How to Achieve Results Without Burnout: Ambition vs Interest

In this video, I examine one of the central myths of today’s achievement culture: that results come through ambition, goals and a mission. I live in Silicon Valley, and for fifteen years I have watched thousands of people try to build successful projects according to the right formulas — pitches, investors, incubators, a mission, values. And at the same time I have watched other people, without ambitions or strategies, achieve results the first group can only dream of.

Can ambition produce serious results, and when does it actually work? Why is real life possible only outside a contract, and why do real results appear when you simply do the work without knowing whether you like it or not?

Results from a genuine, living interest

Today I want to explore an important question: how can a person truly achieve results — understanding when you are acting out of a desire for gain, out of ambition, out of your own enormous desires, and when, in contrast to that or alongside it, you have a genuine, living interest in something, in an activity. Can you achieve results when you simply do something because it has come into your life? It isn’t even a question of whether you like it. Serious results. And can you achieve results through ambition? Does it work at all?

This is a very interesting topic. I live in Silicon Valley, I am very involved in IT projects, and I even have a large channel about artificial intelligence. It is very interesting to see which people make money. There is so much talk about the right way to build a startup: incubators of some kind, questions, answers, pitches. You need to get in touch with two hundred investors, find customers, a whole lot of things. And then there are people — an enormous number of people — who make money because they simply decided to do something.

A man was sitting somewhere in Australia, and his dog was sick with cancer. He thought: “Why don’t I create a vaccine to cure my dog?” He created some kind of treatment — and now Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, is talking about him. Amazing! When he was creating that vaccine, did he think Sam Altman would write about him? Hardly.

I know an enormous number of people who want to meet Sam Altman and work with OpenAI. They make an incredible range of efforts. And here someone simply decided to cure his dog — and the media started writing about him, and people started contacting him everywhere.

The man who was curing his dog was acting out of a genuine, living interest. He had no ambition to create some impressive, famous project.

Why did I take my example from projects? Because Silicon Valley is probably the embodiment of these ambitions and the source that spreads this ambitiousness to the whole world, as far as the technological world is concerned. Everyone wants to build startups, everyone talks about it. And for fifteen years I have watched everyone talk about it endlessly, rehashing one piece of information after another. I have a fairly systematic mind, and at the same time I see the spiritual across a very wide range and perceive everything in a very living way. And you see that the causes and effects are completely different from the ones you use to explain why a person achieved this or that result.

From the very beginning I asked the question: can you achieve results while doing something not even out of love?

Do you need to invent a mission?

Because in the world there is a lot of talk about how you have to do your work out of love: if you do it out of love, you will achieve results. In companies, for example, they talk about this a lot: there must be a mission. A mission, values — and then you will achieve results.

And here is the question: is a mission an ambition, or a living, true path? Do you need to invent a mission for a person who brings goodness from the start? Did the man who was making a vaccine for his animal need to invent a mission and declare right away: “I just want to help all the animals on planet Earth”? He didn’t want to do that at all. He wanted to find the right way to cure his dog. What mission? He was solving a simple, normal problem. Everyone told him the dog would die, and he wanted to save it.

What mission can there be if I use artificial intelligence or create some algorithms to manage my health better? I pay quite a lot of attention to particular sensors that work with my body, and then to analyzing my various health indicators. What mission is there supposed to be? I am not doing it for humanity. I am doing it simply to understand it and to make the right decisions.

Do I like doing it, do I love doing it? I’m not sure. I’m not sure it is some super-joy of my life. Personally, I find it far more pleasant to look at a child and delight in them.

I, for example, do a lot of gardening. I do an enormous number of things in the garden. I think I could even make a whole series about it: I have thousands of plants or flower bulbs planted there — maybe fifty, a hundred or two hundred species, I don’t know — and the way you look after all of it. But it seems such a simple, ordinary, everyday activity to me that I even feel there is nothing special about what I have. I simply do something every day.

