One of the most important discoveries I made in the process of being ill is that solitary striving, my American habit of self-focus, was in some fundamental way a degradation of the most powerful aspects of our lives, which now seem to me to be our interconnectedness and need of others.

—Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness⁶³

A FEW YEARS ago, I sat with a small group of business owners in a cute condo in Whitefish, Montana. I was there to facilitate a retreat where each business owner had time to share a current project, challenge, or opportunity, and workshop it with the group. These business owners were all quite successful in their own ways as well as being thoughtful and compassionate. They valued hearing others' experiences and answering their colleagues' fresh questions. Each took their own turn over the time we had together. As the retreat neared its end, only a couple of business owners were left to share with the group. Finally, one of them, Rita Barry, spoke up. Barry's advertising agency had seen explosive growth over the previous two years, so I was curious what she was going to bring to the table.

She said, “The question I've been trying to answer for myself is: What does growth without striving look like?” The whole group, myself included, sat in stunned silence for a minute. What does growth without striving look like? That question seared itself into my brain. Barry and I share a similar personality type and experience as overachievers. We both like awards, trophies, and merit badges. In fact, Barry still has her laminated straight-A report cards from school. We've always excelled, and we've always felt the pressure to excel even more. As if our excellence could prove we were good and worthy enough to take up our little patch of earth and air.

Recently, Barry told me that, while her accomplishment might have looked fairly effortless on the outside, on the inside, she was a bundle of stress and anxiety. She lost clumps of hair as a teenager when the stress started to manifest physically. Because she grew up with financial need, Barry knew her future depended on her ability to wow colleges with her smarts and potential for success. She said, “Everything was about achievement and external validation, even though I didn't actually think of it that way… . It never occurred to me that there was an option that wasn't that. To me, that was striving. That's just how I lived and how I felt all that.”⁶⁴

I don't think that striving is necessarily a negative word. But it's an apt way to describe the anxiety-ridden push toward a goal. It's not only battling resistance or rising to the challenge—but doing so with an acute fear of major consequences if you don't. Not all of us experience the level of striving that Barry describes, but I think we've all had a sense of it. Similarly, not all of us approach goal-setting in a striving manner, but we've probably all had the experience of feeling like “everything is riding on this.” Striving is a natural byproduct of the many cultural systems we've talked about to this point. We strive because we're told it's our personal responsibility to succeed (or at least survive) despite the brokenness of everything around us. We strive because our economic salvation depends on it. We strive because we experience precarity and internalized ableism. We strive to prove that we're valuable members of society. We strive because we believe attaining more than our family or friends will make us happier. And we strive to live up to the questionable stories that self-help influencers turn into advice for good living. Rachel Hollis, writing of discouraging experiences, offers up this advice to strivers: “Rend your garments and wail to the heavens like some biblical mourner. Get it all out. Then dry your eyes and wash your face and keep on going. You think this is hard? That's because it is. So what? Nobody said it would be easy.”⁶⁵ This is the affect of striving. In other words, if it feels like everything is riding on your ability to achieve that next goal, there's a damn good reason.

So what does growth without striving look like? Thanks to Barry, I've made this a central question of my work over the last few years—as well as the central question of this book. Now that I've unpacked what I argue creates the condition for such self-destructive striving, I want to explore our alternatives. To do that, I begin with common feelings that arise during the process of this deconstruction: disorientation and alienation, and how we might get reoriented and reconnected to our sense of purpose.

I'm Not Lost, I'm Exploring…

It's entirely possible to feel disoriented and alienated from yourself before you start to recognize the systems that have inspired your goal-setting and, likely, some negative self-talk. So many of the systems we operate in are designed to make us feel that way. Disoriented people are more likely to keep working harder and harder, buying more and more. But once you do start to acknowledge those systems and examine how they've impacted your life, there's a good chance that your response will be, “Well, now what?!” It's certainly what my response was—along with many other people I've talked with. What do I do now if washing my face and getting back to the grind isn't actually serving me?

