Peak Performance #30 | Life is for Living
The case for having a meaningful life outside of work, performance, and achievement.
“In order for art to imitate life, you have to have a life.”
Whitney Cummings
Life is for living.
If losing sight of this truth were a crime, I would be on the most wanted list. I am a prolific repeat offender.
One common way to lose sight of this reality is to make life about work, performance, and achievement. The price you pay for having such a single-minded perspective is high. It reduces your capacity to be present, content, and to experience beauty and joy.
...which doesn’t sound so bad if you believe that life really is about work, performance, and achievement. So let me up the claim: when you lose sight of the fact that life is about life, your performance suffers.
A Meaningful Life is Diverse
Let me draw a clear line in the sand: I am not against valuing work and performance. Competence and excellence are deeply beautiful things. To set out to do something bold and elegantly accomplish it is a wildly fulfilling part of being human.
When you value living a meaningful life, you’re not “against” any part of life. All aspects of life provide depth and beauty. You value them all for that fact alone. Work is as essential a piece of how we make meaning as interpersonal relationships.
But here’s the thing: work and performance aren’t the only parts of a meaningful life. And while you may consciously agree with that statement, I suspect that, unconsciously, you might not believe it.
This is the trap of our culture. It constantly subconsciously signals to you that life is about work and performance. Embedded in this is the unconscious belief that, absent excellence and competence, you do not have worth1. If you aren’t working and performing highly, you should sacrifice the rest of your life to make up for it.
When this happens, work begins to crowd out the rest of life. Habits and hobbies that cannot be justified as driving performance drop off. We lose the ability to live life and do anything outside of the context of driving performance. In doing so, Life and Performance suffer.
Diversifying makes you Antifragile
When you narrow your life by isolating meaning and worth to only one part of it (be it work, health, or a relationship), you make yourself fragile. To be fragile, per Nassim Taleb, is to easily succumb to stressors. Like a ceramic teapot making impact with the floor, you easily break when life stresses you. You are brittle.
In Brendan Moynihan’s What I Learned Losing a Millions Dollars he postulates that while there are infinitely many ways to win in the stock market, there is only one way to lose: emotionalism, or making decisions based on emotions.
He argues that traders lose (really lose) because of psychological factors, not technical ones. They personalize the market & their positions, internalizing what should be external losses. This sets off a cascade of bad decisions that derails them.
The reason why you are made fragile when you put all of your eggs in one meaning basket is the same reason you are when you put all of your money in one investment: you have nowhere to go and nothing to do to recover when things aren’t going well.
If work is your sole source of meaning, you have nowhere to go when things aren’t going well at work. There’s no other area of life that you can use to source meaning, recover, and renew. Because you derive your worth from performance, your self-worth takes a hit. This makes you emotional, which makes you more susceptible to emotionalism. Emotionalism leads you to make cascades of bad decisions, putting you in a downward spiral. You experience internal tension that seeps out into your relationships. You can no longer see clearly.
This fragility-induced cascade robs you of your ability to perform anywhere near your peak.
When you live a rich life2, you diversify your portfolio of sources of meaning. Work underperforming one day? That’s fine, you have your health practices, hobbies, community, family, and friends to lean on. That diversity improves your resilience and provides recovery that empowers mental toughness: your ability to pick yourself up after you get knocked down and find the next most important thing to work on.
In this way, living a rich life makes you antifragile: by having many sources of meaning and beauty, you are better able to adapt and improve from stressors in any one domain. Like a bouncy ball, being dropped only empowers you to bounce back even higher.
Postscript: The Perfectionism Trap
There’s a trap in what I’ve written above, and I feel obligated to call it out before we part ways. If you take what I’ve written and use it to make living a rich life about work, performance, and achievement, I’ve failed completely. You won’t have escaped the problem at all. You’ll still be made fragile by work, and on your bad days you will simply be frustrated that taking care of your health, and having hobbies, and caring about community and friends and family isn’t making you invulnerable at work.
I know because I’ve been there. Over and over.
This is the trap of perfectionism and progress. We seek to live a rich life out of some desire for having perfect days or making perfect progress rather than for having a rich life.
Instead of making work one of a symphony of parts that interact in a positive feedback loop to create a rich life, you are still making work (or performance, or perfection) the whole of life and putting other things underneath it.
Don’t do that.
Remember, life isn’t for work.
Life is for living.
Messy, chaotic, up-and-down living.
The most vicious part of this underlying belief is that excellence and competence are measured relative to other people. When performance is measured competitively, not everyone can be excellent, and therefore not everyone can be worthy.
By rich, I mean abundant with diverse sources of meaning.