Always Happy, Never Satisfied

Life is full of tension. As humans we have competing desires - to be loved and appreciated for who we are right now, and to strive to learn and improve for tomorrow.

Adam Smith captured this sentiment when he said: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”

If you focus on being loved without being worthy of it, you have empty appreciation and participation trophies. If you don’t improve, you may inadvertently fall out of being loved through lack of effort.

If you focus on being worthy of love by constantly striving to improve, you’ll burn out AND likely not be loved anyway because of that relentlessness.

So how do we strike a balance between those two extremes?

In today’s newsletter we’ll explore how to stay in the productive middle part of the curve. Or, as I like to say: “always happy, never satisfied.”

Where this phrase first appeared for me

I started using the phrase “always happy, never satisfied” during my time at Atlassian. The company grew roughly 30% per year, every year, for a decade. In that type of high growth environment there are always problems to be solved. There are always areas that need to improve.

I don’t remember the specific meeting, but I was pushing for improvement in certain areas. Members of the team pointed out how much those areas had improved over the years. Wasn’t I happy about that? Why did I need to push it further?

It’s true, those areas had improved quite a bit, and I was happy about it. But I also saw how much more those areas needed to improve in the future to keep pace with the rest of the business, customer expectations, and competitive pressures.

I started using the phrase, “always happy, never satisfied” (AHNS) to represent the duality I felt.

Diving into the duality

AHNS doesn’t mean “never good enough.” It means things are good now, but we need to make them better next.

ANHS doesn’t mean “work more.” It means we need to consistently rethink our approach and the systems that drive these outcomes.

AHNS is a reminder for the leader to live in this duality, because living at either end of the spectrum isn’t good.

I know this, because I tend to see the “never satisfied” side of things very clearly, which in practice can mean I come off “rarely happy.” It was so clear to me how far we were from “better” that I emphasized the gap and tried to close it.

The challenge with emphasizing the gap is that there are always problems to solve - it’s a never-ending treadmill. If you’re constantly pointing out what needs to improve, then you’re literally never satisfied. That’s not fun to be, and that’s not fun to work for.

Conversely, if you’re always happy with how things are, no matter the gap to what they need to be, you’re probably not getting much done.

If you’re celebrating all the things you’ve done in the past, you’re not getting your team and company in the position it needs to be in the future.

“Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges.”

— Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in “Extreme Ownership”

The challenge comes in being good at both sides of AHNS without overemphasizing either. You can’t be so happy with everything that nothing gets done, and you can’t push so hard to improve that you create burnout in yourself and others.

What are the ways we can balance this?

Celebrate, then Optimize

As Jocko said in the quote above, leaders need to build the mindset of improvement into themselves and the team. One way to help remember this is the idea to celebrate, then optimize.

There are many ways to implement this across many different scales. For example, imagine if someone on your team takes the initiative to create a helpful artifact, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark on the first try.

Celebrate: Thank them for taking the initiative. Tell them what you love about what they’ve created.
Optimize: Ask questions to get them to see the gaps you see. Offer advice and suggestions for how to improve it.

In another scenario, imagine that an employee had a difficult goal to hit, and they’ve managed to get 80% of the way there with one week to go.

What would you do? Celebrate them for achieving the 80% and leave it alone? After all, it was difficult!

Would you immediately pressure them to hit 100% in the final week?

Thinking of “celebrate then optimize” here are some things you could do next.

Immediate: Share appreciations on concrete behavior they’ve embodied and for achieving most of a difficult goal. Then ask, “What’s can you do to hit the final 20% this week?”

Within A Day or Two: Publish a public Slack post or email with the team - shared wins and progress! In a 1-1, ask: “What worked? What’s your constraint? What needs to be true to hit 100%?”

Next Week: Run a retro. What worked well? What could be better?

What you’re trying to do is strike the balance between appreciation and improvement. You’re trying to push without being demotivating. You want to show the team that they have the capacity to improve.

“It’s not easy to live with the constant angst that we might not be doing enough. It would be more fun to do victory laps and pat everybody on the back all the time. But in the end, we will be all be better off because of our intensely vigilant posture toward our mission. We won’t rest on our laurels. The competition is getting more aggressive by the day, so this is no time to relax our focus.”

— Frank Slootman in “Amp it Up”

Marathon, Not a Sprint

If you’re like me and tend to push heavily for improvement, you’ll need to temper that instinct lest you run into burnout. This is especially important when running a team; not everyone may be built like you. Here it may be helpful to remember that you’re running a marathon, not a sprint.

Sure, you can push yourself and your team to relentlessly pursue goals and self improvement, and there may be times when you must do that for the importance of the mission or a critical milestone, but you can’t do that forever.

Just like our bodies have the dual “fight or flight” and “rest and recharge” nervous systems, you’ll need to balance any periods of pushing with periods of lighter intensity.

Bringing it all together

“Always happy, never satisfied” is a way of being as a leader. It starts by honoring the good work that you’ve done to date, then challenge yourself to think what could be better next. Where’s the final 10–20% hiding? What constraints can we remove to unlock it?

The loop is to celebrate, then optimize. It shows people they’re seen and it gives them a path forward. We can be proud of today without getting stuck there.

Over-index on “happy” and you drift into victory laps. Over-index on “never satisfied” and it turns into a grind. The middle path asks you to balance the tension between those two for better overall results.

Think marathon, not sprint. There will be weeks where the right answer is to push hard, but there must also be time to consolidate the gain, catch your breath, and make the next improvement easier to achieve.

Be proud of today, and earn tomorrow.

Call to Action

This week look for what’s gone under-acknowledged. Is there a win or improvement that you can honor? Give yourself the opportunity to celebrate how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved.

But don’t stop there! Look for the 1% improvement you can make in an area of your personal life or business. Where have you gotten too comfortable and you need to challenge yourself to improve?

Choose to make one improvement by the time next week’s newsletter rolls around.

Kevin

PS - Share the win with me. I’d love to celebrate you as well! kevin@catalyst.group18.co