Here’s a pattern you might recognize:
You have some goals you care about. Say, for instance, you want to develop a personal exercise routine, or you want to grow and scale your tech startup.
You know these goals will take a lot of discipline to achieve, and perhaps you’ve even tried and failed at them multiple times before. So you decide it’s time to “get serious” and really “lay down the law.” Perhaps you try to channel the spirit of Michael Jordan or some other hard-driving athlete you admire. So you sign up for a rigorous and competitive training program, and you come down hard on yourself anytime you start falling behind—first by chastising yourself to try harder, or compelling yourself to step up, and eventually calling yourself a “loser” and a “lazy-ass”, comparing yourself to the most dedicated athletes in the program, etc. Likewise, maybe you try to channel Steve Jobs’ famously demanding leadership style at work, both modeling and expecting long, grueling hours in pursuit of the ambitious growth targets you’ve set for your team.
At first, this approach might produce some amazing results. After a few weeks or months, you’re “head of the class” in your fitness program, and your company’s new subscriber counts are off-the-charts.
But after a few more months of this regime, the burnout starts to set in. Perhaps you start resenting your fitness trainer and the others in the program, and your self-contempt only grows as you inevitably miss more and more workouts or weigh-ins. Meanwhile a parallel process unfolds at your startup, where your team members start losing morale, complaining to HR, even threatening to quit.
After a few failed crack-downs that only seem to make everything worse, and perhaps after consulting with a fitness or executive coach, you decide to shift to a gentler, more compassionate, more process- rather than outcome-focused approach. Instead of berating yourself whenever you fail to live up to the “perfect” fitness routine, you listen to your body, celebrate incremental gains, and give yourself a break if you need to miss a workout here or there. Likewise, if your team members are underperforming, you try to cut them some slack, perhaps hiring wellness coaches or instituting “mental health days” to help prevent burnout, and praising them for their positive attitude and genuine efforts to implement your feedback, even if they never quite hit their performance goals.
At first everyone feels happier and calmer with this approach. But as time goes by, you find that you’ve completely abandoned your exercise and fitness goals, and that your company has settled into a culture of comfortable mediocrity—with no one even seeming concerned by the growing chasm between your expected and actual revenue growth. So you feel like you need to “lay down the law” again—only this time at even greater cost, and against even greater resistance.
Ring a bell? I’ve observed variants of this oscillation between what I’ve called the “drill sergeant” and the “Zen guru” approach in just about every domain of human endeavor: work, school, health, relationships, teaching, parenting, business management, communication, politics, you name it. We see variants of this conflict play out under the headings of “hustle culture” versus “self-care culture”; “missionary” versus “mercenary” leadership; “traditional” versus “progressive” education; “extrinsic” versus “intrinsic” motivation; “change-based” versus “acceptance-based” therapies; “outcome-based” versus “process-based” goals. And the solutions on offer all tend to boil down to variants of the same suggestion: “take the middle road.” Balance some acceptance with some change; set your standards high, but not too high; it’s “yes, and,” not “either-or.”
It’s not “yes, and,” but “neither-nor”
For context, “yes, and” originated as a technique for building on each other’s ideas in improv, and it works fantastically well in the many circumstances where two seemingly conflicting ideas or perspectives can in fact be reconciled with some creativity. But just as it’s a mistake to presume that two ideas can’t be reconciled, so it’s at least as big a mistake to presume that they can. Either way, we artificially constrain our hypothesis space when dealing with a given “A vs B” dichotomy.
Sure, it’s possible that A and B are actually just extremes of some quality that works best in moderation (a la Goldilocks’ complaints about the too-hot and too-cold porridge) or some continuum along which there are many acceptable “shades of gray.” But here are some other possibilities:
We have a misconceived or incomplete understanding of both A and B, such that they seem contradictory but are actually getting at different aspects or stages of the same legitimate phenomenon (like “empathy” vs “problem-solving”, which are both forms of “support” but are appropriate in different contexts).
One of them is actually right and one is wrong (as in the case of, say, “freedom vs slavery”).
A and B are both wrong (as in the case of, say, “passive” and “aggressive” communication, or “authoritarian” and “permissive” parenting), whereas some third option C is right (like “assertive” communication, or “authoritative” parenting). This is often the case when we have some underlying assumption (call it X) in our belief system such that A and B seem like our only alternatives, when really there are different and better alternatives, call them C+. The real solution may be to correct premise X to premise Y, which would lead to different downstream conclusions than either A or B. In other words: sometimes the solution to “black-and-white thinking” is not to “think in shades of gray,” but to think in color.
This last possibility is the one I believe best applies here: both the “drill sergeant” and the “Zen guru” mindset share a common underlying worldview on which our lives do not fully belong to us, in that we have relatively little agency over the goals we set and the means by which we pursue them.
The “builder’s mindset,” by contrast, flows from a qualitatively different and deeply countercultural worldview: one on which all of our efforts can and ought to be organized around the ultimate goal of building and enjoying our own best life.
To show you what I mean, let me sketch a more vivid psychological picture of how you might experience your life when you’re operating on each of these different mindsets.