Discipline Got You Here, But It Won’t Get You What You Really Want | (#098) 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 questions behind what they’re building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

In ancient China, there was a farmer in the state of Song who had a problem that you’ll recognize before I even finish describing it, hopefully. His grain was growing too slowly, so every morning he’d walk out to the field and look at it, and every morning, it was barely taller than the day before, so he decided to help it out. He went down each row, took hold of every single shoot and pulled it up an inch, gave it a head start, and he did the whole field by hand that way.

Then he came home that night, and he was exhausted, wrecked, and filthy, but proud of himself. He told his family, “It was a big day today, a long one, but I helped the crop along” Then, in the morning, his son ran out to the field to see, and every plant was dead. [00:51.3]

Now, what’s the point or takeaway from this funny anecdote? The farmer didn’t fail because he was lazy. He didn’t fail because he didn’t care or didn’t try hard enough, or didn’t put in the hours. He failed because he tried harder than the situation could survive. He worked himself into the ground, doing damage, and the entire time it felt to him like diligence, like effort, like exactly the thing that had worked for him everywhere else in his life. Right?

This is the most respected form of failure there is. It’s not the guy on the couch being lazy. It’s the guy in the field at dawn pulling up the sprouts. Most high achievers have a version of this running right now in some part of their lives, but they can’t see it. They can’t see it because it feels like to them like they’re working hard, and working hard has never once let them down before. It’s led to a lot of their success. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to tell the difference between success that you’re forcing and success that carries its own power, in your work, in your relationships, in your ambition itself. [01:59.0]

For most people, those two kinds of success feel identical from the inside. They both involve what feels like effort. They both involve wanting something. They both leave you tired. So, people assume they’re the same thing, just aimed at different targets, but they’re not the same thing, and it’s important to recognize that unforced success isn’t the soft option. It’s not the consolation prize for people who just couldn’t cut it. It’s actually more effective, and it’s a lot harder to knock over. I’ll show you why, and I’ll show you that it’s not just some kind of metaphor.

Now, the person who can’t tell the difference between forced success and unforced success will spend the next decade or more pulling up the sprouts to help them grow, and I don’t just mean this at work. He will force the marriage the way he forced the last funding round. He’ll schedule the friendship as if it were a standing meeting, and then wonder why that friendship feels so thin and unsatisfying. He’ll try to force stillness, which is its own kind of tragicomedy. He’ll be sitting there gripping the cushion real tight, furious that he isn’t relaxed yet. [03:02.5]

He’ll force the next venture out of the same hunger that drove the last one, and on paper, some of this might actually work. The numbers might actually even be fine. The résumé is probably fine. But the most important things that don’t respond to force are dying in the field while he congratulates himself for all his effort. Okay, that’s the cost—a whole life built on a fuel that taxes you even when you succeed, and especially when you succeed.

Now, I want to take on the biggest objection upfront and head it off at the pass, because maybe it’s already forming in your mind, and it goes something like this: “David, my intensity is the whole point. My intensity is what got me here. That drive, that refusal to settle, that engine that won’t shut off, that’s my edge. And what? You’re telling me to now let go of it? To, I don’t know, go soft? No thanks, man. If I stop forcing it, then I lose the thing that makes me special.” [03:58.3]

Okay, so there’s a truth buried in this objection and I don’t want to just dismiss the whole thing, right? Your intensity is real, let’s say. It did get you here, let’s say. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ll grant you that. But you’ve ended up bundling two different things together and just called them the same thing. You’ve taken your intensity and your division, and you’ve called the whole bundle drive, and you’ve decided that they come as a set. If you lose one, you lose the other, but they don’t come as a set.

Intensity is how much fire you’re bringing. Division is whether a part of you is fighting another part of you while you do it. It’s inner conflict. Those are two separate variables. You can turn one all the way up, and turn the other all the way down. You can be every bit as intense, and stop being at war with yourself while you’re intense, and when people do that, when they keep the intensity but drop the division, they don’t lose their edge. That’s the fear, right? But this fear is founded on falsity. When you drop the division, you lose the tax, but your edge stays sharp. What falls away is the private cost that you are paying to hold on to that division. [05:09.7]

Okay, let’s look deeper at what forced success actually is. Forced success is excellence driven from a divided place. Okay, so the excellence might be genuine. The result is good, right? You get this success. I want to be clear about that. The skill could be there. The output could be there. The results could be there, but the fuel driving it is division.

