Three, two, one. Welcome to Jim's Take episode 159, Never Enough and the Pressures of our Environment. I don't know about you, but I feel like enough is no longer enough.
And we have to keep raising this bar in a crazy, crazy kind of way. And our environments, the multiple different environments that we exist in are giving us this crazy amount of pressure. And there is this creeping feeling, and maybe it's no longer creeping, maybe it's already here, that we're being left behind.
And we're doing all the right things. We're working hard, we're providing for the kids, we're posting on social media if you're a business owner, we're performing at the office, whatever it is. You're doing all those checklist things that you're supposed to be doing, and you still feel like you're just massively behind.
And we have this judgmental environment, and a lot of it's internal, but a lot of it's external, where these different environments are making us question our ability, because when we do enough, it's not really enough. And these environments are social, digital, they're economic, like these structures and these bars that we generally have to pair ourselves up against to say, are we making it? They're constantly moving and adjusting. And what we thought was right is no longer relevant, and things that we thought were relevant are no longer there.
And we as humans are wired for community, we're wired for contribution, like being useful, we're wired for that recognition. And the recognition, I've always talked about how you don't really want the external recognition, though it's nice, we have to find the internal recognition that we have. But instead, we're being fed with this idea of comparison, competition, conditional worth, right? If you do this, then you're valid.
And it's impossible, we're not wired to operate this way. And I want to break that down today, I want to go into this, you know, we feel left behind, we feel like we don't matter, the pressure of performance is so high, it's impacting our mental health, there's no question about that, we know that, everybody can say that. And it's just too much of keeping up, and it's no longer keeping up with the Joneses, or maybe it is.
But I would say this, this pressure of keeping up has surpassed our ability, or our capacity to have just a well-meaning life, like a relaxing, kind of well-lived life. You know, you look back at the people and, you know, we see the mantras all the time, those little things, a picture of the old person saying, oh, you know, when I look back on my life, I'm happy with the time I spent with my kids, and it's valid, but they had more time to do it. And there was less distraction back then.
And when we compare ourselves to older people, and the freedom that they had, it's a very different mindset today. And I worry about the next few generations, I worry about my Gen X slash millennial, I'm in that transition period, I'm just above a millennial, I'll always say that. But there's so much to worry about.
And this is not a be present mantra, even though that's very helpful. And it's valid if you give it meaning, right? Understanding what real presence is, is a very important thing. But just saying be present isn't enough.
It's never enough. And I would say it's, you know, our mental capacity is hijacked, we're exhausted. I am doing a lot of reading up on the happiness philosopher, Epicurus, like this Epicurean philosophy, which is happiness is basically the absence of anxiety.
And what do you really have to worry about? All right, if you have to worry about death, well, nothing's after death, maybe, so then you don't really have to worry about it. Or if you're dead, then you're dead, right? And you can't control it. So don't worry about it, like that kind of mentality.
But when we think about the environment and the reality that we live in, I don't want to go into this, like be present and hippie kind of thing, though the hippies are often very right, if you have the ability to do that, there's also a realistic world that we all operate in. I recognize that our environment rewards performance. And it does not reward presence in any way, shape or form.
But we as humans can reward ourselves. And our human mind was not built to keep score in this kind of performance mechanism and all this kind of crazy stuff. And so I went down this path, I was thinking about ideas for the podcast was talking to the team was doing all this kind of stuff.
And I read this book a while ago, it's called Never Enough. And I must have read it at least a year ago. But it was really a book on the pressures we're putting on our children.
And the author, I forget her name right now, I should have it off the top of my head, I don't. But if you look up Never Enough, and it's about performance, it's a good book to read. Worth, we've aligned worth with achievement, your GPA, your title, the number of followers you have the whatever it is.
And we've interpreted that as part of our identity, and it becomes conditional love. And the way she framed that out, I thought was very impressive, right? If you don't have a 4.0, you're not going to be loved. Or now it's what 5.0 or 4.5. I don't even know the GPAs are like off the thing, but we've internalized it.
And it's not what's meant, right? I mean, if my kids aren't getting straight A's, it's not that they're not going to be loved, right? And we have to drive that home, we have to be intentional with it. And when we internalize it, we carry that into adulthood. And now it's, you know, well, what about the, you know, my identity is part of the value, I bring it work.
And what else, you know, do I get love by being a provider or making a certain amount of money or doing this thing. And we've changed over the past few decades on this individualism, this competition, status anxiety, and it's grown way faster than our social support, right? If you take a look at the social support that we have, and the people that matter in our support systems, and the people who love us unconditionally, right? We have them, everybody has them. But that's been lowered in importance to status, and money, and what car are you driving? And I mean, we've talked about that for ages, that's going back to like the big 80s, you know, whatever.
