This Might Be the Most Important Work You’ll Ever Do
When John Elway retired in May 1999, he had just finished one of the greatest careers in NFL history.
Two consecutive Super Bowl titles.
Super Bowl MVP.
Nine Pro Bowls.
Forty-seven fourth-quarter comebacks, the most in league history.
148 wins as a starting quarterback—the most anyone had ever won.
He was thirty-eight years old, the reigning champion, walking away at the very top.
How proud he must have felt. How fulfilled. He had spent sixteen years proving himself; surely the proving was over. Now he could enjoy what he had earned.
If he did feel that way, it didn’t last.
Because do you know how he admitted to actually feeling when he retired?
His peers had spent those same sixteen years building careers in business. Elway worried that outside football, he had no transferable skills beyond his name.
Jackass star Steve-O reached a similar summit and found something equally unsettling.
In 2006, Jackass Number Two had catapulted him into mega-stardom. At the red-carpeted movie premiere, he was on top of the world. Or so one would have thought.
Instead, he felt like he was at his own funeral.
He worried he and his team would never again produce something as good, that it would be downhill from there.
His fears spiraled into addictions, arrests, an intervention, and eventually a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold after he emailed friends that he was “ready to die.” It would take him eight years to climb out.
One man got almost everything he had worked for and felt behind. Another reached the height of his fame and felt as though he were at his own funeral.
For both, success had delivered what it promised but failed to deliver what mattered.
Which is why we all need to spend more time cultivating something less visible and far more durable: a rich inner life.
Life is too uncertain, and our interpretation of it too consequential, to leave our well-being entirely in the hands of circumstance or our ever-changing feelings.
Without a rich inner life, we become the person Seneca described as needing “another happiness to safeguard the happiness one has,” forever saying prayers “on behalf of prayers already fulfilled.”
A rich inner life is what keeps the outside world from having the final say.
Few people demonstrate this more powerfully than Etty Hillesum.
As the Nazi occupation tightened around Amsterdam in 1942, Etty’s physical world shrank almost to nothing. The young Dutch Jewish woman was banned from public transportation and parks and forced to wear the yellow star.
Yet, in the midst of this, she wrote in her diary:
“Is this really my life? So full, so rich, so intense and so beautiful?”
Those words seem almost impossible for someone in her situation.
But Etty had learned how to meet life inwardly. Through relentless reflection, she developed what she called an “uninterrupted dialogue” with beauty—even inside a room she was legally forbidden to leave.
“Within these four walls or within four other ones,” she wrote of her impending internment, “what does it matter? If you have a rich inner life [. . . .] there probably isn’t all that much difference between the inside and outside of camp.”
It reminds me of Epictetus’s challenge: show me someone who can be equally happy on the podium or in prison, and I’ll show you a wise person.
What makes Etty’s example especially inspiring is that she wasn’t born that way. She had to work really, really hard.
In one entry she writes: “In the past I would live chaotically in the future, because I refused to live in the here and now… I had the feeling that nothing I did was the ‘real’ thing, that it was all a preparation for something else, something ‘greater’… But that feeling has dropped away from me completely.”
Etty learned to bring herself back.
To the dishes. To a lesson. To a conversation. To one minute lived all the way through instead of mentally abandoning it for the next.
One of her most profound realizations came when she noticed how much of her anxiety came from trying to possess what could never really belong to her.
She would look at a beautiful landscape and feel a pang of sadness because she wanted to own it—to write it down, capture it, make it hers before it disappeared.
She did something similar with people. Her attachment to her mentor Julius Spier could become jealous and possessive: she loved him, so she wanted to make him hers.
And here’s the paradox: loosening that grip didn’t make her feel less connected to him. It made her feel more connected.
“Now that I don’t want to own anything anymore and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.”
The less she tried to force life into the shape she wanted, the more connected she became to other people, to the world, and to herself.
Again, none of this happened automatically. She practiced.
Instead of praying for circumstances to change, she prayed that she could change. She prayed not to become preoccupied with food or clothing or the cold. She reminded herself that sleeping on a hard floor or being forbidden from certain streets didn’t need to consume her.
“These are minor vexations,” she wrote. “So insignificant compared with the infinite riches and possibilities we carry within us. […] Let every day be something more than a thousand everyday cares.”
She sat quietly in the mornings and listened. She picked up a pen and set her thoughts down on paper.
Because to journal is to reason and to reason is to free ourselves.
The act of setting down words is the act of setting down weight. She could see what had been burdening her, and she could question it, reframe it, release it.
Where a less reflective person can become a consumer of circumstance—waiting for the outside world to provide reassurance, meaning, excitement, adequacy—Etty became a generator of meaning.
When the Nazis stripped away more and more of her external world, she kept producing meaning from within.
But that inner work did not end with her. By rooting out personal desires and trivial preoccupations, she made more room in herself for others. She became a haven—a person able to absorb sorrow, offer comfort, and remain present to those around her.
She famously wrote that she wanted to become “the thinking heart of the barracks.”
“I so wish I could put it all into words. Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learned to love Westerbork.”
She didn’t wait for Westerbork to give her peace. She brought peace to Westerbork.
She did the inner work. And it was the most important work she ever did.
