The Pursuit Itself Is Excellence

Many people in developed countries, particularly in the US, feel they have a right (of sorts) to being happy. Or at the very least they feel they should be happy. Even when someone tells you that you have a right "to the pursuit of happiness" it feels like it's all upside.

Over at The Growth Equation, Steve and Brad are there to tell you differently.

Brad, author of the best-seller The Way of Excellence, and Steve's new blog post is "Struggle, joy, and the meaning of life." They particularly focused on Olympic Gold medalist Alysa Liu. Their next post was about Olympic Gold medalist Connor Hellebuyck. Both are must-reads.

Their analysis of Liu, which is entirely consistent with their other wiring, centers on the 'the totality of the journey.' Here is how they put it:

Alysa Liu worked hard, struggled, and sacrificed. She endured monster training sessions. She put in thousands of hours. She fell on ice more times than you could imagine. Anyone who tells you her path to gold was all fun and games is not a serious person. But what changed between the first ten years of her career (age 6 to 16) and the last two (age 18-20) is that she began to find joy in the hard work. It’s not that every day was fun, but the totality of the journey was.

They continue:

What I found [in my research on top performers] was a combination of fierce intensity and deep joy—a willingness to work hard, struggle, and sacrifice; and also to have a whole lot of fun.

People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, fueled by anger and resentment. It’s the David Goggins’ approach to greatness. But the truth is that if you’re not having fun, you are not going to last long at whatever it is you do, and you certainly won’t get the best out of yourself. Not every day has to be great, but you’ve got to learn to find joy in the totality of the journey. There’s this foolish misconception that you either have to be full of struggle and intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. Time and time again in my reporting I found that joy and struggle can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

They even mention Sisyphus, whom we've mentioned before:

The combination of struggle and joy feels like a particularly vital lesson for our current moment. A great risk of the modern world is that we numb ourselves to death, going wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along an algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere. Technology lets us date, order food, shop, scroll, and work all from the same small screen. You are always one click away from making a decision or reversing it. You never have to put yourself out there. You can build a whole life around consumption without much, if any, production. It’s an emotionally flattened passivity that kills struggle and joy. Which is to say it kills aliveness...

In the myth of Sisyphus, the gods condemn the protagonist to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down each and every time, for all of eternity. There are countless interpretations of the story. The one I’ve come to adopt is that we are all Sisyphus. We are all pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall—again and again and again.

A good life is about finding fulfillment in the struggle. It’s about expressing our unique talents and gifts and creating joy, community, and meaning in the process. It’s about exerting ourselves with a smile on our face more often than a frown.

In a technical field such as cybersecurity, it might frequently seem that it's all about following routines and logging things and processes. As the scale and scope and frequency of attacks increase, though, you're being asked to grow to the point where you find your motivation -- or you leave the field. That's when you need to ask yourself whether you're 'finding fulfillment in the struggle,' to use Steve's phrasing.

It's not a question to answer quickly and move from. Much like Sisyphus, and in fact this is the whole point of that myth, as Steve says We are all pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall—again and again and again. A good life is about finding fulfillment in the struggle.

You don't have to love your job, though it's nice if you do. Maybe cybersecurity is not your idea of "joy," but think about having the opportunity to protect your friends & loved ones from bad actors; that might bring you joy.

Steve & Brad followed up with a story about Connor Hellebuyck, Team USA men's hockey goalie. The story is about resilience. Here is the key part from Steve & Brad about resilience, and this is really excellent writing in addition to being insightful:

We often get resilience wrong. We think you either have it or don't, or that the way to develop resilience is by simply toughing it out. But Hellebuyck's story gives us the nuance of actual resilience: It's a skill built through repeated encounters with failure—but only if you process those failures correctly.

Every stop in his career told him he wasn't enough. But at each stop, he chose the same interpretation: this is information, not my identity.

Most people let setbacks become self-definitions. Hellebuyck let them become data points. The failures were real, but he got to choose where to go next. The guy who processes failure as calibration points rather than catastrophes is the guy you want when 41 shots are coming at him in a gold medal game.

Eventually you have to love your calling as a cybersecurity professional. You need to process the results of your work, but they cannot become definitions of who you are as a professional. 

If that's not working for you, and you haven't given up pushing the boulder, then give some thought to talking it through with a coach.

You might find your passion again.

Ask us how you can regain the passion you had for cybersecurity work.

p.s. I have no affiliation with the authors and I receive no compensation if you buy this book. I'm bringing it to your attention for your benefit.

(image credit: David Campbell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)