How Success Costs You The Good Life | (#100) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Question Behind What You’re Building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

So, you could probably look at your business or your company, or whatever your project is or whatever you’re responsible for, and tell in 30 seconds whether it’s healthy. You know which number is telling you the truth and which one is just hopeful thinking. Most people can’t do that, but you can, right? You’ve got a number for what’s coming in and what’s going out, and how fast the whole thing is growing.

You trust those numbers because they’ve never lied to you. Every good decision you made in the last 10 years or so came from a number telling you something that you believe to be true and you acting on it. This process and these numbers built everything you haves—so, you use the same instinct on your own life. You keep track of whatever you can count. The parts that you can’t count, you handle by feeling when you get around them. Nobody taught you that. It’s just what any competent person does with a process or tool, or system that’s never failed. [01:06.2]

Those numbers were built, though, to measure your work. If you use them on your life, you’ll get good at the wrong thing. Nothing about it feels like a mistake while you’re making it. You find out only 20 years later when the thing that you skipped is now no longer available.

The two sides of your life aren’t of the same importance. One gets nearly all your attention. The other holds what, at the end of your life, looking back on your life, you would say that your whole life is really for. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to tell them apart, in your own week, which aspects of your life your numbers can see and which aspects they can’t. [01:48.8]

Almost everything that decides whether your life is actually good is a good life sits on the side that the numbers do not cover—like whether you have a loving marriage, whether anybody has known you deeply or authentically for the past 20 years, what kind of person you’re turning into while you’re building all this—and you’ll discover how to put time into those before anything can prove that they’re working, and that might be the hardest part.

Every other investment that you’ve made, you made because something told you that it would pay off, almost guaranteed, right? These pay off, too. They just don’t report immediately or on the spot for maybe 20 years, so you either put the time in on your own judgment or you put it in after the proof has arrived, which is usually too late to do anything with in these most important aspects of your life—so, this isn’t about a better quarter. It’s about which life that you will actually have lived when you look back on it. [02:51.8]

The renowned researcher Clayton Christensen taught at Harvard Business School for decades. He also kept going back to his own class reunions at Harvard, where he watched people who had graduated with every door open show up divorced, miserably divorced, and not speaking to their kids. He was clear that not one of them had planned this.

Nobody stood there at graduation and picked out that destiny. Instead, it piled up a half hour at a time out of a thousand sensible choices of just looking at them in isolation, choices to spend the time where the payoff came fastest.

Every one of those choices held up on the day that they were made—so, you can spend the next 10 or more years succeeding at everything that you can count and measure, especially the ones that give you immediate results, and end up having stopped paying into the things that were most important to you in the long run, for example, the people that you are doing it all for, and you may have fallen into that trap without ever deciding to. [03:54.0]

Most people believe that a good life is the reward for some success. Do well at the visible part, like the exit or the title, or the role or the number, and then, of course, the private aspects, the personal life, is supposed to just fill in behind it naturally, automatically—the loving partner, the great kids, the friends who stick around through thick and thin—but it actually works the other way.

The same skills that make you good at the visible aspects are what actually starve the rest. Every hour that goes to the thing paying this month in a visible way is an hour that didn’t go to the more important thing that may only visibly pay off in 20 years. Success doesn’t buy you a good life. If you leave your life unexamined, success is actually what costs you the good life.

So, let’s start with what you’re already good at, because the habit that built the work success is the same habit doing the damage. Anybody who has built something serious already knows this. Strategy isn’t like the deck. It isn’t the offsite or the three-year plan, or what you tell your investors about the market. Strategy is where the money and the hours actually go. [05:10.5]

You can write down that your priority is keeping customers for the long haul. You can even believe it, but if every engineer in your company is focused on next quarter’s feature, and nobody’s actually on the work that keeps people around only in Year 3, then your actual strategy is just short-term growth, whatever your deck says.

Clayton Christensen put this well in saying, “Where the money and the hours go is where the plan meets the ground. Everything above that is mere intention,” and you already know this. You’ve probably said some version of it to somebody on your team, maybe even this month. Show me the budget and the calendar, and I’ll tell you what this company actually cares about. [05:55.4]

The second related point is that companies put money toward whatever pays off soonest and most visibly, and this isn’t stupidity or bad management. It’s just how the decisions and incentives get lined up, and that’s how the decisions get made. A project with a return that you can put on a slide this quarter ends up beating a project with a return that only shows up in six years and cannot be traced to any individual’s decision, and then gets buried.