But we've engineered a culture of competition that drives chronic inadequacy, right? You are never going to be good enough. And that's an external influence that we have to adjust. And I've been going through that a lot.
And I've been, you know, ayahuasca helped, of course, but that's, you know, when we have this chronic inadequacy, open up your feed, your social feed, and there is a litany of gurus or solutions to fix it that you can pay for. And who are you performing for? I mean, that's really the question, who are you performing for? And what really is valid? And, and, yes, the environment has changed childcare through the roof healthcare is bananas. But we're outsourcing this kind of self worth that we have to compartmentalize these things into different ways where there's a function of, I need to pay for that, yes, but that's not my value as a human being.
And how do I buy the time back to pay myself first, for the things that are really relevant and important to me. And that's where I want to go today, right now that I'm what, eight minutes in. And so going back to so identity, identity is a, you know, what really matters to you.
And identity, I think used to I've told this story before on the podcast, I went to Walden Pond to reflect for a weekend. And I was sitting at breakfast and I, you know, I was just, I was feeling lost and I needed a little bit of thorough kind of inspiration and simplicity. I'm a big simplicity fan.
I believe in it so much, the less you have, the less you have to worry about. And I was sitting at breakfast and I wrote down, you know, what really matters, right? Like what matters to me, what's important. And I was going through that exercise.
And of course, the first thing that comes up are your kids, my kids matter. Yeah. But then I went deeper.
Why? Why do my kids matter? And what, you know, what do I, what matters with my kids, right? I want them to be independent. I want them to be healthy. I want them to be strong.
I want them to be, you know, all those things. I want them to be smart. I want them to be social.
I want them, you know, all these things that I want them to do. And it made me question the way that I was parenting my kids and my involvement with my kids and the way that I was interacting, right? You buy stuff for your kids. You don't buy them because they're asking you buy it because you want to give it to them.
That's a me problem, not a kid problem. And when we project this type of stuff, when we think about identity what is the identity you wish to have? And the identity we used to have back before all this technology and the comparison and all of that, when we were younger too, right? We weren't as I think as in tune with it, you know, in your early twenties, it matters a lot less than maybe in your forties because you've got the kids and you're keeping up and all that other stuff. I think what used to matter was identity was part of your participation and participation in family, participation in community, participating in creating something and doing a craft like building something that you wanted to be proud of.
I think those are all very important and we've evolved now with this never enough mentality. Now it's just projection. You have to tell people you did it, whether you did it or not.
And I think I talk about projection so much. It all comes down recently to projection for me. I think it's such a lack of authenticity.
Authenticity is so important to me, right? Because it's so exhausting, duplicity, trying to be multiple things to multiple people, trying to be something we're not. And we confuse visibility with value. We confuse being seen with actually doing the work, right? And we have to do the work and it's kind of the corporate thing was, right? The relationships help you better than, you know, being seen at the right meetings and all that kind of stuff.
But that's not what I'm talking about. You know, we have to feel the value in ourselves and the value that we're doing and create something meaningful. There was this great book called Bullshit Jobs.
I don't know if it was great. It was fine. It was an interesting thing.
But it was a relevant one where most of the time people like you could eliminate like 60 percent of people at work because they don't care about their work. They're just pushing papers around and just want to, you know, collect a paycheck. And that's fine.
Right. But that's the way we've built in. We've created this kind of mythical kind of performance, kind of be this kind of crazy person at work and you'll be rewarded and all that kind of stuff.
And when we think about visibility versus value, it's like marketing versus PR. It's like two sides of personality. Yes, you have to show up.
There's no question. Right. And we see that all the time.
Like social media, as an example, they're the people who are posting 30 times a day. Right. But it's just noise.
I'd much rather pay attention to someone who posts one time every five days because they have something meaningful to say. And so there's there's marketing versus PR. There's there's visibility versus value.
It's doing something because you're supposed to or actually giving thought to doing something that's meaningful. And when we think about the two sides of personality, like who you are, when we think about identity, who are you? There is one. I ask clients this a lot.
Right. What is personality? And most people will say it's who you are. Yes.
But go deeper. Right. Tell me more about that.
Who you are is one on the inside. It's your motivations, your values, what's important to you, the things you do, the usefulness you feel like all of those types of things. The other side of it, of who you are, is what other people see.
And sometimes we give too much credence to that, but sometimes what other people see are not the person that we deliver. And this is where exhaustion comes in. This is where burnout comes in.
