I’ve heard many ultra-successful people explain this in many different ways. This is not a prescription.
Highly successful people are driven by deep-rooted insecurity.
If you feel adequate, fully whole, and comfortable, then you have absolutely no reason and hence no (necessary) drive to excel to the extremes.
The law of conservation of energy applies to all domains of life. It states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
Human beings feel all types of emotions – both positive and negative. Some feel them more intensely than others. Being able to willfully place yourself in a mindset to extract dormant negative energy is a highly underrated motivational skill.
For example, many of my friends and family members have never seen me angry or stressed because those feelings rarely burden me. But they are natural human emotions. And I consciously use that dormant negative energy whenever I lift weights at the gym.
I essentially command what feels like a boost of adrenaline, in a healthy way, for a short burst of physical amplification. This puts me into an intensely focused mindset. Without this, I would not be as fit as I am today.
Highly successful people have something similar to this, except it’s a lot more extreme, perhaps even involuntary, and it’s switched on 24/7 365.
There is a reason that when someone is comfortable and satisfied, they will not change. Why would you? You’re in a good place and you want to retain that. However, when you are uncomfortable, then you feel like something must change. That’s when you quit your job, break up with your significant other, move cities, etc.
Highly successful people have a sort of trauma or hole in them that they feel needs to be filled. While there could be many ways to try and fill that hole, highly successful people do that by chasing extraordinary accomplishments. This becomes more than a want, but a need. They will work harder, sacrifice more, and risk more for their reasons. They are driven by something that no comfortable person can compete with. They run on a different type of fuel.
This is extreme and should not be emulated. Success doesn’t require this. But this is the dark truth about highly successful people, the 0.000001%.
Notes:
- “I have taught many children and teenagers who were caught up in the belief that their self-worth depended on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-and-death issues. They are consistently measuring themselves in comparison with their friends by using their skill at tennis as one of the meaning rods. It is as if some believe that only by being the best, only by being a winner, will they be eligible for the love and respect they seek. Many parents foster this belief in their children. Yet in the process of learning to measure our value according to our abilities and achievements, the true and measureless value of each individual is ignored. Children who have been taught to measure themselves in this way often become adults driven by a compulsion to succeed which overshadows all else. The tragedy of this belief is not that they will fail to find the success they seek, but that they will not discover the love or even the self-respect they were led to believe will come with it.” Gallwey, T. (1974). chapter 9. In The inner game of tennis. essay, Random House.
- “His father’s mean words had activated deep within him some errant strain of DNA, a mutation of competitive nature so strong as to almost seem titanium. They represented a contempt articulated almost daily in manner and attitude in the Jordan household throughout Michael’s tender years. “Years later,” his sister Deloris recalled, “during the early days of his NBA career, he confessed that it was my father’s early treatment of him and Daddy’s declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him… Each accomplishment that he achieved was his battle cry for defeating my father’s negative opinions of him.”” Lazenby, Roland. “Chapter 4.” Michael Jordan: The Life, Back Bay Books, an Imprint of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY, 2015.
- Coco Chanel, an orphan born into poverty, rose to become one of the wealthiest women in the world by building one of the most valuable luxury brands in the world. Young Coco was living a very rough life and wanted to kill herself. “‘At the time, I often used to think about dying. The idea of causing a great fuss’ – she’s talking about her death, what her suicide would have done to other people. ‘The idea of causing a great fuss of upsetting my aunts of letting everyone know how wicked they were, fascinated me.’ She has almost this desire for revenge it sounds like, right? ‘I dreamt about setting fire to the barn. Coco grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out. Yet in a sense, she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved by the ‘aunts’, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of the nuns, by her absent father, all the stories she read had taught her that love conquered all, that desire and passion set men and women all right.’ The rest of Coco’s story is an unlikely reality. She was not born for the success she attained. But she was driven beyond normality and continued to work long after she accumulated enough money for her and her entire family to never need to work again. In fact, Coco Chanel worked until the very day she died. Not because she needed to, but because she felt she needed to. (Quotes are from David Senra’s review of her biography, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life)
- Max Verstappen, one of the most talented drivers in the world, is who he is due to his rough upbringing by his father.
- “The most insecure people in the world are the most powerful ones… You should never feel secure in that position because there’s always somebody gunning for you” – Mike Tyson. This is also the man who said “Here I am, the most insecure, scared guy in the world,” but who also, during his prime boxing years, genuinely believed he was a demigod and his actions and accolades followed suit “I’m the best ever. I’m the most brutal and vicious, and most ruthless champion there’s ever been. There’s no one who can stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No, I’m Alexander, he’s no Alexander. I’m the best ever. There’s never been anybody as ruthless. I’m Sonny Liston, I’m Jack Dempsey. There’s no one like me. I’m from their cloth. There’s no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children.”
- More speculatively, Elon Musk may be driven by his rough upbringing. The abuse at home from his father, the bullying at school, and the fact that he felt like an outsider growing up. It may also be his dire need to understand the universe which he has credited many times as his reason for starting any of the companies he has, and maybe even his reason for living “I guess when I was around 12 or 15…I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? It all seemed quite meaningless,” to which he concluded, “Life is to understand what to ask about the answer that is the universe.” This may be why, despite becoming the wealthiest human in the world, he still works harder than most.
- In Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs, one of the central themes is Steve’s struggles and acceptance with being adopted. Despite having incredibly loving and supportive foster parents, he felt unwanted and struggled greatly with this reality. “’I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,’ said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. ‘He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.’ Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. ‘Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,’ he said. ‘It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.’” This dark energy was indeed a powerful driver of Steve Jobs and is to thank for his magnum opus, Apple, which billions of people use today and is the largest company in the world.
- Even someone as seemingly happy and peaceful as Lebron James has admitted to his own insecurities that have always driven him to excel to the extremes. In an interview, James said, “I’ve always had that chip on my shoulder. I’ve always felt like I had something to prove. I think that’s what drives me.” He has also mentioned his constant fear of failing and not being good enough. Imagine being the greatest basketball player in the world and still feeling that burning sensation of needing to improve. Healthy or not, that is what separates the ultra-successful and the rest.
- “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” – Shakespeare
Economic Motivation 