…the practice of freedom—i.e., the morning after, and the morning after that—is what, if we're lucky, takes up most of our waking lives.

— Maggie Nelson, On Freedom⁸¹

WHEN WAS THE last time you worked on something that was really, truly important to you? Something that held a greater meaning for you than it might for someone else? Something that doesn't merely prevent pain, hassle, or misfortune, but something that adds real value to your life? I hope that the last time you engaged in this kind of project was recent—maybe even today. But with the many external demands on your time and attention, it might be difficult to remember. The relentless pace of our culture requires that we continuously react to circumstances beyond our control. We frenetically switch between tasks to convince ourselves we've got it all under control. We shoulder the burden of fixing “problems” and taking on new responsibilities. So much so, that we attempt to stave off reacting by pre-reacting—considering what could go wrong and acting to prevent that. I viscerally feel the absence of a safety net and work to weave one for myself every day, often subverting my commitment to longer-term action in the process. No wonder it can be such a challenge to spend time on meaningful projects or take a longer-term view.

Meaningful projects and long-term action rarely lend themselves to efficiency or optimization. And because economically and culturally we value efficiency and optimization (“Remember, time is money”), we tend to view what we can't do quickly as a luxury. Chapter 2 looks at the cultural systems that have influenced this—rugged individualism, neoliberalism, Protestant work ethic, and supremacy culture. But before you can learn to prioritize meaningful, long-term projects, I want you to look at an unexpected weapon wielded by these cultural systems: time.

Social theorist Barbara Adam explores the quality and instrumentation of time throughout her work. She notes the difference between time as we experience it—day and night, seasons, relationships, conversations—and clock time—hours, minutes, days, weeks. The invention and standardization of clock time facilitated industrial standardization. Once time became a ubiquitous quantitative measurement, it could be used to measure all sorts of processes and actions. We owe all of our modern conceptions of productivity and management to the advent of standardized clock time. As Adam explains, the necessary result of this process is “time compression,” trying to fit more into less time. Time compression brings with it an intensified workload. As we fit more and more into less time, we're quite literally working harder, despite the technology that purports to ease our burden. Adam also argues that because time becomes inextricably linked to money, any time off takes on the quality of wasted money. Urgency grips us at work—but also at play and at “rest.”⁸²

Our pervasive sense of urgency leads to a sense of separation. We feel like the whole world is on our shoulders. We sometimes buckle under the responsibility to keep up and keep smiling. With each of us in our own little bubbles of urgency, we end up distanced from our colleagues, friends, and family. But we also find ourselves separated from our own pleasure and satisfaction, alienated from meaning and purpose. Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie describes what happens as a result: “our lives become about the struggle to keep up.” She continues, “To truly feel our experience with depth and presence, we would have to slow down a lot (which would make us less efficient consumers, students, workers, prisoners, soldiers…).”⁸³

While there are urgent challenges in both our micro and macro worlds today, embodying persistent, unyielding urgency will not help us solve them. But it will make us more susceptible to manipulation, outside influence, and control. When we're just struggling to keep up, it's nearly impossible to think critically about what we're trying to keep up with. As we fight to maintain our pace, we choose action that prioritizes short-term comfort over long-term satisfaction and meaning. We end up caught in The Validation Spiral, divvying out limited resources to more and more (mostly) invented responsibilities.

No matter how much your vision of who you want to become lines up with a picture of traditional Western capitalist success, I sincerely doubt that it includes needless urgency. Your vision isn't about keeping up with or reacting to the external environment. So we need a way to constitute this slower pace and more thoughtful approach—even as we work to detach ourselves from urgency and reactivity. When sharing the difference between practice and achievement in Chapter 4, I introduce you to Kieran Setiya and his book, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and I explore the role of telic and atelic activities in our lives. Now, I want to draw on a similar duality he shares as a source of dissatisfaction as we age: activities with ameliorative value and activities with existential value.

Activities with ameliorative value are those that prevent something bad from happening or occur in response to something bad happening. For instance, you begrudgingly pull together your paperwork for your accountant so they can do your taxes to avoid the pain of notices (or worse) from the IRS. Or, you take a shower before you go to work so that you don't get a reputation for being unkempt. Or, you make sure your kid did all their homework so that you don't have to deal with an email from the teacher. Granted, there are probably positive reasons you do these things, too. Maybe you get your refund faster or enjoy the smell of your soap or find meaning in helping with school work. But, for many people, these tasks are more ameliorative than they are meaningful on their own. For instance, you could likely be a part of your kid's education without checking up on their homework every evening. You check up on the homework to avoid hassle later on—for both them and you.

