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June 1 - June 1, 2023
I’ve come to call this heroic individualism: an ongoing game of one-upmanship, against both yourself and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success.
These notes made me realize that we do everything we can to optimize our entire existence so we can finally feel like we are enough. But perhaps this isn’t so optimal. In ancient Eastern psychology there is a concept known as the hungry ghost. The hungry ghost has a bottomless stomach. He keeps on eating, stuffing himself sick, but he never feels full. It’s a severe disorder, and one many people still experience.
The groundbreaking sociologist Émile Durkheim noted that “Overweening ambition always exceeds the results obtained, great as they may be, since there is no wanting to pause here. Nothing gives satisfaction and all this agitation is uninterruptedly maintained without appeasement. . . . How could [mental health] not be weakened under such conditions?”
experts believe that loneliness and social isolation have reached epidemic proportions. In 2019, the World Health Organization classified burnout as a medical condition, defining it as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Signs You May Be Suffering from Heroic Individualism
This is what we need to be developing. We need to stop spending so much time worrying about our metaphorical overstory, our high-hanging branches, and instead focus on nourishing our deep and internal roots. The stuff that keeps us grounded throughout all kinds of weather. The foundation. The principles and practices that we often overlook, that get crowded out in a too-busy life focused on the relentless and all-too-often single-minded pursuit of outward achievement.
Groundedness is unwavering internal strength and self-confidence that sustains you through ups and downs. It is a deep reservoir of integrity and fortitude, of wholeness, out of which lasting performance, well-being, and fulfillment emerge. Yet here’s the common trap: when you become too focused on productivity, optimization, growth, and the latest bright and shiny objects, you neglect your ground. Eventually, you end up suffering.
It is only once you are grounded that you can truly soar, at least in a sustainable manner.
Interesting mixed metaphor
What, then, would it look like if instead of always pushing for conventional success, you focused on cultivating groundedness? What if the answer is less about excitement for the future and more about leaning into the present? What if you stopped trying so damn hard to be great all the time, stopped focusing on external results, and instead focused on laying down a solid foundation—a kind of groundedness that is not an outcome or a onetime event, but a way of being? A groundedness out of which peak performance and well-being and fulfillment can emerge and prevail for a lifetime? How would one
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WHAT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ...
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What’s more, we’re all affected by what behavioral scientists call hedonic adaptation, or the “set-point” theory of happiness: when we acquire or achieve something new, our happiness, well-being, and satisfaction rise, but only for a few months before returning to their prior levels. This is precisely why it is so hard, if not impossible, to outwardly achieve your way out of heroic individualism. If anything, thinking that you can is the crux of heroic individualism’s trap.
Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who coined the term “arrival fallacy,” says, “We live under the illusion—well, the false hope—that once we make it, then we’ll be happy.” But when we do make it, when we finally “arrive,” he says, we may feel a temporary blip of happiness, but that feeling doesn’t last.
As this book will show, there is a way to change your set point—to permanently increase your happiness, well-being, satisfaction, and performance—that has nothing to do with focusing on external achievement or chasing status. Rather, it has to do with focusing on groundedness.
The recurring theme is clear: if you want to do well and be well in an enduring manner, you need to be grounded. What’s interesting, and something I’ll discuss more in later chapters, is that not one of these ancient wisdom traditions promotes passivity. They all promote wise action. Wise action is very different from our default mode of reaction. Whereas reaction is rushed and rash, wise action is deliberate and considerate. Wise action emerges from internal strength, from groundedness.
The findings, which were published in the book Dark Horse, written by human-development researcher Todd Rose and neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, center around two major themes followed by people who chart untraditional paths to good lives: these “dark horses” focus on accomplishing the things that matter most to them, and they don’t compare themselves to others or to conventional definitions of success.
THE PRINCIPLES OF GROUNDEDNESS
happiness, fulfillment, well-being, and sustainable performance arise when you concentrate on being present in the process of living instead of obsessing over outcomes, and above all when you’re firmly grounded wherever you are.
The remainder of this book is my attempt to figure out how to live this truth.
Briefly, the six principles of groundedness are as follows:
Accept Where You Are to Get You Where You Want to Go. Seeing clearly, accepting, and starting where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where other people think you should be. But where you are.
Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy. Being present, both physically and mentally, for what is in front of you. Spending more time fully in this li...
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Be Patient and You’ll Get There Faster. Giving things time and space to unfold. Not trying to escape life by moving at warp speed. Not expecting instant results and then quitting when they don’t occur. Shifting from being a seeker to a practitioner. Playing the long game. Staying on the path instead of constantly veering off.
Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence. Showing up authentically. Being real with yourself and with others. Eliminating the cognitive dissonance between your workplace self, your online self, and your actual self so that you can know and trust your true self, and in turn gain the freedom and confidence to devote your energy to what matters most.
