I was wondering if people would rather push themselves and try to live to their full potential and be extremely productive, or have a lot of spare time and take it easy? Or do the first choice first and then retire early and do the second…
For me, I was quite the go-getter in my younger days. Now I can’t be bothered and just take it easy for the most part. So age often has a lot to do with it.
I’ve gotten more ambitious since my 20s. When I was younger, I couldn’t figure out how trading all of my free time for cash made sense. Now that I’m older, I’ve realized that I’m very bad with unstructured time and ultimately don’t enjoy it, so I might as well be ambitious.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still pretty busy every day. Just busy with stuff I want to concentrate on and not so ambitious anymore.
I’ve thought about this a bit, I got out of the Army two years ago and started back in college a year ago, I was going full time before the military but I changed my major when I started back a year ago. I’d like to think that even if I say won the lottery and never had to work another day in my life that I would finish school and get a job, I think it’s probably not a good thing in the long run to have a completely stress free life and no goals. If money was no object I think I’d still want to work although possibly on a part time basis but I would also pursue other interests and hobbies and try to better myself it wouldn’t all be vacations and a life of decadence and leisure.
I’ve never had any sort of ambition. I want to be “good enough,” and that’s fine. I’m a B+ student, and I got good job reviews at my last job. I will never be “all I can be.”
I won’t sandbag or featherbed. I’m lazy, but not immoral. My employers have never complained about my work: I give good value for the money. I put in the expected overtime hours, show up during emergencies, show up for inventories and migrations. But I’ll never be “management material.” Zero leadership skill.
Bless all the people in this world who really are heroes – military, firefighters, police, paramedics. But for me, personally, I’d rather read about it in the papers than get out there myself. A man’s gotta know his limitations.
Going to full potential requires too much effort.
Put just enough effort in to be better than 95% of the peergroup is all that’s needed.
94… 94… Do I hear 93? 93? 93 to the guy in the torn t-shirt… 92? Do I have 92? 93, going once…
“I don’t need to outrun the Grizzly, I just need to outrun you.” Always put in at least enough effort to achieve an acceptable result and save your energy for what gives you personal satisfaction.
I think the key is balance. It’s good to have goals and make some strides to achieve them, but one doesn’t have to do all in one day.
I’ve spent the last three years putting in 60-80 hr weeks to try and achieve my potential. I obviously can’t keep doing this forever but I figure I’ve got 3-5 more to achieve what I can. At that point I’ll go into cruise mode and focus on being a family man.
Agree.
I can be laser focused and work terribly hard on a specific goal or project. But I don’t live for that feeling. I want down time to rest and also reflect.
This is beginning to cause conflict in my relationship. My gf prides herself on “working like a mule”. I wish she would work smarter rather than harder, but she seems to see it as a point of pride that she just works hard. She claims it helps her think to be in motion, but it’s also an obvious source of conflict for us when she sees me sitting still.
I tell her she’s Enrico Fermi and I’m Leo Szilard. The former loved to get down and dirty with his experiments, while Szilard did his best thinking in the bathtub. Both were geniuses, but ultimately found they couldn’t work together.
Life is multi-faceted. If you push to fulfill your potential in one area, others will suffer. My goal is to maximize all areas of my life to the extent that I can do so while meeting my needs and staying in relative balance. Some things may require more time and effort than others, but as long as I’m not neglecting something else I’m happy. I’m a very driven person naturally, and a workaholic due to that, but I’ve finally realized the importance of having a well rounded life.
“You don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin. He’s broke. Don’t do shit.”
I guess I don’t see the two as being mutually exclusive or incompatible. I tend to thrive in a “work hard/play hard” culture (which usually translates to “work a shitload of hours for lots of money and drink a lot”).
But truth be told I do like to take it easy. My favorite time was the summer between when I graduated business school and before I was scheduled to start my new job at a fancy Manhattan management consulting firm. I basically spent 3 months doing jack shit.
IOW, I don’t mind taking it easy after I’ve been working like crazy and if I know I already have something lined up.
Even still, I can only do "“jack shit” for so many hours a day. Then I get bored and start taking up activities like judo or kayaking.
I could have written this, except for the bless the heroes part. I figure they do what they do precisely because they have a different temperment from me, and they aren’t overcoming what I would have to overcome to do it.
I personally prefer a mix of both. I’m 60, and I’ve accomplished more interesting stuff at work in the past 7-8 years than in the rest of my working life. And I really like that feeling of being on my game.
But I also enjoy my time off, and I’d be glad to have more of it. Time to spend with friends, time to go interesting places, time to pursue challenging avocations, time to totally goof off. I figure these things are part of my full potential, every bit as much as my working life is.
More so, really, because ultimately work is what I do to pay the bills, and there will come a time when I will retire. And I will still want to grow, still want to learn, still want to challenge myself. Just in ways that have nothing to do with work.
I’ll third (or fourth or whatever) the “good enough” sentiment. I want to be a good writer, and I want to make a living as a writer, but I don’t particularly care about being the best writer (or even an award-winning writer, as nice as that would be). Those things would be nice, but they don’t seem worth the effort to me.
This attitude hurt me a bit at one point in the Navy. I was a good submarine officer, but not a great one, and not the best JO (junior officer) on the crew. And I didn’t try to hide that I was content being a good-but-not-great JO. This bothered the hell out of one of my XOs (executive officers), and he put a bit of effort into making my life shittier. My COs all seemed fine with it, though.
I used to be more ambitious, but at some point, I realized that so was everyone else, and that most of them would backstab me, undercut me, or do any number of other nasty and/or unethical things to throw me under the bus or make me look bad so they could get ahead. I also looked at what the upper managers’ lives actually looked like, and it seemed like a LOT more time at work and a LOT more image consciousness than I was willing to put up with, if I wasn’t wholly invested in what I was doing, other than merely being ambitious.
I reevaluated my priorities in life, and decided that being the boss and/or making a colossal amount of money were probably booby-prizes, in that being the boss may come with a colossal amount of money, but you also often end up working crazy hours, have to deal with various assholes above and below you, and they’re often expected to make (IMO) unfair sacrifices to their personal lives for their jobs- there’s a concept here where I work that “PTO” stands for “Pretend Time Off” among the managerial ranks rather than the actual acronym of “Personal Time Off.” Us worker bees generally aren’t having that, but it seems like ALL the managers pay a lot more than lip-service to it.
So I basically take it easy. I do a good job, but I’m not trying to impress anyone overly much, and I have my family firmly placed as my first priority, and my personal life as my second, with work taking third place, when it comes right down to it. I figure when I’m old and decrepit, I may fondly remember having had a good time with my family on some random weekend or weekday evening, but I won’t give two shits about what I did at work on some random week, or worse, I will remember, and will resent remembering that rather than family time.
I figure if I wasn’t reasonably well paid, I might have a different attitude, but that’s not the case, so I don’t.
That was a very cool answer, I wished I could have wrote it. I am retired now and spend a lot more time pursuing things I didn't have time for when I worked. Sounds like you are on the right track.
Makes good sense. I was thought to be ambitious prior to my divorce at 40. Truth was I cared less about money but really enjoyed making a business run like a well oiled machine. I got personnal satisfaction by validating my own theories. I never felt ambitious.