You know, if you think about what defines you by you and what other people think, if your identity depends on your performance, you are never going to win. Because the goalposts are always moving. Right.
Yeah. You can run a marathon in three hours and then people are going to say, well, can you do it in two and a half and then say, can you do it in two? And can you do it in an hour and a half? Right. And you're pushing.
And now there's there's healthy pushing and there's healthy kind of stuff, but we're burning ourselves out because we're moving goalposts based on what other people see and judge. So if you were to sit down and think about and write down what defines you as a human and then in the next column, write down who told you that. I'm pretty sure you would have a pretty interesting list of I told myself that versus somebody else.
And are they even relevant of the things that we think define us? And when we start saying this doesn't define me, I don't care about this. This is irrelevant. Right.
This is not the way that I want to do it. Self-control and pushing ourselves and identifying and intentionally going down the path that's meaningful to us is so incredibly important just for our mental clarity and focus and stress relief and relaxing of burnout. We're not burned out because we're busy.
We're burned out because we're becoming people we don't recognize. We're burned out because we have to be this person at work and this person at home and this person with the friends. And none of those people are you.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote and he wrote a whole bunch of amazing books, Life and Time of Cholera, 100 Years of Solitude. I love this quote. It says everybody's got three people inside them or three personalities, your public, your private, and your secret.
Right. Your public person, your private person, your secret person. And we're managing those three different people inside of us all the time.
But when the public persona now becomes six different people and the private person is one and you're not even dealing with the secret person, you're like, I don't even know who I am anymore. Right. And this is why we're never enough because we can't be 17 different people at the same time at all.
Um, so how do we, how do we identify ourselves and build an identity and find self-worth without the BS? A lot of clients come to me where they say, you know what? I want to work in meetings. I want to be more confident. I say, you don't want confidence.
You want self-assurance, right? There's little nuance in the things we want. There's a, you know, I've got imposter syndrome. No, you're looking for self-worth, right? It's these, these things because we're so focused on the external components of who we are.
We're not focused on the internal work that we have to do ourselves. Um, self-worth and self-importance are two different things. Self-worth isn't about thinking that the world revolves around you.
Self-worth is knowing that you have value when the rest of the world may not recognize it. Right? So self-importance versus self-worth are two very different things. Um, confidence versus self-assurance are very different things.
And, uh, it's not something that you manifest. Like when we think about the self-help culture, these stupid yappy people online, um, it's such a toxic, I don't use the word toxic lightly. I hate the word, but the self-help guru culture is incredibly toxic.
It's telling you you're wrong so that they could sell you something different. Um, just meditate and everything would be fine. You're like, no man, that's not how it works.
Okay. Um, you don't manifest your worth. You don't, um, you know, imagine what it is that other people are going to see.
You accept your worth. You recognize your worth, right? You don't manifest who you are. You just find it inside of you.
It's something that you have that we've, we've lost this false positivity. These bullshit gurus, um, embrace your worth, realize your worth. Um, and it's probably if we unwind the box, appeal back the onion, your worth is probably not what you think it is.
It's the things that come naturally easy to you. It's the things you do where you just lose track of time, where you spend time with the people who matter and they recognize you for, you know, not those facades that you're putting up. Um, you know, we're told we have to be all of these things.
We're told we're supposed to be empathic. We're told we're supposed to be, um, all these different types of things. Empathy is a waste of time.
We don't have energy for it, right? I will die on this Hill. Empathy is overrated. Um, because we don't have the physical and mental capacity to feel what other people feel.
Compassion is very important. We have to recognize it. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, right? Um, empathy, the difference between empathy and compassion here, let me talk about this real quick because everyone, I hear this a lot in corporate, everyone's gotta be empathic.
We have to, you know, find empathy and all this kind of stuff. You're a manager, you have to be empathy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Empathy means I feel your pain.
That's what empathy is. You're feeling the feelings of the person across from you. Compassion is I understand your pain and I'm willing to help two very different things.
We don't have the capacity to be empathic anymore. Okay. We don't empathy, throw it out the window.
We can't feel what everybody's feeling because we can't even feel stuff for ourselves. Compassion is very important. I have to recognize that you've got crazy bills to pay and you're getting laid off and everything else, right? I don't need to feel that, but I need to understand it so I can help you.
That's very, very different, right? Empathy is exhausting. It's too exhausting. We can't do that anymore.
So when we think about who we are, right? A lot of people like to put empathic down as part of their identity. I disagree because when we talk more about it, it's kind of a misinterpretation of what empathy is. Kind of like a misinterpretation of what humility is.
