Maslow's Lighthouse: Strive for Mastery, Not Money (the money will follow)
“Get good at something. That’s it. Everything else is bullshit.” — Jerry Seinfeld
I recently wrote that “the mind does not retire” once you’ve made all the money you need. But should it? What kept Buffett and Munger mentally fit for such a long time? Their work kept them engaged (and surely the live adulation by 40,000 fans helped). Working on interesting problems, lifelong friendships, respect and admiration, and being a master of your domain — these money cannot buy.
By contrast, the merely rich can struggle with meaning. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, a keen observer of human nature and estimated to be a billionaire, pointed this out in a recent interview with the New Yorker. “I know a lot of rich people,” he said, “they don't feel as good as you think they should. They're miserable.”
At 70 years old, Seinfeld keeps working because “the only thing in life that's really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession.”
“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” Stephen King once told Neil Gaiman, “for something that I would do for free.” Elon Musk has been building one company after another and used to sleep on the factory floor. Warren Buffett calls Berkshire Hathaway a painting and the closest thing he can get to enjoying himself every minute of the day. “Be guided by beauty,” is one of Jim Simons’s principles at Renaissance. “Just as a great theorem can be very beautiful,” he noted, “a company that’s really working very well, very efficiently, can be beautiful.”
These are my kind of people.
They care deeply about the process and quality.
They approach their work as a craft to be mastered, not a job to be done.
These people have found their calling and they pursue it with zeal. They keep showing up long past the point where more money makes a difference.
“There’s nothing I revile quite as much as a dilettante,” Seinfeld told GQ, “I don’t like doing something to a mediocre level.” Escaping mediocrity requires focus. “You have to dedicate yourself to these great things,” he added. “And I don’t believe in being good at a lot of things—or even more than one.”
The intensity required for mastery can’t be faked. You have to tune into your genuine curiosity and passion. “When I was young, I was obsessed with race-car driving, big-wave surfing, skydiving and really fast motorcycles,” Seinfeld wrote in Is This Anything. One year into stand-up comedy, he lost interest in all of them. His passion for comedy consumed him. Robert Greene wrote that one’s interest has to “border on the religious.”
Maintaining focus becomes easier because ideas become less interesting. “Experts literally experience a different world within their specialism,” Tom Morgan pointed out. Experts perceive more layers and details, they see patterns and nuances invisible to others. Their experience of the same domain is richer, more interesting, and filled with an intensity of devotion that other areas can’t match.
The pursuit of mastery is a path of focus, an answer to dopamine culture with its endless distractions, noise, and shiny objects.
It is a path that demands that we reach for our full potential, but it can also take us beyond ourselves, toward greater contribution and inspiration. It is this path of pursuing our inner calling which we innately crave.
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