Scott H Young

My recent article, When to Quit, received quite a few comments and attention. Some people congratulated me for standing against the success hype currently within the self-help community for pointing out that sometimes working hard simply isn’t enough to achieve your dream. Other people criticized me for the same point. Unfortunately I think both these comments missed the real essence of the article and the true point I was trying to get across.

I’m not a believer in the falsely supported belief that all goals are achievable if you just try hard enough. I pointed out how this myth that circles most personal development material, although well intentioned, can be destructive if it is misused. But the point of my article wasn’t that you should give up on dreams that are difficult or even have a small likelihood of success.

The message was simply that it doesn’t matter whether you ever reach your objective because life isn’t about objectives. Whether your goal is to become president of the United States or something more humble like owning a successful small business, achieving that goal is just a inconsequential blip in the current of your life. What really matters is the path that leads to it.

Unfortunately some people twisted my message to indicate that because they don’t believe their dreams are very likely, they should give up. There are many flaws with this kind of thinking only the foremost being that it focuses on the outcome and not the path. Hopefully I can clarify some of those misconceptions in this article.

How Most People Pursue Dreams

Most people pursue dreams using a fairly simple equation:

Investment Necessary / Chance of Success (Must Be) > Satisfaction Gained

Simply read this equation means that the investment divided by your approximate chance of success should be at least as great as the satisfaction you would achieve from reaching the outcome. So if becoming a president would require decades of personal investment and the chances of success are incredibly low, you would need to really, really desire the outcome in order to pursue this path.

Just one problem: the formula is complete garbage! This formula is rooted in the completely false hypothesis that achieving the result is what will derive the greatest amount of happiness. Once you actually get your dream, you will likely revert to your original happiness level far, far faster than you had to spend investing in it.

This was the point I was trying to make in my article. That success guru’s try to fix the formula by saying your chance of success is 100% if you just put enough investment into it. Unfortunately the formula is so broken it is beyond repair. The truth is it doesn’t matter what your chance of success is because when you reach your goal it can’t possibly repay the investment in terms of the satisfaction gained.

Instead what you need to look at is the path that leads to your goal. Completely ignore your potential chances for success and instead look at the path. Will you grow along this path? Can you achieve smaller victories that lead up to your final goal to provide fulfillment? Is it a continuous path that will fill you with passion when you work towards it?

How You Should Pursue Dreams

The real way you should look at pursuing dreams has nothing to do with calculating odds of success (I’ll explain exactly why in a bit). There are only a few characteristics you need to look at for your dream to answer whether you want to pursue it and none of them have anything to do with potential success.

With this new mindset of achieving goals you can be completely satisfied even if your goal never gets realized. More importantly this mindset allows you to get out of losing yourself in a desert, chasing a mirage. Simply look at your dream and the path that leads to it. Although these characteristics aren’t rules, they are a good guide to use when deciding to pursue a path.

Continuity

When deciding to pursue a dream, an important thing to look at is how continuous it is. Winning the lottery is a discontinuous path to a goal. There is no steady improvements over time it is an all or nothing endeavor. Running a successful business is often very different involving the slow continuous improvement over time.

If your dream allows for degrees of achievement, each with their own rewards of growth, fulfillment and passion, then these paths are generally better to follow. This isn’t a rule, mind your, but it is a good idea to look at when choosing what you want to do with your life. If each day you can experience little victories then it doesn’t matter whether you achieve the final goal.

The other important point with this is that if you pick a goal which doesn’t have a really continuous path, try finding another path that leads to your goal which is continuous. So if your path to becoming a famous actor is simply to audition for leads in major films, this is very discontinuous. However, if you take small steps in smaller productions working towards your goal you can make it a more continuous path.

Flexibility

Another characteristic of a good path to partake upon is one that is highly flexible. A highly flexible path is one where the growth you achieve in it is highly applicable to multiple paths. For example, if you wanted to work on starting your own business, you would end up growing in ways that would help you even if you later decided to pursue a completely different path.

An inflexible path is one that any progress towards it can’t really be applied in other areas. All paths are generally flexible to some extent, but the more you can transfer the growth attained to a different path later on the better.

Passion

Above all the key determinant in choosing a path is the amount of passion you have for it. Growth is universal and can be pursued in many different ways. Although growth is fundamental, passion is limited. You may grow extensively by either trying to become a doctor, athlete or millionaire but you may only have a passion for medicine.

Remember, you passion must be for the path and not the destination. If your dream is to become a famous movie star but you absolutely hate doing any small budget theater or commercials, your passion is only for the outcome. Passion must be something you can do every single step of the way, not just at the end.

Don’t Predict Difficulty

Because the path is what matters not the arrival, the difficulty of the path isn’t important. Not only is difficulty unimportant but it is foolish to try to predict. Too many people predict their chances of success as a reason for whether or not to try. In my opinion this is a completely stupid move.

