Why You Can’t Stop Your Productivity Addiction - Oliver Burkeman

Many people struggle to find a healthy way to pursue goals without tying their self-worth to the outcome. The only way to pursue a goal is if you care about it, and in caring, you'll be disappointed if you don't reach it, and the disappointment is a value judgment about your worth. How do you healthfully pursue goals without tying self-worth to the outcome?

There's a way of caring about goals that defines yourself as inadequate until you've met them, and other ways of caring. The concept of the insecure overachiever—half the people in a room recognize it. People who do really well in life, driven and applauded, but doing it to fix something about themselves, feel okay, or fill a void. Many successful people feel they absolutely have to succeed otherwise they don't deserve to exist.

This puts you in a perpetual place where goal pursuit is to make yourself feel less bad about yourself. Anything you achieve instantly becomes the minimum standard to meet next time, which is depressing. You do well at an exam or get public success, and it becomes the baseline—if you don't meet it next time, who are you?

Another way: entertain the possibility that everything was fine right now, you feel good about yourself without self-worth psycho dramas, and then decide to create cool things because it's more interesting than doing nothing. You can be ambitious and accomplished without fleeing from something.

Curse of Competence06:30

Curse of competence: when things go well most of the time, success is no longer a reason for celebration; it's the minimum level of acceptable output. John Bellion Luke song: "if the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all?" Pattern matched to personal development.