be the best idea.”

When you go all in, you move from a place of wanting to succeed to needing to succeed. The day you say you have to do something, you’re screwed.

Such a strategy [hybrid approach] brings two major benefits: First, you are more likely to take bigger risks with higher payoffs when you know that failure won’t ruin you. You won’t have to worry about playing it safe or constantly second-guessing yourself while pursuing your passion. Doing so relieves pressure and allows more room for error.

There is, of course, a case to be made for going all in on a passion from the outset, for choosing must over should. Perhaps for those who truly thrive under immense pressure, going all in from the outset translates to better performance. But for the vast majority of people—at least according to the research—the best route to directing more time and energy toward a passion is to follow the barbell strategy, incrementally shifting more and more weight away from safe and stable (i.e., your day job) and toward what makes you tick (i.e., your passion).

Vallerand’s obsessive passion refers to those that become motivated by achievement, results, and external rewards more so than by internal satisfaction. It’s when someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself.

One of the foremost reasons for this is that someone who is obsessively passionate ties their self-worth to things outside their control. This often ends up creating high levels of distress.

Being passionate about—or, perhaps better put, a slave to—the achievement of an external result that you cannot control creates a volatile and fragile sense of self-worth.

Erich Fromm wrote, “Human freedom is restricted to the extent to which we are bound to our own egos. By being bound to our egos we stand in our own way…If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, then who am I?”

Those who are most focused on reaching some external barometer of success are often the same people who struggle most to enjoy it. That’s because they’ll always crave more.

Hedonic adaptation says that we quickly adapt to a state of happiness or contentedness, and it’s not long before we’ll want more.

“Our very success can be the cause of a greater anxiety for further preservation of our success,” writes the poet David Whyte.

Individuals who display obsessive passion are more likely to engage in unethical behavior and are at a higher risk for anxiety, depression, and burnout.

In a separate study, when Olympians were asked if they would take a drug that guaranteed them a gold medal but would kill them in five years, half of them said yes.

Yet this isn’t the only way passion can turn into suffering; this also happens when passion gets hijacked by fear. In particular, fear of failure.

When we shed fear, it’s not that we become complacent. If anything, we become even more inclined to push the envelope, take chances, and express our authentic selves. We go from playing “not to lose” to playing to win. In psychology, this is referred to as the difference between a prevention and promotion mind-set.

The two main forms that the dark, bad kind of passion takes, both of which are detrimental to long-term performance, health, and happiness: The rewards-driven variety, in which an individual becomes addicted to external results, recognition, and the validation of others. The fear-driven variety, in which someone does anything it takes to avoid failure, not wanting to disappoint others or themselves. In both cases, passion is fueled by something other than a joy of the pursuit itself. And in both cases, passion easily turns into passio, suffering.

Your passion should not come from the outside. It should come from within.

When you sit down to write, you should sit down to write, not to sell books. When you show up to work, you should show up to make a meaningful contribution, not to get promoted or earn bonuses. When you train and compete, you should do so to get better, to master your body, not to win awards or improve in the rankings. When you love—be it a partner or a child—you should do so out of nurturing a special relationship between you and the object of your affection, not because you fear losing them.

Harmonious passion manifests mainly from activities that are freely chosen without contingencies; when you do something because you enjoy it, not because it offers potential rewards, and not to avoid negative repercussions. Not every moment of harmonious passion is necessarily pleasing, but overall, it is deeply fulfilling. It aligns closely with the ancient Greek notion of eudaimonia, or a kind of happiness that results not from overwhelming pleasure but from striving to meet one’s full potential by engaging in activities that one considers meaningful.

The great paradox, however, is that although external achievement is never a primary goal of harmonious passion, when you become completely immersed in what you’re doing for the joy of the activity itself, it is often a by-product. Those who focus most on success are least likely to achieve it. Those who focus least on success, and focus on the process of engaging in their craft instead, are most likely to achieve it.

Individuals on the path of mastery are driven from within. Their primary motivation isn’t external measures of success or fear, and it’s certainly not satisfying others or conforming to a certain peer group or social norms. Rather, their motivation originates from an internal desire to improve and engage in an activity for its own sake.