To be disoriented is to be directionless. What do I actually want? Where do I hope to end up? What am I working toward? The answers to these questions are often supplied by culture; one thing the neoliberal meritocracy myth and the advice industry that props it up give us is a sense of direction. All that emphasis on personal responsibility and proving oneself valuable to society might not be a particularly healthy direction, but it's a direction nonetheless. It's the stuff New Year's resolutions, self-help journals, and productivity apps are made of. When we deconstruct all of the conditioning that gave us direction and orientation in the past, we have to reconstruct a new way to orient ourselves. Some of it might look very similar from the outside—but the motivation behind it will be drastically different.

When your direction has been your identity and that direction is not your own, the result is self-alienation. Our desire feels foreign. Our values seem exotic. We don't know who we are without the systems that have, up until now, formed a major part of our identities. Who am I (and why am I valuable) if not a “productive worker,” or “goal-oriented business owner,” or “next in line for a promotion?” Earlier, I looked at the question: Who am I without the doing? For many of us, a sense of alienation—otherness—is what's left when we contemplate the essence of our selves without the doing we identify with. Strip away the shoulds and supposed-tos and it can be difficult to know who you are underneath.

We end up disoriented and alienated because the systems we operate in teach us who we are and what we care about—even when our sense of self and personal values are at odds with that conditioning. C. Thi Nguyen's philosophy of games provides a framework for analyzing this phenomenon. Nguyen explains that game designers tell us what to care about by creating a points system and defining the conditions for winning the game. Games—whether they're sports, board games, video games, or party games—necessarily simplify values and goals, providing the structure for play. In playing a game, we temporarily take on those values and goals for the pleasure of the experience.⁶⁶

If we view systems like neoliberalism or supremacy culture through this lens, we can imagine the rules, goals, and point system that we use to play the game. They might very well be things that we take for granted as desirable or morally good: get married, go to college, land a job, purchase a home, have children, and so on. But why are these things so desirable (if not to you individually then certainly within our culture)? Are they things you care about or have you been taught to care about these things? I'm not suggesting, of course, that any of those things are bad. I've done them all. But I did them less because I really, really wanted to and more because our systems are designed to make life easier if I do them. Getting married and buying a house—there are tax breaks associated with each of those. Landing a good job means health insurance and paid time off. Going to college creates the potential for a solid middle-class life. The incentives are clear. The points system is well-defined.

But unlike in a game, the values and end goals of our economic and cultural systems aren't something we take up voluntarily or temporarily. The constraints of the systems we inhabit are enduring and compulsory. Sure, you can play around and break all the rules but, at some point, the system is going to make that really hard for you. Nguyen writes, “Games offer us a momentary experience of value clarity. They are a balm for the existential pains of real life.” These systems do offer value clarity—but at the expense of a more nuanced experience of the world. They reduce the discomfort of self-authorship but increase our sense of alienation or disorientation any time we pause to reflect on our lives. Here, what works is balance. We must (re)discover our own desires and purpose and use them to navigate existing systems while—I hope—trying to change those systems. We must recognize the points systems that provide structure to our lives and create new structures that allow for a more nuanced and humane perspective. Structure, whether explicit and overt or implicit and loosely held, is a key part of how we function. You don't have to identify as particularly organized or systems-oriented to recognize structure as an important part of your life. Structure can be as simple as the set of values your action and decision-making is based on. Or, it can grow to include things like habits and routines. Your structure likely needs some sort of purpose to feel like it matters.

Goals versus Commitments

Goals are the basic building blocks of achievement-oriented structure. And while it doesn't have to be the case, that means how we strive to achieve those goals becomes part of the foundation of our life structure. Commitments, on the other hand, are the basic building blocks of practice-oriented structure. Commitments give direction to personal values, create a presence of mind, and help you connect to the evolution of your core identity. Commitments help you reorient without reintroducing striving.

