Who shows up in this part
Two questions
Two questions first. Nobody is checking, so you can be honest.
How many things have you said you would do, and then didn’t? Keep it to the last month. We’re not here to ruin your evening.
And how often are you the first one to make a move in a conflict? The first “okay, that one was on me,” the first message after the long silence?
Hold on to your two answers. They measure two different things, almost nobody works on both, and the few who do end up living a different kind of life. That’s the whole idea, so you can disagree with it early. A person grows in two directions. I call them DO and BE. DO is how much you make things happen. BE is how much you let go of whatever holds you back from the inside, which turns out to be how much you can be here, aware of what is actually happening right now. I call the place where both are high high agency, and the rest of this essay is about what it is, why it’s hard to get to, and why it’s worth the trouble.
The whole thing is one big graph that I’ll draw slowly. Congratulations.
DO: making things happen
Start with the easy one, since everybody already agrees it matters.
Picture the steering wheel of your life. Either you’re holding it or you’re in the back seat. How much of your life happens because you made it happen, and how much of it just happens to you? How often do you start things, how much effort are you willing to put in, how much do you actually get done?
My favorite test for this is a boring one: how well do I follow up on my words? That’s most of it. It doesn’t need a loud personality, and a very quiet person can be extremely actionable and do things that would be hard for the loud ones. It doesn’t need a world-changing project either. Making a plan for the day and then following it counts, and I’d say it counts for more than most world-changing projects, which tend to live in the notes app.
The quieter examples tell me more than the big ones, and the best of them is learning something new. Nothing visible happens on the day you sign up for the course or pick up the guitar, and for weeks you’re bad at it in private. But you’ve decided that in a year you’ll be able to do something you can’t do today, and you’ve actually started, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
Organizing is another. Somebody has to send the message that turns “we should catch up sometime” into Thursday at seven, and in most friend groups it’s the same person every time. Picking the restaurant belongs here too, and I consider it the hardest outer-agency test most groups ever face.
Asking is a quiet one: for the raise, the introduction, the help, out loud, instead of hoping somebody notices. So is finishing, especially the small things that sit on a list for months, like the form, the package that needs returning, the dentist appointment that has been “next week” for a year. And there’s fixing the thing that annoys you every single day, the squeaky door or the chair that wobbles. If you’ve been going to fix it for a year, you’ve been running a free experiment on yourself, and the results are in.
I call all of this outer agency, and DO is the direction it lives in. The common thread is that you did something on purpose, and afterwards your life has something in it that wasn’t going to show up on its own.
BE: letting go, and being here
BE gets talked about much less, and I find it the more interesting of the two.
BE is the ability to be at ease with yourself and to be here, aware of what is actually happening right now. Letting go is how you get there. It’s being able to show your inner world to another person without three days of rehearsal. It’s knowing how much you believe your own fears, how much the ideas in your head are running the show, how much other people’s opinions push you around. You could call it internal resilience. It’s also where the kind, supportive part of a person lives, because that part has a habit of switching off whenever you’re braced.
It matters even if you couldn’t care less about being a nice person (those are welcome too). The ideas in your head are a source of tension. The tension lives in the body, and you feel it as literally tense. It also affects how effective you are, and that’s the practical part. I think of it as a tax on your ability to see solutions. If you carry enough fears and doubts, there is a whole shelf of solutions you will never look at, because they’re unusual, or embarrassing, or kind of crazy, and you ruled them out before you noticed you were deciding anything. You fall back on the default answer that’s already in your head, and you pay the tax on every problem you meet.
Jonny Miller has a long article on this called “How to Unclench,” which goes much deeper than I will and uses a similar tax image. I’m borrowing the idea and putting it on a bigger chart.
Here is the connection to being here. Tension drags your attention away from the moment. A braced mind spends its time somewhere else: replaying what already happened, rehearsing what might go wrong, checking how you look. Your body is in the room and your attention is in a meeting that isn’t happening. In one study that pinged people’s phones at random moments, their minds were somewhere other than the task in front of them almost as often as they were on it, and that typically made them unhappy (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Presence is the opposite: attention on what is actually going on, the person in front of you, the task in your hands, the feeling that is in you right now. The two feed each other. The more you let go, the more attention is free to stay here, and the more you stay here, the more you notice a feeling while it’s happening, which is the moment it can move. That’s why they sit on one axis.
A word on the word. I don’t mean relaxed, because you can be relaxed and asleep. I mean released: free from your own internal limitations. Relaxed describes how you feel. Released describes what is holding you, and when it lets go you end up more here, not less.
So how do you move up BE? People assume breathing apps and long baths. Those do something. What moves it most is the thing nobody wants to do: admit you were wrong in a situation and take the first step toward fixing it. Say sorry, and mean it. Have the hard conversation with someone you care about, or with someone you don’t care about but still don’t want to hurt, feel the “oh no, I really don’t want to” go through you, notice it while it’s happening, and do it anyway.
