what you should do
deliberate effort and self-actualization
Imagine you are a body builder. You go to the gym every day. You work out for hours. But you only ever do exercises for your right arm. You have a magnificent right arm, but the rest of you is completely average. You actually start to look ridiculous, maybe even like something is wrong with you. That’s because something is wrong with you: you are out of balance. And frankly, you look like a freak. You have exercised only one of your gifts, and you have neglected the rest. It would be better if you sacrificed some of the effort you put into your right arm to improve your left arm, your legs, your chest, your core, etc. Then you would be well-balanced, and you would be beautiful – or at least less freakish.
In my post, Performance, talent, and fit, I talked about finding a thing you are a good fit for and pursuing it so that you could achieve a professional level of performance. I used this graph to explain:
If you have a natural talent for something, some skill, the same amount of effort will yield higher performance. We all have known people who seem to be able to pick up some skill with ease, whether that was a sport or math or art. If you and this other person put in the same amount of effort, the other person would blow you away in terms of performance. That is because they were a great fit for the skill, and you were probably of average talent. The good news is, because we are all different, there is almost certainly something you are a better fit for than they are. Furthermore, in many areas, this is not an all-or-nothing competition. We need many people who are a really good fit for a variety of professions. We need nurses and electricians and police officers and professional football players and millions of other roles. And we also need them in particular geographic areas. So the opportunities to find your fit and achieve high performance are practically limitless. The hard part, sometimes, is the finding. I think more on that in a later post. What I want to focus on today is balance and not just focusing on one area where you have natural talent.
Part of the Worthy Life model is achieving financial self-sufficiency. This fits under general competence. To do that, you must find at least one area where you can achieve professional level performance so that someone will be willing to pay you[1] enough so that you can support yourself financially and meet your financial obligations. Most likely there are many choices. Part of finding fit is to find the choice that yields the highest level of meaning by yielding the highest combined levels of (specialized) competence, contribution, and connection. I might be very good at a particular job (high specialized competence), but the contribution doesn’t resonate with me, or I don’t feel a connection to the people I work with/for. The right job for you is not necessarily the one that pays the most money. Money is part of the equation, to be balanced against meaning. I did not choose to be a professor for the money, trust me. The money is adequate, and the balance of meaning I get from the role outweighs the money I could have earned from doing a something else.
Here is where I hesitate a little because I am going to be prescriptive, and that runs counter to my liberal tendencies. Let’s see how this goes.
Once you find the right place for you to make your contribution and achieve financial self-sufficiency, you still have other talents. They may not be sufficient to rise to the level of professional performance, but they are real. If you continue to pour your effort into the thing you do to earn your living, you might become a bit like the body builder who only exercises his right arm. I think there is a value for making space in your life to exercise some of the other talents you have.
This is where I am going to get prescriptive. You should make time in your life to exercise these other talents. One thing you should make time for is literal exercise. Our bodies all have some capacity to perform. Even if you aren’t particularly athletic, you can make small improvements. Walking is one of the best exercises you can do. I say you should make time for physical exercise for two reasons. One is simply that you have the capacity to do it and therefore you should. The second is that exercise of your body improves your physical and mental performance across most other aspects of your life. It interacts with your other activities. Exercise improves your cognition today, and there is evidence that exercise extends your cognitive abilities and is protective against cognitive decline as you age. Mixing physical exercise into your daily effort interacts with your other efforts to make them better. TLW has always been great at this – making space in her life, even when she was tremendously busy with work and being the primary care giver to our children. She somehow still found the time to do something most days. She’s been a great influence on me over the years because, despite what I am saying here, I am a naturally lazy person.
I started with exercise intentionally because I think it is a clear example of how making space for a fuller expression of your talents is additive to your overall performance. If you only have time to do one thing in addition to your primary duties, it should probably be something physical[2]. But the exercise of other talents can have a similar interactive effect, directly and indirectly. Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, talked about how he took a calligraphy course that influenced the design of the Mac:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.”
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”
In my research on creativity, one of the common themes is that most seemingly creative ideas are the result of borrowing common concepts from one discipline and implementing them in another. Thus, taking a calligraphy class influenced the development of the Mac. It probably did more than just influence the type faces. I suspect the idea of beautiful expression was the real lesson learned, or kindled.
The pursuit of unrelated projects can often teach us skills and ways of thinking that we won’t learn if we continue to work in the grooves of our usual duties and as a result give us seemingly creative approaches to old problems. The effort we put into these other activities can interact with our professional pursuits and add to our level of performance. I think this is especially true as we approach peak performance from our direct efforts. In the graphic above, I mean where effort approaches 100, and the return to an additional unit of effort is minimal. At this stage, the amplification we can get from other practices probably adds dramatically.
Another reason it is good to pursue projects outside of our primary, income earning activity, is because there is a joy in gaining mastery. Most skill-based activities yield dramatic gains to modest effort at early stages. Going from zero to modest skill can be very satisfying while opening you up to a different way of thinking and problem solving.
For me, my daily art project has been a great way of forcing myself to do something unrelated to my day job. In addition to an exercise in discipline, it teaches me to look closely at things, and then it requires a physical expression of what I am seeing. It gets me beyond the verbal/written expression and symbolic manipulation I spend most of my day working on. I don’t know that I can point to a specific beneficial interaction between this hobby and my day job, but I know it stretches a different part of my self in a way that, say writing this newsletter does not. Jiu-jitsu is also a good example of stretching. It is both a physical activity, but also a skill-based activity that involves constant learning.
There are some jobs that demand the exercise of a wide range of talent to be successful. Executive level jobs are often like that. This is one of the things that makes executive level jobs satisfying – the job naturally engages many of our gifts. These jobs also don’t leave much time in the day to pursue other activities. But even so, I know enough executives to know they can make space for small things if they try.
People with young children often have little time for anything other than surviving day to day. And of course if you are financially challenged and have to work long hours at unrewarding jobs, there is little gas left in the tank. Everyone has a different capacity for self-actualization depending on life circumstances. The standard to judge yourself is whether you are pushing yourself given your constraints.
One last thought to close on: these alternative activities don’t have to be things like my daily art project that are specifically skill oriented. It could also be working deliberately to be a better spouse, parent, or friend. It could be deliberately engaging with your church or spiritual practice. I think the key is deliberate effort and an attempt to learn and grow.
We all have different gifts and different opportunities to express those gifts. What your self-actualization looks like will be different from what mine looks like because we are different. The through line is deliberate effort and balance. You don’t want to be a one-arm body building literally or metaphorically. So what should you do? First, find the thing that is a great fit that will allow you to achieve financial self-sufficiency. Then pursue self-actualization by continuous, dedicated, deliberate effort.
[1] Entrepreneurs pay themselves; stay-at-home spouses are financial partners with their working spouses, providing a valuable service to the family. This is a flexible definition. Let’s not get lost in the details.
[2] Unless your job already offers a well-rounded amount of cardio and strength training – which most do not in modern society.