#100: How Success Costs You the Good Life

Most achievers believe that once they become successful professionally, then personal success will follow: the loving partner, the loyal friends, the children who still want to connect with them at fifty.

But it works the other way. Professional success can often cost most people their personal lives, and it can do the damage while they're doing everything else right.

Nobody wakes up and decides to postpone a family or let a twenty-year friendship go. It happens in half-hour chunks, over ordinary weeks, and each of those choices makes sense at the time you make it.

This episode explains why, and why it comes out of the same instincts that built your career.

The people it costs most are the ones who care most. Clayton Christensen taught at Harvard Business School for decades, then kept going back to his class reunions and watching people who'd graduated with every door open turn up divorced and not speaking to their kids. Not one of them had planned it.

You're likely early enough to fix it. This episode covers how.

Show Highlights Include:

Why do so many people get duped into only caring about something that they'll regret on their deathbed? (1:26)

3 key things you'll never be able to track or put a number to that reveal how good your life actually was or wasn't (1:49)

The sad truth about why so many Harvard graduates end up miserably divorced with no relationship with their children (2:52)

7 words that can prevent you from dying alone (4:40)

How success tricks you into a lifetime of short-term decisions that literally starves your personal life (9:19)