You're Using Your Soul as Fuel

I've met a lot of successful people who are miserable.

And I've been one of them.

People who are making money, building businesses, accomplishing things they spent years trying to accomplish, and somehow none of it feels the way they thought it would.

They get the thing they wanted.

And almost immediately, they're thinking about the next thing.

Or the thing they didn't get.

Or the person who's doing better.

And I think one of the most dangerous things about this is that, from the outside, it looks like ambition.

Sometimes it even looks like discipline.

But there's a difference between being driven by something you want to build and being driven by the feeling that you're never quite good enough.

Those two things can produce very similar results.

For a while.

I was talking with somebody who'd just had his best month in a long time.

He'd made meaningful progress financially, developed some promising business relationships, and made improvements in other parts of his life.

A lot of really good things were happening.

So I asked him to tell me about his wins.

Just his wins.

And almost every time he mentioned something good, he followed it with something that diminished it.

He had a great month, but other people had better months.

He made good money, but a couple of deals didn't close.

He'd worked hard, but he got lucky.

He'd made progress, but he wasn't where he wanted to be.

Now, none of those qualifications were necessarily false.

Other people did have better months.

Some deals didn't close.

Luck probably played some role.

But that's not the point.

The point is that he couldn't allow himself to experience the accomplishment without immediately introducing a reason it wasn't enough.

And if you do that consistently, you end up in a really strange psychological position.

Your failures belong to you.

But your successes don't.

When something goes wrong, it's because you weren't good enough, didn't work hard enough, weren't disciplined enough.

When something goes right, you got lucky.

So where, exactly, are you supposed to get your confidence from?

You've built a system where the only thing you're consistently allowed to own is your inadequacy.

And I think a lot of ambitious people do this without realizing it.

They believe that if they stop criticizing themselves, they'll stop improving.

They think the dissatisfaction is what makes them successful.

And sometimes they're right about part of that.

You can absolutely beat the shit out of yourself and get results.

You can use shame, comparison, anger, and the feeling that you're falling behind to make yourself work harder.

I've seen it work.

But you're using your soul as fuel.

That's the problem.

It's dirty fuel.

And the really difficult part is that you can become addicted to the fuel you're using.

Because it works.

You get angry at yourself, you work harder, you make money.

So you conclude that the anger was necessary.

You compare yourself to somebody who's further ahead, you feel like shit, you push harder, you accomplish something.

So you conclude that feeling like shit was necessary.

But you don't actually know that.

You know that it produced a result.

You don't know what would have happened if you'd approached the same work from a place of confidence, gratitude, and a clear understanding of how far you've already come.

And you certainly don't know what that other approach would have done for your life outside of work.

I want to be clear about something.

I'm not suggesting you sit around congratulating yourself for everything and stop pursuing bigger goals.

That's not what this is.

You should want more.

You should challenge yourself.

You should look honestly at where you fell short.

But you also need to learn how to look at something you've accomplished and let it be an accomplishment.

Without the but.

Without immediately comparing it to somebody else's result.

Without pretending it happened by accident.

Because those wins are evidence.

They're evidence that you've done difficult things before.

That you've learned.

That you've grown.

That you've made decisions that worked.

And when you actually allow yourself to recognize that evidence, you have something real to draw on the next time life gets difficult.

You can look at where you are and remember where you started.

Not because the distance remaining doesn't matter.

But because the distance you've already traveled tells you something about what you're capable of.

I think this is one of the reasons people can become more successful and less fulfilled at the same time.

Their accomplishments keep growing, but their ability to experience those accomplishments never develops.

So the goal moves.

The pressure increases.

The criticism gets louder.

And the life they're supposedly working so hard to build becomes something they can't enjoy.

At some point, you have to ask yourself a pretty serious question.

Are you building something meaningful?

Or are you trying to accomplish enough that you'll finally stop being disappointed in yourself?

Because those are not the same pursuit.

And if you don't understand the difference, you can spend your entire life winning and never feel like you've won.

You don't have to hate where you are to have a reason to go further.

There are better things to run on.