The passion that drives entrepreneurs to achieve greatness can also take a toll on their professional and personal lives. What can we do?
Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness are two of my favorite writers on the subject of human potential. Their 2017 book Peak Performance explored the implications of recent research from psychology, neuroscience and elite athletics for day-to-day effectiveness in the workplace and other domains of life.
Their latest book The Passion Paradox, published earlier this year, continues in this vein and extends the theme of their earlier work into some new directions. While its tone and approach are reminiscent of Peak Performance, Brad and Steve go beyond scientific findings and introduce a range of philosophical perspectives, from Epictetus and Seneca to Alain de Botton.
(Full disclosure: Brad and I are colleagues in the Bay Area coaching community, and I consider him a friend. I haven’t met Steve, but it would still feel a little too formal to refer to them here as Stulberg and Magness.)
The Passion Paradox is subtitled, "A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life," and Brad and Steve’s thesis is concisely stated in their final pages:
Mindlessly living with a passion can be extremely harmful and destructive. Mindfully living with a passion can be the key to a life well lived. Above all, this is the conclusion we came to after researching, reporting, and writing this book. [1]
What struck me as I read The Passion Paradox is the relevance of this idea to the leaders I work with in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are founder CEOs, and all of my clients are entrepreneurs in one way or another--they've taken a leap, they're pursuing a vision, they're building a culture. And they're deeply passionate about their work in ways that are often "the key to a life well lived," but also occasionally in ways that are "harmful and destructive."
While Brad and Steve’s book can be read profitably by anyone, below are nine key points that seem particularly significant for leaders like my clients, related patterns I've observed in my practice, and some suggested "lessons for entrepreneurs":
1. Passion and persistence have a neurological basis.
The sustained effort that’s necessary to pursue a passion in the face of adversity can be the result of a lower-than-normal sensitivity to the neurotransmitter dopamine:
Unlike other feel-good chemicals that are released after you’ve accomplished a goal, the far more potent dopamine is released prior, during the pursuit… [As a result] it’s not surprising that people who are insensitive to it (and thus need more of it to feel good) embody persistence, demonstrating unwavering determination and relentless drive. The more dopamine someone needs to feel good, the more willing she is to strive for and chase after ridiculously challenging rewards, even if doing so turns out to be detrimental to her in some way. [2]
To be clear, I don't have any data indicating that my clients or other entrepreneurs are less sensitive to dopamine, but it's a plausible hypothesis that could explain patterns that I frequently observe in my practice: Founders and other entrepreneurs work harder and longer than many other people, and they often accomplish more as a result, but they can also take less pleasure in the process and feel less fulfilled by success.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: I often have to remind clients that their employees need to celebrate company achievements--many of my clients are inclined to simply "check the box" when a milestone has been achieved and move on to the next task.
2. Struggles and failures can spur subsequent performance.
Brad and Steve draw upon a body of research suggesting that experiences of "adversity and discomfort" can fuel a determination to succeed later in life. [3] The life histories of many of my clients reflect this pattern, although the details vary widely, ranging from a sense of social exclusion in school to family turmoil to early career setbacks. I've also observed the inverse pattern--people who reach leadership positions never having experienced significant struggle or failure in life can find it difficult to regain their equilibrium when a setback occurs later in their career.
A version of this that I see in my practice involves a senior executive recruited by one of my clients to join their mid-stage company: the accomplished and polished executive isn't prepared for the inevitable stumbles that occur in a startup, and they experience these difficulties as a threat to their identity, which manifests itself as paralysis and retreat, or defensiveness and blame.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Embrace struggle and learn from failure--they're two of our best teachers. Look for these experiences when hiring, particularly in senior roles--they build reserves of resilience that leaders must draw upon to survive difficulties and help others do the same.
3. Passion is a form of addiction.
Brad and Steve cite a passage from Maia Szalavitz’s book on the neuroscience of addiction, Unbroken Brain:
When starving, when in love, and when parenting, being able to persist despite negative consequences—the essence of addictive behavior—is not a bug, but a feature, as programmers say. It can be the difference between life and death, between success and failure. However, when brain pathways intended to promote [positive attributes] are diverted into addiction, their blessings become curses. Love and addiction are alternations of the same brain circuits. [4]
And as Brad and Steve go on to note, "The line between what is good and bad, between what is productive and what is destructive, between when lots of dopamine fuels generative action and when it leads to disorder—is a fine and fragile one." [5] This is a hallmark of many of my clients--in a sense, they're addicted to work and often consider themselves happy workaholics. But the benefits to be derived from such single-minded dedication can at times be outweighed by the costs.
