Risk-taking floods your brain with serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins, but each win raises the bar, so you need bigger risks for the same high. Driven people stay calm in chaos and make better decisions under pressure, then deliberately create new challenges when things get safe just to feel that rush again.
I was addicted to risk. So what happens when we take a risk and it pays off is our brain is flooded with serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. It creates this sense of well-being and safety and satisfaction. But the problem is every time that we take a risk and it pays off, the next time we need to take a bigger risk and have a bigger payoff in order to achieve that same level of well-being and satisfaction. Driven personality types, when we are in a stressful situation, one that will elicit a fight or flight response, in normal people, we actually go into calm in the chaos. We actually feel most alive when everything around us is falling apart. And this is a very useful evolutionary adaptation. This is what allows us to make the hard decisions and be the leaders and build companies. Really useful, except for when we're safe. This is why when things are going well, we create a new fire so that we can elicit that performance.
