How to Achieve Results Without Burnout: Ambition vs. Interest

AVAlexander Volchek

Today I want to explore an important question: how can a person actually achieve results? And how do you understand the difference between acting out of a desire for gain, out of ambition or some enormous personal desire, and, by contrast—or alongside that—having a genuine, living interest in something, in an activity? Can you achieve results? Can you achieve results when you simply do something because it has come into your life? This is not even a question of liking it. Serious results. And can you achieve results through ambition? Does that work at all? This is a very interesting subject. I live in Silicon Valley, I am heavily 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 create a startup: incubators, questions and answers, pitches. You need to contact two hundred investors, find customers, all sorts of things. And then there are people—an enormous number of people—who make money because they simply decided to do something. A man somewhere in Australia had a dog with cancer. He thought, “Why don't I create a vaccine to treat 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. Here, someone simply decided to treat his dog, and the media started writing about him, doing all sorts of things, contacting him everywhere. The person treating his dog was acting out of a genuine, living interest. He had no ambition to create some impressive, famous project. Why did I use projects as an example? Because Silicon Valley probably embodies those ambitions and spreads that ambitiousness throughout the technological world. Everyone wants to create startups; everyone talks about it. For fifteen years I have watched people talk about this endlessly, rehashing one piece of information after another. I have quite a systematic mind, and at the same time I perceive the spiritual across a very broad range and see everything in terms of life itself. And you see that the causes and effects are completely different from the explanations people give for why someone achieved a particular result. At the very beginning, I asked whether you can achieve results by doing something even without doing it out of love.

Because one idea constantly promoted in the world is that you must do your work out of love. If you do it out of love, you will achieve results. In companies, for example, there is a great deal of emphasis on having a mission. A mission, values—and then you will fully achieve some result. The question here is: is a mission an ambition, or is it a living, true path? Does someone who inherently brings goodness need to invent a mission? Did the man making a vaccine for his animal need to invent a mission and declare from the outset, “I just want to help all the animals on planet Earth”? He did not want to do that at all. He wanted to help himself find the right way to cure his dog. What mission? He was addressing a simple, normal question. Everyone told him his dog would die, and he wanted to save it. What mission could there be if I use artificial intelligence or create algorithms to manage my own health better? I pay quite a lot of attention to particular sensors that work with my body and to analyzing my various health results afterward. What mission is there supposed to be? What mission? 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? Well, I am not sure. I am not sure it is some extraordinary joy in my life. I would much rather look at a child and delight in them. Personally, that is what I prefer. I do a lot of gardening, for example. I do an enormous amount in the garden, a great deal. I think I could even create an entire series about it: I have thousands of plants or flower bulbs planted, perhaps fifty or a hundred or two hundred species—I do not know—and all the things involved in caring for them. But it seems like such a simple, ordinary part of life that I do not even feel there is anything special about what I have. I simply do something every day. On the one hand, I like certain things because they look beautiful to me. On the other hand, I simply do some things. I notice that I simply do them. And when I ask other people, “Well, is it beautiful?” someone says… Especially when you ask someone independent, they say, “Well, yes, I guess.” But you can see that it actually makes no difference to them.

They say, “What difference does it make? We can look at your garden here, or at the hundred trees in the wild forest or the wild plants farther out. What difference does it make to us whether there is something extra, something special you have done?” Do you need to attach a mission to that? Do you need to find a particular goal for it? Can a result emerge when you simply do something? Essentially, we arrive at two very important things. I will explain them through relationships between a man and a woman. I am introducing a concept here: there are contractual relationships. In our world, we have contractual relationships wherever we can enter into a contract. I hire someone and agree with them on what they are supposed to do and how they will be paid. They agree with me on when they will work, and so on. More or less, everyone tries to comply—or not comply—with that contract. Usually the compliance is relative. Some people are very serious and precise about it, others less serious. Airplane pilots, flight attendants, people working at border control, taxi drivers take it somewhat more seriously, right? Some people take it less seriously—mass-market marketers, for example, have a less serious attitude.

I am not putting anyone down. There are marketers who take their work very seriously. Some gardeners do not take it seriously, and some do. Some nannies take it seriously, and some do not. Some cooks do, and some do not. Some directors take their work seriously, and some do not. These are contractual relationships. You are constrained by a certain contract, and you know about it; you remember it. Wherever you go, you remain within the bounds of that contract, those agreements. And there are noncontractual relationships. Relationships between a man and a woman are often contractual. A contractual relationship does not necessarily mean a signed marriage contract. It can also mean living in a particular country under particular rules—for example, religious rules. I have been to Egypt, where a man can have three wives. I think you have to give notice if there will be other wives, and so on, but it is possible there. You can also specify in the contract that there will be one wife. But essentially, three is already a contract. Why? Because it is the law. Why not four? Why not five? Why not two? There is some sort of contract, right?

