Ironically, the complexity of modern living demands greater inputs while providing lesser meaning than historic life. Less than a hundred years ago, establishing a content middle-class family was a much more attainable goal for many more people in far less time and effort than required today. People felt more meaning in life, and it cost them less to find and maintain. Today, the cost of living—in the most holistic sense of the phrase, including the financial cost and the emotional, mental costs—is so much higher than before, and yet it seems that there is much less meaning available in most of the options before us.
Meaning has always been the motivator for hard things. The pairing works well enough when the rewards are sufficient to match the costs. Some problems have always required sustained sacrifice under uncertainty, but they provided rewards deemed worth it.1
Today, many modern problems expand beyond yourself and across others, and the time scales and resources required are exponentially more than in the past. For example, most tech startups today require at least two million dollars and five years just to know whether a minimal viable product is possible or not, and those quantities continue to rise geometrically. Imagine pouring your heart, soul, and life savings into an idea for five years without having any signal to indicate probable success.
Inescapable uncertainty against increased duration and degree of sacrifice has always been a hallmark of some endeavors, like starting new exploratory businesses, but it is spreading to more areas in modern life—areas that do not provide the same kind of rewards as high risk endeavors.
We are naturally incapable of productively managing modern complexity. People are just as inadequate at complex productivity as they ever were, but today’s highly complex world makes those inadequacies more apparent. More and more historically normal situations now require the same level of uncertainty and sacrifice as only a few elite endeavors used to, from normal jobs to normal family relationships. Many of the best outcomes today require long periods without the intermittent micro-rewards that so many people required to remain motivated historically. The demands of the modern world overcome the many weak spots in a person’s natural ability to be rationally intentional and effective.
You need new levels of motivation and meaning to justify the unprecedented challenges that you will face today. To have the confidence to engage in what were historically normal activities in life, and to have any chance at success, you have to have excruciatingly rare resilience and exceptional productivity. You need the wisdom to know what is worth the full investment increasingly required for success in more and more aspects of what used to be normal life. You need the discipline to continue on a task that will take much longer than comparable challenges used to.
The framework described in this book arms you with each of these vital abilities. It maximizes meaning against modern challenges through purpose-driven productivity.
Footnotes
- 1. A fairly simple version of this is sales. In sales, unpredictable small actions lead to the majority of your measured results. You have to continuously face apparent failure while working as hard as normal people only would when continuously receiving short-term rewards that exceed the cost. Other examples include art, writing, and other creative work. All of these feature high rates of failure, but outsized rewards for success, and the ratios match up enough that there have always been roughly enough people to meet demand. ↩