Take, for example, an Olympic swimmer on the path of mastery. She is unlikely to be enthusiastic about every workout. And while she’ll certainly be excited for the Olympic Games, that still won’t be her primary motivation. Rather, her focus will be on her overall progression as a swimmer—on pushing her physical and psychological capabilities and evolving her stroke and its relationship with the water.

It’s worth repeating: The mastery mind-set acknowledges that external motivators—be it Olympic medals, book sales, art commissions, or venture capital funding—will influence your motivation. At the same time, however, the mastery mind-set ensures that the influence of such external motivators takes a backseat.

Don’t judge yourself against others. Judge yourself against prior versions of yourself and the effort you are exerting in the present moment. This is about as healthy a form of competition as there is.

It’s also important to note that motivational patterns are finicky and start early in life. If you work with children in any manner, do encourage them to follow their interests and support their natural talents. Do not exert too much pressure or emphasize external rewards (for achievement) or punishment (for failure). Your actions will either promote or suppress the mastery mind-set. Far too many parents, teachers, and coaches teach children to measure their value based on external signals or results.

The mastery mind-set involves shifting your focus from achieving any one goal itself to executing on the process that gives you the best chance of more general improvement over time. Someone who embodies the mastery mind-set judges herself based not on whether she accomplishes her specific goal but rather on how well she executes her process. After all, it is the process, not the outcome, that is within your control.

First, set a goal—but remember, it should serve more as a direction than a destination. Next, figure out the steps that are required to make progress toward that goal and that are within your control. Then (mostly) forget about the goal, and focus on nailing the steps instead.

Process spurs progress, and progress, on a deep neurochemical level, primes us to persist. Focusing on the process also ensures that your self-worth never hinges on events that are outside of your control. Focusing on the process also fosters a wonderful sense of internal satisfaction that comes with knowing that you put in the work; a special kind of confidence, fullness, and contentment that no one can take away from you. It’s a way of saying, “I did everything in my control, so let the chips fall where they may.”

In an ironic twist, adhering to a goal of “getting better” can be especially powerful when it seems that you are destined to get worse. That’s because in the grand scheme of things, “better” is less about objective results and more about the evolution of your relationship with your passion. “Better” is about how the practice of your passion transforms you as a person. This shift becomes especially important as we age, losing some of our physical and perhaps even cognitive abilities.

Someone who in their youth ran exclusively to win races might take up doubles tennis or water aerobics in old age. But a runner will continue to pound the pavement. And even though her finishing times may stagnate—and perhaps “run” will even turn into “jog” or “walk”—her relationship with the sport will continue to evolve and grow. No matter how much she slows down, as long as she keeps training, she will be faster than if she quits, and that in and of itself serves as the primary victory.

Failure sets off a cascade of changes that help you evolve so you can meet a greater challenge next time. In other words, your body can’t really grow unless it fails. This principle holds true far beyond your muscles.

Individuals who have faced adversity and faltered in the past are more likely to show persistent effort and succeed in the future.

Shedding your fear of failure doesn’t mean you should actively seek out failure. But it does free you to pursue bold challenges, to push the envelope. When you do, one of two things will happen: You’ll either break through, or you’ll fail. Both outcomes are integral to ongoing advancement down mastery’s path.

No one becomes a master after a single, perfect attempt. Mastery is the product of many failures, each serving an important lesson.

“The master has failed more times than the student has even tried.”

Remember that what feels like failure in the short term is often essential to your ability to make long-term gains.

Aikido master George Leonard, “To learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau.”

If you ask yourself why you are passionate about something and your answer is related to external validation or failure avoidance, it should prompt some serious reflection. But if your answer is aligned with mastery—for example, you’re engaged in something to grow, learn, and become a better human being—then regularly coming back to your purpose is a powerful way to remind yourself of the value of staying the course, especially during times of boredom, when you’re on the plateau.

Have you ever met an interesting person—let alone a deeply passionate one—who is balanced?

“You’ve got to be a minimalist to be a maximalist; if you want to be really good, master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you’ve got to say no to many others.”

