By David Tian, Ph.D.
Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (Level 3). Ph.D., University of Michigan, specializing in moral psychology. Former tenure-track professor of philosophy, National University of Singapore. Brown University Certified Leadership Coach. Private adviser to founders and high achievers.
Key Takeaways
- The creativity, curiosity, play, intuition, and connection you have lost are not gone. They were benched, one by one, because they slowed the climb down.
- The narrowing was not aging or pathology. It was a sensible adaptation to what winning required, completed mostly between adolescence and middle age.
- In Internal Family Systems terms, one managing part got so good at its job that it stopped letting the other parts speak. Most successful people end up identified with that single part and forget there is a fuller self behind it.
- The benched parts are recovered through unburdening — noticing the managing part is not the whole of you, making contact with the exiled parts, and letting them back into rotation gradually over months.
- The exiled parts come back almost completely, as capable as the day they were sent away, because they were never broken. They were made to wait.
- This work usually makes people more productive, not less, because the parts that come back online are the source of most of the original creative innovation and output.
This is from the Self-Mastery series.
The capabilities you exiled to win — such as creativity, curiosity, play, intuition — are not gone. They have been waiting for the climb to be over.
After a decade or more of hard work, most successful people start to notice that something has gone quiet in them.
It is hard to describe and easier to feel. The work still gets done. The numbers still go up. But a kind of spark that used to be reliable — call it curiosity, or play, or the taste that used to feel automatic — is no longer reachable when they go looking for it. They can still produce results. But they can no longer create in the way they used to create. People who have not felt this would call it midlife. People who have felt it know that label does not capture it.
What is happening is not aging. You have been getting narrower, year by year, for a long time. You did not notice because the narrowing was the price of winning, and the winning kept telling you the price was correct. You have now reached the part of life where the narrowing has gone about as far as it can go, and the bill has come due.
Here is what almost nobody is willing to say plainly. The qualities you have lost are not actually lost. They are still in you. They have just been waiting.
If you have arrived at this question after an exit, or after the year or two of restlessness that usually follows one, the work that is being asked of you is not what you would expect. It is not to slow down. It is not to spend a year traveling. It is not to find a new mountain to climb. The work is to get back the parts of yourself you exiled in order to win — creativity, curiosity, play, intuition, real connection, the urge to contribute. The exiling was the cost of the climb. Recovering them is what comes after.
Why nothing feels fun or interesting anymore
The qualities that made things feel fun and interesting in the first place have been benched, one by one, for thirty years. They have not been replaced. They have just been turned off.
The kind of curiosity you had at twenty-three — the kind that wandered into a topic for no reason and came out three months later with something useful — has not visited you in years. You have research now. Research is not curiosity. Research has a goal. Real curiosity has no goal. It is the part of you that gets interested before it knows why.
The kind of creativity you had when you were building the first thing has been replaced by something more disciplined and less alive. You produce now. You used to invent. The two look similar to people watching you. They don’t feel similar to you, though.
The kind of play you used to do — the hours that disappeared into a problem you were not being paid to solve, the conversations that went on too long, the experiments that had no business case — has been replaced by “hobbies.” Your hobbies are excellent. But your hobbies are not play. Play is what you do when you are not trying to be good at anything. You have not done that in a long time.
The kind of intuition that used to feel reliable, that knew before it could explain, no longer reaches you the way it once did. You consult it less. You learned, correctly, that you cannot defend it in a board meeting, and so you have stopped consulting it even when no one else is in the room.
The kind of connection that used to come easily has thinned. You still have friends. Most of those friendships are now made of logistics. You manage them, the way you manage everything else. True connection — the kind that requires you to be a whole person in front of someone else — has become rare.
This is not aging. It is the slow cost of having spent thirty years arranging your life around a narrow output, and being very good at it.
Why most successful people are missing pieces of themselves
The reason most successful people end up missing pieces of themselves is that the climb required it, and the method by which it required it has a name.
The method I often use with my clients is called Internal Family Systems, or IFS. It was developed in the 1980s by psychotherapist Richard Schwartz, mostly for treating trauma. It has spread, in recent years, into mainstream therapy and self-help, and is now usually presented as a way to heal old wounds. This is correct but partial. It is, in my view, the second-most interesting use of the method.
The most interesting use — and the one almost nobody is writing about — is for people who are not in any obvious sense wounded. People like you.
The basic claim of IFS is that the self is not one entity but many. We talk this way naturally, even when we have been taught it is unscientific. Part of me wants to take the offer; another part is hesitant. I’m of two minds. Something in me will not let me drop this. These are not just figures of speech. They are accurate descriptions of how the self actually works. The mind is more like a large family of parts than like a single voice.