Let's look at an example. Your goal might be to lead a major project at work this year. That's pretty solid. Leading a project would give you exposure to the higher-ups who will think of you the next time a promotion comes up. It'll also give you a chance to explore a strategic or creative element of your work. Plus, leading a project will help you forge new relationships with colleagues. For you, a goal like this may or may not involve striving. It may or may not be something you believe you're supposed to do rather than something you really want to do. It's not a bad goal (and it's not that goals are bad). But the structure and impact of this goal are limited. This goal isn't doing much to provide direction or reconnection outside of the office. It's probably pretty estranged from the things that make up your identity, and likely, it doesn't help you fulfill your personal values, either.

A commitment might be: Raise your hand. “Raise your hand” has a broad scope. It conjures memories of when you had an answer to a question, volunteered yourself, and voted for your preference. It affirms your agency and applies at work as well at home and in your relationships. At work, raising your hand might simply be a practice of being seen or heard from more often. It might mean you volunteer for more responsibility. And yes, it might mean you lead a major project. At home, raising your hand might be tackling that project you've been meaning to do for ages. It might be offering your partner or child additional support. And it might mean (I hope it does) acknowledging your own needs more often. “Raise your hand” is a commitment to practice values like reliability, creativity, leadership, or spontaneity.

When you make a commitment first, you don't throw out more concrete objectives or projects. It means those objectives and projects are grounded in purpose and in service of your commitment. A commitment provides orientation and direction across a broad range of challenges, decisions, opportunities, and daily tasks. And commitments remind you of your values and vision every time you practice them; they're identity-affirming. Commitments move us toward the self-transforming mind that Robert Kegan describes. They give us a way to take a step back from reflexive action by making our personal frameworks self-evident. When we externalize our values and desires in that way, we're better able to take in new information that might lead to fresh analysis of something we thought we knew or wanted. Plus, commitments give us opportunities to make meaning every day. While a goal might be excellent structure for achieving a specific outcome, a commitment is excellent structure for ensuring the things we do actually mean something to us.

Personal Values

In Chapter 7, you can create a personal vision you can use to orient your commitments, and later, your projects and plans. But before you do, let's talk about personal values. Now, I'm going to guess that if you've picked up this book, there's a good chance that some other productivity, leadership, or self-improvement writer has asked you to name your personal values and given you a big list of values to choose from. On the odd chance you have no idea what I'm talking about, I offer a common way to identify the ideas and characteristics you really value. But I also want to speak to the philosophical and psychological aspects of identifying personal values (because I love some context).

Personal values are how you define what is most important, meaningful, and beneficial to you. They're big picture objectives that help you define what is good and what is bad according to your own personal ethic. We likely borrow personal values from the traditions, culture, and family we grew up in, especially early in life. But as we develop into the self-authoring phase and on into the self-transforming phase, we edit or refine those values.

Clearly defining your personal values can seem like busywork—especially if you've done it before. But it's an essential task when we've existed for so long in systems that tell us what to care about, often in opposition to our true values. Again, if we consider Nguyen's philosophy of games, we can see the homogenizing effect that these systems have on our values. We come to see success, independence, and prosperity as values we can all agree on—instead of as values that we've been taught to care about. Cultures and communities will naturally form around shared values—but those shared values should be in harmony with our own personal values and beliefs. And when systems create value structures that oppose our own value structures, we should be able to identify that clearly so that we can make intentional decisions and take appropriate action. So, yeah, we need to pause to reconsider our values in light of the deconstruction we've done to this point.

There are many visualizations and exercises you can do to help you identify your values. Most are free and just a search engine away. But a quick search will also return a long list of personal values that have been aggregated over time from things people say they value. My preference? Take a look at one of those massive lists—or even several—and write down every value that feels important and meaningful to you. For instance, you might recognize that “honesty” is important. But does it have a special importance or meaning for you? If not, that's okay. It doesn't mean you're cool with dishonesty. It just means that it's not a driving force in your life. On the other hand, maybe “transparency”—a variation on honesty—does have special meaning and importance to you. Transparency, then, might be one of your personal values.