There are also rules there, various accepted rules. Those rules are a kind of contract, a particular social contract. And this is not just in Egypt. I used an example that many people would consider extreme. They would say, “What do you mean, three wives? That is wrong,” and so on. But if we look, most countries and most models of social organization have established rules about how men and women interact, how they treat one another, what each expects from the other, what the man is supposed to do, what the woman is supposed to do, and so on. Ask my wife: she will tell you an enormous number of things a man is supposed to do. She says, “That is what men do in every family.” I say, “Not in every family. That is not true. It is different everywhere.” But overall, there is a certain understanding. A person has an understanding of a particular contract. Yet if we look at a true relationship between a man and a woman, it can form only in the absence of a contract. Real love—because if the word “love” comes into it, and genuine interaction between two people, true interaction between two people, true interaction between two neighbors, or people we might call friends or acquaintances, then that genuine interaction is possible only without contracts.

Even between employees, or between an employee and a manager, genuine interaction can only be noncontractual. When we talk about people, wherever the word “person” comes into it, the basis can only be noncontractual. There is no contract; there is life. Someone will ask, “What does exist, then?” There are the laws of the Universe, a true perception of another person, certain rules and patterns of behavior. The true rules and patterns here are the causal connections in human interaction: karmic, psychophysical, inherited connections, those of the spiritual being, the spiritual order of the world and spiritual hierarchies—planetary, nonplanetary, beyond the planets, and so on. Those of astral worlds, every possible realm, everything there can be. There are foundations you can rely on, a vast array of them. But this is not a contract. It is infinity, an infinity in motion. It is not a contract.

An infinity in motion is not a contract. If we look at how all the planets move, how everything moves, it all seems to move according to a contract, according to rules. But essentially, there is no contract there. Humanity and science have defined a certain contract for themselves and cannot see beyond it. All our physics is based on this too. It cannot see beyond the contract. Start asking more questions, go further: describe what comes next. What will happen after that? What else will happen? What is guaranteed to happen? There are no guarantees. There are relatively known or unknown trajectories. We see this in the world, in the various events that happen, and in people's ability to predict even the weather, earthquakes, or something else, such as floods. It seems they can; it seems there is a probability; and it seems they cannot. There is life. A real relationship between a man and a woman can be based on a contract, and, again, contracts are present everywhere. They are there because of people's lack of development in terms of consciousness and 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 situation. There are circumstances where it will be impossible to put this into practice. You would have to reincarnate; you will not be able to do it because of restrictions in the social characteristics of the society, environment, or place where you live. And there is a noncontractual basis: that truth is a noncontractual basis. In the same way, imagine that, in terms of striving for achievement, ambition, or accomplishing anything in life, you 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 be 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 relationship, organized according to social expectations. I need to hang paintings on the walls. That is the right way to see things. I must have a hobby. I must walk or run—walk a lot, walk a little, jump or not jump, sit or stand, 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 contracts when you hire someone. We live in a social society. But there is life. When we talk about achieving a result, we need to look at the result we want. Is it contractual? Then ambition can be part of it, along with setting goals, requirements, and rules. Or is it undefined? If it is undefined, you enter into the movement of life. Everything moves; everything simply moves. Yesterday I was talking to someone close to me. He asked, “I want to fire someone. Is it all right for me to fire this person, or should I wait, or do something else?” I said, “I get the impression that you think you are doing something bad to them.” He said, “Of course I am doing something bad to them. They will lose their job.” I said, “So you think you control another person's life. Perhaps they need to lose their job, and you are preventing that loss. They need to take some other action. The very fact that you think they will be worse off, while you are this great, mighty figure controlling their life and figuring out how to make it good for them, shows how inflated your personality is in terms of ego, rather than healthy perception.”

It would be different if you came and said, “I do not understand whether this person should be fired or hired in terms of karmic cause and effect. They seem to be doing a poor job, but they also seem to be doing all right. From the standpoint of the social contract, I seem to be obliged to fire them. At the same time, perhaps I should not; perhaps they are doing their job.” But the question was framed differently. You think you control someone else's life. Look at how many businesspeople in the world talk about saving people, helping others, preventing various situations or conflicts. They speak everywhere and tell people about it. But that position is egotistical, demonic. Often. Not always, of course. There are many people who bring real benefit to the world, but there are also many demonic structures. Contractual ambition. So if, for example, you set yourself a task in terms of ambition and say, “I want to earn a hundred billion dollars,” you must know that this is not a contractual arrangement. It is life, something that can simply happen or not happen. Then you begin to approach all your actions as things you simply do.