In a healthy life, the parts work together. Different ones come forward at different times. The playful part comes out around people you trust. The strategic part comes out when there is a problem to solve. The curious part comes out when there is time to follow something. The intuitive part comes out when a decision needs more than analysis. None of them is in charge all the time. They take turns.
In a successful person’s life, this rotation usually breaks down. One part — typically the strategic, productive, manage-everything part — gets so good at what it does that it ends up doing most of the work. It does not delegate. It does not let the others speak. It manages operations all day, every day, for thirty years. The other parts, the ones that used to come out, get sent away. They are not gone. They have just been benched.
This is what I mean when I say the qualities you have lost are not actually lost. The parts are still there. Most of them are still capable of everything they were capable of when you were twenty-one. They have been waiting for you to be done with the climb.
Why successful people lose their spark, edge, and curiosity
Successful people lose their spark, edge, and curiosity because those qualities slow the climb down, and the climb does not allow anything that slows it down. It was not a failure or a wound or a pathology. It was a sensible adaptation to what your life required.
Climbing, at the level you have climbed, requires focus, and focus requires suppression. Most people’s full personalities are inefficient for that kind of climbing. They are too curious, too playful, too connected, too easily distracted by what is interesting rather than what is important. To climb, you had to bench the parts of yourself that would have slowed the climb down. For many people the benching started far earlier than the career did — as young as three or four, more often somewhere in adolescence, when a child first learns which parts of himself are rewarded and which are better kept out of sight. The climb did not begin the benching. It inherited it, and then deepened it. By the time you were well into your career, the benching was close to complete. The parts you sent away were precisely the ones that would have kept you from getting where you got.
Creativity often goes first. It is slow, unpredictable, and cannot be timed. The board does not want it.
Curiosity went around the same time. Real curiosity wants to follow the rabbit hole. The climb does not allow rabbit holes. It allows research, which is the thinned-out version of curiosity that has been put to work as a tool.
Play went, and was replaced by performance. Performance looks like play and pays a lot better.
Intuition went, because the rooms you spent time in did not respect it. You learned to translate everything into defensible reasoning. Eventually you stopped feeling the original signal that the reasoning was a translation of.
Connection thinned, because real connection requires time the climb did not have, and vulnerability the climb could not afford. You replaced it with networking, which is connection’s commercial cousin.
The contribution part — the one that wanted to make something for its own sake, the one that wanted to leave the world a little stranger and more beautiful — got the longest sentence. It was the most expensive of all to keep online, because it actively worked against optimization. So it went away and stayed away the longest.
You knew, on some level, that you were paying this price. You assumed the parts would come back when you were done. You were not entirely wrong. They are still there, just buried deep underground. And they do not come back automatically. The benching has become a habit, and the part of you that did the benching is still doing most of the work. Until that changes, nothing returns.
How to get your creativity and curiosity back after success
The work of getting your creativity and curiosity back after success has a technical name. In IFS, it is called unburdening. The popular literature presents this as a tearful process involving childhood pain. It can be that. With my successful clients, more often, it is something less dramatic and more practical.
You begin by noticing that the part of you that has been doing all the work for thirty years is not the whole of you. This sounds obvious. But it is not. Most successful people, by the time I meet them, have completely identified with this manager part. They think the manager is them. They have forgotten there is a self behind the manager.
You then practice making contact with the parts that have been benched. This is not mystical. It is closer to remembering. The curious parts are still there. The playful parts are still there. They are easier to find than people expect, because they have been waiting. You ask them what they want. You discover, sometimes with surprise, that they have been waiting for permission. They were not broken. They were told to wait, and they waited.
You then let them come back into rotation. Not all at once. The manager has been doing the work for a long time and has earned trust by doing so. The shift is gradual. Over months, the playful part starts getting a few more hours a week. The curious part starts being allowed to follow something for no reason. The intuitive part gets consulted before the strategic part runs its analysis. The creative part starts being given problems that have no deadline.
The exiled parts, given a few months of this, come back almost completely. This is the surprise. You expected them to be diminished, or wounded, or atrophied. They are not. They are exactly as capable as they were the day you sent them away. The capacities you have been mourning are intact. They have just been waiting.
What changes when the missing parts come back
When the missing parts come back, several things transform, almost regardless of the person.
The work gets better. Not more productive per se, but more interesting. You start having the kind of ideas you used to have, the ones that came out of nowhere and turned into something. The pipeline of thoughts that felt like a trickle starts looking again like the pipeline you had when you were younger.