That is an act, and it goes against your own resistance. I call it inner agency. Outer agency is how you move along DO, and it gets things done. Inner agency is how you move up BE, and it gets you unstuck. Both are ways of expressing yourself in the world effectively. That’s all the word agency means here: the ability to express who you are, effectively, in two ways.
Four rooms
Draw them as a cross. DO runs left to right, from things happen to me to I make things happen. BE runs bottom to top, from braced and elsewhere to released and here. You get four rooms. I gave each room a name and a few famous residents, because a chart with nobody on it is just algebra.
Default
Bottom left: tense and passive, low BE and low DO. Things happen to you, and you’re braced for the next one. You say a lot, and you follow through on a fraction of it. I will be honest with you: roughly 95% of people live here. Before you ask for the source, it’s a feeling with a percentage sign on it.
Squidward is the most extreme case and the funniest. He complains constantly, all his problems live next door, and he has big dreams of being a famous artist and clarinetist. When he does try, it goes badly and he blames everybody else. In one episode he moves to a town full of people exactly like him, and the sameness drives him up the wall, which shows how much he likes his own company.
There’s a line going around that you either die a SpongeBob or live long enough to become a Squidward. It’s a joke, and it’s more accurate than I’d like. Kids are born pretty relaxed. They’re joyful, they do things, and nobody has told them yet what’s impossible, so they try it anyway. Over time life adds ideas, doubts and fears, and we start taking them seriously.
George Costanza is the exit story. He lives with his parents, has no job, is deeply insecure, and believes everything his head tells him. Then comes the episode where his friend Jerry tells him that if every instinct he has ever had is wrong, the opposite must be right. So George does the opposite of every fear and doubt he has, and by the end he has a girl, a job and a bit of respect. It’s very funny, and I highly recommend it. I wouldn’t call it the perfect way out of this room. I also can’t tell you it doesn’t work.
Default has a nice corner too, and I don’t want to skip it. Up near the edge closest to the middle live the decent, functional people. They keep their word most of the time and apologize sometimes. They have a job, a few friends and something they do on weekends, and nothing is on fire. They’re even balanced, just at a low level. A lot of them feel ok, just a little flat, and there’s a word for the flat part: languishing, a term from the sociologist Corey Keyes that Adam Grant made popular. You’re not depressed, and you’re not thriving. You’re meh. Thoreau noticed the same thing back in the 1850s. In Walden he wrote that most people lead lives of quiet desperation, and before that sounds dramatic, here is how I read it: people who are doing fine, who went along with the life that was expected of them and never got around to asking whether it was theirs. The desperation is quiet because it hardly feels like desperation. It feels like Tuesday.
Hank Hill is that corner at its most lovable. He’s responsible, kind and loyal, he has opinions about lawns that border on a belief system, and he can barely say “I love you” out loud. Jim Halpert is the relaxed version: kind, funny, good at his job, and for years he treats the job as temporary, something he’s doing until something better turns up. Pam Beesly sits a few feet away, a receptionist who wants to be an artist and takes years to do anything about it.
What makes this room sticky is that it feels like making your own decisions. When people start watching themselves closely, one of the first things they find out is how few of the day’s decisions they actually made. On a retreat, participants get one small instruction to follow for a few days, something like not touching the phone for a few hours. I’ve watched people catch themselves with it in their hand anyway, without having decided anything, and on my first retreat I was one of them. The mind decided, and we just did it. That’s Default from the inside: not fully living, only a little bit, with attention mostly somewhere else while the body follows the autopilot.
Driven
Bottom right: tense and active, low BE and high DO. Still tense, because nothing has been let go, but these people get things done. You know some. You may be one. I was.
With my personality tendencies, it was a natural fit. For a few years I dedicated myself very deeply to a career in cyber security: working all week, studying on the weekends, with a constant background tension of not being good enough and not much time for the questions I’d started with, or for my wish to help other people live happier lives. I did become quite good at it. Luckily, something stopped me, and it came from the inside.
The motivation underneath is often hidden from the person who has it. Somewhere behind the scenes there’s an “I’ll prove them wrong,” or an “I’ll get it done and then people will like me.” It’s all about a lack they can’t let go of, so they push harder in the one direction they know. Our culture pushes the same way. Pretty much every idea we have about success comes from people in this room, and we hardly have any examples from the top right.
I don’t want to knock this room. It builds companies and wins medals and, as far as I can tell, answers its email. People here are often interesting to be around, because they act against the norm and take risks, and that usually comes from personality more than from any big shift inside. The cost is the tax from earlier. With enough tension in the system, the only tool you can see is more force, so when a problem doesn’t move you push harder in the same direction, because it’s the only direction you can see. For a long time that works. Then it stops working, and the person has no second move.
You can spot it from a few signs. Rest feels like wasting time, or makes you anxious, so a free Sunday turns into a project. You’re rarely where you are, because attention is on the next thing, so the meal and the conversation and the walk are things you get through on the way. The finish line moves: when I get this, then I’ll relax, and when the this arrives there’s a new this. Your worth tracks your output, so a bad week feels like a verdict and a good week only buys you the right to keep going. Praise bounces off, because the voice saying it isn’t enough is louder. And sometimes the body says stop. Which raises a good question: what happens when a driven person actually reaches the dream?
