Can Ambitious People Ever Have Balance? - Russ - #1046

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You were talking about work-life balance and your inability to have it.

**Russ** (0:04)
Yeah. Man, I mean, balance is just, it's a luxury now, it's a privilege. You can't have it on the way up. It just has to be full 100% commitment to the grind. So now I'm trying to have more balance, but the guilt is there, you know, still. Like, it's just that PTSD of like, I shouldn't be relaxing right now, you know?

**Chris Williamson** (0:32)
It's a difficult question to work out. You know, almost everybody's on the come up. By design, very few people make it or have made it. There's way more people that want to be there than are there. And that means first off, that it's a sort of an iccy situation, because the total addressable market for people who need to learn how to put their, take their foot off the gas is basically zero, and the total addressable market for people that could do with working hard to achieve their dreams is still pretty high. But a good question to ask yourself is, okay, let's say that you achieve the things that you want to achieve, you get to where you're supposed to get to. Yeah. What then?
Then what do you do?

**Russ** (1:09)
That has been beating my ass for like two years, that question. Because here's kind of like how I thought about it, is the thing I'm scared of now is not having a horizon, because in the past, my present self was not my future self. There was a huge gap between who I was and who I wanted to become. In that gap, the distance is what birthed the hunger and the velocity. Now, my present self is my past's future self. The gap has collapsed, so the hunger has nowhere obvious to point. It's scary because it's not really a fear of complacency, it's a fear of directional ambiguity.
To touch on what you said where the market for people trying to get here versus people who are here, it's obviously a huge difference. But the engine that was driving me and I think drives most people at the beginning is here's this person that I want to become, that I can imagine. And that engine works until you arrive. And most people never arrive, so they never have to confront this. But like high achievers have to confront it, and it's just honest, you know? And so now it's trying to figure out like, not necessarily the new dream, but sort of like relocalizing the hunger, trying to find a new domain for it. And I think that's why, to be honest, therapy has been so activating for me and interesting, because the ambition like moved houses to this internal landscape, where I can like attack the internal world, because at the beginning, the external stuff is such a motivator. Career, status, metrics, whatever.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
Validation.

**Russ** (3:04)
Yeah, all that. But then you get it, and you're like, well, I can't keep tricking my brain into thinking that I want another plaque or another 100 grand, you know what I mean, or whatever it is. It's, this internal world is so fascinating because it's untapped land. It's new.

**Chris Williamson** (3:19)
New games.

**Russ** (3:20)
Yeah, it's new. It's, but the issue with this is there's no finish line.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
So there's no metrics of progress.

**Russ** (3:26)
There's no metric of progress. So it's real easy to just get lost in myself and end up just doing this endless self-monitoring rumination. It's like, all right, hold on.

**Chris Williamson** (3:36)
Well, you apply the same hypervigilance and obsession that you do to finding the perfect kick drum to working out your relationship with your parents.

**Russ** (3:45)
Exactly. It's like, maybe you need to relax today, not attack this relationship.

**Chris Williamson** (3:51)
Think about this.
So many people, I believe, have an obsession with personal development. I certainly know that this is true for me because it was an anesthetic against not liking who I was in the moment. I was able to delay, I was able to put on hiatus, self-love because I knew that tomorrow me was going to be better than today me. So, it didn't matter that I didn't love myself today because tomorrow I'll be better.

**Russ** (4:19)
Tomorrow I will, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (4:20)
But tomorrow I might, well, I'm moving in the right direction. I don't need to matter about where I am now. Well, I haven't reached this level of validation or this particular achievement that I've got. Then when you do arrive or get close to arriving, or you outstrip the non-goals that you didn't really have, and you just think like, what the fuck am I doing here? You're forced to confront a much more difficult question, which is, I can no longer artificially inflate my, like artificially add buoyancy to my own lack of self-love with tomorrow's promises.