In cities, specifically San Francisco, there’s a pervasive focus on personal growth. I’m a big culprit of this. It’s ingrained in who I am but certainly was exacerbated by moving to SF. I’ve always obsessively focused on self optimization, making the most of my time and constantly at competition with myself to be better better in every way. It’s daunting when even ‘spare time’ is a chance to compete for productivity and improvement. Any moment spent on something mindless would feel like wasted time, a cause for internal chastising and turning off Netflix to pull out a business book or turn on a podcast. Even my introduction into meditating was rooted in a desire to improve my thinking and effectiveness. This applied to everything from mind to body to relationships, reading to expand my knowledge base and challenge my intellect, meditating and writing to improve my thinking patterns, perfecting diet, training, sleep, and supplementation to optimize my health, analyzing relationships to remove any poisonous or negative connections.
Looking back after years of this, it had the intended effect in that I experienced unparalleled rapid growth that makes my college self and current self seem like two different beings. But having recently gone deeper into mindfulness and meditation, I’ve been observing where this obsession truly comes from and what I’m aiming for. It’s difficult to nail down the deep-seated end goal that drives the fervent determination towards improvement, to every day be better than the last, so I venture to guess that it’s simply the act of improving that feels good and makes me continue.
On the surface this might seem like a great habit, a powerful trait that leads to success, but it’s more likely just a piece of a bigger puzzle. The unintended negatives come from when the effort is mostly or entirely internal. When almost all time and energy is being put towards improving, growing, adding value—for me alone. I could focus on being the most smart, mindful, well-connected, healthy being but if the internal value isn’t translated into external value, helping others, it has limited benefits. The benefits would remain limited to the direct personal effect of the optimization, and stop there.
A vital piece of human existence and a key to thriving in life is purpose and fulfillment, to which the clearest path is making others’ lives better in some way. Benjamin Franklin lived by this principle, one of his 12 Virtues was
Industry. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful.
A legendary stoic, Marcus Aurelius, said
We were designed to live among other people and interact with them in a manner that is mutually advantageous; we will discover that human nature is very much like that of bees. A bee is not able to live alone: it perishes when isolated. Fellowship is the purpose behind our creation. Thus, a person who performs well the function of man will be both rational and social. To fulfill my social duty—to do my duty to my kind—I must feel a concern for all mankind. I must remember that we humans were created for one another, that we were born to work together the way our hands or eyelids do.
We only have so much mental energy, when the majority is put towards driving internal value, less remains for driving external value. And as both Franklin and Aurelius would tell you, driving external value, being useful, is where fulfillment comes from. But I’ll also tell you what’s perhaps equally as obvious but clearly was lost on me at the height of this obsession, driving external value is where wealth and opportunity come from. Look at the extreme examples, when Beyonce was working on one of her early albums she reported forgetting to eat or sleep for two days. When Tesla was grinding to meet Model 3 production deadlines, billionaire Elon slept on an old office couch. He has similar accounts from starting his first two companies Zip2 and X.com.
There are countless stories of entrepreneurs, executives, artists, activists who have sacrificed internal value for external value. These are people who were working on something bigger than themselves, people driven by an obsession to contribute something meaningful, useful, impactful, something that would improve others’ lives or make a difference on a bigger external scale. Albeit, some of the more extreme examples like these may tip too far in the other direction. They obsessed over external growth and neglected to take care of themselves, i.e. disregarding their health, state of mind, relationships. So I’d argue that this is a sliding scale and you want to be on average somewhere in the middle to reach peak enduring fulfillment, a healthy dose of energy towards both helping yourself and helping others. An internal/external seesaw.
TLDR, after years of rapid self growth from internal perfectionism, I still sensed a big missing piece. I started to define that missing piece and seek it out. Doing so made me realize how much time and energy was directed towards this internal growth, the shift I needed was to deploy more of that thriving energy out into the world. I’ve since tapped into the true fulfillment that comes from making a mark on other people and society in both small and big ways, and plan to continue multiplying those efforts.