So, companies end up underfunding the things that matter most to them over the long haul, and then they do this constantly in this sort of short-term thinking, and they don’t even realize it because it doesn’t feel like that and it gets rewarded in the short term—and I know you know this, too. You’ve watched it happen at other companies, and you’ve probably fought it at your own company and maybe lost a few of those fights to people whose numbers just looked more correct.

None of this is controversial. It’s actually ordinary and commonly accepted business sense, the kind of thing that you would nod at in a board meeting and then try to use the next morning. Your strategy is wherever your hours and your money actually go, and that drift towards the fast, visible payoff happens naturally and automatically, unless somebody stops it on purpose. [07:12.1]

Clayton Christensen taught this for years at Harvard and other places to people who went on to lead large parts of the economy. On the last day of his course, he would ask his students to point those two ideas at their own personal lives, their own hours, week after week, and what that showed about what they actually cared about, as opposed to what they would have said if you had asked them beforehand.

These were people who could take apart a company’s P&L in an afternoon and tell you which part of the company was being starved, but most of them had never asked the question about their own week or about their own personal lives. Christensen’s explanation for this has nothing to do with those people being shallow or short-sighted. It comes out of the thing that made them successful in the first place. [07:59.0]

Say, you’re somebody who needs to achieve and you’ve got a spare half hour at the end of your day. Nobody sits down and decides where it goes. It just goes somewhere, right? It goes without you thinking about it to whatever gives you the most tangible achievement. His phrase was “most tangible accomplishments.” It’s not the most important thing that you put your time into. It’s whatever produces a result visibly, tangibly, and measurably as quickly as possible.

Work pays in exactly that currency. You create a product and you ship it. You sign the client. You get the promotion. The number changes the same day and you get to watch it change, and then it becomes addictive and you keep doing it over and over. You feel like you did something, and within hours, the world came back and told you that, yes, you did and it all counted, and it all got banked. [08:49.0]

But an hour with your partner on a random Tuesday night pays you nothing today. Nothing comes back visibly, measurably, in results that you’re tracking on some dashboard. You can’t tell on Wednesday morning whether it worked, because if it’s a healthy relationship, you’re not trying to do something that worked. This is the same with the friend that you call for no reason except to just chat. It pays off in 20 years looking back, but you never see which hour during those 20 years did it.

Christensen said this about kids. He says you don’t get to put your hands on your hips at the end of a hard day and say you raised a good son or daughter. That verdict, he says, takes two decades, and when it finally arrives, it isn’t clear which particular Tuesday turned it.

It’s the same with a marriage that lasts 30 years. It’s not like one evening that then made it last, and it’s the same with the friend who shows up the week your company fails or goes under, and everyone else avoids you like the plague. That friend didn’t show up because of anything you did that week, probably. That friend showed up because of a thousand ordinary hours over, I don’t know, 15 years, none of which, at the time, felt like an investment while you were doing it. [10:05.1]

So, the person best equipped to succeed at the countable part of life is, for that reason, the person that is most likely to starve the rest of it. It’s one person with one habit getting two different results in two different spheres of life—and it isn’t that this person doesn’t care. Okay, so that’s what people, the critics, get wrong about this.

These achievers can care enormously. They would tell you their family matters more than anything, right, more than the company that they’re working on? And when they’re saying it, they are perfectly sincere. But their numbers only cover one of the two spheres, and they trust their numbers, so the spare half hour—guess where that goes? It goes where you can see the numbers change almost in real time, every time, for 15 years. [10:53.2]

There’s something almost tragically comic about this. The better your measuring gets, the more you trust your measuring, and the more you trust it, the more of your life you hand over to it, until you stop believing in anything that the measuring doesn’t obviously cover, or visibly cover.

You end up like the person who has lost his keys and drops down on his hands and knees under the street lamps, patting the pavement, looking for his keys, and then somebody comes over and says, “Why don’t you look over there in the grass? Why are you looking here under the streetlight?” He says, “Because this is where the light is.” The keys are in the dark part. Okay, they are always in the dark part. Otherwise, you would see them immediately, right?

