Why I Stopped Reading Personal Development Books
I chased happiness, impact, and success. All three failed me.
The YouTube video said “Best commencement speech ever,” and I couldn’t resist.
The speaker was cowboy-shirt-wearing billionaire Chris Sacca, who I recognized from Shark Tank. His speech lived up to the hype, for the most part. He was down-to-earth, funny, and inspiring.
But then he got to the punchline, the big takeaway for the graduates in the audience.
“So how will we know when we’ve done it right?,” he says to them.
“What is the key to success?”
“Happiness. In my experience, it all comes down to happiness.”
His words felt like a balloon deflating.
Now, in the past, in my atheist days, I wouldn’t have disagreed. Sure, happiness might have seemed a bit shallow. But I couldn’t do any better.
And it really gets to the question Sacca originally asked: “How will we know when we’ve done it right? What is success?”
When he asked that question, my mind explored the possibilities.
Is happiness the goal of life?
Happiness is fleeting. When my cousin passed away from a rare disease in her late 30s, I wasn’t happy. When my parents divorced, I cried.
You’re not supposed to be happy in those moments. You’re supposed to be sad.
And the happy moments? When I received my college acceptance letter, after my first date with Laura, when my son was born… happiness arrived. But so did other things.
“Crap, college is a lot of work.”
“I hope I don’t screw this up with Laura.”
“Can we afford a family?”
Happiness comes and goes in waves, and that’s normal. External circumstances pull us between ups and downs.
Sacca would, of course, agree with me. And he would redefine happiness as more than just an emotion. He’d say, “It’s contentment” or something like that.
But this is demanding too much of the word happiness. Happiness, as the goal of life, stretches the concept beyond its meaning.
We need another target.
What about “making an impact?”
When I was in college, man, did I want to make an impact.
I adopted clean energy as my cause and launched projects to rid the world of dirty fossil fuels. I was sure our projects would make headlines. We’d win awards and be interviewed by Oprah.
Yet I was partying, drinking, doing drugs, chasing women, and avoiding the difficult conversations I should have been having with my family.
My university’s motto was: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Which is a very Christ-like saying, and ironically, the exact opposite of the path I chose. Instead of getting my own house in order, I wanted to solve the world’s problems.
But say you do get your house in order. You fix the inside and turn outward. There's still a problem: no one can agree on what the impact should look like.
Everyone has a different answer. For some environmentalists, impact means a world with fewer humans so that nature may thrive. For some technologists, it means a world where robots eliminate all labor, giving humans ultimate comfort and abundance.
G.K. Chesterton had the right response:
“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision. Instead, we are always changing the vision.”
What about achievement?
Achievement was my favorite drug, and it’s still the preferred drug of my peers.
“Get to the next level.”
“Scale your business.”
“Find success.”
I consumed a steady diet of personal development books from people like Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, and Grant Cardone. I joined masterminds where my worth was measured by my bank account balance and photos with gurus.
The pressure to achieve peaked when I moved to Los Angeles. The mountain was right there, and all you had to do was climb it.
But it’s a false god, and in my pursuit of it, I tripped, fell down the mountain, and left Los Angeles having hit rock bottom.
I lost my savings to a fraudulent entrepreneur I'd met through a mastermind. My fiancée and I broke up. I gave tens of thousands more to a guru whose promises proved empty.
The city of stars stripped me of everything I had. The one bright spot was that it left me vulnerable enough to finally question it all.
I had chased happiness, impact, and success, and all three had failed me.
“Have I really been pursuing the right goals?” I sat there in tears.
We’ve seen this story before
Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. He came back to depression and alcoholism. Anthony Bourdain built a life most people envied, and then he ended that life. Tim Ferriss, the king of modern personal development, recently wrote an article admitting the whole model is broken.
He figured out that self-improvement requires you to stay broken, and that the only way out is to transcend yourself. But when he went looking for what self-transcendence actually meant, he landed on a campfire scene in Montana, sitting with friends under the stars.
These stories are endless. Yet the secular world is still searching for a better answer.
I couldn’t find a better answer either, until I became a Christian.
The answer didn’t come by looking to my side. It came from looking up.
A Seat at the Divine Council
Ask a Christian the goal of life, and their answer is simple. The goal is to become holy.
As I explained in my first post, the skyscraper of reality points upward toward a destination. The Catholics call it sainthood. Eastern Orthodoxy calls it theosis. The destination is the same: a seat at God’s table. Participation in his life, reigning with Christ.
We are called to be like Jesus, which means transforming ourselves by casting away sin. This answer fills the gaps of the other three.
Happiness fails because it can’t survive suffering. It's the glass facade, not the load-bearing beam.
Sainthood promises something more durable than happiness. When my cousin died, when my parents divorced... those weren’t obstacles to the goal. Because in the Christian frame, suffering is where we find meaning. I wouldn’t be the man I am today without that suffering.
Making an impact fails because no one can agree on the vision. Mother Teresa had the answer to that:
“I am not called to be successful. I am called to be faithful.”
She didn’t set out to change the world. She set out to be faithful, caring for the sick and poor in Calcutta. Changing the world was a side effect.
Achievement fails because it’s a false god. You can always tell which god someone worships by what they sacrifice for.
I’m watching a TV show right now, Your Friends and Neighbors. Jon Hamm plays a rich hedge fund manager who comes home to his mansion and finds his best friend sleeping with his wife. The divorce follows, then the bills, and then a life of crime just to keep up with the life he built.
His wife later tells him that he had disappeared from them long before any of it happened. He sacrificed his family on the altar of achievement.
It’s a trope because it’s true.
Happiness, impact, and achievement share the same problem: the self is at the center.
Happiness asks, “What makes me feel good?”
Impact points outward, but you still choose the cause and define the vision.
Achievement asks, “How high can I climb?”
In all three, the self is setting the terms.
Sainthood asks you to step down from the throne. It gives you something worth sacrificing for that doesn’t take everything else with it.
As Jesus says in Matthew 16:25
“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
That's the goal of life.
And for the first time, I had a foundation I didn't build myself.