Jake Burhans argues that chasing money, status, and relationships to fill internal emptiness creates chronic stress and anxiety. Expression-based success, rooted in acting from an abundant inner state, leads to regulated emotions and faster achievement without the misery.
There are fundamentally two modes of success, and Western society has taught you the one that makes you miserable. The first one is compensatory success. This means that you are constantly chasing external things to try to compensate for an internal lack. You're chasing money, a job title, a status, a relationship, travel. You're constantly looking for things out there to fill this internal void in here. And this is how we get taught, right? In schools, if you get a D, you're worth nothing, right? If you don't make the varsity team, you're worth nothing. If you don't get into this college, you're worth nothing. So we start to tie our internal worth to external things. Then we spend the rest our life chasing those external things to try to make us feel better on the inside. This leads to a lot of stress and pressure and anxiety because it's always out there. It's always out of reach, right? It makes you dysregulated. You can't think as clearly. Overall, no bueno. The other mode of success is what I call expression-based success, or this is what would be called, you know, living from an abundant state or a sufficient state. This is when you are acting because you like what you do. It aligns with your values, and it's how you want to contribute to the world. Because when you line up on those 3 things, you actually enjoy the process of what you're doing. And ultimately, because you enjoy it, which makes you regulated and not stressed out and you can think clearer, you're going to get there quicker and you're going to get more done. So you get to have your cake and eat it too when you're living in an expressive-based model of success versus a compensatory.