You know, we don't take credit for the things that we're supposed to take credit for. Humility is bullshit. It's meant to have a lesser thought of yourself.
It's given in the context of, you know, religion and God and all of these different types of things. And yeah, there is a certain place for humility. I get it.
If you understand what humility is. Most people misinterpret humility. And we don't need to feel for everyone.
We don't need humility in every kind of component. I mean, don't go out and be an arrogant asshole. But we need to show up with compassion.
We need to show up with usefulness. We need to show up with understanding. And that pertains not just to other people, it pertains to ourselves.
Right? How do we be useful to ourselves? We're willing to drop everything to help other people. When are you going to drop it to help yourself? That's what never enough is all about. I mean, usefulness is all about it when we think about the bullshit jobs thing.
Everybody's looking for purpose at work. It's not purpose. We're looking for usefulness.
Right? When we say we want meaning is we want to be valued. We want to do something valuable, but not what other people to send you an email saying, great job so that we could feel it. And it's not, it doesn't come from other people.
It comes from inside. We crave evidence that we are making a dent in something that what we do touches someone or something that, you know, we have this crazy impact, but we're losing it through isolation or bureaucracy, whatever it is. Usefulness comes from this internal recognition that what we did provided value.
And it's the impact of our presence that when we walk into a room, we're providing the value that we're able to provide. Um, it's being seen, it's being recognized. We don't need to be important.
Everybody's striving to be important. Everyone's striving to be crazy, relevant. Everyone's trying like all this kind of stuff.
We need to be useful. And when you shift your mindset in that kind of way, you'll realize most of the things we're chasing just don't freaking matter. They just don't, right? Yes.
We have obligations to do. We have to meet those obligations. Yes, we do.
But there is context around this. This is not an all or nothing proposition. We get to kind of find the things that are relevant to us and the things that matter and for us to matter.
We have to believe that we matter, right? All of these challenges are emotional challenges, right? We're trying to fix emotional challenges with logic solutions, right? The overwhelming feeling of paying bills and taking care of kids and doing all these types of things, like knowing you matter is intellectual, right? I know I matter. I know I'm, I'm an important person. I drive a Chevy Malibu, whatever that, um, uh, Oh, what the hell? Well, well, is that his name from Saturday night live? Right.
I'm an important manager. Um, knowing you matter is intellectual, believing you matter is emotional, right? And it's the same thing. I told you when I asked people, what's the definition of leadership? Everyone gives me attributes of a leader, but they don't give me the meaning of leadership.
The meaning of leadership is that it's emotional, right? Because everybody has a different interpretation of it. And if you want someone to think of you as a leader, then you have to tap them in an emotional way. If you want to believe that you are a leader, you have to believe it on the inside, right? It's not logical, right? You could tell yourself over and over and over again, but if you don't believe it, it's irrelevant, right? And so when we know it, we can kind of articulate, we can put it down, right? But it requires two things.
Believing we matter true. It requires two things. One is, um, we're adding value to others and we feel it.
And the other one is when we do that and we provide value and we feel it, we recognize that others will value us, right? Everything is social and everything is personal and everything else. Um, but in order to do that, we need some kind of social proof. We need social interaction.
We need to, um, have that kind of connection. We need conversation. We need presence in the moment, not sitting on your phone.
We need conversations with people and understanding where they are, what they need, what we need from them and all of that. Um, and that's it. I mean, when we think about never being enough, it's a lot of worrying and, um, enough isn't about climbing a ladder.
It's not about having, um, it's also not about having less ambition. It's about giving value to the meaning, like building a foundation for your meaning and what meaning you have and what's important. And so when you stop performing for the world and just start participating in it, um, that's when you finally feel like you're enough.
That's it. I mean, ask anybody with kids when they spend a weekend putting the phone away and have meaningful interactions with their kids, it's everything for them right now. Yes.
Work supports that. Um, community activity supports that, like all of these different types of things, like everything's all connected, but what you give meaning to and what you prioritize and the things that are important to you, that makes you enough for the rest of everything else that you're looking to do. So that was it.
I went, I went a long time. I kind of rambled. I went off on a rant.
All right. Happy week, man. We are enough.
You are enough. Let's go, man. Screw the environment.
We're going to, uh, and the pressures of the environment. We're gonna, we're gonna rock and roll. Have a wonderful week.
Um, recognize that you have value. We're getting into holiday season soon. Um, it's great time for good connection with people.
We get that grateful feeling inside of us and everything else, lean into it, leverage it and make it sustained beyond. I think that's going to be my next podcast. How do you make that grateful feeling kind of go into the new year? Um, have a wonderful week.
