Twenty years ago, I took a 7 a.m. class that I can’t say I ever looked forward to. In part because of the time slot, but also because it was about the interior life, becoming a certain kind of person, and I hated it because I was good at the other thing. Give me a task with a deadline, and I’d work until it was done. Ask me to sit still with no deliverable at the end, and I genuinely had no idea what to do. I’d been a relentless achiever for years — not a trait anyone punishes you for. Mostly they promote you, applaud you, congratulate you. Even if your motives, means, and sanity are all questionable.
I mention it because a lot of high-functioning people are wired this way, and I’ll say it plainly: It can be and often is a gift. The drive that gets you named in an issue like this one is the drive that has helped build real things and created real positive change for communities, companies, clinics, nonprofits, and families. The applause is earned. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for being good at what they do.
But that class was after something the achieving couldn’t give me. What I saw was this: Two people can do the same impressive work but be running on completely different engines. One engine builds because the next win will temporarily settle something inside them. Somehow they’ll prove they’re enough, find a quick fix from the ensuing promotion, and quiet the underlying insecurity and doubt. The other engine builds from a place that’s steady, intrinsic, and settled, so the work is actually the byproduct of the interior life. Outward success is merely the overflow of what’s inside, rather than a temporary fix for it.
From the outside, it’s often hard to tell the engines apart because they produce the same output, the same résumé. The difference is in how it feels when the light goes out at night. One engine finishes a good day and feels it. The other starts chasing the next goal before dinner, because a win that has to prove something has a shelf life of about an afternoon or until the applause disappears.
I ran the first engine a long time, and what slowed me down wasn’t burnout. It was a suspicion I couldn’t shake — that I had the order backward.
Henri Nouwen spent much of his life pointing gently at the same thing. Beneath all our doing, he’d say, there is also a being — a self already loved by God, already at home, before it accomplishes a thing. He offered this insight not as a rebuke, but as an invitation: You can work from that place instead of toward it.
That reordering changes what the work is for. When the doing grows out of the being, the work opens us to something recognition can’t reach. Not the applause, but the actual difference it makes in one person’s life, home, community, and city.
Because the lasting good of our work comes, in the end, not first from the good we do, but from the person we are while we do it. Same effort, same output — but one flows from a settled life and lands as impact; the other chases a destination that keeps moving.
So, Columbia go-getters, keep building. Our city needs what you make. Start the company, take the promotion, chase the hard thing. Every so often, though, check what engine you’re running on. Ask whether the next win is meant to complete you or express you. One of those roads has an end you’ll never reach. The other doesn’t need one because you’re already home, and the work is the overflow.
