Pain may be inherent to excellence. Desire is what allows us to endure it.
Written by Maxx Burman | Art by Erik Guarisco
For the last twenty years, I’ve had two careers in two incredibly competitive fields. I spent a decade as an artist in the film and games industry, contributing to more than 200 projects, from blockbuster films and television to some of the biggest game franchises. I spent the next decade as an entrepreneur, building a company from a garage into one of the most recognizable brands in the creative industry, serving more than 40 million users worldwide.
By almost any measure, I achieved excellence in both fields. Neither career ended because I had accomplished everything I wanted (I didn’t). They ended because I lost the desire to keep going.
Doing something at the highest level requires us to push beyond what is comfortable, make difficult choices, and do whatever the outcome demands. As long as we still want something badly enough, we can survive an extraordinary number of setbacks. We can change strategies, recover from failures, and find another path forward.
Once we stop wanting to continue, it doesn’t matter how clear the road ahead becomes. The pursuit is over. If we want to achieve excellence, we need to protect our desire to keep going.
At the beginning of my career, every dream was ahead of me. I wanted to become a great artist, work alongside people I admired, and contribute to films and games I loved. Every new skill, project, and opportunity moved me closer to those goals. That feeling of progress made me willing to tolerate almost anything.
Painting was the fun part. Sure, there were internal struggles that came with making art, the feeling that maybe this time I wasn’t going to be able to produce a masterpiece, or whatever my own ego was trying to prove. But that was part of the process, and I learned to accept it. Headphones on, put in the hours, and a painting would come out the other end that I was usually pretty happy with.
What wore me down was everything that accumulated around it. Clients. Politics. Pointless notes. Fighting studios to get paid. Moving to another country because of tax incentives. Working late because a director couldn’t make up their mind. Spending years mastering something only to have to prove myself all over again at every new studio.
Early on, almost any sacrifice felt justified by what was ahead of me. But success slowly changed the equation. After ten years in the industry, I had achieved many of the things I once dreamed about, and I had a much better understanding of the tradeoffs that came with pushing further.
When I stopped working as an artist, there were still plenty of projects I wanted to work on, teams I wanted to collaborate with, and higher levels I could have reached. I just didn’t want them enough to keep paying the cost.
When I started my second career, I was determined to pursue it in a more sustainable way. I wanted a more balanced life, so I moved from Los Angeles to Portland and set boundaries around my time that would have been unthinkable during my years in film. No more late nights, no more working weekends, no more allowing work to take over my life.
I gave the business a set number of hours each day, and when those hours ended, I was able to build a rich personal life outside of work that I’m incredibly grateful for. What I hadn’t considered was that eight hours of work could become much more draining without becoming any longer.
In the early years, my days were spent building products, growing a team, and creating a brand I cared deeply about. The work was hard, but I loved doing it. As the company grew, the work changed. More of my days became filled with personnel issues, financial reporting, and legal reviews. There were fires to put out, politics to navigate, and decisions I had to convince people to make before I could act.
Over time, more of my time was spent doing things I had to do and less doing things I enjoyed. The hours hadn’t grown longer, but they had become less enjoyable, less energizing, and harder to look forward to. Eventually, I stopped wanting to do them at all.
It wasn’t enough to protect my life from my work. I needed to protect what I loved about the work.
It would be easy to conclude that protecting our desire means reducing the demands of the pursuit. Set smaller goals. Move at a more sustainable pace. Remove as much friction as possible. But some of the most demanding periods of my life have also been the most energizing.
I love becoming completely obsessed with a painting, product, or problem, thinking about it from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep. I love choosing goals that I have no idea how to achieve, committing myself completely to them, and discovering that I might actually be capable of pulling them off.
Those things take a lot from me, but they give something back. The size of the goal creates excitement. The intensity creates momentum. The difficulty creates growth. They don’t just demand desire. They create it.
And the more desire we create, the more we’re willing to endure. When I desperately want an outcome, I can spend longer being bad at something, recover from more setbacks, and keep pushing long after “good enough” would have been a perfectly reasonable place to stop. The more I want something, the more I’m willing to give in pursuit of it.
That’s why I don’t think the answer is to make our ambitions smaller or our pursuits less intense. If excellence requires us to endure an extraordinary amount of pain, then we need an extraordinary amount of desire to sustain us through it. The greater our desire, the greater our capacity for excellence.
Closing Thoughts
A successful pursuit doesn’t need to last forever. It should last long enough to take us where we set out to go.
When I look back at my first two careers, I’m incredibly proud of how far I climbed. But in both cases, my desire ran out before I reached the summit I had imagined. I spent years improving my skills, learning how to overcome more difficult challenges, and chasing goals with all of my energy, without ever considering that desire itself was something I needed to manage along the way.
I want to approach my next climb differently. I don’t want a smaller mountain, and I don’t want to climb it with less intensity. I want to choose something big enough to generate enormous desire, give myself to the journey fully, and protect the parts of the pursuit that make me want to keep going.
If you’re climbing your own mountain, I hope something here helps you get closer to the summit you’re chasing. And if you’ve reached the point where you no longer want to continue, I hope you can look back with pride at how far you came, find peace with where you landed, and choose another mountain worth climbing.