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Hopefully I have noted the concerns with just doing more. Being obsessed with achievement was a major problem for me. I changed my life in response to realizing this, and I’ll say more about it as we go.
But these concerns could also be misunderstood as wholesale rejection of hard work and challenge—which isn’t the case at all!
I actually love working hard on something I’m excited about. I believe in challenge and striving as core values.
So while I have no problem critiquing the cult of productivity for productivity’s sake (and there is more to be said on that in other posts, stay tuned), there’s also something else we need to discuss.
This topic can be summed up as: Challenge is good for you.
Doing hard things doesn’t always feel good at first, but it usually does afterwards. You can’t just “do what makes you happy”—at least, not if you want to live the most meaningful life.
alternatively:
What makes you happy in any given moment or situation is not always what’s best for you later.
so now let’s get to it…
Ice Cream for Dinner
Let’s start with an example, from a New Yorker profile of Jesse Itzler. I’ll paraphrase this slightly and add the emphasis.
His home is an incubator for optimization. Itzler recently told an audience, “I said to my brother about my son, ‘He’s a good swimmer, but he doesn’t really have that eye of the tiger,’ and my brother said, ‘That’s O.K., as long as he’s happy.’ ” There were murmurs of approval. “And I’m, like, ‘No! He’d be happy playing Fortnite and eating Häagen-Dazs every night. We want him to live up to his potential.’ ”
Itzler is married to Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx. No doubt their son will experience plenty of pressure in growing up in such a household. And maybe some people will have a problem with the burden of “living up to [one’s] potential.”
All fair points. But I think the much greater point is … Itzler is right. His son might actually be happy playing Fortnite all the time and eating ice cream for dinner, but as parents, Itzler and Blakely have decided that these are not great life choices for him.
