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Achievement has become our most socially acceptable addiction, social science researcher Tom Rath argues.
“We celebrate the workaholic, the harried CEOs and executive career climbers, the perpetual hustlers, the never-satisfied strivers – even as they sacrifice their health, their relationships and their inner peace on the seemingly sacred altar of accomplishment,” he writes in What’s the Point?
He stresses that ambition is fine. So is excellence. But it’s crucial to not pursue achievement as an end rather than a means to contribute and help others. Life and work is about contribution.
Often we are told to find our passion. He calls passion “cotton candy – sweet, enticing, and gone the moment reality hits.” The research shows it doesn’t predict career success. But purpose does.
People with a strong sense of purpose feel better and earn significantly more money. “Not because they were chasing wealth, but because purpose drives performance in a way passion never could. We’ve got the entire equation backward. We think money leads to meaning, that success creates satisfaction, that passion produces purpose. We’re wrong on all counts,” he says.
In his interviews with hundreds of successful professionals across different fields, only one person attributed success to following their purpose. The rest found something that needed doing, got good at it and discovered meaning through contribution. Fulfillment followed becoming competent. Purpose emerged from practise. You build purpose, he advises, brick by brick, through the daily act of making things better for people.
So follow your contribution, not your passion. Ask who you can help? Seek significance. Find the thread that connects your daily tasks to someone else’s better day. Identify activities where your skills directly help other people.
As well, choose the right challenges. His interviews found too many mid-career professionals who realized they had spent decades in motion without any actual progress. One Fortune 500 executive told him, “I kept getting promoted because I was good at executing whatever you put in front of me. I was the ultimate team player, never questioning, always delivering. Now I’m running a division I don’t care about in an industry I accidentally fell into, doing work that will be forgotten the moment I retire. I’ve spent 20 years perfecting someone else’s vision.”
Mr. Rath urges you not to go along with the flow. Create your own current – a contribution current.
“The strongest currents aren’t created by individual achievement or external rewards; they’re generated by contributions to something larger than yourself. When your work visibly improves others’ lives, you tap into motivational forces far more powerful than any paycheque or promotion could provide,” he writes.
The people you surround yourself with, he adds, will shape your future. They don’t just influence your mood or habits. They rewire your brain, altering your potential, expanding or contracting your sense of what’s possible.
So choose them carefully. “We often assemble our inner circle with less strategy than we use to choose a restaurant,” he warns. We stumble into professional relationships and years later feel trapped. Instead, he advises you to search for shoulders to stand upon – people of excellence, who can inspire and instruct, boosting your career.
He suggests identifying the five people you spend the most time with professionally and asking whether at least some of them are significantly ahead of you in areas you need to grow. If not, you must upgrade your circle to include other shoulders to stand on.
“Becoming an effective shoulder hunter requires accepting an uncomfortable truth: The relationships that will transform you won’t feel good at first. They will make you feel inadequate, expose your ignorance and highlight how far you must go. This discomfort is the feature that makes those relationships transformative,” he says.
But he also stresses that these new relationships must be reciprocal. If these folks contribute to your career, you must contribute to theirs. That might be energy, curiosity, follow through or potential. Because they want to contribute, your execution of their insights becomes evidence of their impact.
Quick hits
- Try this experiment from neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff to counter the busyness trap most of us have fallen into and become more comfortable with stillness: Sit idle for five minutes at one point in the day. Do it every workday for a week. You can set a timer and keep your phone in another room so you’re not tempted to reach for it.
- Stanford economist and artificial intelligence expert Erik Brynjolfsson says almost every project can be divided into three stages: Defining the question, executing it once it’s well-defined and evaluating if it was done right. For all of history, humans did all three parts but now AI agents are tackling that middle part, which is just following instructions. If that’s all you do, you could be in trouble.
- The attitude “I have to be me” requires others to adapt to you, notes executive coach Dan Rockwell. Why shouldn’t you adapt to them? He advises: Don’t be yourself. Become your best self.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.