On a road trip with a friend through Ireland this past August, I listened to a podcast that featured Moby, the bald, skinny, spectacled techno producer who’s sold some 20 million records worldwide.
Moby told an intimate story about a night before the 2002 MTV Awards.
I didn’t know, but Moby was apparently one of the biggest music stars in the world at that time.
For the MTV Awards, he was being housed in a fancy hotel in Barcelona — “one of the most elegant hotels I’ve ever been to,” he says — in one of the hotel’s four penthouse apartments. In the other three apartments were Madonna, Bon Jovi, and P. Diddy.
And yet, the night before the awards, Moby started to feel suicidal.
The reality was had been given everything — money, fame, appreciation — and yet he wasn’t happy. He had tried to drink his troubles away, but even that didn’t work.
So there Moby was, in his penthouse apartment, trying to figure out how to open up the big glass windows so he could jump out and end the misery. (He couldn’t figure out the windows either.)
This story struck me when I heard it. But really, if you listen a bit, you will hear the same story from a lot of people who go from absolutely nothing to absolutely everything.
It feels great for a while. A pretty short while.
But if it turns out that this is really all there is to it — living in the penthouse apartment, in an elegant hotel, with Madonna and P. Diddy as neighbors, with all the money and fame and achievement you could ever want — what follows is first emptiness, then craziness:
“Is it my fault? Am I such an idiot that I cannot appreciate all this? How messed up am I?”
Or…
“Was I so blind to pick the the wrong goal? Did I work like a dog all my life to get to the wrong destination, one I never really wanted?”
Or…
“Is it that there’s no sense in having any goals to begin with? Is all achievement and striving ultimately a race to disappointment?”
These are ugly questions. Maybe you started feeling uneasy just reading them. It’s no wonder that people who find themselves ruminating on such questions often start to feel crazy or even suicidal.
Good news:
The answer to all three questions is ultimately, “No, that’s not it.”
I could go into the psychology and neurology of it, what I know of it, but really, it’s much better to hear a story or three about it, and to be inspired along the way.
The best and most inspiring bunch of stories I’ve found on this topic come from business coach Rich Schefren, from a talk that Rich gave a year ago.
Rich answers all the questions above, and tells you what goals really are, and what they are for.
It was new and inspiring to me when I first heard it.
I still think about Rich’s points often.
And so I want to share his talk with you once again, and remind myself of it as well. In case you’re curious, here’s Rich on stage, giving the best presentation he’s ever given: