The Tension Between Success And Happiness - Paul Millerd - #460

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Paul Millerd. He's a strategy consultant, author and a podcaster. The old stories we were told about success and happiness no longer apply. We don't have to wear a suit or go to an office or have a job for life. But do we even need success? Is there a simpler route to being happy? Paul has spent the last five years trying to find out. Expect to learn why the road between success and happiness might have a shortcut. How optimizing for freedom gave Paul everything he wanted from his life. Why the ancient Greek word for leisure tells us a lot about the modern world. Why following a default path is dangerous. Why unplanning your work day might make you happier. And much more. This is a conversation that I've been having so much with my friends recently out here in Austin. People that are playing with this tension between the fact that they want to achieve things, worldly successes. But they kind of get the sense that by working so hard, they're making themselves miserable and the goal is to be happy. And they're making themselves miserable in the pursuit of getting success, which is the thing that's supposed to make them happy. And it's pretty prevalent. I really, really appreciated this conversation with Paul. I also get to talk about the Three Minute Monday Newsletter and something that I came up with on there, which I really hope you enjoy. If you do want to sign up to that, you can go and get signed up for free by going to chriswillex.com/books, and it will give you my free reading list, a hundred books that you should read before you die. But now, please welcome Paul Millerd.
Paul Millerd, welcome to the show.

**Paul Millerd** (1:59)
Excited to be here, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
I have been fully adopted by Texas now. So I went to a co-Wetzel country music rock concert in a stadium last night. People unironically wearing cowboy hats, people unironically saying like, dang and yee haw. I'm one of the locals now.

**Paul Millerd** (2:24)
I think I'm the same. Me and my wife were saying, we still have to go to a rodeo and then we can probably say that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
There's like a sequence of qualifications or trials that you need to go through. Yeah, precisely. How many cans of Lone Star have you drank? How many times have you said the word dang?

**Paul Millerd** (2:42)
Exactly. Yeah, we love it here. It seems like there's a convergence of internet weirdos and hyper-curious creators that I've just really enjoyed.

**Chris Williamson** (2:53)
Well, the first time that we met was at the Less Wrong Meetup, which is that's the-

**Paul Millerd** (2:58)
The nerdiest place you can meet.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
Oh, that's the synthesis. Yeah, that's the fucking epicenter. That's patient zero for the nerdiest people in Austin. They'd even imported people from outside of Austin to make it significantly more nerdy.

**Paul Millerd** (3:13)
Exactly. Yeah, it's been great. I love it here.

**Chris Williamson** (3:17)
One of the things that we've both been converging on was something that I put into my newsletter this week, and I want to talk about that. So I'm going to read the newsletter out for people that didn't read it. If you haven't read it, go to chriswillex.com/books, and you can sign up for free. So one of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between a desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. Success is a strange thing. Presumably, we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem. We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high performers is this. Parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising them when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding. That lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into, I am only worthy of love and acceptance and belonging if I succeed. Now, powered by an internal feeling of insufficiency, this person is driven to achieve many things. They're prepared to outwork, out hustle and out suffer everyone else because they're not just running toward a life they want, they're running away from a life that they fear. Success and progress ameliorates the feelings of insufficiency. Therefore, success and progress become prioritized above everything else. Now, don't get me wrong, many high achievers genuinely love the work that they do. And many are driven by a well-balanced simple desire to maximize their time on this planet, rather than trying to fill a void inside of themselves. But if I was to place a bet, I'd guess that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency, rather than a holistic desire to be better. I think people who are high achievers, on average, are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we most admire are the ones with the least admirable internal states? If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy, and in the pursuit of success we make ourselves miserable, why not shortcut the entire process and just be happy? Is that even possible? Now, external accolades do count for a lot. I don't think that recanting all worldly possessions and retreating to a cave in the woods is an optimal strategy. Some degree of external material success is important to make us feel validated and satiate our desire for status and respect. But external success won't fill an internal void.