Is Marriage Worth It for Successful People? The Data Says It Depends Entirely on Whom You Marry
Most successful people in midlife look at marriage as a financial risk, and they are half right. The wrong spouse can cost you decades of your peace and half of what you built. The mistake is to blame marriage. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study of adult life ever conducted, found that married men lived seven to seventeen years longer than unmarried ones. But the same research shows that men in unhappy marriages carry a twenty-one percent higher risk of dying from any cause than men in happy ones. A good marriage adds years. A bad one takes them. The question is not whether to marry. It is whether you have found the partner whose partnership in your life over the next decades would give you back at least double what you brought to them.
The Lie About Money That’s Costing You Your Life | (#089) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
A toxic and false belief has been dominating business culture for decades: Money is the byproduct of value creation. It sounds like common sense, but it is one of the most damaging things a thinking person can believe.
This episode takes the belief apart and shows the moral claim hiding inside the causal one. The cost of getting this wrong is steep: you spend thirty years hounded by a number you can never reach, unable to rest, unable to truly enjoy what you have built — and then arrive at sixty to discover the prize the belief promised was never there.
How to Know If Your Partner Is the Right Person For You: What Your Dating History Is Actually Telling You
Most people, trying to decide whether to get serious with someone, ask whether their partner is the right person. The question feels like the important one. It is also the wrong one, or at least the secondary one. The primary one is about the person doing the asking. The qualities in your partner that first drew you in are usually the same qualities you eventually try to suppress in them, because they’re the same qualities you suppressed in yourself a long time ago. The variable in your dating life has never been the partner. This essay is about what it has been.
What to Look For in a Partner: Why the Checklist Doesn’t Work
When successful people sit down to write what they want in a partner, they usually produce something closer to a job description than a portrait of someone to live with. The list reads like a spec because that is what it is, and the spec is doing a job for the writer rather than describing an actual person. The job is settling an old question about whether you are enough. No partner can settle that question. This essay is about what to do instead.
Why Drive Stops Working at a Higher Level
The drive you used to have was running on a fuel source that gets depleted by the wins it produces. By your forties, the tank is empty, and pushing harder is the thing accelerating the loss. This is not burnout, not midlife, not lost hunger. Instead, it is a design flaw in the engine that got you here.
The Move That Got You Here Is the Wrong Move for What’s Next
The playbook that got you to this altitude has stopped producing. The standard remedy — point it at a bigger target — costs more than it produces now. This is not an argument for a quieter life or a different mountain. It is an argument that the next decade can dwarf the last one, and that the constraint is somewhere you have not been looking.
Why Hitting Your Next Number Never Works | (#088) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
You set a number for yourself a long time ago. You meant it. You told yourself, when I cross this line, I will know I am ok.
You crossed it. But you do not feel ok.
You are not poor. Not even close. But you still cannot sit still.
There is a story behind the thing that keeps driving you, and that story was handed to you before you were old enough to question it. It told you your worth was something countable. It taught you to measure yourself by your output, and to measure the people you care about by their output. So they measured you back.
This episode walks you through where the story came from, what it has been doing to your nervous system, and why no further amount of money will turn it off.
Why You’ve Lost Your Creativity, Curiosity, and Spark After Success
After a decade or more of hard work, most successful people start to notice that something has gone quiet in them. The work still gets done. The numbers still go up. But the curiosity, the play, the taste that used to feel automatic — none of it is reachable the way it used to be. This essay is about what actually happened to those qualities, why they are not gone, and how the figures whose later work is more interesting than their earlier work got them back.
The Reason Achievement Never Made You Feel Loved | (#087) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.
There is a certain irony in your situation, visible only if you step back far enough.
You have spent your entire adult life getting very good at one particular skill: earning. It built the career, the bank account, the reputation. Then you walked into the one room in life where earning stops working — love — and wondered why your strategy had failed you.
Your strategy didn’t fail. It’s just that the room is now different.
Why You’re Never Satisfied No Matter What You Achieve
You won. But it didn’t feel the way you thought it would. The numbers that used to keep you up at night have stopped doing that. And yet you cannot rest, you cannot stop competing, and when you win, what arrives first is relief — not joy. This essay is about the question that arrives sometime after the win, and what the people who hold up over decades have done with it.