Jim Carrey is one answer. He reached about everything an actor can reach, and he has talked openly about years of depression. He has said everybody should get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of, so they’d see it isn’t the answer. It’s one of the truest things I’ve heard anyone say, and he would know.
Michael Phelps is the same story, counted in medals. He has the most Olympic medals in history, 28 of them, 23 gold, over four Games, by a big margin. By his own account he crashed after every Olympics: you build four years toward one moment, and then you feel lost. In 2014 he checked into a treatment center. He has said he had always seen himself as a swimmer and not as a human being, and that he carried every negative emotion for years without talking about it. He says that in London in 2012 he just wanted it to end, and that Rio in 2016 felt nothing like that.
Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history, counting Olympic and World medals. In Tokyo in 2021, mid-air, something stopped working the way it always had. She pulled out of the team final after one vault and said why that same day: mental health. She sat out most of the other finals and came back for the beam, where she won bronze. Since then she has won three golds in Paris. I won’t tell you which room she lives in now. That’s her business.
There’s a name for what Carrey and Phelps ran into: the arrival fallacy, from the author and positive-psychology teacher Tal Ben-Shahar. It’s the belief that once you arrive, you’ll finally feel the way you’ve been chasing. You arrive, you get a few days of relief, and the old tension is still there, now with a nicer view. In my case the background tension was “not good enough,” and I can confirm it is a productive thing to run on, up to a point.
Driven people have their own way of dodging the work: using the next goal to avoid whatever the last goal was supposed to fix. Busy is a very respectable way to never sit with yourself, and almost nobody gets an intervention for working too hard. They get promoted. The tools of letting go get recruited too: meditation for focus, Stoic quotes on the lock screen. Some of it genuinely helps. But the aim hasn’t moved. Whatever the engine was, whether a point to prove, approval to earn or a fear of not having enough, it’s still running. It just has a nicer morning routine now.
Drifting
Top left: released and passive, high BE and low DO. I call them drifters and I say it fondly, because I was a pretty good one. That was my life until I was about 24, before my Driven years: a kind of spiritual drifter, with big ideas and not much done. The room is full of very relaxed people. Chill, kind, nice to be around, you’d happily spend an afternoon with them. They also do very little. It happens a lot when life rarely pushes you from the outside, which in my case it didn’t, so I had plenty of time for big ideas. Several of them are still ideas, and as far as I can tell they’re very comfortable where they are.
The trap is that it feels good, and the good feeling is real. You’re calm and comfortable and nice to everyone. But look at what is producing the calm. Mostly it’s that nothing is pushing on you: no deadline, nobody waiting on an answer, no colleague who irritates you, no relative asking when you’re getting a real job. If the people around you live the same way, nobody triggers anybody, which is very peaceful and a bit like a gym where nobody lifts. Calm that depends on nobody asking anything of you lasts exactly until somebody asks. One real demand, a landlord or a deadline or a partner who wants a decision, and it’s gone.
The other sign is the explanations. Drifters tend to have a good one for why nothing has started: the timing isn’t right, wanting things is just stress, everything happens when it’s meant to, ambition is for people who haven’t figured out what matters. Each of them has a grain of truth, which is why they work. The escape moves look like growth too: a long stay somewhere warm and easy, a trip to figure out what I want. Either can be exactly right. They turn into the trap when they replace the conversation with the person you can’t take anymore, or the application you keep not sending.
The best-known example is the Dude from The Big Lebowski, which is, by the way, my favorite film, so you can see how I ended up in here. He is the chillest person ever put on screen, until he finally blows up at Walter over Donny’s ashes. Mostly he goes wherever people push him, and most of the plot is other people’s plans happening to him. He is loved for it, and for good reason. We could use more of that calm in the world. I’m not against the Dude. I’d just like him to own a calendar.
Phoebe from Friends is the Dude with a guitar. She’s kind and odd and loved by her friends, she wrote Smelly Cat, and she mostly floats through life on instinct. She’s the happiest resident of this room and still a resident.
John Welwood, an American psychologist and a long-time Buddhist practitioner, knew the meditation world from the inside, and in the 1980s he coined a term for those escape moves: spiritual bypassing, using spiritual ideas and practices to avoid your own problems. Running off to an island for a long meditation, so you never have to face that one relationship, is the obvious version. What he described was people using meditation and talk of awakening to rise above the messy human stuff before they had faced it: the hurt, the anger, the unfinished business. Notice what gets skipped. It’s the sorry, the hard conversation, the first step in a conflict: the whole inner agency list. Bypassing is a very sophisticated way of never having to do any of it.
Almost every tradition that works on letting go has its own version of this, and it usually happens the same way: the deep teaching gets shortened to the part that sounds like permission.
