Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment (Currency 2022, pp.15-34).
One of Peter Drucker’s valedictory insights before he died at age ninety-five in 2005 said as much:
In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
Freedom and mobility create what Barry Schwartz famously described as “the paradox of choice.” We do better with fewer choices, not more. Faced with thirty-nine flavors of ice cream, we often make a disappointing choice. It’s much easier to pick between two options—say, vanilla or mint chocolate chip—and be satisfied. It’s the same with creating your own life in a complex, rapidly advancing world: Not only is it hard to sift through the myriad choices, but even when we know what we want, we don’t always know how to follow our dreams.
The barriers holding us back in our choices and actions, frustrating our will to live our own life, are formidable and numerous, beginning with these:
1. OUR FIRST OPTION, UNFORTUNATELY, IS INERTIA
Inertia is the most resolute and determinative opponent of change. For years, whenever I’ve been confronted with clients failing at changing the behavior they insist they want to change, I have fallen back on the following mantra: Our default response in life is not to experience meaning or happiness. Our default response is to experience inertia. I want them not only to appreciate inertia’s omnipresence but to see their particular inertia in a new light.
We think of inertia as the state of being inert or motionless—one of our purer displays of passivity and disengagement. It’s not. Inertia is an active event in which we are persisting in the state we’re already in rather than switching to something else. This is not mere semantics. It’s a different point of view, characterizing even our most sloth-like passivity as the active choice to persist in the status quo (i.e., no choice is a choice too; it’s choosing to say “I’ll pass”). On the other hand, the moment we shift into a new gear and choose to engage in something different, we cease to persist as inertia’s patsy. Being inertia’s victim or escaping its malign gravitational pull is a choice that’s solely ours to make. When people discover that they have a choice, they are usually empowered to change.
Another intriguing characteristic of inertia is how well it provides us with a glimpse of our short-term future. It is more accurate than any algorithm or forecasting model. Inertia is the reason I can stipulate the following rule about your immediate future: The most reliable predictor of what you’ll be doing five minutes from now is what you’re doing now. If you’re taking a nap or cleaning your home or shopping online, there’s a high probability that you’ll be doing the same thing five minutes from now. This short-term principle also applies in the long term. The most reliable predictor of who you’ll be five years from now is who you are now. If you don’t know a foreign language now or how to make bread from scratch, you probably won’t know in five years either. If you’re not talking to your estranged father now, chances are you won’t be talking to him five years from now. And so on for most of the details that describe your life today.
Appreciating our agency over inertia’s impact teaches us how to shape it into a positive force. When we develop productive (rather than destructive) habits or routines—e.g. exercising first thing in the morning, eating the same nutritious breakfast, taking the same hyperefficient route to work each day—inertia is our friend, keeping us grounded and committed and consistent.
These are the features that make inertia a major force affecting every aspect of an earned life. But even when we gain dominion over inertia, there remain a few other targeted forces that also block us from living our own life.
2. OUR PROGRAMMING LOCKS US IN PLACE
All of us are programmed in some way by our parents. Mom and Dad can’t help it (and it’s usually well-meaning). They shape our beliefs, our social values, how we treat other people, how we behave in a relationship, even which sports teams we cheer for. More than anything else, they program our self-image.
This is most obvious when siblings are involved. Over time, with enough “evidence,” our parents subdivide us into distinct personalities: the smart one, pretty one, strong one, nice one, responsible one—whichever of the many descriptors seems to apply at the time. It’s as if they’re unwittingly trying to turn us into an archetype of a human being, erasing all the nuance. If we’re not careful, we not only accept the programming but adapt our behavior to it. The smart one falls back on cleverness rather than expertise, the pretty one relies on her looks, the strong one prefers raw power to persuasion, the nice one acquiesces too quickly, the responsible one sacrifices too much in the name of duty. Whose life are we living when decisive parts of it, imprinted during our formative years by people we love, have already been created for us?
The good news is that we have the right to deprogram ourselves whenever we want. Our programming is only a problem when it becomes a life blocker. We consider trying something new—a U-turn in our career, a new haircut—then reject it with excuses such as “I’ve never been good at _______” or “It’s not me.” Until we (or someone else) challenge the validity of our excuses (“Says who?”), we cannot imagine imposing our will upon beliefs that we’ve come to accept as gospel. Our programming’s biggest impact is how proficiently it blinds us to our need to reject it.
