Transcription
Okay, great! You're successful, but have you made the devil's bargain? My name is Craig Philik, and for the past 15 years, I've been coaching some of the most successful men in America to clarify what's next after they achieve success. In this video, we're going to talk about what the devil's bargain is, whether you made it, and if you did— which you probably did—how to get out of it.
So, let's talk about what the devil's bargain actually is. This concept comes from an early 1800s book by Goethe, who you probably know as the German philosopher. He said, "Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. At the moment of commitment, the entire universe conspires to assist you. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too." That's pretty damn good! He was a writer and has several books, but the one that the devil's bargain comes from is "Faust." Dr. Faust was an alchemist in German folklore. Legend has it that he made the devil's bargain; he met with Mephistopheles because he wanted knowledge and material power beyond what he could create for himself. So, he traded his soul and had that material knowledge and power for 24 years, ultimately spending eternity in hell.
Now, that's an extreme example, but what does the devil's bargain actually mean in terms of our daily life experience? I really like the way that Dr. Robert A. Johnson, a Jungian analyst and Carl Jung's youngest student, talks about this in "The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden," which are two myths that come from the 12th century. These myths describe the very beginnings of mechanistic, or you could call it the Industrial Revolution. This is when water wheels emerged.
Let me tell you the story so you can really understand it. There was a miller in town who worked by the sweat of his brow. He did fine; he was making a good living for his wife and daughter, and he had a good life in town. Everybody respected him. Then one day, the devil comes to him and says, "You know, you're working too hard for what you have. You should be working a lot less and should be a lot more." The miller, being a simple man, says, "Well, how do you mean?" The devil replies, "I will make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams—more money than you could ever spend—and you will barely have to work for it." The miller says, "That sounds pretty good! How are we going to do this?" The devil says, "Leave that to me." The miller then asks, "What do you want for it?" The devil replies, "Oh, just that which stands behind the old woodshed." The miller thinks to himself, "The cypress tree," and he shakes on the deal.
The devil builds him a water wheel, so now instead of grinding flour with the sweat of his brow, the water wheel is doing all the work. He's selling more flour than he's ever sold and making more money than he's ever made. This is the beginning of industrialization. In a way, we've all made the devil's bargain, and you can see that in things like our cell phones and technology. It sucks the soul right out of us, and in return, what do we get? Endless supplies of cheap dopamine—endless rewards. That, in and of itself, is a devil's bargain.
But for successful midlife men, it cuts a little deeper. In the story, which you can probably relate to if you have passive investments at this point or if you have a business running without you, you get to a point where you don't feel so great. You're kind of lost, bored, confused, frustrated—maybe you feel empty. This relates to the myth in the legend of the handless maiden. The devil comes back and says to the miller, "I have come to claim my price." The miller responds, "Oh yeah, the old cypress tree," and they march out behind the woodshed. The devil has the axe and is prepared to cut down the cypress tree and give it to the devil. But there's a twist: his daughter is standing behind the woodshed at that moment, and he panics. Eventually, through some negotiations, the devil doesn't take his daughter, but he takes her hands. So, they chop her hands off, and it's gory and brutal.
But like any Jungian interpretation of an old story, there's a reason for this. What does the daughter represent in our interior experience? It represents the feeling function. As men, we give up our ability to feel because we get caught up in our pursuits, and we lose our ability to be in touch with our authenticity and our internal feeling function. But it's not totally gone; just her hands are gone. The daughter walks around the house, and they have all this opulence. She says, "But what can I do?" They respond, "Oh, you don't have to do anything. We've got maids for that. We've got servants for that. We've got all sorts of fancy gadgets and things that can handle that. We don't need you to do anything."
This is why I suggest you probably made the devil's bargain. You've got the opulence of a king, even a hundred years ago. Anyone living in the suburbs has a washing machine, a dishwasher, a blender, a refrigerator. On average, there are enough appliances and electricity in the home to do the work of something like 70 servants. We've all got that now. We are all living like kings. The wealthiest among us, the top 10%, have so much opulence in the history of civilization that we run out of things to do. Then what's left is all this time to think, to create, to philosophize, to connect with people. But what do we end up doing? Scrolling on our phones, taking another luxury vacation, going on another expensive shopping spree—whether that's to the Ferrari dealer or wherever your favorite spot in Vegas is to buy $1,000 shirts. What does that give you? Does that actually fill you up inside? No, because that inner daughter, the feeling function, doesn't know what to do.
So, through the story, she ends up running away, marrying the king of another kingdom, and having a child. He has Merlin come in and give her silver hands, replacing her feeling hands with silver hands. You've met women like this—women who couldn't milk a cow, who can barely care for a baby. They have silver hands; they're not connected to their heart or their soul. And that's what we become. We don't want our $1,000 shirt to get a stain on it. "Oh no, my $1,000 shirt got a stain on it!" From what? From enjoying yourself, from laughing, and maybe getting scuffed up in the grass or spilling some wine on you. What would you do that would get a stain on your shirt? Living your life—that's the silver hands. We lose that ability to just be human beings.
So again, we've traded our soul for opulence, for material reward. If you're honest with yourself, it's a kind of hell. It's like King Midas—you can't eat gold. This awareness has been around in civilization for thousands of years, ever since we created leverage, ever since we created the ability to have more than we could possibly eat in a day, more than we could possibly spend in a lifetime.