Take Stoicism, because the internet version is so popular. The idea itself is practical. Some things are up to you, like your choices and how you respond, and a lot of things aren’t, like other people, the weather and how it all turns out. Put your effort into the first group and make peace with the second. The popular misreading takes one more step: if most things aren’t up to me, I shouldn’t feel anything about them. Be a rock. Nothing bothers me, and if something does, nobody needs to know. That’s the stiff upper lip, and it works like a volume knob turned down to zero. The Stoics weren’t after a rock. They wanted to stop being run by fear and anger, and they kept room for joy and for goodwill toward people. Marcus Aurelius’s private notebook is a good place to see it. It is full of him reminding himself not to snap at difficult people and talking himself through it, which is a man working on his feelings, not a man without any.
Advaita Vedanta, the Indian school of non-duality, says in short that the separate self is a kind of appearance and that what you really are is the awareness behind it. Read on a weekend, that turns into: there is no doer, so nothing is my responsibility, the world is an illusion, so why would I answer that message. The traditional route asked for preparation and ethical living before the big statements. The quick version keeps the punchline and loses the setup. Buddhist non-attachment goes the same way and becomes plain detachment, which is exactly the confusion Welwood warned about. Mindfulness becomes “just let it go.” And “everything happens for a reason” covers anything you’d rather not feel.
The extreme version of this room is the person who has done this for years. They learned to watch their thoughts without getting pulled in, which is a real skill, and kept going until they were watching their whole life from the side, like a documentary about somebody else. That’s awareness without being in it, and BE needs both. Ask how they are and they’ll tell you, sincerely, that they have no problems. Nothing is happening inside, so nothing is wrong. Super calm. Boring calm. I was heading that way myself, I’ll admit, and I got lucky: I met people who fixed my silly ideas about it before I got there. The way I put it is that you need to open your heart, not just your attention. Calm that costs you your feelings isn’t release. It’s anesthesia.
High agency
Top right: released and active, high BE and high DO. Both high, finally. You’ve let go of enough of your limitations to be here, and you’re doing things from there, and this is where you start expressing yourself properly. It’s also turbulent.
A quick way to find your own examples is a test from George Mack, who wrote the essay on high agency. You’re in a third-world jail cell. Who do you call? Whoever you just thought of is the highest-agency person you know: capable enough to do something about it, and caring enough to bother.
Look at the person you picked and you’ll probably find a few things in common. They treat a problem as solvable until it proves otherwise, so the first question is what can I do about this, and whose fault it is comes a distant second. They don’t wait for permission. They’re willing to be disagreeable when the situation calls for it, and they don’t do it for sport. They own their part in a mess without turning it into a punishment, which is the move driven people tend to miss. And they care, which is what separates agency from ruthlessness. You can be capable without caring. You just wouldn’t have called that person from the jail cell.
The turbulence comes from walking on two legs. In Driven you hop on the DO leg. In Drifting you hop on the BE leg. In this room you finally put both down, and walking turns out to be hard. Every step swings to one side or the other until you find the center and learn to DO and BE at the same time.
Here is why the turbulence is worth it: the two legs feed each other. BE widens what you can see, so you notice more things worth doing. Doing them tests the fears that kept you from looking, and a lot of those fears turn out to be smaller than they looked. Each one that fails the test loosens the tension a little more, which widens what you can see. George Costanza ran this experiment for one episode. A person who keeps it up for years looks less like someone balancing two things and more like someone doing one thing, with a bit of a dance in it.
High agency doesn’t mean control over everything. Part of it is knowing which things are up to you, which is the useful half of the Stoic idea from the drifting room. The weather, other people’s opinions, the economy and the past are facts to work with. Pushing on a wall for a year is Driven, whatever you call it.
Sitcom characters are hard to find for this room, which tells you something about how rare it is, or how hard it is to write jokes about it. So first, real people.
Malala Yousafzai kept going to school under the Taliban, wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC and spoke out on national television, all at eleven. At fifteen she was shot in the head on her school bus. She survived, built a global movement for girls’ education, won the Nobel Peace Prize at seventeen, and then got an Oxford degree, which after that list sounds almost modest. In her speech at the UN she said she doesn’t even hate the man who shot her. That’s both legs in one person: willing to disagree with the status quo, and free of the hatred that would have been the easiest fuel.
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire for nineteen years with a plague in it, a long war on the frontier, and a general who declared himself emperor behind his back. On campaign he wrote notes to himself in Greek, almost certainly never meant for publication, which we now call the Meditations. It reads like a man with the largest to-do list on earth reminding himself to do the task in front of him and to stop being run by other people’s opinions. When the usurper was killed, the ancient sources say, Marcus didn’t celebrate. He was upset he’d lost the chance to pardon him. Outer agency at the top of the world, with the inner kind to match. We also have a pretty cool statue of him.
Rosa Parks is a good one for anyone who thinks this room needs a loud personality. She was soft-spoken, a seamstress, and she had been working with the local NAACP chapter for years before the day in 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery. She said later that she wasn’t physically tired, and that the only tired she was, was tired of giving in. Then came decades of steady, unglamorous work.