3. WE ARE UNDONE BY OBLIGATION
The beauty of obligation is that it directs us to keep our promises to others, implied or explicit. The misery of obligation is how often those promises conflict with the ones we’ve made to ourselves. In those moments, we tend to overcorrect, choosing between the extremes of selfless and selfish—and end up disappointing either ourselves or those who depend on us. Obligation forces us to prioritize our responsibilities. It is a gray area, with few norms to guide us beyond the Golden Rule and “do the right thing.”
Sometimes it’s proper and noble to be selfless. We join the family business instead of pursuing a more exciting career. We stay at a dull or hateful job for the paycheck that covers the family bills. There’s fulfillment in honoring our obligations to our loved ones.
That said, sometimes it’s okay to put ourselves first, in spite of what others think.
As the great journalist Herbert Bayard Swope (winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917) said, “I can’t give you a surefire formula for success. But I can give you a formula for failure: Try to please everybody all the time.”
4. WE SUFFER FROM A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
Choosing between two or three valid ideas for the life you want to lead is a legitimate source of confusion for many people. On the other hand, some people cannot imagine one path for themselves, let alone two or three.
Think back to your senior year in high school. I’d venture to say that applying to college is the first time you felt control over your future.
Then you matriculated and discovered that whether you were the prom queen or class clown in high school, the socialite or brainy geek, college was your opportunity to delete your adolescence and write a new script. You could accurately measure the success or failure of your college years by how recognizable you were at graduation compared to the person who had entered the scene four years earlier. You did it once; you can do it again.
5. WE ARE WINDED BY THE PACE OF CHANGE
The pace of change you are experiencing today is the slowest pace of change you will ever experience for the rest of your life. (Rob Nail)
You’re deluding yourself in pointless nostalgia if you think that, no matter the situation, at some point in the near future—when you finish the “rush” project or when the kids get older and your domestic life calms down—you can revert to a slower time when the pace of life and the speed at which it changed was more relaxed and gentle.
Our failure to adapt to the quickening pace of change blocks us in the same ways that a failure of imagination does. We cannot interpret what’s happening around us. If we cannot keep up, we get winded and fall behind. And when we fall behind, we are living in everyone else’s past.
6. WE ARE NARCOTIZED BY VICARIOUS LIVING
Because of social media and a smorgasbord of technological distractions, we have an abundance of opportunities to live through other people’s lives rather than live our own. We allow ourselves to be impressed by strangers’ social media posturings. Sometimes we return the favor by posturing to impress them, ignoring the likelihood that they’re not paying attention to us as avidly as we pay attention to them. We have gone from watching to watching others do our watching.
Narcotized by technology, we sacrifice long-term purpose and fulfillment for the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops created by Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Only we can control how profoundly we allow vicarious living to infect our life, one individual at a time.
T. S. Eliot’s immortal phrasing, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” It’s not just social media’s fault. Our entire world operates as a distraction engine. A warm sunny day, a baseball game on TV, breaking news on the radio, a phone call, a knock at the door, a family emergency, a sudden craving for a doughnut. Anyone or anything can pull our focus from doing what we should be doing and coax us into doing what others want us to do. That’s one definition of not living your own life.
7. WE HAVE RUN OUT OF RUNWAY
There are two occasions when runway becomes a major obstacle. When we’re young, we tend to overestimate our runway. Money may be scarce, but time seems infinite, dampening our sense of urgency. We put off the start of our “real life” to test more appealing or fanciful options. We’ve got time to take a so-called gap year. Nothing wrong with that—except when indecision or inertia extends our gap year into a “gap decade” or, worse, a “gap life.”
The other extreme—when we’re old—is more invidious: We foolishly believe there’s not enough time to achieve our next dream.
I see this all the time, when my CEO clients are approaching “retirement age”. They think no one will hire or invest in a sixty-five-year-old when so many younger candidates are available. They’re staring at a broken clock, convinced that time has stopped for them.
Adults are capable of miscalculating their personal runway at any age, from twenty-five to seventy and beyond. I know thirty-year-olds who, after three years of law school and a half dozen years climbing the associate ladder at a firm, realize that practicing law is not for them. Paralyzed by the prospect of restarting their career at ground zero, the young attorneys struggle in three ways: First, they treat their early disappointment as a catastrophe second, they cannot imagine a next step; and third, they don’t appreciate that they have two-thirds of their adult life ahead of them. That’s a lot of runway, which some people find daunting. I suggest it is a lifeline.
PARENTAL INFLUENCE. OBLIGATION. Mental block. Peer pressure. Not enough time. Inertial devotion to the status quo. These are the perennial barriers that freeze us in place and leave us yearning for a new path yet unable to take the first step on that path.