Once you've short-listed maybe 10–20 values, look for patterns. Which are similar? Where is there overlap? What word better describes a grouping you've made from the shortlist? Ideally, you're going to get this list down to about three to five. These are the concepts that you want to guide you, the concepts you hope others see in you. Once you have the winners, jot down a few behaviors that demonstrate each of these values. What do you do that signals that you hold these values? For instance, if transparency is one of your values, you might write down that you avoid saying “fine” when a friend of family asks how you are, and instead, give a specific answer. Or, you might say that you have weekly money meetings with your partner so that you both know what's going on with the finances. This is called “operationalizing your values,” and it helps to make your values feel real and integrated.

Now, you should have a working list of personal values, as well as a few behaviors for each that help you recognize how these values are integrated into your daily life. This list is not set in stone—you'll refine it over the course of your life. But it gives you something to work with from this point on.

The psychologist and researcher Edwin Locke pioneered goal-setting theory. A goal, as Locke uses the word, is the intended result of any action—not necessarily a particular achievement. Or, as Locke defines it, “ideas of the future, desired end states.” So we're talking lower-case-g goals, as opposed to capital-G Goals. Locke's theory deals with goals as the origin of action (i.e., I don't want to be hungry anymore, so I'll eat lunch). But Locke also gestures toward higher-level questions that can be explored in relation to goal-setting theory, the first being: Where do goals come from? Here, he points to motives and values—what's driving us and what's important to us. The second higher-level question Locke poses is: Where do the motives and values come from?⁶⁷ You might guess that this is the question that excites me the most—and why the entire first half of this book is devoted to exploring the origin of many of the beliefs and motivations that have become “common sense” in our productivity-obsessed culture.

Here, Locke posits that motives and values come from needs, but also acknowledges that this doesn't explain the varied motives and values we experience as humans who all share basic needs. I'm not a psychologist, and so I'm not going to suggest an alternative theory to apply with broad strokes. However, I do think that this is an important question for personal inquiry, especially in light of the deconstruction we've already done. Where do your personal values come from? What motivates you, and why? Is there a particular need, narrative, or system that's influencing your motives or values? The answers to these questions can be neutral—no need to assign moral value to any answer. But you can ask yourself whether the sources of your personal values and motives are things that you want to influence you on the most fundamental level.

This is the perfect time to bring Rita Barry, the advertising agency owner who was on the retreat in Montana, back into the picture. Barry likes to work hard. She likes to make big things happen. She likes to pursue her edges and improve her skills. She just didn't want to strive—and she didn't want to feel like everything was riding on her striving. She told me, “I can still work really hard and want to achieve, but it's no longer about what that means about me. Am I worthy if I'm a failure? If I do [fail], it's just neutral.” What this tells me is that Barry didn't just examine her goals or even her personal values; she examined where her motivation and values were derived from. Some of it she threw out—anything that made her believe it was a personal failing if a project didn't turn out the way she hoped—and some of it she kept. She rebuilt the source of her motivation and values in a way that affirmed her worthiness and set about new projects based on that.

We exist in a multiplicity of systems designed to make us question our worthiness and personal values. Those same systems insist on making meaning for us and supplying us with proper motivation. So any time we try to answer the question, “What does growth without striving look like?” it's imperative that we examine what growth means to us and how the goals that we might be most likely to strive toward are motivated by the system rather than genuine desire. Nguyen offers a way to think about this, too. He describes what happens when our own thick, nuanced values are superseded by simplistic metrics—a process he calls value capture. Value capture occurs when we start to prioritize earning points in a flattened value system rather than creating room to examine rich and subtle forms of value in our lives. Nguyen offers the example of setting a goal to “get fit” and then becoming obsessed with the metrics on your FitBit or watch.⁶⁸ Fitness tracker metrics do not tell you how fit you are. They can certainly be useful and fun—but they can just as easily inspire obsessive behavior. The same thing can easily happen in our lives with less explicit points systems. Earlier, I mentioned things like buying a home or getting married. If you imagine those milestones as associated with “experience points” and then the ways that points continue to accrue as you keep paying your mortgage or avoid getting divorced, you can see how easy it is gamify the tax code or social structures while missing out on the complex experience of making a home or growing into a relationship.