I'm here. If you need me talk to everybody soon. Thank you.
And we have to keep raising this bar in a crazy, crazy kind of way. And our environments, the multiple different environments that we exist in are giving us this crazy amount of pressure. And there is this creeping feeling, and maybe it's no longer creeping, maybe it's already here, that we're being left behind.
And we're doing all the right things. We're working hard, we're providing for the kids, we're posting on social media if you're a business owner, we're performing at the office, whatever it is. You're doing all those checklist things that you're supposed to be doing, and you still feel like you're just massively behind.
And we have this judgmental environment, and a lot of it's internal, but a lot of it's external, where these different environments are making us question our ability, because when we do enough, it's not really enough. And these environments are social, digital, they're economic, like these structures and these bars that we generally have to pair ourselves up against to say, are we making it? They're constantly moving and adjusting. And what we thought was right is no longer relevant, and things that we thought were relevant are no longer there.
And we as humans are wired for community, we're wired for contribution, like being useful, we're wired for that recognition. And the recognition, I've always talked about how you don't really want the external recognition, though it's nice, we have to find the internal recognition that we have. But instead, we're being fed with this idea of comparison, competition, conditional worth, right? If you do this, then you're valid.
And it's impossible, we're not wired to operate this way. And I want to break that down today, I want to go into this, you know, we feel left behind, we feel like we don't matter, the pressure of performance is so high, it's impacting our mental health, there's no question about that, we know that, everybody can say that. And it's just too much of keeping up, and it's no longer keeping up with the Joneses, or maybe it is.
But I would say this, this pressure of keeping up has surpassed our ability, or our capacity to have just a well-meaning life, like a relaxing, kind of well-lived life. You know, you look back at the people and, you know, we see the mantras all the time, those little things, a picture of the old person saying, oh, you know, when I look back on my life, I'm happy with the time I spent with my kids, and it's valid, but they had more time to do it. And there was less distraction back then.
And when we compare ourselves to older people, and the freedom that they had, it's a very different mindset today. And I worry about the next few generations, I worry about my Gen X slash millennial, I'm in that transition period, I'm just above a millennial, I'll always say that. But there's so much to worry about.
And this is not a be present mantra, even though that's very helpful. And it's valid if you give it meaning, right? Understanding what real presence is, is a very important thing. But just saying be present isn't enough.
It's never enough. And I would say it's, you know, our mental capacity is hijacked, we're exhausted. I am doing a lot of reading up on the happiness philosopher, Epicurus, like this Epicurean philosophy, which is happiness is basically the absence of anxiety.
And what do you really have to worry about? All right, if you have to worry about death, well, nothing's after death, maybe, so then you don't really have to worry about it. Or if you're dead, then you're dead, right? And you can't control it. So don't worry about it, like that kind of mentality.
But when we think about the environment and the reality that we live in, I don't want to go into this, like be present and hippie kind of thing, though the hippies are often very right, if you have the ability to do that, there's also a realistic world that we all operate in. I recognize that our environment rewards performance. And it does not reward presence in any way, shape or form.
But we as humans can reward ourselves. And our human mind was not built to keep score in this kind of performance mechanism and all this kind of crazy stuff. And so I went down this path, I was thinking about ideas for the podcast was talking to the team was doing all this kind of stuff.
And I read this book a while ago, it's called Never Enough. And I must have read it at least a year ago. But it was really a book on the pressures we're putting on our children.
And the author, I forget her name right now, I should have it off the top of my head, I don't. But if you look up Never Enough, and it's about performance, it's a good book to read. Worth, we've aligned worth with achievement, your GPA, your title, the number of followers you have the whatever it is.
And we've interpreted that as part of our identity, and it becomes conditional love. And the way she framed that out, I thought was very impressive, right? If you don't have a 4.0, you're not going to be loved. Or now it's what 5.0 or 4.5. I don't even know the GPAs are like off the thing, but we've internalized it.
And it's not what's meant, right? I mean, if my kids aren't getting straight A's, it's not that they're not going to be loved, right? And we have to drive that home, we have to be intentional with it. And when we internalize it, we carry that into adulthood. And now it's, you know, well, what about the, you know, my identity is part of the value, I bring it work.
And what else, you know, do I get love by being a provider or making a certain amount of money or doing this thing. And we've changed over the past few decades on this individualism, this competition, status anxiety, and it's grown way faster than our social support, right? If you take a look at the social support that we have, and the people that matter in our support systems, and the people who love us unconditionally, right? We have them, everybody has them. But that's been lowered in importance to status, and money, and what car are you driving? And I mean, we've talked about that for ages, that's going back to like the big 80s, you know, whatever.