Activities with existential value, on the other hand, are the ones you do because they are personally meaningful to you. You don't do them to avoid pain; you do them because the activities create satisfaction all on their own. Reading, baking, and going for long walks while listening to podcasts are activities with existential value for me. I do them because I find joy in them—even when they're challenging or mundane.

Many of the goals we set are ameliorative themselves. Maybe you set a goal to exercise more because if “you don't use it, you lose it.” Or maybe you want to spend more time with your family because you worry about getting into fights with your partner. Maybe you want to put down your devices more often because you're trying to avoid the onslaught of daily bad news. How likely are you to stay committed to a goal that's ameliorative? Well, depending on what research you look at, somewhere between 7 percent and 25 percent of people stick with their New Year's resolutions—often our most ameliorative goals. So I'd say the odds aren't good.

Buying In

To follow through on our intentions for growth and change, we need existential commitments. Existential commitments cultivate what I refer to as buy-in. Buy-in is the feeling that you get when you know that what you're working on really, really matters. It's not just busywork, nor is it something you slog through to avoid consequences. It's also not a project you dreamed up with the hope to alleviate phantom discomfort. Buy-in comes from activities that are fundamental to the overall success of your vision.

Buy-in replaces the morally weighty concept of “self-discipline.” You don't force yourself to do what needs to be done. You don't deprive yourself or punish yourself. Instead, you create the conditions in which you readily do what you want to do. Importantly, buy-in isn't something you have or you don't. You create buy-in.

I think it's valuable to return to Max Weber and his work on connecting the Protestant work ethic to the spirit of capitalism here. One of Weber's most salient points about the Protestant work ethic was how the culture it created valued work above pleasure, going so far as to declare an ascetic life to be the morally virtuous life. He writes, “In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture.” To put that in modern terms, Weber concludes that the most virtuous and morally righteous people, according to Puritanical culture, were those who avoided pleasure and enjoyment so as to work harder and earn more money. Importantly, the religious beliefs foundational to this culture inculcated work ethic as a measure of morality and faithfulness. Either you were righteous and self-disciplined or you were born lacking the necessary discipline that would signal your salvation.⁸⁴

Recall Kegan and Lahey's work on our immunity to change. One of the big assumptions I often uncover when working with business owners around growth and mindset is that they believe they aren't the kind of people who are self-disciplined or capable of follow-through. Like they were born with a personal deficiency. This assumption can form for any number of reasons: a teacher told them they were lazy; a parent disciplined them for not doing their homework; the media told them that if they hadn't accomplished X, Y, or Z by the age of 30, they were failing; and so on. And this assumption—this identity—is particularly hard to unravel because it gets reinforced over and over again through culture. In contrast, we're often fed the opposite line: You can do anything, don't quit, no limits, and so on. These phrases sound good, but when you are faced with real limitations—and the vast majority of us are—they can be supremely disempowering. Again, we start to internalize that it's our self-discipline that's lacking.

This is where Bandura's concept of self-efficacy can really come in handy for developing buy-in. Remember that self-efficacy is believing that you are capable of the action you want to take to achieve a certain outcome. Actively working to strengthen your self-efficacy is a way of rewriting the big assumption that you're not disciplined enough to succeed at what's important to you. Self-efficacy is influenced by personal experience, observed experiences, social feedback, imagined experience, and physical and emotional states. Each of these are variables that we can experiment with to improve our sense of self-efficacy. We can create small experiments that give us new personal experiences to draw from. We can seek out people who have done what we want to do. We can have conversations with others on similar paths or use meditation to integrate new information. None of these things require prolonged self-discipline or major change.

Let Go of Discipline

“Discipline” is presented as a positive character trait. Most often when we talk about discipline, we talk about the ability to will ourselves to do what we don't want to do so that we achieve a desired outcome. We have to be disciplined to lose weight. We have to be disciplined to start a business. We have to be disciplined to write a book. We assume that misery will lead us to the joy of success. I find that whole notion pretty bleak. I don't want to avoid hard work, but do I really need to be miserable to earn my way to joy? No. When we replace discipline with buy-in, we circumvent the assumption of misery. We don't need to do things we don't want to do to achieve a desired result. Instead, because we know exactly why a particular task matters to the big picture, we can connect with a genuine desire to do that task. It might not be pleasurable, but it's intrinsically valuable. Whatever resistance we might still feel teaches us about the nature of our project.