On the one hand, there are things I like because I want them to look beautiful; on the other hand, some things I simply do. I notice that I simply do them. And when I ask outsiders, “So, is it beautiful?” — especially if you ask an independent person — they answer: “Well, yes.” But you see that it actually makes no difference to them.

They say: “What difference does it make? We’re looking at your garden here, and farther on you have a hundred trees of wild forest growing, wild plants. What difference does it make to us whether there is something extra here, something special of yours?” Do you need to graft some mission onto that? Do you need to look for some particular goal for it? Can a result come about when you simply do something?

Contractual and noncontractual relationships

Essentially, we arrive at two very important things. I will explain them using the example of relationships between a man and a woman. I am introducing this concept: there are contractual relationships. In our world, there are contractual relationships wherever we can enter into a contract. I hire a particular person and agree with them on what they are supposed to do and how they get paid. The person agrees with me on when they work, and so on. And more or less everyone tries to keep, or not keep, that contract.

Usually the keeping is relative: some people are very serious and precise about it, others less serious. Airplane pilots, flight attendants, people at border control, taxi drivers are more serious. Mass-market marketers, for example, have a less serious attitude.

I am by no means putting anyone down. There are marketers who work very seriously. There are gardeners who don’t take their work seriously, and there are those who do. There are nannies who work seriously, and there are those who don’t. There are cooks who take it seriously, and there are those who don’t. There are directors who work seriously, and there are those who don’t. These are contractual relationships: you are bound by a certain contract, you know about it and remember it. You have gone out somewhere while staying within the zone of that contract, those agreements.

And there are noncontractual relationships. Relationships between a man and a woman are often contractual. And a contractual relationship doesn’t necessarily mean a signed marriage contract. A contractual relationship is also when you are in a particular country, within particular rules — in religions, for example.

I have been to Egypt, and there a man is allowed to have three wives. I think you have to give notice there that there will be other wives, and so on, but it is possible. Or you can write into the contract that there will be one wife. But essentially, three is already a contract. Why? Because it is the law. And why not four, why not five, why not two? It is some kind of contract.

There are also various accepted rules there. And these rules are a kind of contract, a particular social contract. And it isn’t only in Egypt. I gave an example that many people consider extreme. They will say: “What, three wives? That’s wrong.” But if we look, in most countries, in most models of how social society is organized, particular rules have been formed: how a man and a woman interact, how they treat each other, who expects what from whom, what a man must do, what a woman must do.

Ask my wife — she will tell you an enormous number of things that a man must do. She says: “That’s what men do in every family.” I say: “Not in every family. That isn’t so. It’s different everywhere.” But on the whole there is a certain understanding: a person understands a particular contract.

Even between an employee and a manager, real interaction is possible only on a noncontractual basis. When we talk about people — wherever the word “person” comes in — there can only be a noncontractual basis. There is no contract — there is life.

An infinity in motion is not a contract

Now someone will ask: “Then what does exist?” There are the laws of the Universe, a true perception of another person, certain rules, patterns of behavior. The true rules and patterns in this case are the cause-and-effect connections of human interaction: karmic, psychophysical, hereditary, the connections of the spiritual being, of the spiritual order of the world, of the spiritual hierarchies — planetary, nonplanetary, extraplanetary and so on. The connections of the astral worlds, of all possible zones, of everything there could possibly be. That is, there are points of support you can lean on — a huge layer of these points of support. But it isn’t a contract; it is infinity, an infinity in motion.

If we look at how all the planets move, and everything in general, it seems that everything moves according to a contract, according to rules. But essentially there is no contract there: it is humanity and science that have defined a certain contract for themselves, and they can’t see beyond that contract. All our physics is based on this too: it can’t see beyond the contract.

