Canadian Lawyer

www.canadianlawyermag.com 53 relationships and even our happiness? Is excellence the metric by which we should measure ourselves? One-dimensional excellence might be the wrong goal "There were times when I didn't leave the factory for three or four days – days when I didn't go outside." That's Tesla CEO Elon Musk, acknowledging the toll of work-re- lated exhaustion. In a candid interview with the New York Times, he admitted that 120- hour weeks had become his norm. He hadn't taken more than a week off since 2001 when he was bedridden with malaria. His exhaustion had also led to less-than-exemplary leadership — like berat- ing an analyst, which spurred him to pub- licly apologize. Musk's experience highlights another pos- sible toll of excellence: relationships. Those 10,000 hours have to come from somewhere, and often we start skimming them from nights and weekends; precious hours that are typically dedicated to friends and family. As Erin Callan, the former Lehman Brothers CFO, who left shortly before its collapse, wrote in a New York Times article: "When I wasn't catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage –which ended just a few years later." Musk and Callan aren't the only successful figures who received the wake-up call. It took a personal health crisis for Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to reshape her own idea of success. "It was a day I've talked and written about dozens of times — the day I collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaus- tion, broke my cheekbone and woke up in a pool of blood," she wrote in 2017. "For me, that day literally changed my life. It put me on a course in which I changed how I work and how I live." Her latest venture, Thrive Global, is dedicated to "end[ing] the stress and burnout epidemic." Before we barrel blindly toward excellence or 10,000 hours of mastery, it's important to consider the potential tradeoffs. Sometimes we get so invested in a certain outcome that we lose sight of why we even started. We can't see the bigger picture, and our passion and excitement fade. Take elite athletes, many of whom are groomed for greatness from a very young age. Sports psychologist Adam Naylor says he observes many college-level athletes who are now playing "out of obligation, not pas- sion." After a life spent in training, the excite- ment that first led them to pick up a hockey stick or tennis racket is long gone when they What happens when the quest to rack up the hours required for excellence ends up compromising our health, relationships and even our happiness? they can hold scissors. But at a certain point in my own career, I started to question excellence. As the founder of JotForm, should I be encourag- ing our 130 employees to strive for excel- lence and nothing less? How did we arrive at this state of obsession with excellence – and more importantly, what should be the standard for success? How the excellence obsession began Since 1936, when Dale Carnegie published his now-iconic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, ambitious readers everywhere have been striving to improve themselves. More recently came the 10,000- Hour Rule, popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell, who claimed that achieving excel- lence was simply a matter of time and dedi- cation – 10,000 hours of practice. By offering a concrete, quantifiable goal, excellence seemed more achievable. Want to become an expert programmer, chef or hockey player? You can. We all can. It's just a numbers game. Gladwell's theory is based on the research of Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psy- chology who pioneered the study and science of peak performance. But Ericsson doesn't entirely agree with Gladwell's conclusions. In fact, he calls them "a popularized but sim- plistic view of our work … which suggests that anyone who has accumulated a suffi- cient number of hours of practice in a given domain will automatically become an expert and a champion." What happens, though, when the quest to rack up the hours required for excel- lence ends up compromising our health,

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