You’re doing the work for the applause or you’re doing it for the conquest to beat someone, to be the one who came out on top, or you’re doing it to prove an old wound wrong, to show some version of yourself or some person from years ago that they were wrong about you. That’s forced success. It could be real capability, but it’s running on a fuel that has nothing to do with the work itself. [05:56.2]

Okay, it’s got at least three tells. I’m going to give you these three tells, and you can see if you can spot them in yourself or in someone else. The first tell is that it’s brittle. It breaks the moment the supply runs out, because it was never running on the actual work or the activity, or the process. It was running on the validation, the applause, or the conquest, and the day the applause stops, or the day that nobody’s left to beat, the whole thing collapses. It falls over. The achievement was standing on something outside itself, and outside things get taken away or they go away.

Okay, the second tell is that it’s frantic. There’s no floor. There’s no amount that counts as enough, because enough was never the real target. You hit the number that you swore would satisfy you, but you feel the satisfaction for only about a weekend, and then the floor drops out again, and you’re scrambling for the next one. If you’ve ever hit a goal that you’d wanted for a long time, like a decade, but then felt almost nothing, then you know what this is like and you know this truth in your body. [06:56.8]

The third tell is that it taxes you even when it does work. Okay, this is a really cruel part of it. Forced success doesn’t only cost you when you fail. It costs you when you succeed. You win the thing, but you’re still tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix, because holding it all together took something out of you that the victory didn’t put back.

Now go back to the farmer from Song for a second. The thing about the farmer is that he was certain that he was helping the sprouts grow. He wasn’t being lazy or careless. In his own mind, he was the most diligent man in the village. In fact, to himself, he thinks he came up with some new innovation. He pulled every shoot up because he believed sincerely that polling was helping them. His certainty was total, but his certainty was worthless, because it was pointed at the wrong thing, based on a falsity. [07:49.3]

Here’s a clinical version of this. The felt sense of “I’m working hard at this” tells you actually nothing. It tells you nothing about whether your effort is building the thing or killing it. Those are two separate questions. How hard it feels, how much hard work you put in, is one question. Whether it’s working is a completely different question.

But we constantly use the first to answer the second. We feel the strain, we feel the sweat, and we conclude we must be helping. We must be effective, because when has effort ever been the problem? But effort in the wrong direction isn’t neutral. It’s not just wasted. It’s actually destructive. It’s a negative. The farmer didn’t just do nothing. He’d have been better off doing nothing.

There’s an ancient idea here that gets this exactly right. When Mencius told the story of that farmer, he had a specific target in mind. He was going after the people of his day who thought you could reason your way to the right action, calculate it, and then just force yourself to perform it. Their view was that you could install good behavior using willpower, like tightening a bolt. [08:59.7]

But Mencius says, no, the good you actually want in yourself, in your life, in the people around you cannot be installed by force. It isn’t just some bolt. It’s instead like a crop. It grows through cultivation. You can tend it, feed it, protect it, and give it every condition that it needs to grow. What you can’t do is grab it and pull it up. You cannot force it to grow.

So, forced and unforced success end up looking almost the same from the outside. Okay, this is a real problem for those who are externally focused. Two people can produce the same result, hit the same numbers, run the same company, give the same talk, but one of them could be the farmer pulling the shoots up to help them grow, and the other one isn’t, and you can’t really tell just by looking at them from the outside, because both might look competent or impressive. From across the room, forced excellence and unforced excellence look nearly identical to someone who does know them very well or from the inside. [10:02.5]

People know this at some level, so they learn to perform the ease. Okay, this is the counterfeit version. The counterfeit version, like the founder who’s calm on stage, but at war the second he steps off it. The performed version of unforced, worn like a jacket over a body that’s clenched underneath, maybe he studied what relaxed power looks like and he’s doing his impression of it, and maybe for a short while, this impression holds up. But here’s the thing about the counterfeit version—it doesn’t hold for long.