Something many of my clients experience is persistent and even obsessive thinking about the company--they're constantly turning it over in their minds, solving one problem so they can move on to the next. They're like a gamer who's unable to stop playing until they've "won"--which is itself a form of addictive behavior. Such passion can be a tremendous advantage in overcoming difficulties and persisting in the face of adversity, but like every superpower it has a dark side: I've had many clients who've experienced difficulty sleeping or being fully present in personal situations because thinking about work is a constant distraction.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Obsessive focus can be a superpower, and yet more isn't always better. Under some conditions it yields increasing returns, and under others it doesn't--be thoughtful about the difference.
4. Passion can be cultivated (although it may not feel good at first).
Psychologists have observed that people generally hold one of two different beliefs about how passion for work is obtained--we either find the right fit at the outset, or we develop it over time--and Brad and Steve cite a paper on this subject by a team from the University of Michigan and USC. They don't quote from it directly, but I found it sufficiently interesting to explore further, and the authors write:
The dominant mentality in America is the belief that passion is attained through finding a fit with the right line of work: We enjoy working in vocations compatible with our true selves. This is captured in the term "follow your passion," which advocates actively seeking the right fit...
[In contrast,] espousing what they consider a more realistic approach, some people suggest that passion for work can be cultivated over time in any line of work. They advocate developing one’s passion through mastery rather than expecting it from the outset. [6]
As Brad and Steve note, the vast majority of people who hold what's called a "fit mind-set" believe that "happiness comes from finding an activity or job about which they are immediately passionate, something that feels intuitively right from the get-go." [7] But the problem is that people with this mind-set tend not to follow pursuits that are initially challenging but offer greater potential for long-term growth, and they give up in the face of early disappointments.
In my experience entrepreneurs generally take the opposite perspective and hold a "developmental mind-set." My clients are clearly driven to pursue their professional goals, but they don't expect entrepreneurial leadership to feel good from the start, and when it does feel good, they're keenly aware that such feelings will probably change quickly as the business evolves and requires something new of them as a leader.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Resist the temptation to conclude that early challenges are a sign of a poor fit. Cultivate your comfort with discomfort in order to persist through challenges while pursuing growth opportunities.
5. Passions fulfill fundamental psychological needs.
Brad and Steve discuss the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who developed the concept of "self-determination theory" in the 1970s. According to this model, we remain motivated by a pursuit over an extended period when it fulfills three primary needs:
- Competency, or "a sense of control over the outcome of your efforts and the ability to make progress over time."
- Autonomy, "sometimes referred to as authenticity, [which] is about acting in harmony with your innermost being." Brad and Steve clarify this concept further by citing the work of a team of psychologists from the University of Washington:
The great benefit of being able to convincingly rationalize one’s work as a manifestation of the true self is that it gives the individual direction and purpose. Work then provides the answers to an individual’s fundamental questions: "Who am I?" and "What should I do with my life?"
- Relatedness, or "the need to feel connected to and/or like you are part of something larger." [8]
I regularly observe all of these factors in my clients, particularly founder CEOs, although each strength comes with a downside. Entrepreneurial leaders enjoy a great deal of agency and rightly believe that their individual efforts will be vital to the company’s success (or lack thereof), but as a result they often struggle to relinquish ownership of key tasks and delegate them to subordinates. Entrepreneurs generally feel personally identified with their venture, which enables them to serve a unique role as an avatar of the business, but this can undermine their sense of self-worth should the business stumble or fail. And entrepreneurs typical relish the experience of being a central figure in a community of employees, customers, and other stakeholders, and yet even the most extroverted leader needs time away from the spotlight to replenish themselves.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Just as passion itself can have an addictive dark side, the aspects of leadership that are most fulfilling can also carry a cost. Be mindful of the need to let go and delegate, maintain a separate identity, and disconnect from the role.
