The Worst Self-Help Advice

We're often told that to be successful, we shouldn't settle.

We should be pushing for more in every area of life.

Otherwise, we'll end up overweight, lonely, and broke.

But what if settling is the key to success?

What if there are times when lowering our expectations actually helps us achieve more?

Here's why "never settle" is terrible advice:

1. Settling helps us avoid burnout

The ecologist Edward Abbey once said, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

In nature, everything goes through cycles of growth and decay. Birth and death. Stress and recovery.

The same is true in business. It's natural for a company's revenue to fluctuate year to year, even if the trajectory is upwards. Rapid growth can be as damaging to a business as stunted growth.

For example, Starbucks closed hundreds of stores in 2008. Years of agressive growth had impacted the customer experience. They laid off thousands of people and lost millions of dollars in the process.

Or take fitness as another example. You can't lift weights every day and continue to get stronger. Without adequate rest, your body doesn't recover. The biggest gains, in weightlifting and in life, come over the span of many years. So you need to choose something that you can do for the long term. Otherwise you burn out.

Ernest Hemingway often stopped his writing sessions mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence. He told other writers:

"The best way is to always stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day...you will never be stuck."

This is so counterintuitive, especially with something difficult like writing. What you want to do is maximize all that creative energy while you've got it. But sometimes you need to stop in order to fight another day. You need to settle.

2. Settling helps us prioritize our time and energy

The writer David Sedaris once shared this theory he heard from a successful business owner. She told him to picture a four burner stove.

"One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two."

It's easy to try and argue with this theory. Are these four areas of life really so separate? Maybe improving your health also fuels your work life, etc.

That's true to a certain extent. But it's also true that life involves tradeoffs.

A lot of self-help advice boils down to re-allocating your time and energy from one area to another. You read a book about growing your business, act on the advice, and find that you've ruined your marriage. So you buy a book on marriage, take the advice, and then your business fails.

Is it possible to achieve balance in your life? Of course. But balance requires settling. And so does outrageous success. If you choose to funnel all your time and energy into one area, you are choosing to be mediocre in the other areas.

By acknowledging your limited time and energy, you're free to focus on the things that matter most.

3. Settling helps us perform under pressure

There's a concept in psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson Law. It says that performance looks like an inverted U. As stress increases, performance also increases. But only to a certain point. After that point, more pressure has us perform worse and we go back down the other side of the curve.

In athletics, they call it "choking."

In sales, they call it "commission breath" - when the salesperson is so hungry for the sale that the prospect senses their neediness and doesn't buy.

That's the problem with never settling. When you're attached to a certain outcome, you fear failure and you perform worse.

There's also the temptation to seek shortcuts when you're feeling desperate.

You've probably heard of the Donner Party, who set out for California in 1846. They left later than they should have.

Halfway through the trip, they met an explorer named Landsford Hastings. He convinced them that they could shave 300 miles off the journey by cutting through what is now Utah.

The shortcut took them through the Salt Lake Desert. They ran out of water, lost most of their oxen, and added a month to their journey.

Then they had to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in the middle of winter. They got stranded. And then they started eating each other.

Optimization is great up to a point. But sometimes the best shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts.

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In conclusion, I think we need a new definition of settling.

Settling isn't about watching 5 hours of TV a day, doing a job you hate, and arguing with your spouse until you die.

That's more like complacency.

A better definition of settling is "to decide on." You're deciding what enough looks like.

But we rarely take the time to do this, right? Instead, our goal simply becomes "more, better, faster."

And that's when we get ourselves into trouble.

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If you liked this concept, I think you'll enjoy an article I wrote called The Performance Paradox.