There’s an old Chinese word for this, de. It’s the quality that genuinely undivided people carry, a kind of magnetism, a charisma, a pull that other people feel and then instinctively trust. We trust it because it can’t be faked. It can’t be faked past a certain point. The undivided, unconflicted person has no war to hide, so there’s nothing leaking out from the sides. [10:59.3]

The forced man does have a war, an internal war going on, and he will inevitably leak it out, a beat too long before he answers or a laugh that arrives a half second late, where the eye is doing one thing while his mouth does another. He can manage it. He can micromanage it. He can try covering up for a lot of it, but he can’t cover all of this, all the time, because it’s coming from a real fracture inside, and that fracture is still there, that’s a fact, and astute people feel it.

The people around him eventually will feel the difference, even when they can’t put their finger on it or can’t say exactly what it is. They don’t walk away thinking, Ah, I detected internal division in this man’s fuel source. No, they walk away thinking, I don’t know, something’s off about this guy. I didn’t fully trust him, but I can’t tell you why. [11:49.7]

So, when I say the undivided person is more or feels more trustworthy, this isn’t some kind of sentimentality. I’m not saying he deserves more trust as some kind of moral reward. I’m saying trust is a signal other people are reading off you constantly, whether you want them to or not. You’re transmitting it right now, and you don’t get a vote. The only question is what you’re transmitting, and that’s decided by whether the internal war is there, not by how good your impression is.

Now, I can feel some of you might already be trying to fix this. Maybe you’re already thinking, Fine, I’ll just be undivided then. I’ll relax, starting right now. Okay, and this is kind of the joke, right? You try to relax on command, and then watch what happens. Serenity now. You can’t will your way out of willing. The effort to stop forcing is itself a kind of forcing. It’s like being told to be spontaneous. The moment you try, you’ve already lost it. [12:51.8]

Sit with this for a second or for a minute. Let it sink in, because this is not some kind of trick and it’s not a dead-end. It’s just what happens to high-achievers when they try to walk out of the field. You can’t grab your way to letting go, which raises an obvious question, if you can’t force it, then what do you actually do? What are you supposed to do?

Before I answer that, I have to clear away a misreading, because it’s one that a lot of people reach for, and it’s dead wrong. This misreading is that unforced means lazy, that it means passive, that I’m telling you to stop working or drift endlessly, or take your hands off the wheel or trust the universe to bring you a bell stand. Okay, none of that is what I’m getting at here. Unforced does not mean untrained. This is a super important point. Unforced does not mean untrained. [13:43.9]

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.”

There’s a story in the Zhuangzi about a woodcarver named Qing, and Qing gets a commission from the king himself to carve a stand for a set of bells. This isn’t some kind of low-stakes job. There’s real money on the line for him. There are imperial honors on the line. Okay, so the king is watching, the whole court is watching, and this is exactly the kind of high-pressure, high-visibility work that makes you clutch, right? Here’s what Qing does before he carves a single thing: he fasts. [15:00.6]

He doesn’t do this to look holy or anything. He does this to empty out. He says that after three days of fasting, he stopped thinking about the reward, stopped thinking about the congratulations, he stopped thinking about the money. After five days of fasting, he says he stopped thinking about praise and blame, about whether people will call him skilled or clumsy.

After seven days of fasting, he’s forgotten he even has a body. He’s forgotten he has four limbs. He’s become unselfconscious even of his physical body, and he says by then that there is no more ruler and there is no more court. The king who could make him rich has left his mind entirely—and only then, emptied out like that, does he then go into the forest, and he looks at the trees until he finds the one that already has the finished bell stand inside it. He can see it in there, and then he says, all he has to do is bring it out. [15:56.5]

If this sounds strange, here’s the same idea from a man that you probably have heard of, Michelangelo. When he was asked how he made his amazing statues, he is supposed to have said the statue was already inside the block of marble. His job was just to cut away everything that wasn’t the statue. Okay, so the work is there. The reward-chasing, the fear of the king, the noise about skilled or clumsy, that’s all the excess marble. Cut it away, and the thing you’re making is right there.

So, don’t mistake what you just heard. Qing’s ease is genuine, but it is not the ease of a man who skipped the training. This is a master carver. Years of skill are in those hands. The fasting doesn’t replace the training that he had before that. This fasting is what he does on top of a lifetime of training up till now to get the internal division out of the way so that the training can do what it already knows how to do. The ease is the fruit of the discipline, not a substitute for it. [16:58.8]

Confucius says the same thing about his own life in the Analects and he’s very clear about the timeline. He says, at 15, he set his mind on learning, and it’s not until 70, 70 years old, that he can finally follow his heart’s desire and never once overstep the line. Okay, that’s how he puts it in the Analects.

