Arthur C. Brooks argues that leisure feels richer after hard work because we're wired to value earned success. Many strivers lack clarity about what reward they're actually working toward. The answer isn't endless striving or perpetual waiting, but a cycle of effort, struggle, reward, and renewal.
Of course, leisure is great, but I would say leisure is way better when you've been working hard. We are built to earn our rewards. We are built to earn our success. We have no concept of what anything is worth if we don't earn our success. And so one of the greatest secrets to excellence and success in people's lives is the sense of earning it. And that means making peace with suffering, making peace with pain, making peace with struggle. And one of the biggest mistakes that strivers often make is that it's all struggle. You mean, you remember this, that, that not discredited, but complicated, uh, Walter Mischel marshmallow experiments. You know, the follow-up, you know, the kids who ate the marshmallow within 5 minutes, they had no impulse control and they went on to actually get worse grades and worse jobs, et cetera. And the 20% of the kids in the marshmallow experiment who were able to not eat the marshmallow and they got the second marshmallow, they did much better in life. And so the whole point was the deferral of gratification is a big signal of how well you're actually gonna do. One of the biggest problems that strivers have, they don't know what their marshmallow even is. And so they're just gonna wait their whole lives. And that's not what you've been saying. That's not what you're talking about. To never, never, never, never drive out into the— out to Winners, to never actually listen to the music, to never actually wait for the second marshmallow and enjoy that second marshmallow, that's a mistake too. But the whole point is we're trying to find the golden mean between earning it and not earning it, that doing enough and struggling enough and then actually taking the reward and then starting again.
