Why Reaching Here Won’t Get You There

There’s a quiet law humming underneath much of life, a kind of moral physics we don’t openly discuss but sense intuitively, like gravity pulling beneath our feet.

It’s this: The most meaningful things in life cannot be pursued directly.

Enduring happiness, for example, isn’t something you achieve by indulging in a never-ending buffet of pleasurable experiences (people have tried). Chase happiness directly and you often end up with a sort of empty restlessness, not joy. Instead, happiness tends to emerge when you forget to look for it—when you’re absorbed in raising a child, or serving a cause, or quietly just doing work that feels worth doing.

Respect is the same way. Try to force it and you come across as desperate. Try to demand it and people pull away. But live with integrity, show up consistently, speak honestly—and over time, people trust you.

Even success and wealth plays by these rules. The people we think of as “successful” are the ones who became obsessed with the craft, not the prize. They were busy solving real problems, serving real people, building something that mattered—while others were polishing résumés and chasing titles. Eventually, the spotlight found them, but by then they had stopped looking for it.

These aren’t just personal observations—they’re structural features of how human flourishing works. And yet a lot of self-help dogma encourages the exact opposite: set goals, measure progress, go after what you want. We lionize hustle and optimization. But what about the things that don’t follow this logic? There are some things that refuse to be cornered by strategy. They show up only as byproducts, never on demand.

To be clear, this isn’t about renouncing ambition. It’s just about reordering it. Direct pursuit makes us anxious. It tightens the grip, narrows the focus. We grow obsessed with outcomes and impatient with process. But indirect pursuit—aiming not at the trophy, but at the habits and values that naturally give rise to it—creates a more approachable and sustainable posture. It invites patience. It rewards sincerity. It builds trust over time, both in ourselves and in the world.

As I continue to get older, I see this paradox over and over. So I’ve made a shift—from trying to get things to trying to become the kind of person from whom those things tend to emerge. As Charlie Munger eloquently said “The best way to get a good spouse is to deserve one.” That’s the deeper logic at work in the people we quietly admire. They don’t always look like they’re chasing the big things. But the big things seem to find them.

So what does this mean, practically? 

It means you don’t become happy by asking yourself if you’re happy. You become happy by losing yourself in meaningful activity. You don’t earn trust by trying to appear trustworthy. You earn it by doing the right thing when no one’s watching. And you certainly don’t receive love by demanding it. You become lovable by the way you treat others and show up in the world.

The next time something you want feels elusive, don’t instinctively reach higher. Instead, think about the direction in which you’re reaching.

Good Advice, Rarely Followed

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the merits of basic good advice. Simple things like: get more sleep, spend less than you earn, call your parents, move your body, put down your phone, save for the long term, pay attention. They’re not great mysteries. They’re not hidden in secret textbooks or locked away by elite institutions. Instead, they’re more likely printed on refrigerator magnets, woven into cliché hand towels, and delivered ad nauseum in commencement speeches year after year. 

And yet. Most of us nod, silently agree—and then just carry on living as if the advice were meant for someone else. Why?

Part of the problem is that common sense doesn’t feel profound or urgent. There’s no penalty for ignoring that thing today. Skip a workout, you’re fine. Spend too much on dinner, life goes on. Distract yourself for an evening, and nothing tangibly breaks. Instead the consequences arrive silently, compound quietly, and only years later do we discover we’ve traded intention for complacency, resilience for fragility, and depth for distraction.

But there’s also a deeper and more obvious resistance to practical advice. It’s usually not fun. To follow it is to decline the pleasures of the immediate for some promise land of the distant. That’s particularly hard in a culture that’s been engineered to monetize distraction and celebrate indulgence. Doing the obvious thing—closing the laptop, walking outside, initating the difficult conversation—requires a stubborn act of imagination: believing that your future self is as real and deserving as your present cravings.

The point of failure isn’t the lack of knowledge. We fail for lack of seriousness. As author and entrepreneur, Derek Sivers so eloquently once said, “if information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” To live by what we already know would mean admitting that discipline, not brilliance, is what separates flourishing from drift. It’d mean taking responsibility for our outcomes and accepting that we’re vulnerable, impulsive, and emotional humans after all. 

The irony is that the good advice remains free, simple, unchanged, and waiting. The same truths passed down for generations, the same lessons printed into every self-help book on the shelf. If you actually follow them, you become unusual, even extraordinary—not because you discovered something new, but because you finally acted on what everyone else keeps pushing off for tomorrow.

The rarest kind of wisdom isn’t novel insight. It’s old insight, practiced. Good advice isn’t hard to find, it’s just rarely followed.