Note: This is a non-technical post exploring drive for excellence.

I was thinking about what drives people who are top of their field? What makes Alex Honnold climb Taipei 101 without ropes, what makes David Goggins run ultramarathons with broken ankle, what makes Elon Musk sleep on the floor at the factory, what makes Jensen Huang and other top CEOs keep grinding, what makes Bryan Johnson (the “don’t die” guy) blueprint his life, or Tiger Woods, or MrBeast, or whoever you can think is out there pushing the boundary of whatever they are doing.

What makes you do what you do and push for more?

When I was in high school I was best in class, kind of. Anything STEM absolutely. Physics, math, chemistry were my best subjects and I went on to win many regional competitions and almost made it to nationals. But at the same time I was one of the worst students in physical education and music. I could not run and could not sing. I still remember those classes as some of the traumatic experiences of my life. Not being popular, fearing rejections I poured my energy into what I knew worked, which was the deterministic world of coding, math, and hard sciences. Many of us do the same throughout our lives. 

When I think about people I read about or people I know and admire there is always something in their story that made them push for that excellence. On the outside sometimes it looks just like a bit of luck or good upbringing, which do help for sure, but there is always something else. I will try to build my point by running down some names and you will see how the story adds up.

David Goggins didn’t run ultramarathons because he loves running. He ran to kill the weak person he was. His “cannot hurt me“ and “never finished” books are a great testament to that. I read both of those and it is obvious that the man was drowning his psychological pain in physical pain, much like some alcoholics.

Alex Honnold free soloed so much because he didn’t like the idea of having people around him (from one of the interviews) and because this is the way to cancel all the noise. When you are free-soloing El Capitan, you cannot worry about your taxes, your relationship, or your awkward childhood. You must be 100% present, or you die. I rock climb myself, here is my “rock climbing as a way to cope” post.

Jensen Huang famously said that “greatness comes from character, and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it is formed out of people who suffered”. He pushes for excellence because he views ease as a threat to survival and if you watch some of his interviews he constantly mentions the fear of running out of business.

I asked my daughter what she thinks drives MrBeast. Her first response was “money”. I poked more and she said “power”. I think on the surface this is true, but by looking at extreme obsessiveness over metrics and quality I think he is terrified of mediocrity and plateauing. He said explicitly “I am terrified of the day the line goes flat.” 

Bryan Johnson is probably an example of almost pathological fear and unacceptance of death. I am glad the guy is there experimenting on himself for all of us.

I’m not into golf, but by reading about Tiger Woods it becomes clear that for him the only way to feel safe and worthy was to win, all installed by childhood trauma.

I asked my wife to give me an example of someone famous, she gave me Coco Chanel, looking up her early life, her mom died at 12, dad abandoned her, she was raised in an orphanage sewing there and her designs are a desperate need to never go back to being the abandoned girl in the orphanage.

“You are either the best or you are nothing” – not quoting anyone famous, just one of my colleagues describing the harsh truth of some of the upbringings.

I tried to come up with counterarguments to my theory that people that drive for excellence are those that sacrifice something and struggle. I thought of Richard Feynman, Usain Bolt and a few others, and also  looked up some more names like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Charles Darwin, those who showed up as those with highly favorable upbringings. It is clear that not everyone perfectly fits the narrative I’m building. Indeed many of these people lucked out, were born at the right time and had the right start or were driven by some pathological curiosity or something unusual about them. But at the same time, when you think about it, Bill Gates was famously paranoid, remembering the number plates of employees. He definitely wasn’t running from poverty, but he was running from the terror of losing. Even the “lucky” ones are often running from something, like fear of failure, fear of irrelevance, or something we don’t know, which is more likely.

We often romanticize excellence as a pursuit of happiness. But looking at all of the examples above, it becomes clear that excellence is rarely a pursuit of happiness. It is very often a flight. It is running away from mediocrity, away from trauma, away from the noise.

By definition, to be the best, others have to be behind you. But the real race isn’t against them. It’s against the version of yourself you are terrified of becoming. Struggle does not guarantee success or excellence, actually it is survivorship bias to think so, millions of people struggle and get nowhere, many people struggle in destructive manner, so I see it only as necessary fuel on the path of excellence. Combine that fuel with agency and focused obsession, and you have the way to reach the peak.