Fiction has one too: Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting, a community college teacher with a quiet life and his own grief, who at the moment it matters finds the one sentence that gets through: “It’s not your fault.” The person you thought of in the jail cell lives here too, most likely with no statue and no prize.
What the top right gives you
So what do you get for walking on both legs? Here is what I’ve seen, and what people who get there describe.
From the inside, the first thing is that you’re here for your own life. Attention is on what’s happening instead of on the replay or the rehearsal, which on its own feels like a different life. You see more options, because the tax stops being collected. Your reactions get shorter, and so does the time you stay angry at somebody. You say sorry faster: my fault, who cares why, I care more about the relationship than about being right. Emotions still arrive and you still feel them, but they go through you without a fight. Problems change shape. More of them start to look solvable, and I don’t mean that in a positive-thinking way. Big challenges get more interesting and small things get more joyful, which is a strange combination and the best one I know. A lot of people who get here describe it as being in love with life, which I admit does sound like a greeting card.
You can also receive. Help, praise, a day off, things you didn’t feel you deserved. When there’s no voice in your head busy defending you, there’s nothing left to defend. And you say things out loud, including the nice things. From a very young age I felt weird expressing how I feel about people, the positive stuff, to their faces. In my experience, unexpressed gratitude and love sit in you as tension just like unexpressed anger does.
From the outside, people find you steady and warm. You say what you think, and you don’t use it as a weapon. When somebody is having a hard moment you can help them through it, instead of climbing into the mess with them so that two people are drowning instead of one person coming back to themselves. And you become, mostly by accident, the person someone calls from the jail cell. Don’t be surprised when the phone rings.
At the far corner of the chart is the peak, where nothing really feels impossible and very little in you doubts that you can reach what you actually want. Almost everybody has visited. Programmers call it flow, athletes call it the zone, musicians call it the muse, and the rest of us call it a good day. Being in love is the preview: for a few weeks everything is good and you feel like you can do things, and nothing outside you changed. It’s temporary. I see it as a taste of the full version, and you’re welcome to go and find it. Athletes and musicians show the pattern most clearly. An athlete can live in the zone for ninety minutes and lose it in the parking lot. A musician on stage is living at 100%, and a lot of musicians have a hard time off stage. I suspect it’s connected: they can’t carry the skill off the stage. Everybody visits, and almost nobody lives there.
flow
the zone
the muse
a good day
being in love
The math, with a warning
This is the part where I get to pretend it’s science. Don’t quote me on this. It’s just a good way I found to convey the idea.
Say each line runs from 0 to 100. Your effectiveness, meaning how much of your actual potential you use, is roughly your BE multiplied by your DO. I picture them multiplying because each one works through the other: with no DO, all the freedom in the world changes nothing outside you, and with no BE, all the action goes down the few paths your fears allow. If you’re 100 on DO and 1 on BE, you’re about 100 effective. Give up five points of DO, gain a little BE, and you’re at 95 times 2, which is 190, and you got there by being slightly less busy. The number is only a picture. What it pictures is using more of your own life, and output is a small part of that.
Now picture the whole chart as a square, 100 by 100, so 10,000 in total, and a person takes up whatever rectangle they reach.
Default, around 10 and 10, takes up 100: a very small person in the geometric sense. A driven person who goes all the way to the wall, 100 on DO and 10 on BE, takes up 1,000, and it costs everything they have. The drifter at the mirror image, 10 and 100, also takes up 1,000: same size, different shape.
Somewhere around the middle, 50 and 50, you get 2,500. At 80 and 80 it’s 6,400. The corner is the whole 10,000.
The numbers are made up, and I picked 100 because it’s round. The shape is the part that seems right to me. Because the two multiply, neglecting either one costs you most of your potential.
It’s also why I don’t accept the objection I’d expect from driven people, which is that if they let go of the tension they’ll lose their edge. The drive and the tension are two different things that most people happen to have glued together. You keep the drive and drop the brace. That’s what the 95 times 2 was trying to picture. Phelps in Rio is the closest real example I have among famous people, and I’m a smaller one: a lot of the tension from my Driven years is gone, and the drive actually increased.
The line
Now draw a line from the bottom left corner to the top right. Every point on it has as much BE as DO. I think of it as the line of harmony.
On the line, what you’re free to want and see on the inside is in step with what you’re able to do on the outside, and you’re using whatever potential you currently have. You don’t need to be anywhere special on it. Someone at 30 and 30 is on the line and so is someone at 70 and 70. The position along the line says how far you’ve come. The distance from the line says how much is leaking.
Below the line, in Driven, the outside runs ahead of the inside. You can do far more than you’ve allowed yourself to want, so the doing often points at something that was never really yours: a point to prove, someone to impress. The results arrive and nothing inside says thank you. Above the line, in Drifting, it goes the other way. Plenty of freedom inside, not much to show for it outside, and a very comfortable gap between the wishes and the doing.
