How Builders Think

Here’s a pattern you might recognize:

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

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. You decide it’s time to “get serious” and “lay down the law.” 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 any time you start falling behind—first by chastising yourself to try harder, or compelling yourself to step up, and eventually calling yourself a “loser” and “lazy.” Likewise, maybe you try to channel Steve Jobs’s 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 the leader in your fitness program, and your company’s new subscriber count is up and to the right.

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. A parallel process unfolds at your startup, where your team members start losing morale, complaining to HR and 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. Likewise, if your team members are underperforming, you try to cut them some slack, 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 OKRs.

At first, everyone feels happier and calmer. But as time goes by, you find that you’ve abandoned your exercise and fitness goals, and that your company has settled into a culture of comfortable mediocrity—with no one 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. The solutions on offer all tend to boil down to 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.”