Build Deep Community. Nurturing genuine connection and belonging. Prioritizing not just productivity, but people, too. Immersing yourself in supportive spaces that will hold and bolster you through ups and downs, an...
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Move Your Body to Ground Your Mind. Regularly moving your body so that you fully inhabit it, connect it to your mind, and as a result become...
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It’s another to make it real, day in and day out. As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says, “If you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea.”
ACCEPT WHERE YOU ARE TO GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
Instead of accepting this truth, when things don’t go our way we tend to default to magical thinking, convincing ourselves we’re in a better place than we are. Social scientists call this motivated reasoning, or our propensity not to see things clearly but instead to reason our way into seeing things as we’d like them to be.
You can’t work on something in a meaningful way if you are fighting it at the same time. And even upstream of that, you can’t work on something in a meaningful way if you refuse to accept that the thing is happening to begin with.
Hayes emerged from his harrowing experience dedicated to understanding what had happened and how he could apply it—not only to help himself but also to help others. This set in motion a four-decade scientific exploration. Through hundreds of experiments, Hayes learned that the more someone tries to avoid unpleasant circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and urges—exactly what Hayes had been doing before his insight on that fateful night— the stronger and more frequent they become. “If you cannot open up to discomfort without suppression,” he says, “it becomes impossible to face difficult problems
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ACT suggests that when you’re in a difficult or scary situation—be it physical, emotional, or social—resisting it almost always makes it worse. Far better is to accept what is happening; to open yourself up to it, feel it deeply, and let it be there.
The most powerful teachings of ACT, which I’ll detail later in the chapter, can be distilled into a three-part process, which happens to fit into the acronym ACT: Accept what is happening without fusing your identity to it. Zoom out to a larger perspective or awareness from which you can observe your situation without feeling like you are trapped in it. Choose how you want to move forward in a way that aligns with your innermost values. Take action, even if doing so feels scary or uncomfortable.
This approach may run counter to habitual ways of being and doing, particularly for those of us who grew up in a Western society. We’re programmed to react to circumstances, take control of our situations, try to force positive thoughts, and immediately jump into problem solving. But it’s the step of acceptance that makes all of these other strategies effective. Without acceptance, we risk running around in circles, not really working on the things we need to be working on, never making progress. Not accepting our reality causes us to feel tenuous and unsteady, like we’re never really on solid
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Self-compassion serves as the bridge between accepting what is happening and taking wise action. If your inner voice is overly judgmental and critical, you are likely to get stuck, or worse, go backward. You need to be kind to yourself.
“What progress have I made?” wrote the Stoic philosopher Seneca, some two thousand years ago. “I am beginning to be my own friend. That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all.”
Stop shoulding yourself. Shift
Treat yourself like a crying baby.
“This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best I can.”
In the scientific literature, this is called behavioral activation. In lay terms, and phrasing that I first heard from the podcast host Rich Roll, mood follows action.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON ACCEPTANCE Acceptance is about being with your reality, whatever it may be. By doing so, you lessen the distress caused by wanting things to be different and judging yourself when they are not. You rid yourself of the gap between your expectations and your experience, and you eliminate the second, third, and fourth arrows. Only once you’ve accepted your reality will you find peace, strength, and stability, or at least an understanding of the actions you might take to attain these states. Acceptance is not about doing nothing. Rather, it is about reckoning with what is in
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Thousands of years ago, the Stoic philosopher Seneca warned against getting caught in a cycle of “busy idleness,” or as he said, “all this dashing about that a great many people indulge in . . . always giving the impression of being busy [while not really doing anything at all].”
because all this checking habituates us to distraction.
We are optimizing for all the wrong things: Busyness. Nonstop information. Digital relevance.
Seneca and his master work, On the Shortness of Life, written around AD 49. “It is not that we have a short time to live,” Seneca writes. “It is that we waste a lot of it. . . . People are frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Seneca
contacted more than 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were,
So ... they would not reach people who didn't keep their phone on all day AND they were providing interruptions.
love. “The 75 years and 20 million dollars spent on the Grant Study points to a straightforward five-word conclusion,” Vaillant writes. “Happiness equals love—full stop.”
LIFE IS NOW
People often think about the number of years in their lives. But perhaps more important is the amount of life, the amount of presence, in those years.
When you are fully present you not only shape your experience of the now, but you also shape your future.
Someone who understood this well was Erich Fromm, a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and moved to the United States in 1933. He was a polymath: a brilliant psychologist, sociologist, and humanistic philosopher. In 1976, Fromm wrote a book titled To Have or to Be? In it, he coined the term productive activity: when one’s activity is “a manifestation of their powers; when the person, their activity, and the result of their activity are one.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Fromm’s productive activity is strikingly similar to what modern scientists call flow, what Buddhism calls
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