The made-up math has one more thing to say about the line. If you have a fixed amount to split between the two, say 100 points, the product is biggest when you split it evenly. 50 and 50 gives 2,500, 90 and 10 gives 900, and 99 and 1 gives 99. So the line is where whatever you currently have does the most. That’s a snapshot of one moment, though. Over time the two legs feed each other, as I said earlier, and the amount you have to split keeps growing. Harmony turns out to be efficient, which I did not expect to be able to say about harmony.
Why almost nobody stays
If the corner is so good, why isn’t everybody there? Because you can’t steer to it from an extreme.
The reason is inertia. Someone deep in Driven has years of momentum in one direction, and someone deep in Drifting has the same momentum the other way, so neither can simply turn and aim at the corner. The route goes back through the middle first: the driven person has to ease off, the drifter has to start moving, and only from the middle can either of them climb. Nobody does that for fun, so usually something has to stop them first.
For a driven person it’s usually a crash. Burnout, depression after reaching the goal, a body that stops cooperating, or a shift in values when something happens to someone close: a relative in the hospital, a partner’s betrayal. Jim Carrey is a good example of easing back. After 2014 he made far fewer movies. In 2022 he said he was thinking about retiring, that he’d done enough, and then he came back for another Sonic movie. It doesn’t have to look dramatic from the outside. In my case it came from the inside. Whenever I had time to myself I felt an emptiness, a lack of fulfillment that none of my results in my field could touch, and it made my weekends the worst part of the week. Under it was a desire to know myself more deeply.
For a drifter I’ve noticed three things. The first is that the money runs out. I know that sounds stupid, and I’m serious. People get so passive that life arranges a situation where they can’t cover what they need. It’s also why courses promising money without effort are ridiculously popular: there are plenty of people who want to do nothing and get paid, and the product is a magic pill. No matter how spiritual a person is, reality still has a way of reminding us about itself, and money is a good way to do it. The second is that something happens in their life, usually in the family, and they can’t stay passive anymore. The third is the plateau. They’ve been calm and comfortable for years, nothing is changing, and one day they decide the whole thing is a waste of time. Then, instead of stopping in the middle, they swing all the way to the opposite corner: screw this, I’m getting a job.
That’s why people swing. Driven people swing hard into Drifting: burnout, then a one-way ticket to a tropical island. Drifting people swing hard back: I’m going full business, I’m never doing any of that again. I know people from both directions.
One friend of mine is the cleanest example I have: a founder who built a company and by most measures did very well, and who was also, in my friend’s own words, one of the most tense people you could meet. More than once I heard about family trips to beautiful places where every second was miserable, because there was no way to enjoy any of it. Nothing got released, so it built up, until the old way stopped working. Out of options, my friend went on a retreat and, for a while, stopped. On the chart, that’s coming off the wall and back toward the middle, and then climbing, with the action kept the whole way. What changed shows at home. My friend now has real patience with the kids, neither of whom is very calm, and can have a heart to heart with someone about what’s going on inside, calmly and with care.
Learning to walk on two legs looks wonky for a reason. A toddler doesn’t walk so much as fall forward in a controlled way, and sometimes into the coffee table. Adults are the same. At the beginning we overshoot all the time, hard one way, hard the other, and that’s fine, because that’s how you learn it. If you traced a life on the chart you’d see a zigzag that narrows, and it keeps narrowing as you go.
The reason bigger than you
Everything so far has been a push. The money runs out, the body stops cooperating, the plateau gets old, a relative ends up in the hospital. Life shoves you toward the middle, and for most people that’s how they get there. Pushes work, but they have a flaw: they end. The money comes back, the body recovers, and the person drifts back to wherever they were comfortable.
What gets someone across the middle on purpose is a pull. Plenty of people try to get there by being a bit less driven and a bit more relaxed, circling the edge of it for years. What carries a person across is a reason bigger than themselves. “I’ll prove them wrong” turns into “I want to help people do something.” Or “I have kids, and I want to be a better person for them.” Anything that matters more to you than your own wants, needs and fears can do it, however small it looks from outside.
I didn’t invent this. People from very different fields, some of them decades apart, have landed in roughly the same place. Since this is one of the most important ideas in the essay, I’ll show my work.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, argued that a human being is always pointed beyond themselves, at a meaning to fulfill or a person to love, and that self-actualization only arrives as a side effect of self-transcendence. Chase yourself directly and you miss. Serve something and you get yourself as a bonus. What he saw in the camps, by his own account, was that people who had a “why” could bear an astonishing amount of “how,” a line he borrowed from Nietzsche. That’s an observation, not an experiment. He also wasn’t against tension. As I read him, he wanted a different kind: the tension of a task worth doing, instead of the tension of guarding yourself.
The lab has looked at this too, and it mostly agrees. Goals about supporting other people went with less distress than goals about looking good, a purpose beyond the self helped young people stick with boring work, volunteering went with a longer life only when it was done for others, and a stronger sense of purpose went with a lower risk of dying. Almost all of it is correlational, so I’m not claiming that a bigger reason will add years to your life. I’m saying that for an idea that sounds this soft, the direction is the same in nearly everything I could find.
