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Email ThisThere is a catch phrase that has been floating around self-improvement circles for years.
How Good Can You Stand It?
Like other overused mantras pushed by self-actualization gurus, it makes my skin crawl when I hear it. It is meant to urge you to conjure up images of your better, happier, or richer self, a day, week, or year from now. Come on, picture it, how good can you stand it? Do you want that pool, that wife? Do you want the Benjamins or the accolades? The guru leads you down a path where you mind-map with your inner child and then cleanse your spirit to help you discover what stops you.
Put down the Robbins or Chopra book now, what is stopping you is simple and normal. It’s not because you got beat up in second grade, or experienced birthing trauma. It’s that your needs must be met first.
You forgo the pool teeming with hotties because you need to eat. You don’t put time into a great relationship because you need to work and perhaps all you can muster is some drunken tryst on the weekend. You don’t excel in your job because you need to be at the hospital with an ailing friend or relative.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not placing a value judgment on any of your needs or wants. I could care less if you’d rather leave the ailing aunt for the poolside beauty – it’s your life, your call, not mine. I’m only saying that many of our psychological struggles with “What should I do next?” can come when we replace our needs with our wants. I believe this mindset is a major stumbling block to a healthy, happy life.
For example, when I was in high school I convinced my mother I needed to take the day off school and camp out for Beastie Boys tickets, oh, and I needed a new outfit to do it.
Yes, I’m comparing us to the crude example of a whiny teen. We are no different. Whatever we perceive or have created as our most immediate need will take over every time.
So when we read a guru’s advice, and think he’s got the key and say, “What I really need is to work 80 hours a week instead of 60, so that I can be up for the VP-ship when it rolls around next time.” We should then temper our enthusiasm, put on our reality caps and ask, “Even if it will help me achieve my long-term goals, is it right?” You might win a stellar job, but will you pay the price with your sanity?
I’ve talked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and think about it whenever I feel like I’m not performing up to my imagined standards. I remind myself that my base needs are primal: food, water, safety. I love that relationships are next. That is an area I ignore. Then I wonder why I feel empty.
By focusing on my needs, I found the courage to quit my job and I am satisfied stopping at love these days. Loving myself, stealing more time from work and projects to spend with family and friends, though it’s not as frequent as I’d like. I’m learning to stop focusing on the peak of that stupid pyramid. But it’s the peak we’re all told to focus on. We start to neglect the foundations.
I used to have a good friend, we’ll call him Joe. Joe kept that pyramid peak in the front-most of his mind since his youth. The self-image he created, no doubt with other familial and societal influence, was to be rich. More specifically, he would tell you, “Make six figures by the time he was 30.” Since middle school, Joe prepped himself for this life. Joe joined the clubs that would look best for college entrance, won internships for placement in more prestigious internships. His Ivy League pedigrees have scored him jobs like you see in movies where you have to sell your soul to the devil to get them. He’s worth it too, he hands competition their ass on a platter every time. He is a huge success by many standards.
However, Joe revealed to me years ago on a break from his Wall Street gig that he felt as if, indeed, “He no longer had a soul.” His skin was pale, he’d gained weight. A few years later I heard his plans to marry fizzled with a broken engagement, and his physical (and I’d argue mental) health began to fail. He was plagued by chronic pain due to physical manifestations of stress and underwent major back surgery at 28.
Joe ignored his basic needs for so long that his wants got the best of him.
I’m not sure what Joe is doing today specifically, we don’t talk anymore because our friendship is, embarassingly, beyond repair. I do know Joe got what he wanted. But did he get what he needed?
Don’t ignore your needs. While I don’t believe success requires you to sell your soul and crumble from mental and physical exhaustion, I know that risking any fundamental needs will make your success stale and far less enjoyable.
Think about it, wouldn’t you like to be able to swim in that pool, or make love to that hottie without taking blood pressure meds and visiting the physical therapist the next day?
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