Masters in Business · Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Dr. Grummitt uses Elon Musk as an example of someone potentially running on an 'achievement treadmill,' driven by past trauma rather than a sense of meaning. He suggests Musk's pursuit of extreme goals like traveling to Mars or becoming a trillionaire might stem from an inability to process childhood difficulties, leading to unhappiness despite immense success.
“People who have meaning problems often feel like instead of going back and dealing with their past and learning better stories to tell about themselves, instead they think they can jump to the present in future, find a sense of purpose and that's going to quench their meaning problem. They think they can. It's their way to feeling enough inside. And so what you'll find is people who feel bad about things that happened in the past, and instead of dealing with those they achieve more and more and more.”
“I call it the achievement treadmill. We have so many great examples of that in pop culture. Elon Musk is a perfect one. Do you know about Elon Musk? His childhood was hard, He was kind of abused by his father. He was beat up by all the other school kids. I believe from the outside, Elon Musk probably doesn't have the greatest sense of meaning. He sees trauma in his past, and instead of dealing with that, he figures, if I just make a trillion dollars, or if I just travel to Mars, if I just do these things, I'm gonna be happy. But anyone looking at the outside looks at Elon Musk and says, boy, that guy doesn't look happy.”