Why Should You Know This Man?

This is Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. And I'm going to tell you about him in a minute. But first, let me tell you about the hedonic treadmill.

Because, I bet you are running as fast as you can on it.

Marshall has a better idea. And his better idea is the One Question you need to ask yourself this week.

Are You Running on the Hedonistic Treadmill?

Leading up to each success, it’s easy to get distracted by all sorts of trophies: the big job, the big salary, the big house, the big boat, not to mention the country club membership. But people who belong to that country club have even bigger jobs and bigger salaries and bigger houses and bigger boats.

So, you redouble your efforts. You work harder, you get even more things, you outgrow your country club, and you join a bigger one where—guess what?—the toys are larger still.

You keep going and going, until you are working so hard that you never see the country club, other than an alert that pops up on the phone when your kids post pictures on Instagram from the pool.

Lucky them. Not so lucky you.

It’s not your fault. This is a problem experienced by many, and a term was coined for it more than fifty years ago: the hedonic treadmill.

And it’s the opposite of unwinding on a carefree, rejuvenating carousel ride.

As we make more money, we want more things, and as we get more things we expect those things to bring us happiness . . . but they do not. Those things provide a temporary respite, but no permanent gain in our level of happiness.

So, we jump back on the treadmill to make more, get more, and hope for that elusive permanent state of nirvana, which never comes.

Making your peace with Wonderhell often means stepping off that hedonic treadmill and changing your measure of success. The most conclusive, comprehensive way to make this change is by switching your metric from how much you have to how many you can help. (Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in Adaptation-Level Theory, ed. M. H. Appley, 1971

Over and over, successful people have told me that they avoided burnout by no longer pushing for achievement for themselves, for their own trophy cases. Instead, they refocused their passion on those who count on them: friends, employees, fans and followers, family.

Marshall's Story Has Lessons for Us All

This shift in focus is what prompted Dr. Marshall Goldsmith to create the MG100, a collective of the top executive coaches in the world. It all started when Dr. Goldsmith, the number-one executive coach in the world, attended industrial designer Ayse (Eye-Shay) Birsel 's Design the Life You Love program and tried an exercise that would show him how he could do just that.

Ayse had asked participants to write down the names of their heroes.

For Marshall, this list included Frances Hesselbein (former CEO of the Girl Scouts and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom), Alan Mulally (former CEO of Ford Motor Company and Boeing Commercial Airplanes), Dr. Jim Yong Kim (president of the World Bank), Peter Drucker (founder of modern management), Hersey (noted behavioral scientist and a personal mentor of Marshall’s), and Warren Bennis (organizational consultant and one of the world’s greatest leadership thinkers). Then Ayse asked the group to describe what made them think of these individuals as heroes.

“I wrote that they were all great teachers and very generous,” explains Marshall. “She then challenged us to be more like our heroes in designing the lives we love.”

Marshall decided that he would teach everything he knew to one hundred students who were already carving a path of excellence for themselves as executives, authors, thought leaders, and coaches. He posted a video on LinkedIn, expecting to get a handful of applicants, and was surprised to get eighteen thousand responses. He chose the most interesting applicants, and challenged them to do exactly what he intended to do for them: teach others in their circle everything they knew, all in an effort to help as many high performers as possible perform at even higher levels.

For Marshall, this work wasn’t an abrupt switch. He’d already been intentional with his time and his mentoring throughout his career, just as his mentors had been with him. He had good role models for this work, and he was a good role model, too. But his efforts at this stage represented a fuller acknowledgment that his measurement of success was not in the number of digits in his bank account, but in the number of lives he had changed for the better.

Marshall chose this new direction toward the end of a storied career, but we need not be in the twilight of our own career to shift toward what works for us.

You can -- and should -- start now.

P.S. If you know you are made of more, join nearly 2M people who have watched me challenge them to live into their Wonderhell in my talk on TED.com .

P.P.S. If you want to pick up a copy of Wonderhell, from which this newsletter is excerpted, you can do that here .

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