"What's In It For Me?": The One Question Draining All Your Energy

Kodo

25 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

The act is complete only when done without hope for fruition. Total presence is the only true act of love.

You are a leader. Your brain is wired to extract maximum value from every single minute. Before every meeting, every email, and every decision, a calculator runs in your head: "What is the ROI? Where does this get me? What will I get out of this?"

You think this goal-oriented mindset makes you efficient. In reality, it is the exact reason you collapse from exhaustion in the evening and stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

The Anatomy of Your Burnout

Your ego is obsessed with the outcome. The mind is never interested in the act itself; it only cares about the result.

Because you only care about the goal, you constantly look for shortcuts. Your physical body is sitting in a meeting, but your mind is already generating the evening report. You are splitting your attention. You are doing things halfway.

And here is the brutal truth: Every experience that is not fully lived hangs onto you. It sticks to your mind like a parasite, silently screaming: "Finish me!" This is the true source of your decision paralysis and chronic fatigue. You are dragging hundreds of mentally unfinished, unlived moments with you every single day.

Drop All Hope of Fruition

The Zen approach does not care about your business projections. As the Zen master Kodo Sawaki bluntly stated: "Your plans for the future are just delusions." Or as Osho, commenting on Atisha’s sutras, advised: "Drop all hope of fruition."

This is the ultimate paradox of high performance: If you want to achieve extreme results, you must mentally cut off your desperate desire for them.

When you stop calculating what you will get out of a task, you can finally throw yourself into it completely. Being is not goal-oriented. When you act with 100% presence, the action becomes clean and sharp. It no longer exhausts you.

The Boardroom Reality

A leader who does not cling to the outcome does not panic when the market shifts. They are not frustrated when things fail to go according to plan, because they never expected reality to bend to their fantasies in the first place.

They work hard, with absolute focus and a deep respect for the process itself. But at the end of the day, they close their laptop, and their head is completely empty and light.

The Practice: A Radical Experiment

Try one experiment today. Pick one task you absolutely hate doing.

Before you start, sit down, straighten your spine, and breathe into your lower abdomen (Hara) for one minute. Tell yourself: "I am doing this only for this moment. I expect absolutely nothing from it."

Then, give the task your full, brutal, uncompromising attention. You will find that the moment your expectation of the goal vanishes, your resistance to the work vanishes with it.

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