#28: The Cost of Greatness

#greatness #fear #just #accept #act #devotion

Jul 21, 2023

👋 Welcome to this week's Pursuit. My name is Amir, and each week I go over 10 hours of content in pursuit of living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life. I'm grateful to share my findings with you and hope I can have a tiny impact on your life. Subscribe now if you haven't already!

This week’s discovery:

🤴🏼 The Cost of Greatness
🐉 Fears That Warp Ambition (Part 2/2)
☯️ The Fallacy of a Just World
🏄🏼‍♂️ To Orient Toward Doing
🍏 Simplicity of Devotion
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

🤴🏼 The Cost of Greatness

As life forces priorities to shift, so does your personal definition of what constitutes great. There is a tension; the longer you remain committed to a single cause of greatness, the more incapable you become of being good enough at everything else. There is a fear that committing myself to the cause of greatness, to being all that I think I can be, will turn me into something I now dislike. Because greatness is so malleable, I worry that “being great” eventually destroys who I am. Greatness is not measurable. I’m not even sure it is definable. But still we desire it. Be aware, it is a devourer resting within us. What we choose to feed it determines what kind of great we will be.

📖 5-min

🐉 Fears That Warp Ambition (Part 2/2)

This is part 2 of the article I posted last week. Below, you'll find some examples of projects that we continue to work on, which may have originated from our deepest fears.

Worthiness Project: This archetype is driven by the fear of being “not enough.” When caught in this fear, our projects and goals become about trying to prove our worth by achieving more. This fear often leads to dreams associated with status, such as becoming the CEO of a major company, getting into YC, or becoming famous. On the surface, these dreams appear to be about success, but underneath they are about managing a deep-seated fear of being “unworthy.” Another issue with worthiness projects is that they’re never-ending. As we achieve more, we tend to compare ourselves to more successful people. So even if we achieve a dream, it doesn’t necessarily lead to lasting satisfaction. What we consider “enough” keeps changing, and we end up chasing a destination that’s always just out of reach.
Coherence Project: The next archetype is driven by the fear of uncertainty and the need for meaning. A coherence project helps us make sense of our life in some way, and without it, we’re unsure of who we are or where we’re going. This is problematic, because the most interesting paths are often only discovered through open-ended exploration. In the words of the author André Gide: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Security Project: This one is driven by the fear of scarcity—of not having enough. To deal with this fear, our projects become primarily about the accumulation of capital: money, status, or power. We become hyper-focused on the destination and fail to notice the vitality draining out of the journey itself. Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.

📖 8-min

☯️ The Fallacy of a Just World

Shame and depression are closely linked because both are enrooted in the illusion of causality. Shame results from the belief that you did something that makes you unlovable, while depression is accentuated from the belief that you did something that caused it to arise. But the reality is that there is no clear causation in both of those things; they are largely the result of chaos that you had no agency in controlling. One of the quickest ways to accept who you are is to free yourself from the thought that you deserve anything. You don’t deserve to feel shame about something you said, and the moment you realize that, it dissipates. You don’t deserve to feel superior because of some accomplishment, and the moment you realize that, it dissipates. To see through the illusion of a Just World is to see that there are no patterns governing this world. There is just consciousness, the appearances that emerge within it, and the randomness that permeates the present moment. That’s all there is and all there ever will be, so the best thing we can do is to simply enjoy it while we can.

📖 4-min

🏄🏼‍♂️ To Orient Toward Doing

The truth is, there might not be such a thing as being “ready”. There’s only deciding. There’s only doing it, whether or not readiness feels present. There’s only making the choice and being willing to sit with the outcomes of doing so. There’s only a commitment to what matters to us more than a commitment to comfort. There’s only trying — taking action — going for it — claiming the next best move and making it, without knowing how it will go, or what others will think, or what will unfold… because we never have any say in those things anyway, whether we do the thing or not. So maybe Doing The Thing… whatever it is… is less about trying to manage other people’s feelings or opinions about it, and is more about learning we can trust ourselves to hold the discomfort of not having control over any of that.

📖 8-min

🍏 Simplicity of Devotion

It takes space between stimulus and response to hear your own voice clearly. To trust it. Direct it. To appreciate incremental improvements in quality, to develop good taste. Humans like to complicate everything, but I think devotion is simple. It means turning up humbly again and again to the mat. Practice. Presence. Effort. That’s all there is.

📖 5-min