“Boys, you have a choice,” Stewart said. “You can choose to pursue excellence, to be great at something, or you can settle. Most of your peers will choose the latter, choosing the road toward mediocrity, and others will attempt to drag you down, to get you to enjoy the aimless wandering that most do in high school. Some of your friends may be more well-rounded than you, having filled their résumé with various honor societies, debate clubs, student councils, and perhaps an internship or two; but they will never be great. It’s my belief that you can only be great at two things at a time. Any more than that and they all suffer. Being on this team and choosing to be great means that your decision has been made: Your two things will be running and school.” Coach Stewart knew that his capacity to transform the school’s lackluster running program into a formidable force required igniting an intense passion within his runners. He also knew that passion and balance are hard, if not impossible, to reconcile.

Our time, attention, and energy are limited. The more passionate we become about any one pursuit, the less of ourselves we have to offer to everything else.

The problem isn’t that you sacrifice a lot for passion, but that it’s all too easy to let the inertia of a passionate experience carry you forward without ever really evaluating what you’re sacrificing—for example, time with friends and family, other hobbies, even simple pleasures like catching up on the latest episode of your favorite television show.

Lots of people equate a passionate pursuit, going “all in,” with working all the time. But this isn’t a recipe for sustainable success. It’s a recipe for burnout.

If you want to make lasting progress, you’ve got to rest. Working hard toward something, or what we call productive stress, doesn’t yield growth. Growth only occurs when stress is followed by rest.

If you really love your work and want to do a good job at it, the last thing you should do is sacrifice sleep.

“For me, not working is the real work.” If you consider not working a part of the work, you’re more likely to not work.

They all tend to consider rest an essential part of their jobs. They think about rest not as something passive (i.e., nothing is happening, you’re wasting time) but rather as something active (i.e., your brain—or, if you’re an athlete, your body—is growing and getting better), and thus they’re far more liable to respect it. Seen in this light, rest isn’t separate from the work—rest is an integral part of the work. Going all in on something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rest.

There are also risks inherent to having your identity tied up in a single activity—mainly, what happens when doing that activity is no longer an option? It’s not surprising that athletes and super-driven professionals often struggle with depression and other mental health issues when they are forced to retire.

Self-awareness is about creating the time and space to know yourself, constantly checking in with yourself (since your “self” changes over time), and then living your life accordingly. It also ensures that you are making conscious decisions about how you spend your time and energy, and thus decreases the chances that you’ll have regrets about what you did—and didn’t—do.

For some people, when you zoom in on any given day, week, month, or maybe even year, they don’t appear at all balanced. But when you zoom out and look across the totality of their lives, they are actually quite balanced and whole. This is the kind of balance to strive for.

Shalane Flanagan: “I like to go all in on one extreme for a period of time and then shift to another extreme. For me, this means going all in on running, and then taking a vacation where I go all in on things like family and other pursuits. It’s too hard—physically and mentally—to try to do everything at once.”

Maybe the good life is not about trying to achieve some sort of illusory balance. Instead, maybe it’s about pursuing your passions fully and harmoniously, but with enough self-awareness to regularly evaluate what you’re not pursuing as a result—and make changes if necessary.

There are many benefits of living an unbalanced life. Just think about the times you’ve felt most alive in your own life and answer the question, were you balanced? It’s OK to be unbalanced, so long as you don’t let the inertia of a passionate experience push you forward on autopilot without ever evaluating what you’re giving up as a result. Don’t strive for balance. Instead, strive for the self-awareness that is necessary to evaluate the unique trade-offs that passion requires making in your own life.

Similar studies show that when individuals think or journal in third person rather than in first person—for example, “John is running into challenges with his start-up that seem insurmountable” versus “I am running into challenges with my start-up that seem insurmountable”—they also evaluate themselves and their situations more clearly. What would you say to that other person? Would you tell them to keep pushing, or perhaps to push even harder? Or would you tell them, like the triathlete Siri Lindley told herself, to pull back, that the trade-offs they are making in order to pursue their passion are too great?

When we lose perspective—when all we can see is our passion—we lose the ability to choose what we want to do with our lives.

