4 Habits That Undermine Your Fulfillment and Success

AVAlexander Volchek

I always say that every person is capable of growing tens or hundreds of times over. Absolutely everyone! Because real growth and development are not a particular metric, the amount of money in your account, a grade on an exam or the number of diplomas you have. Learning what real growth is already means growing and moving forward. Today I will discuss the fundamental reasons people stop progressing in life. Each reason matters a great deal. Understanding these reasons will help you move forward considerably. Support my channel. Don't forget to like the video and leave comments. It is very useful to me, and I really need it, even if you have only been watching this video and known me for two minutes. Let me give you a habit related to work. It is probably something most people around the world experience: having a negative attitude toward your work, toward your daily labor. What does that mean? When you come to work and do various things, you feel negatively about the work. You feel negativity toward your bosses, your employees, what you do, what you are occupied with. This is the main, fundamental habit I am talking about, because I will go on to discuss various things connected with work.

It fundamentally concerns what you do. A person is constantly trying to find something interesting, exciting, fun, something that brings new ideas, new states, some particular pleasure. This habit is deeply destructive because you spend an enormous amount of time at work. Probably a third of your life, right? Imagine spending much of a third of your life constantly in a state of great disharmony. Most people I hear talking about work express some negativity. Expressing negativity in professional life comes from being unable to find yourself within your day. If you felt truly free, whatever job you had, you would have a strong foundation from which to transform that negativity. I am in no way saying that negativity would not arise. The question is whether it has become your habit, the basis of how you assess your day and move through it, or whether it happens occasionally, spontaneously, and is not fundamental to your life, not something that happens constantly.

This is a very bad habit that destroys your life. Notice where you act from negativity toward your boss, partners, employees, colleagues, what you do or the product you make. What arises inside you? Some people talk a great deal about how wonderful their job is, but if we brought their inner state to the surface, we would see that they spend a great deal of time in a state of intense negativity. Alongside this, I can name a work-related habit that strongly prevents a person from truly understanding what to do and knowing their next step. Consequently, it prevents genuine development and growth. It is the habit of constantly seeking perfection in the tasks you need to do. Why is someone a perfectionist at work? What is that? First of all, I am not saying you shouldn't do tasks well, or that doing them well is bad. People often do tasks really badly, and many things need polishing. The point is that perfectionism mainly arises when someone does not orient their work toward a clearly defined goal. Marketing is often an example.

There are simple examples in marketing. Take this video: someone might say its most important goal is the number of views it gets. Someone else might say it is the number of subscribers the video brings in. Another might say neither metric matters; the most important thing is that people watch the entire video, engage with the speaker and really get to know who I am, for example. Because watching three or four minutes of a video will never let you understand who I am, what I do, what I am involved in, my thoughts and the details. Never. You can write or say that the microphone is bad, the filming isn't right, that I said something wrong or you didn't like a word I used, but you won't truly get to know the person. In many videos, for example, I focus on people watching the whole video. I track that metric. Yet many marketers or editors work on tasks without orienting themselves toward the main goal. They sit and discuss how many people came from which channels, for example. I ask, “What difference does it make which channels they came from?”

What matters most is what percentage of those who arrived watched the entire video, how many watched it all. If the video is forty minutes or an hour—I don't know how long it will be—how many people watched the hour? I am not interested in which channels they came from. I may not even be interested in the number of views. What matters to me first is how many people watched the whole thing. Suppose a thousand people came to my video in one case, and a hundred in another. Of the thousand, three percent watched to the end: thirty people. Of the hundred, seventy percent watched to the end. The case where seventy people watched to the end turns out to be better. Of course it is. Three percent of a thousand is thirty people. Two and a half times better, almost two and a half times better. People very often don't calculate, notice or look at these things in life. I have given a very basic example, but with perfectionism and idealization, a person slips into their own psychological and physical issues. The only focus that addresses this problem and its cause is recognizing that the person does not have a precisely and correctly defined goal.

If a person defines the goal precisely and correctly, perfectionism will begin to disappear. Perfectionism and idealization are a major problem if you approach every task this way. I will repeat: I have absolutely nothing against certain tasks being carried through to completion. I always say that I would rather see a hundred and fifty out of five hundred tasks done, with thirty of those hundred and fifty done perfectly. That is much better than completing ten tasks out of ten. That is how I generally approach life, work, my daily activities and my family: having a great deal of variety. I am comfortable with some tasks not getting done. At the same time, there is always something that is perfect. I always allow for three elements: there are many tasks, some are not done, and some are perfect. It is important that some are not done at all, some are done badly, and some are done somehow. The question is what ultimately has an effect. We noticed this together while making videos. By the way, please write and tell me how long you have been watching me. I am always glad to receive comments.