Start asking more questions, start going further: describe what comes next. What will happen next? What else will happen? What is guaranteed to happen? And there are no guarantees there. There are relatively known or unknown trajectories. And we see this in the world — in the various events that happen and in how people can predict even the weather, an earthquake, a flood or something else. It seems they can, it seems there is a probability, and it seems they can’t. That is, there is life.

A real relationship between a man and a woman can be based on a contract — once again, contracts are present everywhere. They are present because of people’s lack of development in terms of their consciousness, their entire spiritual world. Can you live without a contract? You can. A man and a woman can agree to live that way.

Everywhere, in every situation? Not in every one. There are situations where it will be impossible to put into practice. You will have to reincarnate: you won’t be able to do it because of the limits set by the social characteristics of the society, the environment or the place where you live. And there is a noncontractual basis — that truth is the noncontractual basis.

A contractual result and the movement of life

In the same way, imagine: in terms of striving for achievement, ambition, accomplishing anything in life, you can define a certain contract for yourself and say:

• “If I work at this job, I will have a successful future.”
• “If I work at this job, I will make money.”
• “If I work at this job, I will definitely get promoted.”
• “If I meet the right man, I will have a happy life.”
• “If I graduate from university, I will have a good job.”
• “I need to call my mother once a week — then we will have a proper, socially well-built relationship.”
• “I need to hang paintings on the walls — that is the right perception.”
• “I absolutely must have a hobby, or I absolutely must walk or run — walk a lot, walk a little, jump or not jump, sit or stand, or do yoga, or something else.”

These are all contracts. Is there good sense in these contracts? Of course there is — just as there is good sense in the contracts you make when hiring someone. We live in a social society. But there is life.

Yesterday I was talking with someone close to me. He asks me: “I want to fire someone. Is it all right for me to fire him, or should I wait, or something else?” I say: “I have the feeling you think you are doing something bad to that person.” He says: “Of course I’m doing something bad to him. He’s going to lose his job.”

I say: “So you think you are in charge of another person’s life. But maybe he needs to lose his job, and you are holding back that loss. He needs to take some other action. And the very fact that you think the person will be worse off, while you, so great and mighty, are in charge of his life and thinking about how to make things good for him, shows how inflated your personality is in terms of ego rather than in terms of healthy perception.”

It would be different if you had come and said: “I don’t understand whether this person should be fired or hired in terms of karmic cause and effect. He seems to be doing a poor job, but he also seems to be doing all right. From the standpoint of the social contract, I seem obliged to fire him. At the same time, maybe I shouldn’t fire him — maybe he is doing his job.” But the phrase was framed differently: you think you are in charge of someone else’s life.

Look at how many businesspeople in the world talk about how they save people, help others, prevent various situations or conflicts, speak everywhere and tell everyone about it. But that position is egotistical, demonic. Often — not always, of course. There are very many people who bring real benefit to the world, but there are also very many demonic structures. Contractual ambition.

So if you set yourself a particular task in terms of ambition and say, “I want to earn a hundred billion dollars,” you must know that this is not a contractual story. It is life of the kind that can simply happen or not happen. And then you begin to treat all your actions as things you simply do.

When the very concept of ambition disappears

Because if you know it might not happen, the very concept of ambition disappears. Olya, it doesn’t exist at all. What ambition can there be if you know that this can both happen and not happen at the same time?

And you take it calmly, because understanding life is when you understand and acknowledge the following: everything that lies outside contractual control can turn out in different ways, and it makes no difference to you how it turns out. Because wherever there is a difference — everywhere, there is a contract.

But literally a thousand people on planet Earth will be able to earn a hundred billion dollars — in today’s society, in our time. So far in today’s society, dozens of people have managed to earn that. Or a hundred. A thousand will manage. All right, ten thousand will manage. And you are staking on this among billions of people. It is just a tiny blip you are staking on: “Still, I have a chance. I was born in a particular place, I’m such a clever genius.” Come on! Look at who ended up earning hundreds of billions. Where were those people born?