Your taste sharpens. Decisions you used to overthink become obvious. You can tell, again, when something is good and when it is merely impressive. The two had blurred for you. They separate again.
You start being the kind of person other people want to spend unstructured time with. Your friends notice this before you do. Your spouse notices this before your friends do. Your children, if you have them, notice it the day it starts.
You become more strange, in a good way. The figures you actually admire — the ones whose later work is more interesting than their earlier work — were all at some point allowed to become more strange. They got out from under their own optimization. You start to see what they did, and that you can do some version of it.
Your contribution, when it shows up, surprises you. It does not look like what you would have predicted from your career. It is closer to what you would have made at twenty-three, if at twenty-three you had had the resources and the chops you have now. Most great late work has this quality. It is the meeting of a young self and an old craft.
What this is not
I am not telling you that your strategic, productive, manage-everything part is a problem. It is not. It is the part that built your life. It deserves more respect than your culture knows how to give it. The work I am describing does not retire it. It just stops letting it run the entire household.
I am also not telling you that you need to stop achieving. Most of my clients who do this work end up more productive, not less, because the parts that come back online turn out to be the source of most of the original output. The producer was producing. The creator was where the production was coming from. You will get more, not less, of what you actually want, by getting the rest of yourself back.
And I am not telling you this is therapy in the way that word is normally used. Therapy, in the popular imagination, is for people in pain. The people I do this work with are not in pain per se. Most of them are doing well by every external measure. They are doing this work because they have noticed, correctly, that the version of them currently at the front is missing several of its most interesting features, and they want them back.
If you want to call that therapy, fine. I prefer to call it the next stage of the inner work. It is what comes after the climb, for people who are not interested in spending the second half of their lives in a slow rerun of the first half.
The figures you admire have done some version of this. None of them got there by working harder. They got there by getting their full selves back online. The capacities are intact. They have been waiting for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why don’t I feel creative anymore?
Because the creative part of you was benched, not lost. Climbing at a high level requires focus, and focus requires suppressing the parts that slow the climb down — creativity first among them, because it is slow, unpredictable, and cannot be timed. After thirty years of this, the creative part has been waiting so long you assume it is gone. It is not. It is exactly as capable as it was the day you sent it away, and it returns within months once the part of you that has been managing everything stops running the whole household.
Why does nothing feel interesting or fun anymore?
Because the qualities that made things feel interesting and fun — curiosity, play, intuition — have been turned off one by one, for decades, and not replaced. You have research now, which is not curiosity, because research has a goal and curiosity has none. You have hobbies now, which are not play, because play is what you do when you are not trying to be good at anything. The parts that produced the original feeling are still in you. They have been benched, not removed.
Is losing your spark just a normal part of getting older?
No. What most people call midlife is not aging. It is the cumulative cost of having arranged your life around a narrow output for thirty years, and being very good at it. The narrowing was the price of winning, and the winning kept telling you the price was correct. Aging is real, but the loss of spark is not aging. It is reversible, which aging is not.
Why do successful people feel like something is missing?
Because the climb required them to send away the parts of themselves that would have slowed it down — creativity, curiosity, play, intuition, real connection, the urge to contribute. One part, usually the strategic, manage-everything part, got so good at its job that it stopped letting the others speak. The successful person ends up identified with that single managing part and forgets there is a fuller self behind it. The feeling that something is missing is accurate. Several parts are missing. They are recoverable.
Can you get your creativity back after years of focusing on your career?
Yes. In Internal Family Systems the process is called unburdening, and with successful people it is usually practical rather than dramatic. You notice that the part doing all the work is not the whole of you. You make contact with the parts that have been benched, which is closer to remembering than to healing. You let them back into rotation gradually, over months, while the managing part learns to trust the shift. The exiled parts come back almost completely, because they were never broken. They were made to wait.
What is Internal Family Systems and how does it apply to high achievers?
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a model developed by psychotherapist Richard Schwartz, built on the claim that the self is not one entity but many parts. It is usually presented as a way to heal trauma. Its less-discussed use is for people who are not wounded in any obvious sense — high achievers whose internal rotation of parts has broken down, leaving one managing part doing all the work while the creative, curious, and playful parts sit benched. For this group, IFS is a way to bring the exiled parts back into a life that has room for them again.
Will doing this inner work make me less productive or less successful?
No, and usually the opposite. The parts that come back online are the source of most of the original output. The producer was producing, but the creator was where the production came from. Most people who do this work end up more productive, not less, because they recover the capacities that generated their best work in the first place. The managing part is not retired. Instead, it stops running the entire household.
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