It's clear from my posting history that I am hugely biased towards "pushing myself" to extremes career-wise. But at least in my experience, that doesn't really translate to more stress, and quite often to less.
I have a theory that there's a constant level of happiness and misery that we experience in most normal situations that really has more to do with who we are than our situation. So for example, a guy may experience a certain level of anxiety about losing his job that doesn't depend on whether he's the janitor or the CEO. He will feel the same amount of pressure and exertion whether he's trying to finish mopping the floor on time or launch a successful IPO.
To the extent that this is true, you might as well be the CEO.
A related view is that our perceived difficulties are relative to our challenges. I used this example before: my wife and I are pretty busy with our 1 kid. Our rabbi is seemingly equally busy with his 10 kids. I bet we'd feel roughly as busy if we each doubled our number of kids.
Similarly, I didn't feel that it was "harder" to go to business school while working fill time than it was to just work. It all kinda feels the same, so the "pushing" part is more about being able to get yourself into the situation than handling the situation on on-going basis.
And the kicker is that it all works out way less stressful. If the CEO and janitor worry about losing their job about the same, but the CEO has a much nicer cushion if he actually gets fired, you might as well try to be the CEO. Similarly, if being an individual contributor and being a manager are about equally hard on you, be the manager because if you ever get sick of the job, you'll have 2x the opportunity (all the management jobs along with all the IC jobs) versus just being the IC.
All this is a long winded way to say - people over-estimate the stress of being at the next level, and under-estimate the reduction in background stress that actually being at that level brings.
> I have a theory that there's a constant level of happiness and misery that we experience in most normal situations that really has more to do with who we are than our situation.
I have a theory that there's a constant level of happiness and misery that we experience in most normal situations that really has more to do with who we are than our situation. So for example, a guy may experience a certain level of anxiety about losing his job that doesn't depend on whether he's the janitor or the CEO. He will feel the same amount of pressure and exertion whether he's trying to finish mopping the floor on time or launch a successful IPO.
To the extent that this is true, you might as well be the CEO.
A related view is that our perceived difficulties are relative to our challenges. I used this example before: my wife and I are pretty busy with our 1 kid. Our rabbi is seemingly equally busy with his 10 kids. I bet we'd feel roughly as busy if we each doubled our number of kids.
Similarly, I didn't feel that it was "harder" to go to business school while working fill time than it was to just work. It all kinda feels the same, so the "pushing" part is more about being able to get yourself into the situation than handling the situation on on-going basis.
And the kicker is that it all works out way less stressful. If the CEO and janitor worry about losing their job about the same, but the CEO has a much nicer cushion if he actually gets fired, you might as well try to be the CEO. Similarly, if being an individual contributor and being a manager are about equally hard on you, be the manager because if you ever get sick of the job, you'll have 2x the opportunity (all the management jobs along with all the IC jobs) versus just being the IC.
All this is a long winded way to say - people over-estimate the stress of being at the next level, and under-estimate the reduction in background stress that actually being at that level brings.