Christensen’s own conclusion is quite blunt. He says, “Driven people underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers, and they do it without noticing.” Then he adds two words: even though. “Even though close, loving relationships are the strongest and longest-lasting source of happiness a person gets.” His point is supported by the longest-running study in human history and it’s their strongest finding—and every smart person knows this intellectually by now, but that same week, they gave the extra half hour to whatever would pay by Friday. [12:11.4]

Now, the good news is the rest of your life is before you. Okay, so this applies to the life still in front of you as well. You may not be married yet. Maybe you want to be at some point after the current thing resolves, right? The friendships that used to be daily maybe have now thinned to a group chat that goes silent for four months and then only comes back for somebody’s birthday.

None of that makes you deficient. You have simply been spending your time well for a long time, going by metrics that never told you that those two lines were being cut. Here’s a good way of putting it that comes from classical philosophy: Some things are first things, and some things are second things, and the order isn’t a matter of preference. Put a second thing first, and you end up losing both things. You don’t get the first thing, and the second one goes bad in your hands anyway. But if you put the first thing first, the second one usually comes along with it. [13:12.3]

Okay, in this case, work is the second thing. It can be an excellent second thing, but if you give it your entire life, you don’t even get to keep work cleanly, especially in the long run. You get the small compromises. You get the friendships that you fully meant to keep. You get the family that you were going to start, once things settle down enough.

But you know things never really settle down enough. There’s no quarter coming where the pressure drops enough, and the calendar opens up enough or long enough, and the conditions are finally perfect. This isn’t a scheduling problem that you can fix with a better scheduling system. This is what happens when the countable part of your life sets the priorities by default permanently for the entirety of your life. [14:02.5]

You’re not against getting married. You’re just putting it off after this raise or after this exit, or after this next thing, promotion or whatever, which genuinely is important and genuinely is time-sensitive, and genuinely will be over in 18 months, you tell yourself. [14:20.6]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Christensen’s point about companies applies here exactly in your life. There’s the strategy that people write down, and then there’s the strategy they actually carry out. You never sat down and decided to postpone having a family for 18 months, three years, and then never. You decided it a hundred separate times, half an hour at a time, and each of those hundred decisions made sense on its own in isolation.

But if you add them up, you’ve carried out a plan that you never actually chose. Nobody wrote that down, but everybody follows it. What changes if you act is this—you stop treating the relationship as the prize that you collect once all the work is done, and you start treating it and your personal life as an aspect of what you’re building now in the same week and on the same calendar, just not in a separate life that you get to much later. Code word: never. [16:05.4]

The friendships usually don’t end. They just convert. They become useful. You still see people and you still have dinners, but the dinners now have a purpose, right? And everybody at that table has something the others might want, right? That’s not really friendship. That’s networking with some drinks.

Networking is fine. It’s productive, and you can measure it, but it isn’t the same thing as friendship. The friend who knew you before any of this existed is the one that you can’t replace now. You can’t go get one later. You can’t buy a 20-year friendship at 45. You can start it, but you won’t know whether it’s really a 20-year friendship until 20 years later. [16:45.6]

So, apply the tool that you already trust, and apply it to your life. Where your time and energy actually go tells you what your priorities actually are. Take an accounting of how you spent the hours this past week and go through it the way you would the books of a company that you’re about to buy, last week, not the reunion version 20 years out. If the hours of your life don’t match the priorities that you would claim, then the priorities that you’d claim are not actually your plan. Your calendar is showing your real plan. [17:18.2]

The good news is this is fixable. You’re early enough, probably, that the correction costs you almost nothing that you can measure, and it comes down to one thing that you already know how to do. You have funded something before it had revenue. You did it with the company. There was a stretch when it was all judgment and burn, when nothing in the numbers justified another month, but you kept paying for it because you could see what it would become before there was any evidence when you invested in yourself for the future, or your company for the future.