Okay, do the math on that. That’s 55 years, 55 years of carving and polishing himself before the effort finally turns into natural, effortless ease. The unforced state at the end wasn’t a shortcut around the discipline and training, and skill-building. It was what the discipline ripened into after over half a century.

I’ll concede the whole case for discipline right here. The hours you put in are necessary. The training is necessary. The years of skill-building are necessary. Okay, so this isn’t meant to take a minute away from any of that. You want to keep all of that, all the stuff that you’ve already been doing to get you to this point now. [17:57.3]

But then hear what it was all for. All that discipline is not the destination itself. It’s what, done long enough and emptied of the internal war, finally turns into power that doesn’t strain. In the previous episode, I explained the three modes of success, and this right here is the third mode, the integrated mode in depth. You don’t put out the fire. The fire is kind of the point. You keep the fire. You just change what you fed the fire.

So, why is the mind that’s undivided, free of inner conflict, actually more powerful? Because I’m not proposing that you trade effectiveness for peace of mind. You can get both. There’s a passage in the Dao De Jing by Laozi, describing what the book calls the “way of heaven,” and it’s a portrait of power that doesn’t strain. It overcomes without contending. It attracts without summoning. It plans for everything while staying relaxed the whole time. [18:57.1]

The text describes it like this: “Its net is wide. The mesh is loose. Yet nothing slips through.” Loose mesh, nothing gets past it. Okay, that’s the paradox of the undivided operator—relaxed grip. Still nothing important escapes his attention.

Yeah, let’s cash this out for your actual life so that we don’t just stay up in the clouds. The undivided person decides cleaner. When part of you is defending an ego position, you can’t see the board clearly. You’re not asking what’s true or what’s fact, or what’s reality anymore. You’re asking what protects the story that you have about yourself that you have a vested interest in keeping. Drop the division, and then the decision gets a lot simpler and clearer, because you’re only solving one problem instead of two or more.

The undivided person reads the room better. The forced man is running a persona and having to monitor it in real time. Half his attention is on his own performance. That’s half his attention gone, half his focus, half his concentration. [20:03.4]

The undivided man isn’t managing a persona, so all of his mental energy is available to actually read and sense what’s present in front of him, and people extend him more trust. There’s no war leaking out the sides, so there’s nothing setting off any alarms.

Notice what these all have in common—the force that you thought was your engine was never the engine. It was drag. It was the thing slowing you down the whole time, but you called it horsepower. Clear off the division, and you don’t get weaker. You get faster. None of this makes you less ambitious as a result.

Qing still wanted that bell stand to be magnificent. He wasn’t fasting so that he could stop caring about the work itself. He fasted so that he could care about the work and nothing else. The quality of the results still mattered to him enormously. What left him was all the noise about the validation and the rewards, and the honors and what other people think of him. [21:05.5]

He was every bit as committed to a beautiful result. He was just no longer divided about why he wanted it, and he was no longer pulled here and there by the irrelevant concerns that were not the work itself, and he was no longer divided about why he wanted that beautiful result.

In the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, he had a phrase for this kind of man that stayed with me for years. He’s writing about the leader that everyone instinctively follows from the beginning of time, and he calls this person the unconflicted man, the unconflicted person. [21:41.3]

That’s it. That’s the whole source of the pull. Not the loudest man, not the most aggressive one. The unconflicted one. The one who is not at war with himself, so the rest of us feel safe near him, secure, like we can rely on him, and we trust him. He’s sincere in his integrity and his congruence, and we unconsciously hand him the room without quite knowing why we did. That’s the power on offer here—not more force, but actually less conflict and it turns out less conflict is the more powerful of the two by a wide margin. [22:15.9]

So, let me pull the whole thing together before we finish. Forced success runs on division and it taxes you even when it works. That’s the farmer of Song, out in the field at dawn, pulling every shoot up an inch, certain that he’s helping the crop to grow, killing the crop, though, with his own two hands.