But we've engineered a culture of competition that drives chronic inadequacy, right? You are never going to be good enough. And that's an external influence that we have to adjust. And I've been going through that a lot.
And I've been, you know, ayahuasca helped, of course, but that's, you know, when we have this chronic inadequacy, open up your feed, your social feed, and there is a litany of gurus or solutions to fix it that you can pay for. And who are you performing for? I mean, that's really the question, who are you performing for? And what really is valid? And, and, yes, the environment has changed childcare through the roof healthcare is bananas. But we're outsourcing this kind of self worth that we have to compartmentalize these things into different ways where there's a function of, I need to pay for that, yes, but that's not my value as a human being.
And how do I buy the time back to pay myself first, for the things that are really relevant and important to me. And that's where I want to go today, right now that I'm what, eight minutes in. And so going back to so identity, identity is a, you know, what really matters to you.
And identity, I think used to I've told this story before on the podcast, I went to Walden Pond to reflect for a weekend. And I was sitting at breakfast and I, you know, I was just, I was feeling lost and I needed a little bit of thorough kind of inspiration and simplicity. I'm a big simplicity fan.
I believe in it so much, the less you have, the less you have to worry about. And I was sitting at breakfast and I wrote down, you know, what really matters, right? Like what matters to me, what's important. And I was going through that exercise.
And of course, the first thing that comes up are your kids, my kids matter. Yeah. But then I went deeper.
Why? Why do my kids matter? And what, you know, what do I, what matters with my kids, right? I want them to be independent. I want them to be healthy. I want them to be strong.
I want them to be, you know, all those things. I want them to be smart. I want them to be social.
I want them, you know, all these things that I want them to do. And it made me question the way that I was parenting my kids and my involvement with my kids and the way that I was interacting, right? You buy stuff for your kids. You don't buy them because they're asking you buy it because you want to give it to them.
That's a me problem, not a kid problem. And when we project this type of stuff, when we think about identity what is the identity you wish to have? And the identity we used to have back before all this technology and the comparison and all of that, when we were younger too, right? We weren't as I think as in tune with it, you know, in your early twenties, it matters a lot less than maybe in your forties because you've got the kids and you're keeping up and all that other stuff. I think what used to matter was identity was part of your participation and participation in family, participation in community, participating in creating something and doing a craft like building something that you wanted to be proud of.
I think those are all very important and we've evolved now with this never enough mentality. Now it's just projection. You have to tell people you did it, whether you did it or not.
And I think I talk about projection so much. It all comes down recently to projection for me. I think it's such a lack of authenticity.
Authenticity is so important to me, right? Because it's so exhausting, duplicity, trying to be multiple things to multiple people, trying to be something we're not. And we confuse visibility with value. We confuse being seen with actually doing the work, right? And we have to do the work and it's kind of the corporate thing was, right? The relationships help you better than, you know, being seen at the right meetings and all that kind of stuff.
But that's not what I'm talking about. You know, we have to feel the value in ourselves and the value that we're doing and create something meaningful. There was this great book called Bullshit Jobs.
I don't know if it was great. It was fine. It was an interesting thing.
But it was a relevant one where most of the time people like you could eliminate like 60 percent of people at work because they don't care about their work. They're just pushing papers around and just want to, you know, collect a paycheck. And that's fine.
Right. But that's the way we've built in. We've created this kind of mythical kind of performance, kind of be this kind of crazy person at work and you'll be rewarded and all that kind of stuff.
And when we think about visibility versus value, it's like marketing versus PR. It's like two sides of personality. Yes, you have to show up.
There's no question. Right. And we see that all the time.
Like social media, as an example, they're the people who are posting 30 times a day. Right. But it's just noise.
I'd much rather pay attention to someone who posts one time every five days because they have something meaningful to say. And so there's there's marketing versus PR. There's there's visibility versus value.
It's doing something because you're supposed to or actually giving thought to doing something that's meaningful. And when we think about the two sides of personality, like who you are, when we think about identity, who are you? There is one. I ask clients this a lot.
Right. What is personality? And most people will say it's who you are. Yes.
But go deeper. Right. Tell me more about that.
Who you are is one on the inside. It's your motivations, your values, what's important to you, the things you do, the usefulness you feel like all of those types of things. The other side of it, of who you are, is what other people see.
And sometimes we give too much credence to that, but sometimes what other people see are not the person that we deliver. And this is where exhaustion comes in. This is where burnout comes in.
You know, if you think about what defines you by you and what other people think, if your identity depends on your performance, you are never going to win. Because the goalposts are always moving. Right.