Do that with the marriage or the relationship or the friendship. Pay in ahead of the proof the way you paid in to that company. You don’t build less. You build the same thing, but the people that it was for are still there when it pays. [18:02.1]

The problem isn’t a lack of conviction when you sit down and you know think about your statement of purpose for your life or something. It’s what happens to your conviction on an ordinary random day. People don’t skip the dinner because they’ve decided the relationship doesn’t matter. They don’t miss their friend’s worst week out of some indifference. Nobody postpones a family that they say they love out of contempt for that family.

It’s that every one of those choices gets made for a reason that, in isolation, examined, holds up, but “just this once,” “The quarter’s on fire. She’ll understand.” The problem is, she probably will. They probably will understand—and Christensen came at this like an economist in that same article and said, “The cost of doing the wrong thing ‘just this once’ always looks low.” It looks low because you’re pricing only one night. You’re not pricing the road that one night puts you on. [19:02.2]

One exception costs almost nothing, but the pattern or habit of thought and action that it starts costs you enormously, and that pattern never shows up in the metrics, because at the moment that you decide, it doesn’t exist yet. It’s not visible yet, and Christensen puts this really well in this way: “Holding a line a hundred percent of the time is easier than holding it only ninety-eight percent of the time.”

He isn’t saying that it’s more admirable to hold it a hundred percent of the time. He’s saying it’s less work to hold it a hundred percent of the time, because that two percent is where it all comes apart, because the first exception sets the price. In that exception, you find out what breaking it costs, and the immediate answer is almost nothing. It costs almost nothing, so the second one becomes cheaper, and then the tenth exception doesn’t even register. That’s when you just look at them in isolation in the short term. [19:59.5]

Christensen tells a story about this from his own life. He was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship playing basketball, and the team went undefeated that season. Then they made the national championship, but the final game fell on a Sunday, and when he was 16 years old, he had made a commitment to himself never to play ball on Sunday. He was religious.

His teammates couldn’t believe this. This was the game the whole year had been moving towards, and they told him he had to make an exception, just this once. But he decided he would not play, and he did not play. What he said afterwards was that life is one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. There’s always a reason, and that reason is usually good. If he had crossed the line that one time at 22 years old for a game that genuinely was once in a lifetime, he’d have crossed it again in the years after, over and over, for reasons, at the time, would be every bit as convincing. [20:58.0]

So, try doing that. Draw the line this week while nothing is testing it. Decide what you won’t cancel on your partner. Decide which friend gets the call, no matter what’s happening at work. Decide it while the stakes are hypothetical and your head is clear. You’ll draw a line eventually. Everybody does. The question is whether you draw it now in a calm room, or in the middle of a quarter that’s on fire with three people waiting on you and demanding from you, and giving you an excellent reason to make this one small exception. Draw it under that pressure, and you will make the wrong decision. You’ll draw it wrong.

So, everything so far adds up to basically a kind of instruction, right? Manage your life a bit more like a really well-run company. Spend on purpose. Check the plan. Hold the line. Okay, but there’s a good objection to this. Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker in 2014, went after the habit of taking business logic into places where those values have nothing to do with business, and she meant hospitals, schools, churches, and families, and she put it in four words, which I’m going to quote to you right here: “People aren’t disk drives.” [22:10.6]

Hey, she has a point. Treating your life as if it’s a portfolio to be optimized could be the same mistake that Christensen described. You’d still be handing your life over to the meter. You’d just be handing over more of it now. A marriage that you’d manage as a metric is still a marriage that you’re managing instead of living in. If you start scoring your friendships quarterly, you haven’t actually escaped anything. You’ve simply spread the problem into the last part of your life that it hasn’t gotten to yet.

But the thing she’s objecting to is a genuine problem. Your week has a fixed number of hours, whether or not you find this vulgar, and those hours are going somewhere right now, by default, you probably aren’t picking. Refusing to look at that and where those hours are going on the grounds that love shouldn’t be measured is how the bad reunion happens. [23:01.7]

Okay, so both of those are true. They don’t cancel out, so be clear about what the measuring is for. It’s for finding the sphere of your life, the aspects of your life that are being starved. It isn’t for managing or succeeding in those aspects of your life once you have located them. Okay, those are two different jobs. Instead, use this approach like a flashlight in a dark yard. Sweep that flashlight around and see what’s dying out there.

