A different and better way to live

An exposition of the "builder's mindset" and its contraries

Source: Imagine AI

Here’s a pattern you might recognize:

1. You have some goals you care about. Say, for instance, you want to develop a personal exercise routine, or you want to make your tech startup profitable.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 monthly Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

6. 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 master” 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 master” 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.

Life under “drill sergeant” rule

When you’re in “drill sergeant” mode, you tend to experience your life as some sort of test you’re supposed to pass, or a chore someone else has prescribed for you. Whether you’re exercising, or putting in long hours at your company, or spending time with family, or trying to go to sleep, the dominant motivation driving you to engage in these activities—and governing how you engage in them—is to prove your worth according to some conventional or communal standard. Maybe it takes the form of needing to “feel like you’re not a failure” or like you’re a “good person” or like you’ve “done enough” to lay off the bullying self-criticism for a while, though it’s never really “enough,” of course. Whatever the standard, it operates on you like a ball and chain, quite apart from—and often actively opposed to—what your wellbeing and happiness might require. “You can be happy when you’re dead,” your inner drill sergeant reminds you, perhaps softening this to “after you get the promotion” or “after you raise this next round” if you balk at the undiluted sentiment.

To the extent that you operate on this mindset, you give up some of the precious time and energy constituting your life to whatever authority—whatever “drill sergeant”—is getting to dictate your goals and standards to you. Not that you’d be in bad company, since nearly every culturally dominant moral tradition promotes some variant of the view that this is what you’re supposed to do. And even if you’ve explicitly rejected all such morally authoritarian views in substance, it’s all too easy to remain beholden to them in form—which turns out to be the more pernicious aspect of their influence anyway.

For instance, perhaps you’ve stopped caring about the religious or academic standards by which your parents or community leaders measured your worth when you were a child. So you try to carve out your own path as an irreverent, independent-thinking tech founder, all the while prioritizing your own health and fitness. But your fitness goals quickly turn into new arbitrary benchmarks by which your inner drill sergeant tyrannizes you. Or you find yourself constantly feeling anxious and guilty that you haven’t “gotten as far” or come up with anything as “disruptive” as the other irreverent, independent-thinking tech founders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or whoever it is you’re comparing yourself to, had done by the time they were your age. And you obsessively focus on raising the kind of money or growing the size of team that would mean you’re “not a failure” in the eyes of the tech world, all to the detriment of thinking from first principles about what (if anything) you’re actually excited to build over the next several years of your life, and on what timeline you’d need to be raising money or growing your team (or not) in order to actually serve that specific aim. Or you try to emulate the “wartime CEO” ethos of Andy Grove or Ben Horowitz in a rigid, vaguely authoritarian way that you imagine they might approve of, while neglecting to consider the nuanced contexts in which this approach might be best suited (or not) to ensuring the long-term health and resilience of your company.

In other words, you’re trying to pass a different sort of test now—but you’re still fundamentally in “test-taking” mode rather than “building-a-life-you-love” mode.

Life under “Zen master” care

When you’re in “Zen master” mode, on the other hand, you tend to experience your life as a ride you’re being taken on, or a storm to be waited out and endured. Often in reaction to getting flogged a few too many times by the unrelenting blows of your inner “drill sergeants,” you focus your efforts instead on minimizing the stress of constantly trying to please them. Maybe you take a week or a month off work to go on a silent meditation retreat. Or maybe you just shift your focus to “keeping calm” and “hanging in there,” and not getting too attached to the success of any particular life project. I’m not talking here about refilling your emotional tank or calming your nerves so you can make better decisions that advance your life; I mean that you strive to be “more accepting” and “less judgmental” of how your decisions turn out and of how (or whether) your life is advancing, given how little control you ultimately believe yourself to have over these outcomes.

To the extent that this approach resonates, I submit that you may be trading in some of the excellence and ambitious goal-pursuit of which you may be capable for the peace and tranquility promised by some inner or outer “Zen master.” And if you’re trying to recover from the accumulated trauma and abuse you’ve endured at the hands of various “drill sergeants,” this path may seem like the only sensible recourse: better to ride out whatever failures, setbacks, and curveballs you encounter with equanimity, than to get bullied and badgered by your personal drill sergeants every time you fall short of their impossible standards of perfection.

These may sound, superficially, like opposite approaches, but notice what they both have in common:

• Both the drill sergeant and the Zen master agree that pursuing high standards of excellence comes at the cost of your personal wellbeing. The drill sergeant’s solution is simply to sacrifice your wellbeing, while the Zen master’s solution is to sacrifice your standards of excellence.

• More fundamentally, both mindsets take for granted the “standards of excellence” dictated by your local drill sergeant(s) as part of the furniture of the universe; the Zen master simply attempts to relieve some of the emotional burden of those standards by normalizing the fact that you can’t live up to them.

What neither mindset allows for is the possibility that we can define our own damn standards of excellence, grounded in our own independent judgment of the kind of life we want and the kind of work this will require. But, as I wrote in “The quest for psychological perfection”:

…I say we can do better. We can form our own ambitious conception of exemplary health and thriving, as suited to the particular fully-lived life we want to pour our whole selves into building and enjoying during our limited time on this earth—conventional standards be damned. And we can fight for that deeply personal vision of perfection with all our might, even when it means fighting our own psychological demons along the way. Not in service to God or country or our boss or our therapist or some stodgy inner drill sergeant, but in loving dedication to the builder within ourselves.

Life as a builder

To the extent that you are operating as a builder, you approach your life as the ultimate project you are in charge of shaping and overseeing (i.e., building), by your own efforts and according to your own chosen vision and values, with yourself as its ultimate owner and beneficiary.

So, if you wanted to assess the extent to which you’ve been on a “builder’s mindset” in the past week, you might ask yourself: how much of it have I spent choosing to do things based on how I thought they would serve and advance my life? Did I have clear, personally compelling reasons for the things I did, whether in the form of enjoyment and curiosity or because of the resources and further experiences they would unlock? When I felt bored, afraid, or resistant to a given task, could I clearly answer the question “why is this worth it”? And if I couldn’t, did I feel free to stop or change what I was doing?

A builder’s mindset could apply to almost any particular activity you might choose to do, and for an extremely wide range of particular reasons. Maybe you thought it would help you figure out what you like doing or whom you like being with, so you can then design more of your life around those things. Or maybe you saw it as a stepping stone toward a particular valued venture (like getting fit, or executing on a work project, or remodeling your house, or raising your kids). Or maybe you were doing it to gain the necessary knowledge, skills, health, money, or other resources for advancing your valued venture(s). Or maybe you were doing it to avert a disaster that could plausibly upend your life or the pursuit of your valued venture(s). Or maybe it simply brought you joy. The key question is whether you were motivated to do it on the basis of some such honest judgment (implicit or explicit) about how it would serve your life, while broadly accounting for any opportunity costs to your life as a whole. Maybe you were even mistaken in thinking it would serve your life in some way—in which case you took stock of the error, extracting new wisdom you can now bring to bear on future decisions.

This is what it looks like to function as a builder.

A difference of basic worldviews

Here is a summary diagram of the implicit worldview I believe is common to the “Drill sergeant” and “Zen master” mindsets, and the contrasting position that the “Builder” takes on each issue:

As you can see, the “builder’s mindset” represents a fundamentally different set of underlying core assumptions about the kinds of beings we are, what we can do, and what is worth doing, compared to the other mindsets. This includes: