I Hit the Goal and Woke Up the Same Neurotic Person

If you've ever achieved something you thought would finally make you feel okay, and then you realized you were still basically the same neurotic little creature the next morning, then this video is for you. Especially if your solution after that realization was some version of, well, I guess none of this matters. And then you realize that didn't work either. That's the tension I want to talk about. On one side, winning does not solve all your problems. You make the money, you hit the goal, you get the thing, and then you wake up the next day and You're still you, and that sucks. For me, that became step one on the path to disillusionment and essentially to some form of in my life. I actually went pretty far down that road. I tried living as if nothing mattered for a while, and eventually I realized, well, shit, this doesn't feel much better than believing a bonus was going to solve all my problems. Also, I didn't love the consequences of ditching my responsibilities. They were almost as annoying as the responsibilities. themselves. And even if you don't have many responsibilities, which I largely didn't at certain points, that can be worse because then it gets harder to make up a reason for being here at all. I mean, at least the made-up inconvenience of email gives you something to resent. So now you're stuck and you're asking, does the scoreboard matter or does it not matter? Is it stupid or unenlightened to care about revenue or profit or customers or followers or weight? For your net worth or your dating options or whatever scoreboard you've picked? Or is that naive not to care? And I think both of those extremes are dumb. Like, the question, does it matter, is the wrong question. I think the better question is, what's the score for? The scoreboard doesn't matter in some ultimate cosmic sense. In fact, nothing inherently matters, but we got to keep living anyway is one of the main points of this channel. But the scoreboard absolutely matters inside the game you chose because you chose it. Basketball, for example, doesn't objectively matter. There's no universal law that says a ball going through a metal cylinder should emotionally devastate grown men. But if you choose basketball, if your career is basketball, then the scoreboard matters a lot. Not because God came down and said Blessed are the 3-pointers, for they shall inherit the court. It matters because you happen to choose that game. And that's the part that people miss. Life can just be one big game. Again, business, fitness, money, dating, status, achievement, all of it. And a game is just something with rules and a goal. That's it. How do you track progress towards that goal? That's right, you keep score. So asking whether a specific scoreboard matters is like asking whether a basketball matters. I don't know what game you're trying to play. If you're trying to run full court shirts versus skins, then yeah. But if you're performing open heart surgery, maybe no. So the scoreboard is a tool, and I think the better question is, what's it for? So in this video, I want to answer this question in a way that improves your relationship with whatever scoreboard you check the most So it's no longer this strained, confusing relationship of how much does this matter? Should I care? Should I not? And it'll allow you to use the scoreboard in a way that makes the present more alive and the future more intelligent. If you don't know me, my name is Luke Murray. I'm a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20-plus years, done a little over $100 million in revenue during that time, and I currently run a portfolio of companies doing a little over $3 million a year. I make these videos because I'm trying to figure out ambition without the bullshit. So I think the scoreboard has 2 jobs, learning and feeling, as in feeling emotions, and that's it. It helps you learn and it gives you a reason to feel. Let me make this practical with how it plays out in my day-to-day leadership. When I walk onto the floor of one of my businesses and ask, how did we do today? People don't always know how to answer that question. They'll start explaining the day. They'll tell me it was smooth or that the clients seemed happy or that the team handled it well. And that's not ever what I'm asking, at least not at first. What I want to know is how many people showed up. In other words, what's the score? So if our average is 35 clients and we had 50, that tells me something. Or if it's 20, that tells me something. The number isn't the whole story, but it's the start of the conversation. And my next question is always, why? Why did it happen? What did we learn? Was it controllable or was it not? And if it was controllable, what do we do differently tomorrow to test it out? That's the first function of the scoreboard— learning. The scoreboard creates feedback, and feedback is what lets us improve. Without a scoreboard, you're not really testing anything. You're just walking around with real strong opinions. And here's the part I think is underrated. Learning feels good. And not like fake learning's fun, kids kind of way. I mean, there is something deeply satisfying about trying something, getting feedback from reality, adjusting, and watching yourself get better. That loop is rewarding in itself. It actually has a name. It's called flow. It's a psychological and physiological state where you're so absorbed in what you're doing that your sense of self kind of disappears. You need a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge close enough to your skill level that you have to pay attention. Too easy, you get bored. Too hard, you get overwhelmed. But when the challenge is right at that edge of your ability, your attention locks in. You stop thinking about yourself so much because you're in the thing. In other words, you're learning. And the fancy word for an experience that's rewarding in and of itself Not rewarding because the