Love Can Not Be Earned

Love is a complex, multifaceted thing. It lurks beneath the surface of all human motivation, at least mine.

Too often, “love” is used as a conditioned sort of pecking order grounded in beauty, success, and popularity. You get love by being great at something, better than everyone else, or having a particular gift or talent.

Unconditional love is radically different than the kind of “love” our society is obsessed with.

There is nothing intellectual about it. The only inkling I have of such a thing is the feeling in my heart when I look at my kids.

But the experience of it, the longing for it, the lifetime pursuing it in any number of truly tragic and fucked up ways, is more of a cellular thing, baked into my body far away from either my mind or my heart.

It is essential, yet something I will never fully understand.

When asked about their biggest regret, the dying most commonly say they wish they hadn’t wasted so much time being hard on themselves. As not being good enough to feel this sort of love.

I teach undergraduates these days, and the central question on each of their minds, whether they would consciously phrase it this way or not, is “How do I build a life, career, and adult identity worthy of being loved and admired?” Part of that question is certainly answered by others—the world—but a big part of it is figuring out how to do enough good to judge themselves admirable in their own eyes.

They are just beginning to sort out the difference between conditioned and unconditional love and what a meaningful life might look like for them.

I recently went on retreat, and the leader asked me on the first day what my goal was for our time together. “To be worthy of God’s unconditional love,” she copied down on a whiteboard. A couple of days later, another member of our staff gently pointed out the oxymoron built into my statement. Unconditional love, by definition, does not involve being worthy. And that was in February. THIS YEAR. At 61, after having spent years on this issue.

The most important thing I am trying to teach my students, it is not to fall into the same traps I did. The whole world tells us to climb to a certain mountaintop. Most won’t make it. And to be honest, that is a good thing for them. Because those who do make it, like I did more than once in different industries and different ways, find the experience soul-crushing. In a flash, from way up there after all that blood and sweat, the realization crashes down on the striver that IT’S THE WRONG FUCKING MOUNTAINTOP!

I recently read that an entrepreneur who built a multibillion-dollar cosmetics company literally gave all his money away and became a Catholic priest.

I am not surprised.

Unfortunately, suicide among the ultra-successful is all too common (everyone from Amy Whitehouse to Thomas Lee to Robin Williams). That dragon almost caught me, too, along with the booze and desperate behavior of all kinds.

I try to teach my students, as they think about a career in business, and the CEOs I mentor who are trying desperately to become great leaders, about the interconnection of three essential principles: unconditional love, humility, and a growth mindset.

The Desert Fathers were 4th-century Christians who were fed up with what they saw as Roman perversion of Jesus’s message, so they protested by walking into the desert (I am not religious, but I draw from any spiritual tradition that helps me make sense of all this) and staying there in solitude for twenty years, as the first Western monks.

The desert fathers taught that greed and anger lead to compulsion to have more of everything, and are the source of all human suffering. Their answer is a deep and painful self-appraisal that can take decades to complete. A soul searching in solitude that cannot be faked.

“We can slowly let our compulsions melt away and begin to experience the freedom. Solitude had become an infinite space into which anyone could be invited…compassion is the fruit of solitude.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing it or finding a quick cure.

In solitude, we realize that nothing human is alien to us, that the roots of all conflict, war, injustice, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, and envy are deeply anchored in our own hearts. In solitude, our hearts of stone can be turned into hearts of flesh, a rebellious heart into a contrite heart, and a closed heart into a heart that can open itself to all suffering people in a gesture of solidarity.

…in order to be of service to others, we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others. To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to be free to be compassionate. Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

…solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced there is hardly any difference between doing and being…we can do nothing other than minister because our whole being witnesses to the light that has come into the darkness.”

But I digress, with good reason, to the original monks who understood why so many in our society, including me, suffer so profoundly.

Humility is a superpower. As leaders succeed and gather power and money, they will naturally think they have won the game of life and become arrogant. That is a trap. The great leaders, of which there are very few, become HUMBLER as their success grows. They hire better and better people around them, who they truly believe are smarter, and they never take personal credit for anything. This greatly inspires everyone who works for them, making them even more successful. And the humility fly wheel goes on and on. At no time does greed, anger, or judgment enter the picture.

The deepest paradox of life is that the less we ask for, the more we get.

To lead people toward a growth mindset, those people have to trust you completely. They have to know that you love them unconditionally. And all feedback is given out of that love. Often, the toughest feedback is delivered very directly because a great leader refuses to let the person working for them fail, even though they have made the same mistake 10 times in a row.

All of this is well and good. It helped me make a lot of money, build huge companies, mentor successful CEOs, as well as go through very, very dark periods of my life where I truly did not believe I would survive, where I had crashed my life so hard into a brick wall that every bone in my metaphoric body was broken, and I could not get up.

It is not the case that if we cannot earn love, then we might as well go into seclusion as monks or just give up on a material engagement with the world. It’s just that the whole point of everything changes by 180 degrees.

My joy, my wealth, my success no longer matter. What matters is my connection to other human beings, my support for and love of them, and my attempt to help them through their fears, flaws, and suffering toward the best versions of themselves.

In the end, what the desert fathers are talking about, which I have seen so many times in the business world as the key to “success,” is sympathetic joy. The Buddhists call this concept Mudita, one of the highest, boundless qualities of the heart. Sympathetic joy is the heart’s response to another’s happiness.

In the end, for me at least, the mountaintop I aim for, however unsuccessfully, is the deepest possible connection with others through witnessing their hard-earned joy, a feeling with no limit or end.

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This post was previously published on Linkedin.com.