Be Challenged. Not Overwhelmed.

Be Challenged. Not Overwhelmed.

By Lawrence Yeo                                                                   

There is a fine line between fulfillment and burnout.

Fulfillment is largely linked to purpose, which is driven by your sense of agency over a given result. If you believe that a marginal increase in effort will lead to an outcome you’re proud of, purpose ensures that you’ll put in that extra hour. This is especially true if there’s no one else but you that is responsible for what is created.

But at what point does this marginal effort actually harm the overall result? Or in economics-speak, at what point does the law of diminishing marginal utility kick in? And how do we know when we’ve arrived at that point?

To answer this, let’s explore the bottlenecks of human effort.

The utility of effort generally faces one of two constraints:

(1) Motivation, or

(2) Fatigue.

Let’s start with motivation.

You can have thousands of productive hours amassed in one space, but if those people find zero purpose in what they’re doing, you will have a sub-par result. Imagine an employer that boasts about how many employees he has, but no one believes in the vision. It won’t be long before that company loses ground to a small team of five people that are fanatical about what they do.

In this case, the bottleneck isn’t the lack of manpower. It’s the poverty of enthusiasm that is needed to make that manpower useful. After all, the quantity of workable hours is meaningless without the quality necessary to make it productive.

To solve this problem, employers often use money to bridge the gap. But as I’ve noted before, an increase in pay cannot increase motivation. The best thing it can do is to prevent a decrease in motivation, which is entirely different. Increasing motivation can only come through what psychologist Frederick Herzberg aptly referred to as “motivators,” which are things like challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.

This is why people with high salaries doing difficult work can still feel that it’s pointless. If the nature of that work doesn’t align with their values or their curiosities, then it will feel like they’re watering a plant that looks fine on the outside, but its roots are quickly decaying. Being dead on the inside will eventually find its way to the outside, no matter how much you effort you put into taking care of appearances.

So that’s the first bottleneck. If a surge of effort hits a wall of indifference, nothing too great is going to come out of it.

But perhaps this bottleneck is one that doesn’t concern you. You find immense purpose in what you work on, and derive a ton of meaning from it. You regularly enter flow states and are happy to invest whatever time you have into your craft. First off, congratulations, that’s a wonderful spot to be in. But over time, you’ll realize that you’ll regularly hit the second bottleneck of effort:

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