result it produces is autotelic. So tell that to your nerdiest friends. So the first thing the scoreboard is for is learning. It tightens the feedback loop, lets you see whether your behavior is producing the result you intended. And when that loop gets tight enough, learning itself becomes the reward. If you lose and you learn, that is expensive, but at least you bought something. But if you lose and you don't learn, you paid tuition, To reality, and you skipped class. Now, the second function of the scoreboard is feeling, and this is where the identity stuff belongs, because the only reason we don't treat these particular numbers as clean, emotionless data is because they touch our sense of self. People say things like, your accomplishment doesn't define you, and spiritually, sure, that's fine, but psychologically, that's a little stupid. I mean, if you spend most of your waking life trying to make a company succeed, and success is measured by a number, of course you're going to care about that number. Of course it's going to affect your identity. That doesn't make you broken. We identify people by what they do. He's a founder because he started a company. She's an athlete because she plays sports a lot. He's a doctor because he practices medicine. And the more someone does a thing, the more we tend to define them by that thing. And the more we tend to define ourselves by whatever that thing is. My mom, I think, is the best example of this. Motherhood is probably the best example, period. I mean, she raised 5 kids full-time, but she hasn't been responsible for the safety and welfare of her kids for almost 2 decades. But that's still how she defines herself to this day. So this labeling is a really enduring phenomenon. The scoreboard gives you a reason to feel things. That's the other thing the score is for. So if the number is good and you feel like the man, then fine. And if the number is bad and you feel like a failure, that's also fine. I'm not judging that. The feeling comes from the gap between what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Nobody panics when everything goes according to plan, but actually nobody feels much of anything when things go exactly according to plan. Emotion comes from that gap. So back to my earlier example, we thought we'd have 35 and we had 50. Excitement. We thought we'd have 35, we had 20. Fear. We thought we'd launch and that launch would work and it didn't. Shame. The scoreboard lets you track that tension, and that tension is part of being human. I mean, what the fuck are we doing here if not at least partly to feel things? When I was in middle school, I used to visit this theme park in Ohio. Called Kings Island, and they had this roller coaster called Outer Limits. It was indoors, so you couldn't really see what was coming. You just got launched into the dark, whipped around disoriented, and then you came back to physically the same place you started, which is objectively insane. You waited in line to be physically threatened by machines so you could return to your original location with worse hair. But that's not a failure. That's the point. The point was not transportation. The point was the physical sensation and the emotion that came with it. You chose the ride because you wanted to feel something. That's how a lot of these games work. You choose the business and you choose the goal, which means you choose the scoreboard, which means you choose the pressure and possibility of winning and losing. That's not separate from the game. That is the game. If the scoreboard could write you a love note, it would just say, you're welcome for the lessons. You're welcome for the feelings. You're welcome for the ride. And if you want a blurry Polaroid of you shitting your pants next to your dad, um, they're $100. So learn from the number, feel the emotion, then decide what you want to do with both. And that is where this becomes a deeper video than just business advice. The scoreboard can become machinery for presence. Not automatically, only if you choose to use it that way. And remember, all this stuff is a choice. Learning can bring you into presence because a tight feedback loop forces you to pay attention. It's an opportunity. What happened? Why did it happen? What did reality just teach me? What do I change now? When you're really learning, you're not lost in some abstract story about yourself. You are here watching reality respond to your behavior. That's just beautiful. Emotion can also bring you into presence because strong emotion gives you something immediate to experience. Fear in the body, pride in the chest, shame in the stomach, relief, like all in your nervous system. Before it becomes a story, it's just a sensation. And if you're present with it enough, that's all it needs to be. Before I'm failing becomes an identity, there's just the raw experience of fear. Or disappointment, pressure. So the scoreboard can do 2 things at once. It can teach the business what works, and it can show me what I'm attached to. It can make the future smarter through learning and the present richer through feeling. And that's why I think business is personal. I don't want to be above the scoreboard. I like the scoreboard. And I'm also aware that if I hit the number, I still have to brush my teeth or deal with my mind or figure out my relationships or try not to be an idiot. And eventually just die. So no, the scoreboard isn't the point, but checking out of the game does not automatically make you free either. The better move, at least for me, is just to play consciously. So choose the game, choose the scoreboard, use it to learn, use it to feel the ride. Just don't forget that you chose. And remember, we're all making up stories, so make up a good one. What do you think? Does this fit with your own experience? Let me know in the comments below. Have you reached this point of disillusionment? I want to know about it because you're not the first and you sure as heck won't be the last.