6. External rewards are of limited value.
University of Quebec psychologist Robert Valleyrand has suggested that our pursuits become problematic when, as Brad and Steve note, "someone becomes more passionate about the rewards an activity might bring than about doing the activity itself. As a regular reader of Stoicism, I was gratified to see Brad and Steve link this current research to the teachings of Epictetus, who warns against becoming attached to any outcomes that we do not directly control. [9]
The Stoic perspective helps us manage feelings of disappointment when we fail to obtain a desired reward, but it's just as important to limit the value we attach to any external rewards that we do obtain, because of a process known as "hedonic adaptation." As I've noted before, UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky explains that this is a double-edged sword:
The bad news about hedonic adaptation is that it ultimately dampens your happiness and satisfaction after any positive event or uplift. But there is good news, too. I would argue that human beings are actually lucky to have the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, as it's extremely useful when bad things happen. Some studies of hedonic adaptation show, for example, that we have a phenomenal ability to recover much of our happiness after a debilitating illness or accident. [10]
I observe both sides of this dynamic in my practice. No entrepreneur relishes having to lay off employees or shut down the company, and new leaders in particular can feel a profound sense of dread at the prospect. These events exact real costs, to be sure--careers flounder, dreams die, people suffer. And yet life goes on, and with the passage of time the healing power of hedonic adaptation allows the leader to recover and move on, hopefully having learned how to avoid a similar outcome in the future.
But the sword cuts both ways, of course. Entrepreneurs are as susceptible to the allure of external rewards as anyone else, and many of my clients have pursued and realized these dreams, from the heightened prominence that comes with public accomplishment to the tangible trappings of professional success. But the fulfillment that results is inevitably short-lived, and these rewards lose their ability to stimulate or soothe us as we come to take them for granted.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Keep failure and success in perspective--neither is permanent. Be mindful of the impulse to compare ourselves to others using external measures, which leads to the trap of competition.
7. Fear can be useful in the short-term, but sustained anxiety is costly.
A visceral response to fear clearly offers an important evolutionary advantage. When our early-human ancestors encountered a situation they perceived as dangerous, a powerful threat response primed them to act quickly and decisively, allowing them to survive and pass down their propensity for fright and anxiety. Their less perceptive contemporaries may have enjoyed a more stress-free life, but it was a shorter one as a result.
Yet the same neurological warning system that keeps us safe from harm when we face a literal threat to our physical safety carries a cost when we face merely symbolic threats, which is almost always the case when we encounter a potential failure in our professional lives today. Citing work by NYU's Jocelyn Bélanger and Penn State's David Conroy, Brad and Steve note that fear of failure can offer a short-term boost while imposing a long-term cost:
When we are overcome by fear, we evaluate everything as a threat. Our body and mind prepare us to survive by any means possible. But what is an effective survival response in the short run almost always morphs into anxiety in the long run. [11]
And while we can recover quickly from a sudden jolt of fear once a literal danger has passed, the experience of sustained anxiety in face of symbolic dangers can damage our psychological and physical health.
I see this consistently in my practice. Entrepreneurs face situations on a daily basis that can pose a symbolic threat, from pitching investors to tough conversations with employees, and the relatively mild and brief threat response they experience as a result can help them navigate these situations more effectively. But entrepreneurs can also experience a deeper sense of existential threat over a period of time, not only when the company is failing, but also when the company's succeeding if they're worried about their ability to keep pace as an effective leader. In these cases the toll on the leader can be grave.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Pay close attention to stress levels and make a consistent investment in self-care in order to recover. As Brad and Steve note in Peak Performance, growth results from the right combination of stress and rest.
8. Mastery requires patient effort and focused attention.
Quebec psychologist Valleyrand contrasts a destructive, extrinsically-driven "obsessive passion" with a nourishing, intrinsically-inspired "harmonious passion." [12] One of Brad and Steve's core concepts in The Passion Paradox is that we can attain a state of harmonious passion through what they call a "mastery mind-set," which we might view as an extension of the idea that you can "[develop] one’s passion through mastery," as noted above.