And you will see that they had very different starting positions, very different circumstances. When we are talking about figures of a hundred billion and up, the circumstances are very different. Could this change so that the circumstances somehow even out? It could, but most likely everything will grow upward. A company worth ten trillion or a hundred trillion will appear, and then a hundred billion will be what a billion is now. Earning a billion dollars today is no longer all that much.

A friend came to see me recently, and I told him: “Look at what the most valuable companies in Russia are worth. Take it in.” I remember how we used to take the oligarchs — Mordashov, Potanin, Deripaska — and think these were some great, simply cosmic people. But if you look at their wealth: this year the wealth of the richest man in Russia is thirty-five or forty billion dollars. That is his relative wealth; he doesn’t have that cash, as they say in slang. Now look at the same kind of valuations of an enormous number of other companies. Or look at how much money is being poured into technological infrastructure in the United States or China.

You will see that these people are such huge structures. Mordashov is some colossal structure you can’t even get close to. A whole damn army. And here some guys wrote a startup, launched it and sold it for fifty billion dollars. Twenty-three-year-olds. Amazing. And they had a hell of a serious impact on the world. Those men simply resell some product, the Earth’s resources and minerals. These guys really had a very serious impact on the present day, on how an enormous number of people interact: an enormous number of people truly use their product. Who do we end up knowing? It isn’t some abstract thing being used somewhere out there.

So we have arrived at this: achieving results is of course possible both through ambition — in my reading today, on a contractual basis — and through a full life, when you simply do some work and don’t think about whether you like it or not. For some reason, you simply do it.

In any undertaking there are things you like and things you don’t

Because in any real undertaking there are things you like and things you don’t. I give a great deal of attention to the piano, I practice it, but there are things in it that I like only relatively. They are difficult. It is a relative matter. Do I like setting aside ten percent of my time every day for the piano, or twenty, sometimes even thirty percent of my day — in terms of the share of my day and efficiency? That’s a big question. So I treat it neutrally. It makes no difference. I could lose it today or tomorrow.

Can it turn into some serious result? It can turn into a cosmic result. If we look at what happens to people who study music, we will see that it has an incredible effect on their whole lives. For people’s development, for example, especially before the age of twenty, bringing in music has an incredible effect on life. I’m sure that if a person never studied music and starts at forty, it has an incredible effect on their life. If they studied it and continue to, that also affects their life, because it is an incredible world in terms of their physical system, psychological system, mental system, astral system, spiritual system and their entire spiritual being. These are incredible worlds. And this is just one small zone — I’m simply shining a light on one little zone right now.

In the same way, a person can simply cook food and approach it not from the position of running a blog. How many people I meet who say: “We work with food here, we run blogs about proper nutrition and all that.” You start asking further questions and see that it isn’t their life. They hire people who cook for five. Or they are lazy: it is hard for them to cook particular food for themselves or to make it varied. They don’t read to the end what these products actually are, they easily allow themselves to eat something poor-quality, but in general they promote quality.

My wife laughed about this recently. She was invited, and she went to do yoga with her girlfriends — or with acquaintances. She came back, and I say: “How did you end up at yoga? What were you even doing there?” She says: “I went, there are just nice people there, I spent some time with them.” And she adds: “Though afterward we ate some little pies.” And she simply laughed about it. We discuss this from time to time in terms of approach — that is exactly what approach is about.

Or a person exercises, and then in the morning drives to Starbucks and buys himself a big cup of some drink with four times the daily dose of sugar and a whole cup of ice.

He would be better off doing no exercise at all and not drinking that cup — and his health would be guaranteed to be better. He will never make up for that cup by exercising during the day. Never!

There is no dependence here at all, no correlation. He exercises — and brings in his own pluses and minuses. And with that cup he does nothing but harm, often unrelated to those pluses and minuses, because exercise has both pluses and minuses. This is very important — that there are both pluses and minuses there. That is what a real perception of life is.

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