There are static goals, and there are dynamic ones. A static one: “I’d like to own a yacht.” Another: “I’d like to lose 15 pounds.” Or even: “I’d like to achieve enlightenment.” Static goals aren’t necessarily easy. But you know when you’ve made it, and can then do something else.
Some dynamic goals, from more to less concrete:
I want to add one Anki card per day, then do all my Anki cards
I want to be in a stronger financial position
I want to be more emotionally secure
From any position, these goals invite continued effort. In fact, you never get closer to achieving them. This can be good or bad.
A Portrait of Benign Striving
There are happy people who run on dynamic goals. They lift weights and try to push a little harder every week. They work intense jobs, track their productivity, and frequently apply to jobs that are a stretch. They meditate, going to retreats when they reach a plateau. If they’re married, they interrogate their marriage often, trying to find ways to work better together with their spouse.
Over time, such people become powerful. Because there are few ways to amass so much power other than ceaseless ladder-climbing, they tend to cluster with each other, and reinforce each other’s ambition. The resonance scales very, very far.
It’s easy to be suspicious of perpetual strivers. If you admire them, there’s a tacit pressure to become one, which is a threatening obligation. So it’s easy to mock them, to focus on the LinkedIn hustlegrind and its aesthetic shortcomings. I think that’s a mistake, and infinite ladder climbing should be judged on the merits.
On the merits, there are problems.
The Problems
If your driving principle is perpetual improvement, you eventually hit walls. There are better and worse ways to respond to this fact, but it is a fact. For example:
If you try to increase your bench press weight and reps forever, you will eventually reach the limits of your frame
If you climb the corporate ladder far enough, you will reach a point where broader structural factors strongly determine your fate; at minimum, you’ll be managing many people and their productivity will roll up into yours
If you meditate hard enough, you’ll find yourself in a dark night of the soul, and getting through it probably won’t feel like progress
If you seek fame, you will eventually saturate your plausible audience and have to work hard to tread water, or else peak and lose name recognition for reasons beyond your control
Notably, each of these situations has very bad (and commonly practiced) responses.
You can do steroids to continue with your gains, with frequently terrible outcomes for your health and mood
You can do fraud, assuring your net worth keeps going up even in the absence of further genuine growth
You can push yourself into psychosis, fighting the mental current and dysregulating your mind long term
You can flame out and do stereotypical and obviously harmful attention seeking behaviors, and end up in rehab with a terrible public image
These failure modes happen for other reasons, too! Lots more people do steroids to keep up with their gym buddies than because they’re addicted to progress, for example. But if you are addicted to progress, it’s a risk.
The Hustler’s Pivot
I think the need for perpetual growth is a major driver in hustlegrind behaviors, like pivoting. Pivoting can be a way to save face or keep momentum when a plan doesn’t work out, but it can also be a way to indulge a craving for climbing, after a summit has been reached. This behavior can be excellent, or very cringe. On the good side, Bill Gates became a gazillionaire and pivoted to philanthropy, where he’s met new challenges and done a tremendous amount of good. On the cringe side, people addicted to inner work seem to constantly be having new revelations and reinventions, with a brand new ideology every time the old one gets stale.
Aesthetically, there is something empty about a post-summit pivot. I know we must imagine Sisyphus happy and all that, but climbing a steep mountain and then immediately dimension-hopping to a new foothill sounds really exhausting.
This is among the dark sides of “agency” as I understand it. It’s cool to try new things, but obligate optimizers need to. You push the existing dimensions of your life as far as you can, and when the only remaining options are maladaptive, you just add more dimensions.
There’s a lot of burnout, and no wonder.
Cashing Out
Maybe you want to be powerful, to have affordances and optionality and cool, impressive friends. Then leaning into dynamic goals is a great move. You’ll have a common language with your desired peers, and you can never tell yourself “mission accomplished” and thereby quit too early.
Still, you do want to quit eventually, if only temporarily, or along certain dimensions. The alternatives are going too hard and hurting yourself, or spreading too thin and burning out. It’s plausible to me that the ideal is chasing open ended goals for a while, getting exhausted and resting on your laurels, relaxing and appreciating slack, then getting bored and chasing open ended goals again.
How to do this? I’m not sure. Habits, even good ones, can be hard to break. But I do think static goals can help. Particularly, it helps to set them early on.
For example, if you want to have the dynamic goal of “improve my financial position”, you can simultaneously have the static goal of “pay off my house”. That way, while you keep striving all the while, you can notice when your house is in fact paid off, and take it as a possible off-ramp for that dimension of hustle. If you want to have the dynamic goal of “get stronger”, you can have the companion static goal of “do 50 push ups” and know that, when you achieve this, it’s time to reflect.
Dynamic goals make it hard to be proud. Static goals make it easy to be proud if you achieve them, and easy to take a step back if they feel unachievable. Either outcome is a defense against maladaptive striving, or spread-too-thin burnout.
Demotivation, like motivation, is idiosyncratic. I can’t tell you how to achieve either, or which would be desirable. For me, chilling out seems easiest to do from the outside in, starting at the aesthetic layer and finding ideas later. It’s hard to reason your way out of optimization - optimization is reason’s raison d'être. So, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wear more flower print, and shorts with butterflies on them, and then, one lovely morning, I’ll realize I’ve got enough.