Brad and Steve discuss six different elements of mastery at length: intrinsic motivation; an emphasis on process over goals; consistent, marginal improvements; embracing failure as a challenge; patience; and focus. The entire framework is well worth exploring, but here I focus on the last two and their relevance to entrepreneurs.
Brad has written elsewhere on the problem with hack culture--"Most of it is complete, utter bullshit"--and The Passion Paradox connects this theme with the work of aikido master George Leonard, who disdained "what he called the obsessive personality: someone who lacks the patience and stick-to-itiveness required for mastery." And as Brad and Steve go on to note, "all the previously discussed elements of the mastery mind-set...require patience. Patience is a first principle." [13]
I'm not suggesting that entrepreneurs must be patient in growing the business--they may well need to press forward in the face of competitive threats and limited resources. But I do believe they must be patient in their efforts to develop themselves as a leader (and to support others in doing the same.) There are no hacks to becoming a better leader, no short cuts--it's an arduous process that requires sustained effort over time.
In part this is because entrepreneurial leadership ultimately involves managing attention in any number of ways: deciding what to address and what to ignore, creating the optimal conditions for strategic thinking or a difficult conversation, and regulating anxiety. But as Brad and Steve note, we often fail to treat our attention with the respect it deserves, with pernicious consequences for our effectiveness:
The majority of the time, we walk around on autopilot, not deliberately choosing where or how sharply we direct our attention. To sustain passion, however, we must remove distractions that pray on our attention and break from the mundane and automatic thoughts that normally fill our minds. [14]
The lesson for entrepreneurs: Leadership must be approached like any other demanding discipline. Progress will be contingent on your ability to treat your attention like a resource. A capacity for mindfulness will support patience as well as focus--meditation helps.
9. Balance is overrated, but self-awareness is essential.
Brad has also written elsewhere about the downside of striving for "balance," a perspective that he and I share. As Brad and Steve note, "passion and balance are antithetical," [15] and as I've written before, "balance requires an unsteady equilibrium among the various demands on our time and energy," a precarious stance for a fully committed entrepreneurial leader in a highly dynamic role. Among other proponents of a passionate approach to work, they cite Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic:
You've got to be a minimalist to be a maximalist; if you want to be really good, master and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you've got to say no to many others. [16]
Having rejected balance as a principle for developing a healthy relationship with our passion, Brad and Steve assert that the key is self-awareness:
Self-awareness is perhaps the only countervailing force strong enough to match the extreme inertia of passion. Possessing it ensures that you can thoughtfully evaluate your passions... It gives you the power to choose if and when to pull back from a passion--or, alternatively, if and when to push forward, perhaps with even more fire and drive. [17]
The problem is that many people are actually far less self-aware than they think. Brad and Steve cite research that compares peoples' self-assessments on psychological instruments with assessments made by their friends, as well as those made by total strangers who interacted with them for just a few minutes. The friends' ratings were far more accurate than the self-assessments, and even the strangers' ratings were more accurate for certain traits. [18]
This can pose a significant dilemma for the entrepreneurial leader, particularly in an early-stage company that's growing rapidly. Founder CEOs typically disdain hierarchy--that may be why they started their own company in the first place. As a result they often view themselves as an unthreatening, approachable figure--and that view is often shared by early employees, many of whom know the founder in a personal capacity or worked with them in a prior, more junior role. But fast-growing companies can't fill their ranks with the founder's friends and former colleagues, and eventually the business is populated primarily by people who know the leader only as their CEO--a role that carries ever greater power and authority as the company grows.
And so a gap emerges between the leader's self-image and how they're perceived by others, which can cause any number of problems. For example, a common challenge faced by leaders in my practice is that their passion can lead them to communicate with a great deal of intensity, because they feel a sense of urgency to make good decisions quickly. This wasn't a problem when it was a small group of employees who interacted regularly and who knew the leader as a human being, because they didn't feel intimidated by the leader's intensity and would readily push back. But it can become a big problem when the company grows beyond a certain size.
The lesson for entrepreneurs: The more successful you become, the less feedback you'll get--so ask for it. Cultivate close relationships with your direct reports and encourage them to be candid with you. Model this behavior by assessing your own performance in these conversations. And while I'm hardly objective on this point, get a coach.