Because if you know it might not happen, the very concept of ambition disappears. It does not exist. Olya, it does not exist at all. What ambition can there be when you know that this can both happen and not happen? You take it calmly, because understanding life means understanding and acknowledging this: anything beyond contractual control can turn out in different ways, and it makes no difference to you how it turns out. Wherever it does make a difference, there is a contract. Everywhere, a contract. But literally a thousand people on planet Earth will be able to earn a hundred billion dollars—in contemporary society, in our time. Tens of thousands. Did I say a hundred billion? Yes, a hundred billion. Probably a thousand people will be able to. So far, in contemporary society, only dozens have managed to earn that. Or a hundred. A thousand could do it. All right, ten thousand could. But compare that with a population of billions. What you are staking this on is just a tiny blip. “Still, I have a chance. I was born in a particular place; I am such a clever genius.” Come on! Look at who ultimately earned hundreds of billions. Where were those people born?

You will see that they had very different starting points. Very different circumstances, very different circumstances. When we are talking about a hundred billion or more, the circumstances are very different. Could things change so that the circumstances somehow even out? They could, but most likely the figures will move upward. A ten-trillion-dollar or hundred-trillion-dollar company will appear, and then a hundred billion will be like a billion today. Earning a billion dollars today is no longer all that much. A friend visited me recently, and I told him, “Look at what the most valuable companies in Russia are worth. Really take that in.” I remember how we used to look at an oligarch—Mordashov, Potanin, Deripaska—and think these were great, extraordinary figures, just out of this world. But look at their wealth: this year, the richest person in Russia has a net worth on paper of thirty-five or forty billion dollars. They do not have that in cash, to use the slang; they do not actually have that money. Now look at the 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 those people are like enormous structures. Mordashov is some colossal structure you cannot even get close to, right? It is a whole damn army. And here are some guys who built a startup, launched it, and sold it for fifty billion dollars. Twenty-three-year-olds. Amazing. And they had an impact on the world—a hell of a serious impact on the world. This was not just reselling some product or the Earth's natural resources and minerals. They really had a very serious impact on the present, on how an enormous number of people interact, so that an enormous number of people used their product—really used their product. Who do we ultimately know about? It is not some abstract thing being used somewhere out there. So we arrive at this: achieving results, achieving results is certainly possible both through ambition—on a contractual basis, in the way I am interpreting it today—and through living fully, when you simply do something without thinking about whether you like it or not. You simply do it, for some reason. Because in any real undertaking, there are things you like and things you do not like.

I spend a lot of time and attention on playing the piano, but there are things about it that I only like to a degree. They are difficult. It is all relative. Do I enjoy devoting ten percent of my time every day, or twenty percent, sometimes thirty percent of my day, to the piano, in terms of the share of my day and efficiency? That is a big question. So I take a neutral attitude toward it. It makes no difference. I could lose it today or tomorrow. Could it turn into some serious result? It could turn into an extraordinary result. If we listen to accounts of studying music and what happens to people who do it, we will see that it has an incredible effect on their entire lives. In terms of people's development, for example, particularly before the age of twenty, bringing music into their lives has an incredible effect. I am sure that if someone has never studied music and begins at forty, it has an incredible effect on their life. If they have studied it and continue to do so, 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 entire spiritual being. These are incredible worlds. And this is just one small area.

I am just highlighting one small area here. In the same way, someone can simply cook food and approach it not…

…from the perspective of running a blog. I meet so many people who say, “We work with food; we have blogs about proper nutrition and all that.” You start asking further questions and see that this is not their life. This is not their life. They hire people to cook for five people. Or they are too lazy; they find it a problem to prepare particular foods for themselves or to have variety. They do not read through all the details of what those products actually are. They readily allow themselves to eat poor-quality food, while promoting quality in general. My wife laughed about something like this recently. She was invited to do yoga with her friends or acquaintances, and she went. When she came back, I asked, “How did you end up at yoga? What were you doing there?” She said, “I went because they are nice people, and we spent some time together. Though afterward, we ate some little pies.” And she laughed about it. We periodically discuss this in terms of the approach we take; that is precisely the question of approach. Or someone exercises, then goes to Starbucks in the morning and buys a drink in a big cup with four times the daily amount of sugar and a whole cupful of ice.

They would be better off not exercising at all and not drinking that cup, and their health would be guaranteed to be better. They will never compensate for that drink by exercising during the day. Never! There is no relationship, no correlation at all. Exercise brings its own benefits and drawbacks. That drink only does harm, often unrelated to the benefits and drawbacks on the other side, because exercise has both benefits and drawbacks. This is very important: there are benefits and drawbacks. That is what a real perception of life is. And so, in the things you do and the tasks you set yourself, awareness of this—awareness of this, a correct understanding of the goal—is what leads to a person's real development.