Unforced success is the other one. It keeps every hour of the discipline, but drops the division. Okay, that’s woodcarver Qing emptying out the reward and the fear, the validation-needing, until there’s no more king and no more court, then carving something people think a spirit made. Okay, that’s Confucius at 70, finally able to follow his heart and never cross the line naturally and effortlessly after 55 years of work. [23:01.7]

The difference between the two isn’t something that you can see directly. It’s something other people feel. That pull the undivided, unconflicted person has, the one that others trust without even knowing why, you can keep that fire. Just change what you feed the fire.

Let me show you what this looks like in an actual life, okay, because I’ve seen this up close many times. Okay, so this is a composite. A client came to me. He’s a founder, passed his exit. He ended up with the kind of number in his portfolio that was supposed to settle and would settle for most people who haven’t had this yet the question of whether he was enough, but it didn’t settle it, of course.

He’s off running the next venture just the way he ran the last one, and it looks like on paper that he’s crushing it, but he tells me he cannot sleep and his girlfriend has started saying his name in a tone that he doesn’t like, and he can’t remember the last time he saw a real friend without any agenda attached to it. [23:56.7]

What he says to me almost proudly is that he just needs to work harder on all of it. He’s going to fix his relationship the way he fixes everything else with more effort, more systems, more monitoring, more checking in, more force, more discipline.

So, I stopped him and I asked him this question. “When was the last time you wanted something that wasn’t about proving anything to anyone?” and up to this point, we’ve been doing a lot of work already, so he was able to understand what was behind that question, and he went quiet for quite a long time because he couldn’t find anything.

Every single thing he was chasing when he looked at it honestly had somebody in the stands that he was trying to convince, his father, an old rival, a younger version of himself who felt small, insignificant, unworthy. The whole magnificent enterprise was one long argument with people who mostly weren’t even watching anymore, and even if they were, they weren’t the same version of themselves that they were when he started having to prove himself to them, so he was proving himself to ghosts. [25:06.3]

Okay, so here’s what didn’t happen next. He didn’t quit his job. He didn’t sell his company and move to a beach. He didn’t stop being ambitious. Okay, that’s the part everyone expects, but it’s wrong. What changed was his fuel. We spent months on this and it was gradual, because you can’t force this either, but his drive state, his intensity state, what left him a bit at a time was the internal war.

The strange thing that he reported, strange to himself at least, months into this process, was that he was making better calls. They were easier to make. They were cleaner, clearer, and because he wasn’t defending anything in himself anymore, he could just see the situation and respond to it. His people started trusting him more. His girlfriend started saying his name differently, and his work got better, not worse. [25:58.6]

Now, let me impress upon you what happens if you don’t sort this out, because most people go along the slippery slope without realizing where it’s headed. You end up continuing to pull the sprouts to try to make them grow. Okay, that’s what happens. You spend another decade or more in forced success, and it might look convincing at first because the numbers keep climbing, but if you look at what’s happening off the spreadsheet, it’s bad.

Your leadership gets worse because people can feel the internal war in you, and they stop bringing you the truth. Your marriage or relationship withers slowly, so slowly you can tell yourself it’s fine right up until it collapses. Your friendships thin out to nothing, like a birthday text here or a missed call there. The stillness that you keep promising yourself never arrives. Neither does the calm or the peace, because you can’t force your way into stillness any more than the farmer could force his way into a harvest faster—and the whole time, you call this exhaustion “drive,” and you wear it like it’s some kind of badge. [27:03.2]

This might work well enough to keep you doing it for another decade or three. It’s not a clean failure that you are forced to learn from. It pays just enough to be worth continuing, and that’s the trap. Forced success is like a slot machine that pays out exactly often enough that you never walk away.

Or you learn the difference. Again, here’s what that life is like—the same excellence, the same high standards, the same big ambitions, the same fire, just far less strain holding it. Your decisions start coming from clarity instead of defensiveness, and they get better for that. People trust the room that moment you walk into it because there’s no internal war for them to sense and be turned off by. [27:51.7]

The ambition is every bit as alive as it ever was. It just stops costing you your life to carry it. You overcome without contending. You attract without summoning, right? The mesh stays loose, and nothing important slips through.

You can force your success, but it’ll tax you every day that you do. Or you can keep the fire, and change the fuel, and stop paying that tax. [28:16.1]