If this is resonating with you, what do you do about it? Well, this is what the handless maiden ends up doing: she takes the baby and runs away. She can't stand it anymore. In the woods, she's running, and everybody's chasing after her. She eventually gets away from them and is alone. She ends up trying to cross a brook—a little stream—and she trips, dropping her baby in the stream. She turns and cries, "Help me! Help my baby! Help me!" But there's nobody there to do the work for her. For the first time in her life, she has to get involved. What does she do? She dives into the little stream, scoops up the baby, and comes up with her hands restored to human hands.
What does that mean? It means that we have to care so much about something besides our silver hands, besides our water wheel mill that's just cranking out money like an ATM. We have to care about something more than that. When we give ourselves wholly to that thing, our hands are restored, and we become whole. We integrate. For us as successful midlife men, this means that our authenticity comes back online.
What that looks like in the successful men I've worked with over the decades is that we realize there's something inside of us that has always been there—that feeling function that we've ignored for good reason. Usually, it starts with some kind of trauma in childhood where we're told, "No, no, good boys don't do those things. Good boys don't say those things." Responsible men push that down, and they work and they do. That's real, and we need to do that. That's part of socialization; there's nothing wrong with that because it matures us. It brings us to a point where we're standing on top of Success Mountain. We've checked all the boxes: we got the house, the wife, the kids, the cars, the toys, the vacations, and we're looking around saying, "Now what?"
This is the answer to "Now what?" Now what is we find something that we love so much we're willing to dive in, get messy, get dirty, and bring forth that authenticity into the world. That's what I call the second mountain. But you have to go. We spend our whole lives climbing that first mountain. We get to the top, and we don't want to leave because everything in us has been "up, up, up," "grow, grow, grow," "grind, trudge, scale." Then we get here, and what we don't want to do is go down what Seth Godin calls "the dip"—the valley from the top of Success Mountain to the trailhead of your second mountain, which you can climb for decades. That's where you get the meaning, fulfillment, sense of purpose, and ultimately leave your impact and your legacy: your second mountain.
That's equivalent to the handless maiden—the feeling function in us saying, "I care about this more than I care about anything else." The kicker is that she was still the queen of the kingdom. So, the story doesn't actually proceed from there, but she can go back to the kingdom, nourish her baby, and be the queen of the kingdom and the wife of the king.
Remember, this is all a Jungian interpretation. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious. So, going in and finding that feeling function inside of ourselves and connecting that with the king we've become in the external world—that's what makes us whole. You'll notice it in your relationship with your wife or partner. When you start to feel again, the texture of your relationship with her will start to change. She'll notice it; she'll feel it immediately—like instantly. She'll say, "Oh, hello!" It's a good feeling.
But what does it mean for climbing that second mountain? It means that the thing you were born to do—the thing that's been trapped inside you—can now be pursued because you don't have to work for money anymore. You don't have to trade your soul for material resources, security, or stability. You've got that. You've got your investments; you've got your business running without you. You've got everything unlocked. Now that frees you up to go through the dark forest between the two mountains and find the trailhead of your second mountain.
Every single man I've brought to that trailhead looks at me and says, "I've known this my whole life. This is not news to me." But somehow, it gets lost. That losing of our innate purpose—that is the devil's bargain. We trade that moral and spiritual awareness within us for the ego mind strategy in order to create wealth, security, and stability to produce and provide for our families. That's a good thing; it's a healthy thing. It's a natural step—a usually 12 to 20-year phase of a man's life, which brings us to midlife.
Now, it can take 10 to 20 years to find what that first mountain is. You might have some false starts; you might have a bankruptcy or two in there. That's all part of it. But once you find that first mountain, it's about 12 to 20 years before it's working without you. You can sell it—whatever that is. You've amassed enough resources, enough wealth. If you have a high-paying profession or you're a salesman, whatever that is, you reach the point where you're looking around and saying, "Okay, something else is ready to happen."
But that's where we run out of a roadmap. Society tells us, "Here's the checklist: go to school, get good grades, make that money, get the house, the wife, the kids, the cars, the toys, the vacations." All of that is very clear. But when we get to the top of that first mountain, the backside—that's not clear. There is no roadmap. The reason there's no roadmap is that your second mountain is unique to you.
The first mountain—I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, I'm a salesman, CEO—it's cookie-cutter. The second mountain, when you see it, you say, "Oh yeah, that mountain was made for me. I was born to climb that mountain." It's very individual, so there is no roadmap. You have to create it, and that's what we do with purpose mapping.
So, if that resonates with you, if that's the phase of life you're in and you're at that crisis at the summit, as Harvard Business Review calls it, and you'd like to figure out what to do next, that's what we specialize in. I'd love to speak with you. Go ahead and book a call or watch our Midlife Crisis 2.0 video if you want to spend a little more time getting acclimated to what's going on for you.
This is my thesis: men have never lived longer, never retired younger or wealthier, and that masculine evolutionary purpose starts to wake up in us and says, "Great! You sold your company for $30 million yesterday. What did you do today? How are you contributing now?" That contribution versus going to the beach, golfing your way to the grave, staying stuck on the golden hamster wheel, gliding into a hurricane looking for that rush—that dopamine—that second mountain, that contribution—that's what the handless maiden does to get her hands back. You have to find that thing that you love, and that's what we're here to help you do.
I look forward to speaking with you soon, and if you know a man who would benefit from this message, go ahead and share it with them. Bye for now!