Here, the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has insights we can use. In his book The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Kierkegaard cites three skills we can learn from lilies and birds: silence, obedience, and joy. Today, those are three words that can mean very different things to different people—and even in Kierkegaard's time (the mid-1800s), they would have had various connotations. But Kierkegaard uses three discourses to expand on each one. Silence is explained as removing the influence of anything that is not God's will—to find a stillness in which our needs and our actions are perfectly aligned with God's will. Kierkegaard writes that obedience is unconditional submission to the will of God. And joy is understood as living in the present without anxiety about the future or the past.⁸⁵ Kierkegaard uses overtly Christian language—exploring scripture and concepts like the will of God. But Kierkegaard's work has had profound influence far outside the bounds of the church. Even if the concept of the “will of God” is anathema to you, there is something valuable here. Stick with me. To cultivate buy-in for what we're up to, we must let go of the assumption of misery—and that's what silence, obedience, and joy can shed light on.

Kierkegaard's discourse on silence tracks with the work we've done to deconstruct the economic, political, and cultural narratives we swim in. Our task is to carve out space—as much as possible—for that silence. We need to quiet the voices of “reason” and the false stories we've learned about ourselves, without disconnecting from reality. While positive-thinking gurus might suggest that silence is actually filled with good vibes, I believe silence is actually what results from being able to approach troubling headlines, disappointing results, and, yes, exciting possibilities with objectivity and detachment. Silence gives us the best chance of taking all the information around us and transforming it into meaningful action or choices. Creating the space for silence is what the whole first half of this book has been about.

Now, let's take a closer look at obedience. Obedience might sound a lot like discipline—the will to do the hard or unpleasant thing. But, instead, we can interpret Kierkegaard's obedience as self-trust. Obedience is action that is in line with both who you are and who you are becoming. The lily and bird don't worry about whether they should be like an industrious ant or a playful otter—they are obedient in doing their own thing. All of the worry from the shoulds and supposed-tos we've internalized from external systems and authority is a distraction from our true task—from obedience. Kierkegaard writes about this in terms of necessity:

“You, too, are of course subject to necessity. God's will is indeed done in any case, so strive to make a virtue of necessity by doing God's will in unconditional obedience. …you might truthfully be able to say of yourself: ‘I cannot do anything else, I cannot do otherwise.’”

As I read this, this feels familiar. When I told an editor friend of mine that I was writing this book, I told her that I was excited and that I knew it was going to be really hard. She told me, “I don't think it's going to be hard for you.” This about knocked me over. She didn't mean, as it has been so often said to me, that I was just so [smart, disciplined, well-resourced] that it would be easy. What she meant was that she observed me as being unconditionally obedient to writing. I wouldn't say that I'm a naturally gifted writer or that I always communicate exactly what I want to say. But writing is a necessity for me. There have been times in my adulthood that I've not written, times where I was trying to do or be other things. But those were bad times. They were times full of the misery of doing something I “should” be doing instead of my necessary task. As Kierkegaard puts it: I cannot do anything else, cannot do otherwise, than write. Or as Joan Didion puts it, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”⁸⁶ I don't personally believe we are born with an innate purpose. And I don't believe that I was put on Earth to write. But I've learned that being obedient to the drive to write has helped me to create meaning and purpose in my life. To return to Setiya's framing, writing has existential value for me at the same time that it provides my livelihood.⁸⁷

When I let go of trying to be something other than what I am, I can access the type of joy that Kierkegaard references in his third discourse. Buying in on important work, giving yourself over to it, feels like joy. Maybe not day-at-an-amusement-park style fun, but joyful nonetheless. Even if the work wouldn't feel joyful to someone else, completing a task or working on a project that gets you one tiny step closer to who you're becoming is satisfying. Like many creative people, I've long avoided administrative tasks that are essential to my work. But I've learned to find the joy in these tasks because I am profoundly aware of how they support my ability to do everything else.