It also helps me develop my channel. Don't forget to like the video. Even the small act of subscribing helps me enormously with developing my YouTube channel. We discuss filming for YouTube a great deal. It is constantly surprising to see that filming quality has almost no effect on how many people watch to the end or on the number of views. Often it can even make things worse if the image is too unusual or something is jumping around. You know, Sasha, this is interesting—you are filming me now—

It is interesting. Sasha is filming me now. Yesterday, we were riding with the family, with Polina, and she turned on a video. You can watch YouTube on the screen in front in my car. There was some video aimed at young people. She put it on for fun, and before that one of the children had put on a similar video. In this video, the image kept changing. It was some very famous American blogger, with millions of views, and the picture kept changing. After perhaps a minute or a minute and a half, Polina turned it off and said, “I can't watch this. The image keeps changing.” It was quite funny. The picture kept changing and moving, the shots kept changing, they were showing things, because that is a trend that is necessary nowadays on TikTok and YouTube generally. My wife cannot watch those videos at all. She says, “I can't watch that.” Neither can I, really. I don't need a constantly moving image. I mainly watch content for information. Often that sort of thing only provokes a negative reaction, negative emotions in me. I need focus, I need sound, perhaps sometimes I need to see the person, and I need the right captions at the right moment.

Again, everyone is different and chooses content for themselves. The question is: what is your goal? With perfectionism and idealization, too, the question is what goal you have set yourself. Another cause of serious deterioration is trying to seem like someone other than who you really are. I will touch on this briefly, though it deserves a topic of its own. Perhaps I will make a separate video about it. The main point is that people usually want to be different in order to seem better. For example, someone works as a taxi driver and says, “I'm not really a taxi driver. I have a business.” This is very common—Sasha is sitting here laughing, and so am I. “It's really common here.” Yes. Here too, right? “No, in Silicon Valley.” You mean that funny thing in Silicon Valley, where every taxi driver has a startup? “I'm not a taxi driver. I actually have a startup.” A person tries to seem like someone else, to speak differently. Above all, again, they want to seem better. Notice that if someone driving a taxi says they are not a taxi driver, that they have a business, to many people they will begin to seem worse, not better.

Many people don't understand that: they don't seem better. When a person tries not to be themselves, they don't simply want to be better. They actually become someone other than who they are. As soon as they become someone other than who they are, they have lost. They have lost enormously. And they have lost because—again, they have lost for two reasons. First, they have stopped developing, because someone who does not live their own life is defeated from the outset and will live in great suffering. Someone who does not want to acknowledge or be themselves, does not want to live their own life. And second, they have lost because they set out to seem better, but other people actually formed some opinion of them. Even if you do want to create a different impression, at least recognize that doing so does not necessarily require having two hundred businesses, a great deal of money or a great many credentials.

Incidentally, some wealthy people want to seem different, do not want to be known, do not want others to think of them as wealthy. I knew a very wealthy person—by very wealthy, I mean someone with more than a billion dollars. This person very much wanted to be an ordinary person. Why? Because when people learned that he had more than a billion dollars, they wanted to be with him for his money, rather than simply because he was a person. That is a problem. Avoiding the fact that you are wealthy is a problem too. Of course, our society often demands it. At the same time, the person who wanted to seem not wealthy was also losing. He was losing because he was not being who he was. He was not genuine. In any case, he was hiding something, was not genuine. One of the major reasons people deteriorate instead of developing is that, when choosing what to study, they are guided by the credentials of the person teaching. They say, “We will listen to someone who has made a lot of money about business. We will listen to someone with the world's largest community about spiritual development.”

“We will trust information from a scientist who has a Nobel Prize. We will listen to people with many children about developing a family.” People look at credentials. We all know that everyone wants to see the right bio on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. There is always a need for more credentials, a desire to add something else. Even I often start adding credentials when speaking in a video. Why? To give someone an anchor. Then they think, “Oh, wow, that's interesting!” You start adding: I managed a thousand people; I had six million customers; I am here in Silicon Valley with billionaire neighbors; I went to a meeting with extraordinary people in an exclusive community; I had a partner who earned his first billion dollars through privatization in Russia. And so on. You start adding, “I have four children,” and other aspects that act as triggers, influencing people. What is the problem? The problem is that, when choosing your education, you concentrate very heavily—

Not necessarily you personally, but people often concentrate on credentials and make an enormous mistake about why they are watching the video, what matters to them in it. For example, they focus on the credential that a person's business is worth ten billion dollars. Then the person says something about developing family relationships, and they start behaving the same way. In reality, that person is suffering in their family relationships more than ever, feeling lonely, unbalanced and unsettled. Or this is someone who believes there are no family values and has sixteen women or fifteen wives. You focus on what they say about developing a family, although their values are completely different from yours. You can listen to this person on some subjects, take certain things for yourself. But there are many areas where you will lose out badly and acquire a false understanding. Another major problem with credentials is that having one does not mean, first, that you can do the same thing, or second, that the person themselves can repeat it.

You don't know why they acquired that credential, what happened. NVIDIA is a good example. At the time this episode is being filmed, NVIDIA shares cost about a hundred and seventy dollars. Ten years ago, the shares cost just a few dollars, and the company has grown tens and hundreds of times over in recent decades. There is an enormous number of employees who were at the company—a thousand people—who now have not millions of dollars, but tens of millions. Does that mean they know how to earn ten million dollars? Can they give that advice? Of course you will say, “Of course it doesn't.” They cannot give you a copy of that model, tell you which company to join now so that you will earn twenty million dollars in ten years. How do you predict that? How do you arrive at it? Yet we believe people this way in life: about how they build businesses, how they develop their families, the states they experience, even on trips, in moments of insight or other states, without understanding or recognizing that each person's life is unique.