Yeah. You can run a marathon in three hours and then people are going to say, well, can you do it in two and a half and then say, can you do it in two? And can you do it in an hour and a half? Right. And you're pushing.
And now there's there's healthy pushing and there's healthy kind of stuff, but we're burning ourselves out because we're moving goalposts based on what other people see and judge. So if you were to sit down and think about and write down what defines you as a human and then in the next column, write down who told you that. I'm pretty sure you would have a pretty interesting list of I told myself that versus somebody else.
And are they even relevant of the things that we think define us? And when we start saying this doesn't define me, I don't care about this. This is irrelevant. Right.
This is not the way that I want to do it. Self-control and pushing ourselves and identifying and intentionally going down the path that's meaningful to us is so incredibly important just for our mental clarity and focus and stress relief and relaxing of burnout. We're not burned out because we're busy.
We're burned out because we're becoming people we don't recognize. We're burned out because we have to be this person at work and this person at home and this person with the friends. And none of those people are you.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote and he wrote a whole bunch of amazing books, Life and Time of Cholera, 100 Years of Solitude. I love this quote. It says everybody's got three people inside them or three personalities, your public, your private, and your secret.
Right. Your public person, your private person, your secret person. And we're managing those three different people inside of us all the time.
But when the public persona now becomes six different people and the private person is one and you're not even dealing with the secret person, you're like, I don't even know who I am anymore. Right. And this is why we're never enough because we can't be 17 different people at the same time at all.
Um, so how do we, how do we identify ourselves and build an identity and find self-worth without the BS? A lot of clients come to me where they say, you know what? I want to work in meetings. I want to be more confident. I say, you don't want confidence.
You want self-assurance, right? There's little nuance in the things we want. There's a, you know, I've got imposter syndrome. No, you're looking for self-worth, right? It's these, these things because we're so focused on the external components of who we are.
We're not focused on the internal work that we have to do ourselves. Um, self-worth and self-importance are two different things. Self-worth isn't about thinking that the world revolves around you.
Self-worth is knowing that you have value when the rest of the world may not recognize it. Right? So self-importance versus self-worth are two very different things. Um, confidence versus self-assurance are very different things.
And, uh, it's not something that you manifest. Like when we think about the self-help culture, these stupid yappy people online, um, it's such a toxic, I don't use the word toxic lightly. I hate the word, but the self-help guru culture is incredibly toxic.
It's telling you you're wrong so that they could sell you something different. Um, just meditate and everything would be fine. You're like, no man, that's not how it works.
Okay. Um, you don't manifest your worth. You don't, um, you know, imagine what it is that other people are going to see.
You accept your worth. You recognize your worth, right? You don't manifest who you are. You just find it inside of you.
It's something that you have that we've, we've lost this false positivity. These bullshit gurus, um, embrace your worth, realize your worth. Um, and it's probably if we unwind the box, appeal back the onion, your worth is probably not what you think it is.
It's the things that come naturally easy to you. It's the things you do where you just lose track of time, where you spend time with the people who matter and they recognize you for, you know, not those facades that you're putting up. Um, you know, we're told we have to be all of these things.
We're told we're supposed to be empathic. We're told we're supposed to be, um, all these different types of things. Empathy is a waste of time.
We don't have energy for it, right? I will die on this Hill. Empathy is overrated. Um, because we don't have the physical and mental capacity to feel what other people feel.
Compassion is very important. We have to recognize it. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, right? Um, empathy, the difference between empathy and compassion here, let me talk about this real quick because everyone, I hear this a lot in corporate, everyone's gotta be empathic.
We have to, you know, find empathy and all this kind of stuff. You're a manager, you have to be empathy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Empathy means I feel your pain.
That's what empathy is. You're feeling the feelings of the person across from you. Compassion is I understand your pain and I'm willing to help two very different things.
We don't have the capacity to be empathic anymore. Okay. We don't empathy, throw it out the window.
We can't feel what everybody's feeling because we can't even feel stuff for ourselves. Compassion is very important. I have to recognize that you've got crazy bills to pay and you're getting laid off and everything else, right? I don't need to feel that, but I need to understand it so I can help you.
That's very, very different, right? Empathy is exhausting. It's too exhausting. We can't do that anymore.
So when we think about who we are, right? A lot of people like to put empathic down as part of their identity. I disagree because when we talk more about it, it's kind of a misinterpretation of what empathy is. Kind of like a misinterpretation of what humility is.
You know, we don't take credit for the things that we're supposed to take credit for. Humility is bullshit. It's meant to have a lesser thought of yourself.
