There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up in your body. It lives in your browser tabs. In the draft emails you never sent. In unfinished proposals, missed deadlines.
That exhaustion has a name. Jonathan Goodman calls it compulsive striving: the difference between ambition that originates from your own values and striving that originates from ego, fear, and the pressure to be what you think you should be.
I’ve been living in the second category for most of this year. Maybe you have too. The past 6 months I have built projects to show, attended events, kept adding to the list of galleries to email, people to contact, teaching gigs to chase, commissions to pitch, a ghost list of obligations that I carried everywhere but wasn’t able to act upon.
The Consistency Myth
Lately, I’ve been sitting with a piece by Jonathan Goodman in Forbes titled “Why Consistency Alone Fails and What Builds Real Habits.” Goodman argues something that feels entirely counterintuitive to our performance-obsessed culture: Consistency is for maintaining, but unhinged intensity is for gaining1.
We’ve been sold the compounding curve, the idea that showing up 1% better every single day will eventually, mathematically, unlock success. And if you’re already where you want to be, that’s probably true. Maintenance is real. But if you’re trying to make a meaningful leap, in income, in creative output, in the actual shape of your life, consistency alone won’t get you there.
What gets you there, Goodman argues, is something he calls unhinged intensity: short, focused, obsessive seasons of work aimed at a single target. A season, not something that matters for the next ten years, just for the next 2 to 3 months. The keyword apparently is season. Because the model only works if you actually let the season end.
What the First Half of the Year Was Really For
I am taking the liberty of calling the first 6 months of this year data. Data around what worked and what didn’t.
In the Small Bets2 framework, the idea is that you run low-cost, low-risk experiments to find what has traction before you pour everything into it. This is exactly what the exploratory phase is supposed to look like. Messy. Inconclusive. But full of real signal.
The difficult bit for me wasn’t the experiments. I was thinking I had to complete all of them at the same time, indefinitely, while also applying for jobs and being a present parent. That’s a recipe for overwhelm, with a serious dollop of guilt and shame. Here is what my 6 months looked like.