At least self-help authors were right in telling you to believe you could make it if you tried hard enough. Because by telling you this at least you didn’t start trying to predict your chances of success. I do believe this was a sneaky move, but it is still better than basing decisions on your perceived chances of success.

As I said earlier most people use this equation when deciding whether to go after a goal or dream:

Investment Necessary / Chance of Success (Must Be) > Satisfaction Gained

The biggest problem with this equation, besides the fact that satisfaction comes from achieving and not achievement? The problem is that people are notoriously horrible at predicting their chances of long-term success in an endeavor.

Short-term success is pretty easy to estimate. You look in your immediate past and account for some variables and you can generally judge how well you will perform within a short period of time. Long-term success however is almost impossible to predict. Most people won’t even get in the right ballpark when it comes to how their life will be in a few decades.

Why is this so? The answer is simple. When you grow constantly you also change constantly. That change is also somewhat random and unpredictable. You might get dramatically better or only make small improvements. You might completely change who you are as a person and mature into something different.

As a result when you try to predict what your chances are of becoming a famous actor, a millionaire or a doctor you are basing it on your current skill level and some linear estimate of improvement. But in reality by the time you get close to your goal you will have changed so much that the goal might be ridiculously easy or still out of reach.

Traversing the Forest

Imagine your life as a dense forest. You can see a tall mountain in the distance and a winding path that leads to it. From your current position you can know where the peak of the mountain is but have no idea how far it is to get to. The path might wind around for hundreds of miles and end up at an impossibly sharp cliff. All you can see is the path immediately ahead of you.

My point in the last article and repeated again is simply this. Don’t ask yourself whether the mountain peak is too far away. Just look ahead in the path. Is the path worth traveling? If it isn’t find a different one. Maybe your path will eventually lead to the mountain or maybe you might miss it and end up somewhere else altogether.

Ultimately you will only stop by the mountain for a short time. You will spend most your journey winding through the paths inside the forest. Reaching the mountain isn’t important but how the path twists towards it.

One of the biggest problems in the lifelong pursuit of growth is in hitting a plateau. You first start out and everything is going pretty well, you can see yourself improving as you push yourself to new heights. All of a sudden, wham! The results turn into a trickle and no matter what you try you can’t seem to break through to the next level. You’ve hit a plateau.

For most people, a plateau is just a natural phase in their lives. Most people grow incredibly until they “settle down” at which point their growth becomes minor improvements over the last several decades of their lives. These are the people that secretly long for the days of their youth that were filled with growth but rationalize that, “those days are behind me.”

If you are reading this post, I’m assuming you don’t want to live your life like that. I want my entire life to experience to levels of growth as I continually improve my level of experience, plateau’s should be temporary blips not permanent obstacles. Life is what you make of it and I don’t want it to slow down to a trickle.

The only question is how you can overcome these plateaus? Ascending this level ground can often be very difficult because the strategy used previously won’t work anymore. Setting more goals, working harder and trying to keep yourself motivated will often fizzle out when you are stuck on the level plain. A completely different approach is necessary if you want to reach the next level.

What Causes a Plateau?

Plateaus are areas of your life where you want to improve but you seem to be stuck in the mud. Every move you make seems to be wrought with internal and external resistence. You try to motivate yourself, you procrastinate. You try to work harder and your efforts yield nothing. You set a lofty goal and end up coming nowhere close. These intractable barriers to growth can be incredibly frustrating. Understanding what causes a plateau in the first place is the key to remedying the problem.

Cause One: “Good Enough” Syndrome

One of the biggest causes of hitting a plateau is simply that you start telling yourself that it is good enough. My relationship is ‘good enough’. My career is ‘good enough’. My level of health is ‘good enough’. Then when you try to make smaller improvements you fail to scrounge up any success.

The problem here is that you’ve sunken into a positional mindset. A positional mindset is a way of thinking that evaluates how good your life is based on your current position in growth. By saying good enough you are implying that the amount of success you currently have is the key to your happiness. This is dead wrong.

The key to your happiness has less to do with position and a lot more to do with speed. How fast you are growing and overcoming challenges is the real key to your inner sense of worth and happiness. Although by virtue of comparison and necessity you can derive some happiness from a positional mindset, this kind of happiness is always temperamental and unreliable. When you deride happiness from your current amount of growth you are betting on the only security you have, the now.

Don’t get stuck in the trap of ‘good enough’. There is no such thing as good enough, or even not enough. All that matters is how much you are doing. You will suffer the chronic pain of stagnated growth if you get caught up in this way of thinking and it is one of the major causes of plateaus. Read, Balancing Today and Tomorrow if you want more info about positional versus velocity based thinking.

Cause Two: Your Cup is Full

A long time ago a very smart man left his village in search of an elder who was reported to be the wisest person alive. After journeying for hours in the wilderness, he came upon a mountain hovel where the elder resided. The elder welcomed the man and listened patiently as the man began to discuss all the topics he was knowledgeable in.

