There is nothing wrong with personal achievement. But you can’t necessarily equate your accomplishments with serving the world. And unless you’re serving the world, your successes could end up feeling very empty. In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David breaks down the three types of motives and the results one can expect from each, as well as what he learned from blink-182’s Tom DeLonge. Download the PDF Transcript Sponsors: Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.” Highlights: 00:17 – Deeper realizations 01:12 – Doing things for personal gain 02:20 – Selfish gains quickly crumble 03:10 – Three types of motives 06:04 – Serving the masses (what you can learn from blink-182) 07:40 – See your projects through this lens Transcript: There is something I recently found that kind of gave me pause around the whole constant “Go, go, go, push more, publish more, always be productive, get more done” side of things. And surprisingly it had nothing to do with health. Although, of course, health is important. And I came back from Calgary with eye floaters. I’m doing what I can to reduce them by cleansing and cleaning up my diet and it seems to be helping. But this insight didn't come from some kind of health scare or anything else. It came from some personal development work that I've been doing, and as you know I'm constantly reading and listening to things at this point. It's like there's only deeper realizations in a way. You're not going to discover something completely new for the first time by the time you've read several hundred books and read thousands of articles and listened to thousands of podcasts and been through various personal development programs. But the essence of what I heard was this… and again, it's not something revolutionary or completely new. I've probably read or heard or seen stuff like this dozens of times, and yet this time it hit me square between the eyes and that was this. When you do things for personal gain and selfish reasons, even the successes you do get, and you can get successes being selfish… even the successes you do get tend to crumble or be taken away or is stolen from you. True success is not based on personal gains alone.Click To Tweet I've had some successes that were like that. I just couldn't quite figure it out. It's like I accomplished all this, but suddenly something appears to distract from that success or detract from that success. Or the success itself just doesn't seem meaningful to anyone but me. Like, it makes no difference whatsoever in the eyes of the people that I'm supposed to be serving and care about most, and I couldn't quite make sense of that. But I've started to have some growing awareness around this more recently as I've been diving into some, personal development material. So, first and foremost, success earned through selfish means or for done for personal profit or selfish gain tends to crumble. These successes don't last. They're not meaningful. And the things we do to benefit those around us, like our team members or collaborators or partners or employees, and the things we do to benefit customers… You might remember me talking about win-win-win before and that's in line with us. We want to create a win-win-win situation where there's something in it for everyone. Like there's something everyone cares about. And that made me go like, “Yeah, I love creating things. And on the other hand, I feel like it's okay to kind of slow down and look at what it is I'm doing.” And I think there's sort of three broader categories as I think about it. The first one is something that's done completely out of selfishness. You know that there's a gain in it, you know that there's a credibility or authority boost, or you might be awarded or credited in some way, and you do it because of that. And of course,