Dacher Keltner defines awe as the sense of wonder we feel “in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.” There are a handful of easily accessible experiences that tend to elicit awe in most people. Immersing oneself in lush, natural environments, watching the sunset, stargazing, or observing a full moon. Viewing artistic works. Listening to music that moves you. Looking for examples of extraordinary human kindness (e.g., spending a day volunteering in a homeless shelter). Observing a craftsperson at work using their unbelievable skill (e.g., watching LeBron James playing basketball or Bette Midler acting on Broadway).

Similar to self-distancing, when we are in the midst of an awesome experience, we gain not only perspective but also the clarity required to more objectively evaluate what we call our true selves—what lies at our core beyond the pursuit of our passions—and how we are spending our time and energy.

At one point or another, all of us will have experiences that make us confront our own mortality. But we shouldn’t necessarily wait for them. We should somewhat regularly reflect on mortality instead. Many people don’t like thinking about death because it makes them uneasy, but one of our strongest recommendations in this book is that you should do it more often. Keeping death at the forefront of your mind is one of the best ways to ensure you live the life you want to live.

You want to go to bed every night being content with what you did that day, as if you don’t know whether you’ll wake up the next morning (which, in reality, none of us do). How do you want to be remembered? What actions do you want to contribute to the world?

It’s worth reiterating that the cost (in unease and discomfort) of reflecting on death is great. But the cost of not doing so, of actually getting an awful diagnosis and realizing you didn’t live the life you wanted to, is far greater. As Seneca explained, it’s all too easy to hum along, living without ever thinking about the one consistent truth of life that your time is always running out.

The key to protecting yourself from the intense inertia of passion lies in cultivating self-awareness. Ironically, the best way to do so is to step back from yourself. Regularly self-distancing (thinking about a situation as if a friend is experiencing it, rather than yourself, or thinking/journaling in third person) and deliberately gaining perspective (by exposing yourself to awe, meditating, or reflecting on mortality) are two of the most effective ways to remain self-aware and maintain your ability to choose, even in the midst of pursuing a passion.

Oftentimes, you’ll choose to continue throwing yourself fully into a passion. And so long as it’s a conscious choice, it’s yours to make, and often a wonderful decision. Few things make you feel more alive than pursuing a passion harmoniously.

Although it is desirable to keep our identity separate from the accomplishments and external validation that may be the result of our passions, it’s nearly impossible to keep our identity separate from our passions themselves.

Many individuals who move on from their respective passions (even those who do so by choice, under their own volition) fall into a depression or get hooked on destructive addictions like drugs, drinking, or gambling.

Sperry’s research demonstrated that stories are central to our nature. We literally cannot do or feel anything without creating an accompanying narrative. One of the defining features of the human species is that we are programmed to construct stories to make meaning of our lives. Without such stories, we feel lost.

When moving on from a passion in your own life, it can be tempting to quickly turn to something or someone new to fill the void. But it’s often better to pause and open up some space during which you can reflect on what it is you loved about your passion, what you think you’ll miss most, and how you’d like your own unique story—the story of your life—to unfold.

Our identities are constructs that result from what we reflect on others and what others reflect on us. [Qbism]

Mindfully living with a passion starts with realizing that passion in and of itself doesn’t start off as either good or bad; it just is—a powerful emotion rooted in our biology and psychology. It’s not something we magically find, but something that we develop by following our interests and incrementally devoting more of our time and energy to them.

“Balance” is more often than not an illusion, especially for someone who is wholly absorbed in a passion. Instead of striving for balance, then, the passionate person should strive to be self-aware. Self-awareness—which, paradoxically, comes from distancing yourself from your “self”—is the only force strong enough to counter passion’s overwhelming inertia. Self-awareness ensures that you control your passion rather than your passion controlling you. It allows you to honestly evaluate what your passion is costing you, and to choose how to go forward as a result. So long as your passion is harmonious and you are aware of what you’re sacrificing to pursue it, then there is no “wrong” choice. The only wrong choice is losing the ability to consciously make one. Whatever choice you make about how to pursue your passion, about how much of your time and energy it should consume, it’s critical that you do so as the author of your own story.

Unfortunately, these are the lessons that the commencement and motivational speakers don’t mention. They may not fit into nice sound bites, and they certainly aren’t all positive.