The Cognitive Dissonance And Personal Growth
The Cognitive Dissonance And Personal Growth
Do we sometimes overwork because if we don’t have purpose in our work, what do we have? But being busy isn’t being productive. Is it cognitive dissonance that causes this busy approach to our work and personal growth?
Note, by “work”, I don’t necessarily mean a job. It could be any endeavour in which you set goals and wish to advance and grow.
Purpose
If we feel purpose in our work, it contributes to overall well-being and satisfaction in and outside our work. So if we don’t feel purpose in our work, can we convince ourselves we do, hoping it will boost our overall wellbeing? As we work harder and harder to convince ourselves our work has a purpose, do we fall into the trap of cognitive dissonance?
Have we spent years convincing ourselves that we do have a purpose in our work? Cognitive dissonance explains how we can react when our behaviours and beliefs clash. We could know our work is causing harm to us, but we continue to show up anyway, constantly busy to distract us from our awareness that we need to shift our beliefs and behaviours. Cognitive dissonance is the reason we find meaning and purpose in our current situations, even if none exists. We convince ourselves it does.
There could be many reasons for this. If we consider a career in which we’re salaried or paid, we may have bills to pay, or a young family to support. Our current job potentially doesn’t supply us with the purpose we seek, yet we stay anyway. The financial aspect of our job can lead to further rationalisation as it gives us financial stability, or we’re setting a good example for our kids, for example.
We can pursue a career for years. We think that what we wanted was a job that would make us rich and a house filled with countless possessions. Even if we look back and see we didn’t want this, cognitive dissonance can lead us to continue to pursue this career, trading in our present-day happiness for a past we cannot change. All we can do is accept.
Heavy, right?
So how do we beat this psychological phenomenon, especially in our work? How can we be aware of the stories we tell ourselves to cope with our realities?
Trade-Offs
Take everything in moderation. I’m susceptible to spreading myself too thin, and then collapsing one day. I’m currently in one of those periods. As this post is released, it’s the end of a week I’ve taken to completely rest and recuperate. It was also my birthday during the week, so I was given two reasons to take a break.
In preparing for weeks off in the past, I crammed and overworked to prepare posts for the week. However, this time, I gave myself a longer runway. Many of the posts seen in my newsletters in the past week are posts where sections have been written for months. The parts have been collected together to form some of these posts.
I’ve also started setting myself word limits, otherwise, I ramble forever. That way, if I write a lot in one day, I’m rewarded for it. More productivity one day means a more restful day soon, as my work is split into parts.
Say I write 2000 words in a day. Rather than old me sending that in one post, I’ll split it into two, one for this week and one for next week. IDelayed gratification for the readers too, right?
If we stop spreading ourselves too thin, we find we have time for other pursuits. This can include time to consider your purpose. If we better understand ourselves, we can understand our likes and dislikes. We can continuously try new things. Over time, the purpose is naturally cultivated.
Even if we do work a job that we dislike, the brain capacity we save by not overworking can be time spent pursuing our purpose. Over time, the pursuit of purpose can itself become our purpose. The hunt for personal growth.
Taking A Carefully Planned Jump
Many people don’t know what their purpose is. Some of us search for a lifetime, never finding it.
If you’re lucky enough to find it, not pursuing it is a failure to yourself.
Consider your current work. Does it align with your values? Do you even know what your values are in the first place? If you struggle to begin to frame your own values, check out this worksheet here.
Are you setting realistic expectations of work? Some level of compromise has to exist in all aspects of life.
If your work doesn’t align with your values, how can you better position yourself outside of your work so you have no option but to succeed? By structuring our lives in such a way that if one aspect of our “work” fails, the others prop us up with little or no damage.
If we pursue a pure alpha strategy, as Ray Dalio does, we have so many different strategies that earn income or contribute to personal growth, that even if one completely disappears, we’re not damaged by the hit. This takes time, effort, and patience to build. Once we have, we’re untouchable. We’ll naturally become more aware of cognitive dissonance in our lives. Always be open to discomfort and change.
Concluding Remarks
Even if we find our work is full of purpose, we shouldn’t overwork. Our quality drops when we do. As a principle for life, Overworking ≠ Success. It’s this struggle and cognitive dissonance together that can convince us this is normal. It isn’t. I see countless people in situations where they overwork. If too much is being asked of you, we have to work towards changing this.
I’m not here to attack anybody’s chosen career or work, nor does anybody have any right to. You have to do whatever makes you happy, always putting yourself first. But I am here to ask you to consider cognitive dissonance in your work. Does your work give you purpose, or have you convinced yourself it does? If you can’t answer this question, remember overworking ≠ success. Embrace this, and over time, the former question will be easier to answer.
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