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A weekly collection of ideas on living a meaningful, fulfilling and balanced life.

#29: The Trap of Self-Exploitation

#SuccessIndicator #SelfExploitation #ManagingUp #KnowledgeQuest #FavorPower

Jul 28, 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:

🐢 All Success Is A Lagging Indicator
🪤 The Trap of Self-Exploitation
🆙 2 Tips for Mastering the Art of Managing Up
🧠 The Ambitious Quest for Knowledge
🙋🏼 The Power of Asking for Favors
🗒️ A Quote I'm Pondering On
🎵 Music I'm Listening To

🐢 All Success Is A Lagging Indicator

This passage is from my favorite author, Ryan Holiday. I have read his book The Obstacle Is the Way four times, and I highly recommend it for times when you are going through a tough transition in your life.

Success as a lagging indicator is a phenomenon that holds true across most areas in life. Your retirement accounts are a lagging indicator of whether or not you have your financial act together — earning enough, saving enough. Pulling an all-nighter is not a sign of dedication but a lagging indicator of the exact opposite. It means you plan poorly, you procrastinate, you aren’t proactive enough, you don’t know how to effectively manage your work and your time. Not being able to fully disconnect from your devices on vacation is a lagging indicator that you don’t have good systems in place. Hitting a personal record on the bench press is a lagging indicator of a lot of discipline and hard work. Fifty years of marriage is a lagging indicator of how quickly arguments are resolved today, how mistakes are handled today, the pressure of (or better yet, the lack thereof) today. Nothing comes from nowhere. Not success. Not inspiration. Not the muses. Not writer’s block. Everything is a lagging indicator. Of whether or not you did the work.

📖 4-min

🪤 The Trap of Self-Exploitation

Freedom is the great promise of capitalism, but it has also enshrined productivity as a virtue in order to achieve that aim. You will always feel the need to produce value for others, and it is this ceaseless tug on your conscience that makes your inner critic so loud. No external boss will be needed for you to get to work, as your inner critic will always remind you that there’s more to be done. This dynamic is what is referred to as self-exploitation, which leads to the feeling that you’re never enough. This results in the continuous extraction of value from your own mind to prove that you can achieve the freedom you so desire.
If you were truly content with who you were, you wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with what you have to do next. If you didn’t think that you had to prove anything to anyone, then any demand on your attention will seem far less urgent. By realizing that your identity is distributed across many areas, you can approach your work identity with a lightheartedness knowing that it doesn’t define the entirety of who you are.

📖 5-min

🆙 2 Tips for Mastering the Art of Managing Up

Always Consider Your Manager's Trust & Safety: People often think about what your boss does to create safety for you, but to manage up you need to think about what creates safety for them. What are the areas that make them feel upset and unsafe? A lot of the things you do to manage down are things you should do to manage up.
Package Problems In A Helpful Way: Concisely give your boss the context they need to understand the problem. Avoid collecting and presenting a ton of unstructured detail or data. Instead, provide enough information so that your boss understands the context and how you reached your recommendation.

📖 11-min

🧠 The Ambitious Quest for Knowledge

The best thinkers—and thus the best builders—are not intellectually humble but intellectually ambitious. They respect the work that achieving real knowledge and earned certainty requires, and they embrace that work as the requisite to a life fully and consciously lived. If you truly know little (whether in general or in a given domain), hurry up and admit it; not so you can brandish your humility, but so you can get on with the ambitious quest to learn more. The real problem is not that people overestimate how much they know, but that they underestimate and undervalue the work involved in coming to know.

📖 15-min

🙋🏼 The Power of Asking for Favors

If you're struggling to break the ice with someone you're interested in, try asking for a small favor. According to a study, when we do someone a small favor, we actually like them more. This is because we feel useful and necessary. So, next time you're at a coffee shop, ask someone to watch your jacket while you use the restroom or ask for a recommendation on a good spot to eat. These small acts of service can give someone the opportunity to help you out and break the ice in a way that doesn't feel forced. Plus, it gives you an easy way to start a conversation when you return. Start at 30 miles an hour instead of 0, and see where the conversation takes you!

🎧 3-min