When I interviewed coach and writer Mara Glatzel about how her personal values play out in her business, she told me that she had to decide whether she was ambitious because she was ambitious, or whether she was ambitious because of capitalism. After some introspection, she came to the conclusion that her ambition was indeed intrinsic. But questioning the motivation behind her ambition gave her new parameters for how to support herself. She told me, “In order to produce the way I like to, I need to make a tandem commitment to my own energetic capacity.”⁶⁹ Glatzel recognizes that her productivity is linked to her capacity—not an act of neglecting her own body or mind in the name of ambitious goals. If growth with striving is more familiar to you than growth without striving, you might consider making a similar commitment. What are the necessary conditions for more easeful growth or humane ambition for you? Can you meet those conditions on your own or with support? And if not, how can your expectations for growth shift so that you have what you need to move forward without jeopardizing your well-being?

Self-Efficacy

Earlier, I referenced Edwin Locke's goal-setting theory. His work builds on behavioral and motivational theories developed by Albert Bandura. One of Bandura's core concepts is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the confidence we have in our ability to take the necessary actions to produce our desired results. To act with self-efficacy signifies a sense of agency and relative power within our environment.⁷⁰ If you lack self-efficacy (no shame in that), you might often feel like a ship at the mercy of waves of uncertainty. Self-efficacy as a concept is important within our larger consideration of goals, growth, and striving because we need to both understand the environment we exist in (including political, social, and economic systems) while also nurturing a sense of agency. This is the “both/and” that Barry and Glatzel described.

I also heard the hallmarks of self-efficacy in my conversation with Sarah Avenir back in 2020. Avenir is a writer, designer, strategist, and, at the time, the CEO of &yet, a digital strategy agency. She is an all-around renaissance woman. I set up the interview to ask her about how she was leading her team through uncertainty given the pandemic. She told me that “after the initial shake of the snow globe,” she realized she had two choices. “One [choice] is to freeze up and try to hold on to everything that you have, try to figure it out and strategize how to keep your things safe. And then the other [choice] is to say, ‘well, I never really had much control over this anyway. I guess I might as well just be who I am and allow this to help me take more risks.’” Avenir easily recognized that the environment she was operating in was changing every day, that her employees were scared, and that her clients might be wary of taking on new projects. She used that uncertainty to her advantage, launching creative projects to showcase the agency's unique philosophy on digital development and community building.⁷¹

You can recognize the influence of systems like neoliberal meritocracy, capitalism, and ableism, while also affirming your own intrinsic desire for growth and ability to act on your own behalf. In fact, recognition of this “both/and” is essential. Acknowledging the duality is the only way to analyze what motivates a particular goal or desire. Growth, of course, doesn't have to look like ambition or massive results. Self-efficacy exists whether your goal is to get a big promotion, double your revenue, or take copious amounts of vacation every year and rest. Bottom line: There are things we can do to create a satisfying life. And if it feels like satisfaction is outside your grasp, it's worth questioning whether what you believe will satisfy you is just what external systems say happiness is made from. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we're all going to live in mansions, drive fancy cars, and wear luxurious clothes, nor do I discount the profound pain of poverty or loss. But I do believe that it's possible to take self-efficacious action to embody satisfaction. This action and its fruits are the root of self-esteem and worthiness. We affirm ourselves, our needs, and our desires every time we take action that we believe will impact life for the better. From here, we need to define what impacting life for the better looks like for ourselves. In other words, what is the life you want to create for yourself? Then, from there, you can create a structure for practicing self-efficacy by setting commitments.

Exercise:

Use a search engine to find a list of personal values. Make a list of 10–20 values that have special meaning for you. From there, group values that have similar qualities and consider whether there is a word that better describes that meaning of that group to you. Keep honing your list until you have 3–5 core personal values.

For each of those core personal values, list at least five actions that are examples of those values in daily life.

Example:

Curiosity

• Approach potential conflicts with questions instead of accusations
• Learn something new every day
• Ask “why” before trying to solve a problem
• Gather information from diverse sources before coming to a conclusion
• Fill news feeds with challenging ideas

How do your personal values relate to the values of the systems or institutions you interact with? Are they compatible or mutually exclusive? How will leaning into your true personal values impact your position in the wider world?