What the studies say (6 studies)
- The Soviet physiologist Pyotr Anokhin spent his career on how a living thing organizes itself around a goal. In his theory the brain builds a model of the result you’re aiming at before you act, recruits only the parts of you that serve that result, and then compares what happened with the model. When the outcome doesn’t match, restlessness shows up and you search for another way (Anokhin, 1973). The theory is about what a goal does, and it doesn’t ask whether the goal is about you or about somebody else.
Anokhin's functional system, simplified: a goal is a model of the result, and the result is compared with it. - In two studies that followed college students week by week, students whose goals were about supporting other people got less distressed as the term went on, and students whose goals were about looking good got more distressed (Crocker and colleagues, 2010). Distress also nudged people toward looking-good goals, so the arrow runs both ways, but the pattern was clear.
- In four studies with more than two thousand young people, a purpose aimed beyond the self helped them stick with a boring task and later improved their grades, while self-oriented motives didn’t consistently help (Yeager and colleagues, 2014).
- A long study of older adults found that volunteering went with a lower risk of dying over four years only when the motive was other people. Volunteers who did it mainly for themselves had about the same risk as people who didn’t volunteer at all (Konrath and colleagues, 2012).
- In a small experiment, people nudged to think about helping others instead of promoting themselves had lower stress-hormone responses to a public speaking test designed to stress them out, though they didn’t report feeling less anxious (Abelson and colleagues, 2014). Their bodies calmed down before their feelings did.
- A review of ten studies and more than 136,000 people found that those with a stronger sense of purpose had about 17% lower risk of dying during the follow-up (Cohen and colleagues, 2016). Most purpose measures are broad, which is one more reason to read all of this as a direction and not a dose.
Why a bigger reason works
Picture someone who freezes whenever they have to speak up for themselves: the awkward email, the raise, the hard conversation. Now picture the same person at a school meeting, speaking up for their kid, calm and specific and a little scary. Same person, same nerves. What changed is that the fear got outvoted. The tension we’ve been talking about is a vote against anything that puts you at risk: looking wrong, being rejected, losing control. It wins most of the time because most of the time the thing on the other side of the scale is small and about you, a bit more peace or a slightly better self-image. A reason bigger than you is a bigger vote. The fear can still be there. It just stops deciding.
A lot of the tension is also made of self-monitoring: how am I coming across, am I good enough, what if I fail. A review of 226 effect sizes found that self-focused attention goes with more negative mood, and that the worried-about-how-I-come-across kind goes with social anxiety (Mor and Winquist, 2002). A reason that points away from you gives that attention somewhere else to go. You still care how it turns out. You’re just no longer the subject of every sentence.
Reasons also outlast goals. A goal about you ends when you reach it, and what’s left can feel like nothing. In one study that followed graduates for a year after college, reaching goals about growth, relationships and community went with better psychological health. Reaching goals about money and image didn’t, and went with more signs of ill-being (Niemiec and colleagues, 2009). I haven’t found a study that tests the finish line directly, so take the rest as my reading of the pattern: a reason about someone else has no finish line. Nobody finishes raising a kid, or being useful to the people they work with.
The same fix works for both rooms, or at least I think it does, because the drifter and the driven person have the same hole. In both cases the reason is about them. The drifter’s reason is their own peace, which doesn’t take much action to keep going. The driven person’s reason is their own proof, which never gets enough. A bigger reason gives the drifter something worth getting up for, and it gives the driven person permission to stop proving. As far as I can tell nobody has tested that exact claim, so it’s my reading too.
It also damps the swing. A swing is what happens when your direction is set by your mood: burnout, “screw this,” reverse. A reason doesn’t have a mood. The closest evidence I found shows people with a reason sticking with the work and coping better on bad days. My bet is that a reason won’t make you less tired, but it makes you less likely to quit the whole thing on a Tuesday. Anything else, like a stress-management tool on a driven person, is the nicer morning routine again. It works a little, and it’s not the switch.
What the studies say about sticking with it (2 studies)
- University fundraisers spent five minutes with a student who had received a scholarship. A month later they were spending 142% more time on the phone and raising 171% more money than before, doing the same job, while callers who only read his letter or never met him showed no significant gains (Grant and colleagues, 2007).
- In a diary study of nearly 2,000 adults, stressful days made people feel worse and brought more physical complaints, as you’d expect, but people with a stronger sense of purpose took less of a hit (Hill and colleagues, 2018). Neither study counted people quitting. They show people sticking with the work and coping better, which is the closest evidence I found.
Look back at the high agency room. Malala had girls’ education. Rosa Parks had a cause she’d been working on for years before the bus. Marcus Aurelius wrote that he got up in the morning to do the work of a human being. They had different centuries, temperaments and jobs, and the one thing they share is a reason that wasn’t about them.