It's given in the context of, you know, religion and God and all of these different types of things. And yeah, there is a certain place for humility. I get it.
If you understand what humility is. Most people misinterpret humility. And we don't need to feel for everyone.
We don't need humility in every kind of component. I mean, don't go out and be an arrogant asshole. But we need to show up with compassion.
We need to show up with usefulness. We need to show up with understanding. And that pertains not just to other people, it pertains to ourselves.
Right? How do we be useful to ourselves? We're willing to drop everything to help other people. When are you going to drop it to help yourself? That's what never enough is all about. I mean, usefulness is all about it when we think about the bullshit jobs thing.
Everybody's looking for purpose at work. It's not purpose. We're looking for usefulness.
Right? When we say we want meaning is we want to be valued. We want to do something valuable, but not what other people to send you an email saying, great job so that we could feel it. And it's not, it doesn't come from other people.
It comes from inside. We crave evidence that we are making a dent in something that what we do touches someone or something that, you know, we have this crazy impact, but we're losing it through isolation or bureaucracy, whatever it is. Usefulness comes from this internal recognition that what we did provided value.
And it's the impact of our presence that when we walk into a room, we're providing the value that we're able to provide. Um, it's being seen, it's being recognized. We don't need to be important.
Everybody's striving to be important. Everyone's striving to be crazy, relevant. Everyone's trying like all this kind of stuff.
We need to be useful. And when you shift your mindset in that kind of way, you'll realize most of the things we're chasing just don't freaking matter. They just don't, right? Yes.
We have obligations to do. We have to meet those obligations. Yes, we do.
But there is context around this. This is not an all or nothing proposition. We get to kind of find the things that are relevant to us and the things that matter and for us to matter.
We have to believe that we matter, right? All of these challenges are emotional challenges, right? We're trying to fix emotional challenges with logic solutions, right? The overwhelming feeling of paying bills and taking care of kids and doing all these types of things, like knowing you matter is intellectual, right? I know I matter. I know I'm, I'm an important person. I drive a Chevy Malibu, whatever that, um, uh, Oh, what the hell? Well, well, is that his name from Saturday night live? Right.
I'm an important manager. Um, knowing you matter is intellectual, believing you matter is emotional, right? And it's the same thing. I told you when I asked people, what's the definition of leadership? Everyone gives me attributes of a leader, but they don't give me the meaning of leadership.
The meaning of leadership is that it's emotional, right? Because everybody has a different interpretation of it. And if you want someone to think of you as a leader, then you have to tap them in an emotional way. If you want to believe that you are a leader, you have to believe it on the inside, right? It's not logical, right? You could tell yourself over and over and over again, but if you don't believe it, it's irrelevant, right? And so when we know it, we can kind of articulate, we can put it down, right? But it requires two things.
Believing we matter true. It requires two things. One is, um, we're adding value to others and we feel it.
And the other one is when we do that and we provide value and we feel it, we recognize that others will value us, right? Everything is social and everything is personal and everything else. Um, but in order to do that, we need some kind of social proof. We need social interaction.
We need to, um, have that kind of connection. We need conversation. We need presence in the moment, not sitting on your phone.
We need conversations with people and understanding where they are, what they need, what we need from them and all of that. Um, and that's it. I mean, when we think about never being enough, it's a lot of worrying and, um, enough isn't about climbing a ladder.
It's not about having, um, it's also not about having less ambition. It's about giving value to the meaning, like building a foundation for your meaning and what meaning you have and what's important. And so when you stop performing for the world and just start participating in it, um, that's when you finally feel like you're enough.
That's it. I mean, ask anybody with kids when they spend a weekend putting the phone away and have meaningful interactions with their kids, it's everything for them right now. Yes.
Work supports that. Um, community activity supports that, like all of these different types of things, like everything's all connected, but what you give meaning to and what you prioritize and the things that are important to you, that makes you enough for the rest of everything else that you're looking to do. So that was it.
I went, I went a long time. I kind of rambled. I went off on a rant.
All right. Happy week, man. We are enough.
You are enough. Let's go, man. Screw the environment.
We're going to, uh, and the pressures of the environment. We're gonna, we're gonna rock and roll. Have a wonderful week.
Um, recognize that you have value. We're getting into holiday season soon. Um, it's great time for good connection with people.
We get that grateful feeling inside of us and everything else, lean into it, leverage it and make it sustained beyond. I think that's going to be my next podcast. How do you make that grateful feeling kind of go into the new year? Um, have a wonderful week.
I'm here. If you need me talk to everybody soon. Thank you.
