The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life

by Brad Stulberg

ask yourself why you’re committed to your pursuit. The importance of reflecting on your purpose is also backed by science. Similar to reflecting on your core values, when you reflect on your purpose, not only do you reinforce the mastery mind-set, but you also become more likely to stick with challenges over the long haul.

In addition to providing a boost in motivation, reflecting on your purpose is beneficial because doing so creates space between impulse—the urge to get upset with every acute failure and take shortcuts or quit—and action.

6. Mastery Mind-Set: Be Here Now

being intimately engaged is the key to seeing things clearly and getting the most out of life.

To sustain passion, however, we must remove distractions that prey on our attention and break from the mundane and automatic thoughts that normally fill our minds. Practically, this means we should set aside the time, space, and energy to give our respective passions our all. It doesn’t need to be all day, every day, but we do need to prioritize this time and make it sacred.

Being fully present isn’t just the stuff of philosophers and their (at times) esoteric metaphysics. Scientific research demonstrates that how we assign our attention has an enormous influence on what we do from day to day, year to year, and even over the course of a lifetime.

It’s a bit paradoxical, but the key message here is, what is important doesn’t necessarily get our attention; what gets our attention becomes important.

When you engage in your passion, be intentional about removing distractions so that you can pay full attention. Carve out time, space, and energy for periods of single-minded focus.

In summary, the mastery mind-set contains six key principles: Driven from within. Focus on the process. Don’t worry about being the best; worry about being the best at getting better. Embrace acute failure for chronic gains. Be patient. Be here now.

In order to experience Quality, you can’t be thinking about the past or the future or what other people may think of you or your work. Rather, you must be completely involved in whatever it is you are doing. Totally there. Fully present. Many other great thinkers have taken note of this phenomenon. George Leonard writes that the space between an actor who is dedicated to his act and his act itself is the space in which God lives.22 Erich Fromm refers to it as a special kind of joy, “what we experience in the process of growing nearer [to] becoming one’s [authentic] self.”23 When the late scholar Avedis Donabedian, one of the founding fathers of the quality-improvement movement in healthcare, was on his deathbed, he was asked how, after all these years, he defines quality. His response: “Quality is love.”24

even if you embody the mastery mind-set and experience the harmonious passion it brings, really going for something carries an incontestable cost: everything else that you leave behind as a result. Fully throwing yourself into a passion—even if it’s the best kind of passion, however harmonious it may be—tends to throw your life out of balance. Which begs the question: Is it possible to live a passionate and “balanced” life at the same time? Should you even be striving to in the first place?

Though it may seem like balance is currently having its moment, our fascination with it is anything but new. The concept is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche, tracing its roots all the way back to ancient Greece. In 300 BC, Aristotle instructed his followers to strive for the golden mean, or the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. Around the same time, Plato popularized a “tripartite theory of soul,” which revolved around keeping the different parts of one’s soul in alignment.

have you ever met an interesting person—let alone a deeply passionate one—who is balanced?

Growth only occurs when stress is followed by rest. Or, as the most popular phrase from our last book says, “stress + rest = growth.”

If you are into what you’re doing and you’re dying to get better, the natural inclination is to keep pushing. Unfortunately, even if that pushing is born of all the right internal reasons, eventually the mind and body get tired. And when the mind and body get tired, it’s easy to slip into apathy and, even worse, depression.

And this is to say nothing of the massive importance of sleep. If you really love your work and want to do a good job at it, the last thing you should do is sacrifice sleep. In the early 2000s, then groundbreaking research out of Harvard University found that it is during sleep that you retain, consolidate, store, and connect information. In other words, your mind doesn’t grow and make leaps when you are at work, but rather when you are at rest.

rest isn’t separate from the work—rest is an integral part of the work.

we don’t think that balance—which essentially asks you to never go all in on anything—is the right solution. Far better than striving for balance is striving for self-awareness, or the ability to see yourself clearly by assessing, monitoring, and proactively managing your core values, emotions, passions, behaviors, and impact on others.

For some people, when you zoom in on any given day, week, month, or maybe even year, they don’t appear at all balanced. But when you zoom out and look across the totality of their lives, they are actually quite balanced and whole. This is the kind of balance to strive for. Practicing self-awareness allows you to more honestly evaluate and reevaluate the trade-offs inherent to living an unbalanced, passionate life.

Studies show that those who possess strong internal self-awareness make better decisions, have better personal relationships, are more creative, and have more fulfilling careers.11 Other research demonstrates that internal self-awareness is associated with improved mental health and general well-being.12 When it comes to living with passion, it’s not about balance. It’s about marrying strong harmonious passion with an equally strong self-awareness. Doing so trumps balance any day.

Researchers believe that when someone is in the midst of a passion, there is often a breakdown in communication between the part of the brain that fuels striving (the striatum) and the part of the brain that controls and regulates striving (the prefrontal cortex). The only known way to regain this connection, and in doing so regain control of how you pursue your passion, is through deep introspection and the self-awareness it yields. Self-awareness allows you to honestly and objectively evaluate your passion and, if necessary, shift course or apply the brakes.

No different from a close relationship with anyone else, you need to work at having a close relationship with yourself.

We can get so wrapped up in whatever it is we are doing that it becomes damn near impossible to make any sort of objective or honest evaluation. This is why individuals suffering from maladaptive “addictions,” most notably eating disorders, struggle to recognize that anything is wrong. They literally look in the mirror and fail to see a problem. Not eating isn’t necessarily the pathological part, but the incorrect self-assessment, the inability to see reality, is. Yes, this is an extreme example, but as we discussed earlier, there is much in common between someone with a damning addiction, someone going for a gold medal, and someone trying to build a billion-dollar company. In each case, neurochemically charged feelings can take over and obscure one’s view of reality. Perhaps this is why eating disorders are so common in serious athletes,