Bigger doesn’t have to mean grand. It only has to be bigger than you: a kid, a team, a craft, a person who relies on you. A New Year’s resolution is a reason about you, which is why it tends to expire in February.
It does have to be real, though. In the volunteering study the motive mattered more than the act: same volunteering, different results, depending on whether it was for the other person or for the volunteer. There’s a counterfeit version. “I want to help people” can be the driven person’s new costume, the same engine with a halo. Two questions help tell them apart. Would you still do it if nobody ever found out? And does it make you gentler with the person in front of you, or does that person turn into material for the cause? If it’s the second, it’s the old engine. And bigger than you doesn’t mean instead of you: people who focus on others to the exclusion of themselves report more distress (Fritz and Helgeson, 1998).
Harmony as the road
Put it together. The road to the top right corner is a road to harmony between what you want on the inside, what you can do on the outside, and what you currently have to work with. The way there is to keep catching up the lazy leg until the two walk in step. Pushing the strong one harder only gets you a faster hop.
You can check which way you’re moving at any time. How many options do you see right now, compared with a year ago? When did you last do something nobody asked you to do, for somebody else’s good? Ask again in two weeks.
One hose
The sections so far can read like a list, so here is one picture that puts the pieces in order. Imagine a person is a garden hose, and the water running through it is their energy: the drive, the attention, the amount of life you have available on a given day. A hose has four things to get right, and they lean on each other.
The holes are every fear, insecurity and doubt you carry, and water leaves through each of them all day. Plugging them is inner work, the sorry and the first step in a conflict, and every hole you plug sends more water down the line. The nozzle is DO: somebody has to open it, and that somebody is you. Attention turns the spray into a jet, and wherever it points, the water goes. And something worth watering comes first, even though it comes last in the telling. With nothing to water there is no reason to plug a hole, open the nozzle or aim.
Taken in order, each one makes the next one work. Plugged holes give you water to open the nozzle on, an open nozzle gives your attention something to aim, a steady jet makes a target reachable, and a target worth the trouble is a good reason to go back and plug the next hole.
Zoom out
One correction before this part ends. I told you the top right corner is the peak, 100 and 100. It is the peak of this chart, and I believe this chart is a small part of a much bigger map.
Zoom out by ten, and the whole square we’ve been using shrinks to a small gray box in the bottom left of something a thousand by a thousand: a million, instead of ten thousand. A person can grow into all of that area. I like the plain term for it: full human potential.
What lies past the small square gets mystical fast, so I’ll leave it there for this part.
Sources
Credited in the text
- Miller, J. (2026, September 16). How to Unclench. The Inner Frontier. howtounclench.com
- Mack, G. High Agency in 30 Minutes. highagency.com
The reason bigger than you
- Anokhin, P. K. Принципиальные вопросы общей теории функциональных систем. In: Принципы системной организации функций. Moscow: Nauka, 1973, pp. 5-61. Also “Опережающее отражение действительности” (Вопросы философии, 1962, no. 7), “Рефлекс цели как объект физиологического анализа” and “Эмоции” (Большая медицинская энциклопедия, vol. 35, 1964), reprinted in Философские аспекты теории функциональной системы, Moscow, 1978.
- Frankl, V. E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006 edition, Parts One and Two.
- Crocker, J., Canevello, A., Breines, J. G., & Flynn, H. (2010). Interpersonal goals and change in anxiety and dysphoria in first-semester college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 1009-1024. doi:10.1037/a0019400
- Yeager, D. S., et al. (2014). Boring but important: A self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(4), 559-580. doi:10.1037/a0037637
- Konrath, S., Fuhrel-Forbis, A., Lou, A., & Brown, S. (2012). Motives for volunteering are associated with mortality risk in older adults. Health Psychology, 31(1), 87-96. doi:10.1037/a0025226
- Abelson, J. L., et al. (2014). Brief cognitive intervention can modulate neuroendocrine stress responses to the Trier Social Stress Test: Buffering effects of a compassionate goal orientation. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 44, 60-70. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.02.016
- Cohen, R., Bavishi, C., & Rozanski, A. (2016). Purpose in life and its relationship to all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events: A meta-analysis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 78(2), 122-133. doi:10.1097/PSY.0000000000000274
- Mor, N., & Winquist, J. (2002). Self-focused attention and negative affect: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128(4), 638-662. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.638
- Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi:10.1126/science.1192439
- Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211-222. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211
- Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2009). The path taken: Consequences of attaining intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations in post-college life. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 291-306. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2008.09.001
- Grant, A. M., et al. (2007). Impact and the art of motivation maintenance: The effects of contact with beneficiaries on persistence behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103(1), 53-67. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.05.004
- Hill, P. L., Sin, N. L., Turiano, N. A., Burrow, A. L., & Almeida, D. M. (2018). Sense of purpose moderates the associations between daily stressors and daily well-being. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 52(8), 724-729. doi:10.1093/abm/kax039
- Fritz, H. L., & Helgeson, V. S. (1998). Distinctions of unmitigated communion from communion: Self-neglect and overinvolvement with others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 121-140.