Then, once you found it, you don’t put a street light over your marriage and start tracking your partner’s responsiveness on a chart. Find the neglect. Then put the flashlight down and go be there, doing something maybe you’ll never be able to prove, quote-unquote, “worked.” You won’t get a receipt for that evening. You don’t get a return that you can see on a dashboard for that evening, and that’s what makes it hard for a lot of achievers. [23:53.3]

The numbers you use at work measure work. That’s the only thing they measure. Work pays you back fast, relatively, and where you can see it. You finish the thing, and by Friday, hopefully, you know you know it counted. But a marriage, an old friend, the kind of character you’re developing, those may only be obvious when you look back after 20 years, and you’ll never be able to see which exact day did it—and maybe it wasn’t any one day. It was the accumulation of small decisions.

So, the person who’s best at the first sphere is the one most likely to get the second sphere wrong, is most likely to let go of that second sphere and abandon it. Not on purpose. Instead, through one reasonable exception at a time, just this once, and then again, and then again, until you have followed a plan that you never actually chose. [24:47.3]

This fix isn’t to manage your life like a business. It’s to use the numbers for one task only—look at where your hours actually went last week. Find the aspects of your life that have been getting none of your good attention, and start putting that attention and those hours back in before anything can prove that it’s, quote-unquote, “working.” It won’t prove that it’s working for maybe a really long time. [25:14.0]

I worked with a successful entrepreneur he’d call himself a few years back. At the time, he was in his early 40s. He was a year past his exit, and now he’s in semi-retirement, and on paper, everything looked great. The money was there. People respected him. What he came in with was smaller and harder for him to say out loud.

His friendships had turned into simply a list of names in his phone. Useful people, all of them, but not one that he would call at 2 a.m. if he had something to get off his mind. The relationship he’d always meant to have, he put off so many times that he couldn’t tell anymore whether he still wanted a relationship or he had just delayed it until the wanting just died off. [25:57.0]

None of this was on purpose. For over 15 years, he gave every spare hour of his life to whatever paid off quickest and most visibly, and every one of those choices made sense on the day and hour that he made them. He thought that retirement would hand him back his private life, his personal life. What it did, though, was show him that there wasn’t one and that he hadn’t had one for years. Now, he was not broken or anything. He’s a capable man who trusted the numbers, but he couldn’t see that half of his life or more than half his life that he actually cared about the most.

If you keep going the way you do, nothing goes wrong. The numbers stay good. People might keep congratulating you, right up until the reunion where nobody has kept in touch, the apartment where nobody else lives, the friend whose funeral you hear about two weeks too late from somebody who assumed you already knew. [26:58.2]

Nobody plans to end up estranged from their own children. Nobody decides at 30 to be alone at 50. You just do it half an hour at a time, and every one of those half hours is defensible. But the total is a life that scored well, but lost nearly everyone that it was really for. The bill arrives too late, and it doesn’t tell you which choice caused it.

But this doesn’t have to be the way it goes. You could have the same ambition and the same hours at work, okay? You can measure the business by the business’ numbers and refuse to measure your life that way. You put time into your relationship and into the friendships that you’ve had for 20 years or more, the same way that you put money into the company when it had no revenue, because you were sure that it was worth it, not because anything had proven it yet.

You don’t build less. You build the same thing, but the people that you build it for are still with you and closer to you at the end. Put the first thing first, and the second thing usually comes along with it. [28:06.7]

This is the 100th episode of Beyond Success. A hundred episodes is like a long argument made in public about subjects that most shows don’t care about or won’t take on, like what a life is really for or how to love somebody, or why success stops paying after a certain point, or how to face death and dying—none of that trends, but all of it decides how a life turns out in the end.

People write to me about marriages that were over and now are not, about unrewarding work that they finally left, about the call they made to their father while he could still understand it. Founders who stopped measuring a life by their company’s numbers, which is what I’ve argued for in this episode. [28:54.3]

So, I’ve spent this episode telling you to put time into things that may not prove themselves out for years, maybe. This show is what I have been doing that with, a hundred times over. Thank you so much for listening. Some of you have been here since the beginning, and even earlier with the podcasts I made that came before Beyond Success. So, thank you. Now the next 100 will go even deeper. See you in 101. [29:21.5]