A personal note:
One reason why I found The Passion Paradox so useful is that it offers a perspective through which to view my own professional history. I had three careers before launching my coaching practice in 2006--a short stint as a journalist after college, and then two longer periods that preceded and followed business school. In the first I worked for organizations that served homeless and low-income families in San Francisco, and in the second I worked across the United States and beyond to help the nonprofit sector and NGOs use technology more effectively. Over the course of the latter two careers I was the first employee hired to launch three separate organizations--I'm proud that the first two are still flourishing today, and I like to think of the third as a highly educational failure.
I enjoyed my work as a journalist, but it wasn't a passion. But as I observed and wrote about life in the Bay Area I became deeply passionate about issues related to poverty and income inequality, and that passion propelled me into my career in social services. After being immersed in that world for several years, I became passionate about the potential for technology to transform how nonprofits and NGOs could deliver services and raise funding, and that passion first took me to Stanford to earn an MBA, and then led to the opportunity to serve as the first Executive Director for the Nonprofit Technology Network, known as N-TEN.
For 15 years as I pursued these various passions, my professional life was a roller coaster, rising to the heights as I helped launch new organizations and felt tremendous pride and fulfillment in my work, and then plunging to the depths as I worked long hours under conditions that eventually led to disenchantment and burnout.
But in 2005 I was volunteering to offer support to a struggling management team, and I realized that what I was actually doing was coaching, although no one was calling it that. I had been the beneficiary of some outstanding coaching when I was N-TEN's Executive Director after a member of my board encouraged me to invest in myself and get a coach, and the experience had transformed my perspective on leadership and my sense of my own capabilities. That first round of volunteering led me to seek out additional opportunities to work with leaders, and within a few months I realized that coaching was my passion.
I eventually concluded that I wasn't going to develop myself as a coach in my spare time, and I made the momentous decision to leave my current management role and launch a coaching practice. At the time it felt unimaginably risky, and yet it was clearly one of the best choices I've ever made. Over the last 14 years I've developed a "harmonious passion" for my work that aligns closely with the concepts Brad and Steve explore in their book. My "obsessive passion" enabled me to have an impact in my prior careers, but it always carried a cost and ultimately limited my long-term effectiveness. But I've pursued my career as a coach very differently--it hasn't always been a smooth process, and I made plenty of mistakes, but I adopted an approach that, with the benefit of hindsight, was very consistent with Brad and Steve's "mastery mind-set," and today it's hard to imagine doing anything else.
Thanks to Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness for another great contribution to the literature, and for an opportunity to see myself from a new perspective.
Footnotes
[1] The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life, page 162 (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, 2019)
[2] The Passion Paradox, pages 21-24
[3] The Passion Paradox, pages 27-30
[4] Passage from Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction (Maia Szalavitz, 2017) quoted in The Passion Paradox, page 31
[5] The Passion Paradox, page 32
[6] Finding a Fit or Developing It: Implicit Theories About Achieving Passion for Work, page 1412 (Patricia Chen, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, and Norbert Schwarz, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015, Vol. 41(10))
[7] The Passion Paradox, page 37
[8] The Passion Paradox, pages 44-45
[9] The Passion Paradox, pages 60-61
[10] The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, pages 48-51 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2007)
[11] The Passion Paradox, page 70
[12] The Passion Paradox, page 74
[13] The Passion Paradox, pages 96-97
[14] The Passion Paradox, page 101
[15] The Passion Paradox, page 109
[16] The Passion Paradox, page 109
[17] The Passion Paradox, pages 125-126
[18] The Passion Paradox, pages 127-128
For Further Reading
Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, 2017)
My review of Peak Performance
Ignoring Bandits and Building Resilience
Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance
"Work Hard or Work Smart?" Is the Wrong Question
Comfort with Discomfort
Leader as Avatar
Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)
How I Read Stoicism
The Trap of Competition
Investments, Not Indulgences
The Problem with Hack Culture (Brad Stulberg, Medium, 2017)
The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore
How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
Setting the Table (Difficult Conversations)
Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
Maybe We All Need a Little Less Balance (Brad Stulberg, The New York Times, 2017)
Pirates in the Navy
The Blue Problem (Communication and Power)
How to Find (and Choose) a Coach
