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Greg Faxon argues that 'never settle' is bad advice. Settling, he says, prevents burnout, forces you to prioritize what matters, and actually improves performance under pressure. It's not complacency. It's deciding what enough looks like.
Greg Faxon argues that 'never settle' is bad advice. Settling, he says, prevents burnout, forces you to prioritize what matters, and actually improves performance under pressure. It's not complacency. It's deciding what enough looks like.
We're often told that to be successful, we shouldn't settle. We should be pushing for more in every area of our life. Otherwise we'll end up overweight, broke and lonely. But what if settling is actually the key to success? What if there are times when lowering our expectations helps us achieve more? Here are three reasons why never settle is terrible advice. Number one, Settling helps you prevent burnout. The ecologist Edward Abbey once said, growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. In nature, everything goes through cycles of growth and decay. The same is true of business. It's normal for a company's revenue to fluctuate, even if the trajectory overall is upwards. Rapid growth can be just as damaging as stunted growth. For example, Starbucks closed hundreds of stores in 2008. Years of aggressive growth had ruined the customer experience, so they had to lay off thousands of people and they lost millions of dollars in the process. Or take fitness as another example. You can't lift weights every day and expect to get stronger without adequate rest. Your body just doesn't recover. The biggest gains in weightlifting and in life come over the span of years. So you need to choose something you can do for the long term. Otherwise you just burn out. Ernest Hemingway often stopped writing mid paragraph or even mid sentence, and he gave this advice to writers. The best way is to always stop when you're going good and when you know what will happen next. This is so counterintuitive, especially with something hard like writing. What you want to do is maximize all the creative energy you have while you've got it. But sometimes you need to stop in order to fight another day. You have to settle. Number two, settling helps us prioritize our time and energy. The writer David Sedaris once shared this theory that he heard from a successful business owner. She she told him to picture a four burner stove. One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two. It's easy to try to argue with this theory. You might ask, are these four areas of life really so separate? Like, if I work on my health, doesn't that also fuel my work life? And that's true to a certain extent. But it's also true that life is about trade offs. So you might read a book on growing your business and you act on that advice, only to see that your Marriage over here has suffered. So then you read a marriage book, hoping to work on that, and your business starts to flounder. Is it possible to achieve balance in your life? Of course it is. But balance requires settling, and so does unreasonable success. If you want to funnel all your time and energy into one area, you will necessarily be mediocre in the other areas. By acknowledging our limited time and energy, we're able to prioritize what matters most to us. Okay, number three. Settling helps us perform under pressure. There's a concept in psychology called the Yerkes Dodson curve. It says that performance is like an inverted U. So when you start off a little bit more stress and pressure helps you perform better, and then you reach an apex. But after that, more pressure actually decreases your performance. In athletics, they call this choking. In sales, they call it commission breath, which is basically when a salesperson cares so much about getting the sale, they're so needy that the prospect doesn't buy. And that's the problem with never settling. When you're attached to a certain outcome, you have more fear of failure, and you perform worse. And then there's the temptation to seek shortcuts when you're feeling desperate. You've probably heard of the Donner Party who set out for California in 1846. They left later than they really should have. So halfway through the trip, they met another explorer named Langsford Hastings. He convinced them that they could shave 300 miles off their journey by cutting through. Through what is now Utah. Unfortunately, the shortcut took them through the Salt Lake Desert. They ran out of water, lost most of their oxen, and added a month to the journey. So now they have to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the middle of winter. They got stranded and started eating each other. So optimization is great up to a point, but sometimes the biggest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. In conclusion, I think we need a new definition of settling. Settling isn't about watching five hours of tv, arguing with your wife, and doing a job you hate until the day that you die. That's more like complacency. A better definition of settling is to decide on. You're deciding on what enough looks like. But we rarely take time to do this right. Usually our goal just becomes more better, faster, and that's when we get ourselves into trouble. If you like this video, consider subscribing to the channel for more counterintuitive advice about success. Thank you.
