There is a moment in life, and in a career, when you finally arrive.
It might not come with a trumpet sound. It’s often a quiet, slow-dawning stillness. It’s the feeling of looking at your bank account and not feeling a spike of anxiety. It's the job title you once aimed for, now sitting comfortably in your email signature. It's the completion of a project that, for years, existed only as a bundle of desperate, late-night sketches.
This is it. You are, by all metrics you once cared about, "full."
This fullness is the most dangerous, seductive, and spiritually hazardous place a person can be.
Most of us are all familiar with the famous commencement speech line: "Stay hungry, stay foolish." the Steve Jobs line. It’s a brilliant, vital piece of advice. But it’s advice for the person who is starving. It’s easy to be hungry when you have nothing. Hunger is a reflex, a primal drive. It’s the engine that pushes you from a cold room, from an empty wallet, from the bottom of the ladder.
The real challenge, that one nobody prepares you for, is how to stay hungry when you are full. How do you manufacture a drive that is no longer a necessity?
The harvest is in. The barns are stocked. The immediate threat of failure has receded. The first instinct is to rest. To protect what has been built. The "hunger" that got you here—a force of raw, chaotic ambition—fades and is replaced by a new, more cautious instinct: "Don't lose it."
This is the beginning of the end.
In a career, this is the moment you stop being a creator and become a curator. You become a manager of your own success. You stop taking the "foolish" risks that got you here because you now have a reputation to protect. You stop learning the new, uncomfortable skill because you are already an expert in the old one. You stop asking the "stupid" questions in meetings because you are now the one expected to have the "smart" answers.
Your curiosity, once a wildfire, becomes a managed ember in a fireplace. It's warm, it's comfortable, and it's contained.
This fullness is a form of spiritual entropy. It is the natural, default state of all things to settle into stillness. To stay hungry when you are full is to wage a conscious, daily war against that stillness. It is an act of rebellion against your own comfort.
How do we find the motivation when the mortgage is paid?
I've learned that this "hunger" is not a single thing. The hunger of your youth is a hunger for more—more money, more recognition, more security. It's a hunger of acquisition.
The hunger of your "full" years must be a hunger for different. It is a hunger of exploration.
This is where "stay foolish" becomes the more important half of the equation. The only antidote to the arrogance of expertise is the humility of the beginner. When you are full, you must purposefully empty your own bowl. Go be terrible at something. If you are a brilliant designer, go learn to code. If you are a master engineer, go learn to paint. If you are a celebrated writer, go learn to play a new instrument.
This act of "knowing nothing" is a powerful recalibration. It reminds your mind what it feels like to be hungry, to be frustrated, to be foolish. It brings you back to the crackling energy of the climb, rather than the quiet stillness of the summit.
In my own life, I find this manufactured hunger by asking a different set of questions. The question is no longer, "How can I succeed?" The question is, "What am I now in a position to build?"
Your fullness—your success, your stability, your capital—is not the end goal. It is the fuel. It is the platform from which you can finally take the real risks. The hunger is no longer for yourself; it is for your purpose. It is the hunger to see if you can use your harvest not just to feed yourself, but to plant a forest.
To stay hungry when you are full is to understand that the goal was never to arrive at the destination. The goal was to become the kind of person who is always, stubbornly, joyfully, on the way. It is to look at your full plate, smile, and then immediately start scoping out the next mountain, not because you have to, but because you can't imagine living any other way.