As someone who works in tech, I always hear the famous Steve Jobs quote: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” This can be taken in different directions: in one interpretation, the quote is a prescription to stay curious and to dream big.  However, Andrew and I were drawn to the word hunger and what it meant in the context of motivation, achievement, and pursuing our goals.

Hunger by necessity is a negative word. The literal definition of hunger is to be lacking something so essential to human life that we cannot survive without it. It signals a deprivation, a lack, a need for something that is missing. Just as hunger is a powerful biological cue incentivizing living things to seek food, hunger in a goal setting sense is a powerful cue incentivizing living things to seek change, because of a lack of something in their environment.

Hunger is not always a bad thing. There are times when hunger for change is the right emotion. For instance, in the context of the Black Lives Matters protests in the summer of 2020, the concept of hungering for change is both necessary and apt. There is a deprivation of justice that is happening, and hunger is an appropriate emotion in that case to seek a change.

However, in other cases, the word hunger might be less apt. When entrepreneurs urge their startup employees to stay “hungry,” what is it that they are actually implying? Often, startups encourage and even expect their employees to devote their lives to work, to contribute 80 to 90 hour weeks as the norm. Some entrepreneurs even harken back to their own childhoods in relative poverty: they say that their own childhood has encouraged them to always stay hungry, to always hustle. As a child of immigrant parents, it is something that I (and Andrew) have heard many times. Growing up in the 70s in India, my parents grew up relatively poor. Their ability to be “hungry” for a better life enabled them to work extremely hard to make the journey to the US.

As adults, it is common for many first generation Asian parents to transfer that hunger on to their children. They had to be hungry, they reason, in order to stay secure in life, so it only follows that their children will have to stay hungry as well in order to be secure. They encourage their children to study for 80 hours a week, to sacrifice their mental health for their academics, because they think that hunger is what will enable their children to be financially safe as adults. They do not realize that their own hunger (a necessary construct which was needed to escape post-war India or Cultural Revolution China) has actually given their own children a great blessing: the freedom to live a life where “hunger” need not be a primary motivating force. 

And that, in essence, is our problem with the word “hungry.” By encouraging people to stay hungry, it is encouraging people to keep their deprivations from their childhood, such as their lack of economic stability or their childhood traumas, as a primary motivator in their lives, long after the hunger might be actually necessary. Instead of attempting to patch the deprivation in life through therapy and mental health care, people try to address it through accomplishment and achievement and working hard without the realization that it could lead to burnout.

Hunger, at its core, is a negative motivator. It is running away from something (the hunger) rather than running towards something. Sometimes running away is necessary, but something it isn’t. Someone who grew up deprived of love and then is “hungry” for love may seek to fill that hunger through unfulfilling relationships or by absorbing themselves in work, but neither hunger will fulfill them in the long term. It is food for the hunger, sure, but the food isn’t satiating.

So if hunger isn’t a good motivator, then what is? Why do anything at all if your life doesn’t have a significant deprivation? Well, for us that goes back towards the running towards something rather than running away from something. It is better to fill your cup up with therapy and kindness and then use that as a motivator to do things in the world. So we propose a different motivating force than hunger: love. A love for yourself and for other people, and a love to share yourself with the world and make the world around you a better place.

It is something that Andrew and I are still struggling with today. But this blog is an example of it. It is motivated by love: a love for ourselves, to share and destigmatize our own mental health stories, but also a love for other people, to share these stories in the hopes it will help others.

With that, we’ll leave it off for this week. Next time you are motivated to do something, ask yourself: why am I doing this? Am I doing it out of a negative motivator (hunger)? If so, is that hunger truly necessary? And perhaps, is there a way to change that motivation around to a more positive motivating force, to be motivated by love instead of by hunger?