Accountability and Motivation

Throughout this chapter so far, I've shared ways that you can reposition the growth in front of you as something you want to do, rather than something you should do. Once you've shed the shoulds and supposed-tos that add misery to your life, excitement about the task at hand is a short leap. Yet, for as much as I believe this approach works better than any project management software or reminder set-up, or annoying notifications, folks still want to know about accountability. They claim that if they just had someone who holds them accountable to the work they believe they're supposed to be doing, then they'd be more likely to get it done or make the change. They claim that they're “deadline-oriented” and that due dates give them a way to stay on track. Unfortunately, this just isn't true for anything but the smallest, most concrete tasks.

The way we organize work or track change is important, no doubt. It's especially important for those who experience difficulty with executive functioning. But no amount of deadlines, flashing red notifications, or threats of being held “accountable” are going to matter if you haven't bought into the purpose of the work they remind you to do. I know just how easy it is to disregard a deadline or notification. In their book Uncommon Accountability, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington describe the ways we typically use the concept of “accountability.” They cite all of its negative connotations in terms of justice and consequences. And then, they detail another way to see accountability: ownership. No one can own my tasks, habits, or creative work other than me. I was first introduced to this in their first book, The 12 Week Year, and it has stuck with me ever since. They write, “We either walk our own personal path toward great accountability, or we don't. No one can hold us accountable, only we can hold ourselves accountable.”⁸⁸ Fair warning: This concept can quickly fly into the territory of rugged individualism and the personal responsibility doctrine. And, in fact, much of Uncommon Accountability does draw from that narrative. I certainly don't blame them—that's the audience they're writing for.

But since I've unpacked individualism and personal responsibility already, let me be clear. Redefining accountability in terms of ownership is empowering. It does not mean that your success is in your hands alone, or that failure means you're deficient in some way. Ownership—or my preferred term, buy-in—is a way of saying, “This is what I'm choosing for me given the information and resources I have right now.” When you take ownership, you choose what to focus on, to invest yourself in, to be obedient to, to feel joyful about. The outcome is irrelevant. Ownership, buying in, being accountable to yourself means doing what you've already chosen to do. Changing what you've already chosen to change. Creating what you've already chosen to create. And it's from that mindset that you find joy and satisfaction in doing what it takes to follow through on what you've chosen.

For you, that might include getting yourself set up with an app that helps you plan out your projects. Or it could mean gathering a group of people working on similar projects. You might even check in daily with a friend over email to share your progress. If that's a helpful way to measure your progress so that you can learn and adjust as you go, do it. But know that there is nothing an app or a colleague can threaten you with that will make you do something you don't want to do, something you haven't chosen. No one can hold you accountable but yourself—so you better buy in.

Cultivating Buy-In

Buy-in shifts the objective from checking items off your list to thinking critically about the journey. “What's next?” is only the first (instead of the only) question. When you think critically about your growth or the work at hand, you also consider why you do it, what you learn, and how you can improve on things as you go. No longer a machine executing a list of instructions, you're a human who takes an active interest in the creative challenge of doing the work.

If you're like me, this is kind of work—personal or professional—you crave. And yet, it's the kind of work we are so likely to deny ourselves while we seek out new ways to increase our productivity or maintain the juggling act of everyday life. We might even think we don't deserve this kind of work—that it's the privilege of a certain kind of person with a particular skill set or station in life. But we all deserve the experience of doing work that matters to us—and we all have the opportunity to choose, even in a very small way, to see a bit more of what we do in that light. How can you draw a connection between your daily tasks and your vision for the future? How can you create meaning from the mundane?

Buy-in relies on your active choice to pursue what you want to pursue. Growth, change, creating cool stuff—it all takes some degree of strategic focus. In Chapter 8, you are asked to make a “map” of different paths you'd need to take as you move between your current condition and your personal vision. Now, you must consider the concrete things you'll work on while you're on the path you've chosen to start with. Those are your projects. When your projects are clearly tied to your strategy and your strategy is clearly tied to your vision and your vision is clearly tied to your values, you know that what you're working on really, really matters. You can feel the joy of buy-in. Maybe not every hour of every day. But that feeling is potent. Doing something that really, really matters to you (and to who you are becoming) for even an hour a day can completely change your outlook in the other 23 hours.

So, let's get to work.

Reflection:

• What was the last project you worked on that held existential value for you? Why is it meaningful to you?
• What is something you do regularly for ameliorative value? How else could you approach this activity?
• What do you do not because you “have to” but because it makes you feel more like yourself, obedient to your nature?
• Considering the strategic priority you chose, what activities or projects will you have to establish buy-in for?