Is it possible to pursue excellence without burning out? The high-level answer in the context of professional work is “it depends”. Specifically, it depends on the kind of standard being pursued and what that pursuit brings into conflict within a person.

Closed Versus Recursive Standards

Excellence is subjective, although in most fields the range of interpretation is probably narrower than the word subjective suggests. Fields governed heavily by taste, such as art, may permit one person to see excellence where another sees terrible work. In many other fields, there is more agreement about the range within which excellent work can plausibly be in. That agreement, however, does not tell us what pursuing excellence will require from the person. For us to get a better sense of that, it would help to distinguish between standards that close and standards that recurse.

A closed standard has an endpoint that can be understood. Some externally judged standards work this way - the person evaluating the work sees the output, they may know very little about the effort required to produce it, and once they have declared the work excellent, they are unlikely to care very much about that effort. Their judgment gives the person doing the work a relatively “formed” idea of what excellence means. Depending on the field and the complexity of the work, that standard may be reproducible without continually overstretching the person. Once you know what someone considers excellent, and that is the standard you want to follow, you may be able to produce it consistently without necessarily stretching yourself.

An externally defined standard, however, does not also have to be a closed one. A hard-charging leader may have a conception of excellence that is dynamic and may, deliberately or accidentally, outrun the capability of their team members. But a person may well hold such an impossible standard for themself. For one such person, excellence may mean the best they can do. For another, it may mean the best that can be done. Either way, once this person does something better than they have done before, their sense of the best they can do changes. 

Ultimately, a recursive standard has no clear endpoint. The person is therefore pursuing their limits, testing them, or consciously trying to cross them. A leader who keeps advancing the standard creates the same structure from outside. Excellence remains ahead of the person, however much ground they cover. Pursuing a recursive standard almost necessarily stretches someone because it asks them to go above and beyond what their currently understood capability can easily hold. That stretch increases the risk of burnout, although it does not explain burnout by itself. To understand burnout, we need to understand how a person gets affected by a stretch like this.

Value-Bearing Streams and Burnout

There are many ways to model a person, and different models will be more useful in different situations. One model I have found helpful is to think of a person as containing multiple streams. The streams may be separate drives, desires, or commitments but what usually gives each one force is some value that is subconsciously held by the person. The streams do not need to have a common foundation, and they do not all have to integrate into one truth at the core of the person. Someone may, with a lot of conscious work, build toward that kind of integration over their life but a person can exist with the streams staying separate. Some streams may have a great deal to do with one another while others may have almost nothing to do with one another. The important point is that several can remain active within the same person at a given time.

These streams are more nuanced than just “work” or “personal life”. Work alone may contain a desire to do excellent work, to lead a large group of people, to be liked by them, or to exert power over them. Similarly, something like parenthood can also contain several streams. A person may value being a parent without valuing constant engagement in the way someone else does. They may care about driving education and achievement in their children, finding the best relationship between achievement and enjoyment, protecting their children’s quality of life, or keeping them from danger. All of these belong to parenthood, but they can make very different demands. A person may not know which of these streams they have until circumstances bring them into contact with a given stream. 

When one or more of a person’s streams are forced into conflict because of a given life circumstance, the person has no choice but to rank them relative to each other and let one stream “win”. That ranking happens in the moment. Sometimes one stream goes ahead and then the other. Sometimes the same stream goes ahead repeatedly. If both streams are psychologically important, allowing one to prevail does not make the other disappear. The losing stream continues to accumulate a sense of grievance because of what the person is giving up. This produces psychological friction. What streams matter is determined by the person’s psychology rather than society’s judgment (even if one of the person’s streams is oriented towards deferring to society’s judgement of them). A stream does not need to appear noble, mature, or important to anyone else. If it has substantial force within the person, repeatedly subordinating it creates friction. At some point, this psychological friction can exceed what the person can physiologically manage. They begin wanting to give up whatever seems to be making the conflict happen. This is, essentially, burnout. 

When Recursive Excellence Meets the Streams

We have already established the understanding that the pursuit of recursive excellence keeps a person stretched. The more stretched they become, the more likely it is that important streams will come into conflict. A recursive standard increases the frequency of the forced rankings needed to manage these conflicts, because the standard keeps making new demands on the person’s attention, effort, time, judgment, and physical capacity. The pursuit of excellence may not have created the competing streams but it brings them into contact more often and under greater pressure. An externally imposed recursive standard can accelerate this process. Someone with power keeps moving the standard, so the person does not fully choose when another stream must give way. Their behavior is forced into a ranking that may not reflect their own psychology. The external force does not remove the losing stream or reduce its importance but it makes the person artificially suppress its importance. The stream remains present while the person repeatedly acts against it, which adds another layer of pressure to the conflict.

The complexity of the work also matters. Someone working largely alone, such as an artist or writer, can be stretched severely by a recursive standard. Their pursuit still requires effort and may still expose conflicts among important streams. But the flow of information around the work is more containable because fewer autonomous people affect it. Work involving many people, on the other hand, often has more variability. Every person involved has agency and any one of them can produce information that changes the leader’s understanding of the problem or what the work now requires. A decisive piece of information might come from one group today and one person tomorrow. It might appear in a planned meeting, in an unexpected conversation, or in the middle of the night. It may arrive in a form the leader did not know to anticipate. This makes it harder to control where conclusions will come from and when the work will make a new demand. Leadership and other highly interdependent roles can therefore stretch a person even faster, bringing important streams into conflict ever sooner. 

Conscious Analysis Without Self-Condemnation

Since most of the values supporting streams (and most strongly held values in general) are subconsciously held, they will have significant power over the person. Some stream conflicts are obvious while others produce a broad experience of pressure without making it obvious what the source is. When a conflict is not obvious, the person can feel trapped by something they cannot quite identify, which makes the conflict feel more helpless and can accelerate the movement toward burnout. Without a way to examine the conflict, people often turn it into a judgment against themselves. They ask whether they are a bad person for choosing one thing over another, whether they are failing someone, or whether the pressure proves that they are incapable of doing what they should be able to do. 

A key foundational principle to better managing these internal conflicts is to consciously see one’s self as being something to be discovered and shaped rather than fully formed. Conscious analysis of this nature does not assume that the person can see all their streams or understand exactly how they are ranked. They may discover a stream only when it begins coming into conflict with another. Their analysis of the conflict then starts with understanding the pressure and what it seems to contain - which values may be active, which streams appear to be colliding, which one keeps prevailing in practice, and whether that outcome is being chosen or imposed.

The purpose behind such a conscious analysis is to understand how the person’s psychology is working in concert with the demands around them. The analysis may not, and often will not, produce a clean answer because some streams will, very likely, remain incompatible, and understanding a conflict does not remove the need to live through it. But it can make the conflict less helpless. It can help the person approach the competing streams more actively and resolve what can be resolved without first turning the existence of the conflict into evidence against themselves and their character. It can help a person be more precise about the adjustments they make to reduce a given conflict. And who knows? It may even help them avoid burnout entirely.