The elder started pouring tea for the man when the cup began to overflow. “The cup is overflowing!” shouted the man. “You can’t pour any more tea in the cup it is full,” the man tried to inform the elder, to which the elder replied, “You are the cup.”

I like this parable because it teaches an important lesson about how we can all have full cups in our own lives. A full cup is when you have achieved a level of success in your life that can’t simply be improved by adding more.

A great example of this is the friends you have. Let’s say you have a fair sized social circle but you don’t really value the relationships as much as you would like. You secretly begin to feel that you would like to make better friends who were more interesting, supportive and shared similar interests. Unfortunately you currently have a full cup. You can’t get new friends until you start spending less time (emptying the cup) with the friends you already have.

When you want to start a new career this inevitably means you must empty the cup of your old career and start filling a new one. Due to constraints you can’t start filling your cup without emptying it. A full cup is another key cause of hitting a plateau in your growth.

Cause Three: Lack of Motivation

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but pain motivates far, far more than pleasure. Just because you would like something in your life, doesn’t mean it has any chance of realization. But when you must have something because it is a necessity, the pain motivates you towards action. Thinking of how nice a goal would be doesn’t push you nearly as hard as when success or failure is attached to your survival.

A lack of motivation basically stems from a lack of need. You don’t feel motivated because you don’t feel the need. As I’ll discuss later in the article, creating this need from a simple desire can involve some pretty scary and counter-intuitive steps but sometimes these steps are necessary to rebuild your motivation.

Ascension

Now that you understand some of the principle causes of hitting plateaus, how can you overcome them to reach new peaks in your own experience?

Utilize Lateral Growth

The first way to reach new heights is simply to get outside your comfort zone. Being in the same environment with the same stimulus and inputs will eventually create stagnation. By periodically exploring outside your environment and towards the periphery of your awareness you get the jump necessary to start making changes.

When you are placed in a radically new environment where you are forced to adapt, you grow like crazy. When you were an infant you grew more than at any other time of your life. When your entire world is new, everything you do becomes a learning experience from eating to sleeping. By putting yourself into a new environment you skyrocket your own growth.

But getting outside your comfort zone is uncomfortable and sometimes difficult. When we lead busy and productive lives within our current environment it can be hard to get up the courage to take on a new one. This is when you need to commit yourself to make small leaps outside your zone of awareness.

So if you feel that your efforts to make headway in an area of your life be it career, health, relationships or just your level of enjoyment, start by expanding your repertoire of experience. Go outside your comfort zone and do something you don’t normally do. Get a new perspective and when you return to your plateau you may suddenly see a set of stairs that was missing originally.

Implore Creative Destruction

Lateral growth on it’s own often isn’t enough. Although getting new experiences can twist and transform the landscape of your growth, some plateaus are dead-ends. Sometimes your cup is completely full and it is impossible to pour more into it. Unfortunately you will encounter many dead-ends in your own life where you need to take the terrifying move of climbing down before you can climb up again.

I’m not one for motivational spew that says just take wild risks and chase your dreams and they will come true, but at the same time I believe that you can’t always improve off your current foundation. Some improvements require breaking down much of what you have built. This creative destruction terrifies people, so very few even attempt to turn back when hitting a dead end.

Unfortunately the entire concept of a dead-end is based strongly in positional thinking. By reaching a local maximum in your growth you assume that the current position is what is important. This is nonsense, what matters is how much you are growing right now so stagnation is no compromise.

My favorite example of using creative destruction was when I recently completely remade my social structure after moving to University. Unlike a few of my highschool friends who stayed in close contact with old friends, I pretty much let go of virtually all of the ties I had before. While the few friends from highschool who came to the same University made very few connections with other people, I met hundreds and rapidly created a very large social network.

So long as I still felt there were friends back home waiting for me, I never would have made new friends and got a new fresh start. Holding onto the past has never been a hobby of mine and by letting go I get to enjoy a great present and future. I don’t look for comfort in what has past. Creative destruction is often necessary to reach a new level.

What happens if you climb down the plateau never to find as high a summit? Unfortunately this is reality and this is a very real possibility. But the real question isn’t whether you will go back as high but whether you will better enjoy the experience of growth or stagnation. Position isn’t relevant.

Some Plateaus are Okay

On a final note with the concept of plateaus it is important to note that sometimes hitting a plateaus in an area of your life for awhile isn’t a bad thing. Although you should always be growing in some respect, there is a natural limit to how much you can grow in one area without growing in others. Sometimes you need to accept your current position and pursue another form of growth.

So just because your relationship isn’t absolutely fantastic, doesn’t mean the solution is to leave your spouse to go marry a Nobel prize winning supermodel. Growth in other areas might give you the tools to either improve your current relationship or if necessary, find a more suitable one. Although I don’t normally preach acceptance over growth, as long as you are growing in some way, sometimes you do need to just sit on that plateau and enjoy the view.