How Obsession Makes You Fragile

Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, John Dickerson talked with executive coach and professor Brad Stulberg about his new book Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing—Including You. They discuss what our identities really are and how we can evolve them to cope with change.

This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

John Dickerson: I had thought that identity was: OK, you form it in college, and then you add to it. It’s like, you basically get the vehicle in college, you’re on your own, you build the vehicle, and then, OK, maybe you add a racing stripe or you get the mud flaps or you get a fancy steering wheel. But I realized, when my eldest son went to college, that actually, what it did to change my life required a whole new vehicle. And so, when you write about identity, in other words, identity is not something you add to. It’s something you often rewrite at different stages in your life. Talk about identity a little bit in this context of change.

Brad Stulberg: Changes around us are challenging, but changes to us—to how we see ourselves—are even more discombobulating. Especially for those of us that have grown up in the West, there’s a real prioritization on self-esteem and self-confidence and just self-image, having this standard “self.” So, when things change, it can be seen as a threat to ourself.

So, the first thing that I would say that I uncovered in my research and reporting is that overidentifying with any one thing that you have really sets you up for fragility. “I have this house, I have this job, I have this income, I have this relationship.” Because all the things that you have eventually change. In many cases, they’re taken away.

The second thing that I think comes up often with identity is—especially in the corners of the world that I operate in, where people are interested in high performance and excellence—it’s very easy to say, “If you want to be great at something, you have to go all in. You have to be obsessed.”

And I think that this also makes you inherently fragile. Because when you get injured if you’re an athlete, or when it’s time to retire if you’re an entrepreneur, or when the album doesn’t win a Grammy when you’re a musician, or just when your kids leave the house and you cared really deeply about having them in there, it can be another really discombobulating experience. So, the metaphor that I like to use for identity is to think of it like a house. And if you have a house that only has one room in it and that room floods or catches fire, you’re in for it, there’s nowhere to go, it’s a really terrifying experience. Whereas if you have a house that has multiple rooms and one room floods or catches fire, you can go seek stability in those other rooms while you deal with the flood and fire.

And when you think about building an identity, I think it’s about building a house. And then over time you can renovate those rooms, you can add rooms, you can change rooms, you can spend less time in one room and more time in another room.

I think it’s really important for me to be explicit here. I’m not arguing that the key to navigating change or a life well lived is to be “balanced.” I think it’s okay to have seasons of your life where you really do spend a lot of time in one room, when you go all in, so long as you don’t let the other rooms get moldy. They have to remain available to you.

Right. You do a really great job of helping people be super intentional about finding your other rooms. If you think you’ve only got one room, you might actually have more, and here’s the process not just for identifying a room but giving yourself action items that help engage you. Do people ever say to you, “Oh, this is a lot of thinking about just day-to-day stuff. Do I have to really be so intentional? Do I have to really think about thinking this much? Can’t I just live my life?”

I think that a lot of people might say that. And what I would argue is: Yes, you can [just live your life] until life gets really turbulent, and then you’ll have to do that thinking in the moment. But I also think the intentionality matters, and I think that it matters perhaps more now than ever. On the show, you’ve done such a wonderful job covering what I just call, broadly, “the attention economy” and all the competing forces for our eyeballs, for our ears, for our attention in any way, shape, or form it can be had. And I think that if we are not intentional with how we spend our time and how we set our values and how we navigate the turbulent world, then forces that are really large and well capitalized and well resourced are going to do that for us. So, I do think that being intentional is important.

Right. If you don’t make the choice, Amazon is going to make it for you, or Twitter or Instagram is going to grab ahold of your emotions and make those choices for you.

And I think that there’s a really important balance, too, between just being in your head and just thinking, and then doing in the world. And I almost think of this as a being-doing cycle. Your being or your reflectiveness or your solitude or your reading a book like this and pondering it, that affects your doing—but your doing also affects your being. So, how you show up in the world, the projects that you take on, the relationships that you forge: That’s also going to have a real impact on your essential being. So, I think that people tend to get caught in these two extremes of I’m just going to think and I’m just going to be a contemplative or I don’t need to think about any of this; I’m just going to live my life. And like so many things, I think the answer isn’t either/or but both.