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Arthur C. Brooks explains why reaching your goals doesn't make you happy. Satisfaction comes from the struggle toward them, not from arriving. Highly driven people especially fall for the arrival fallacy, mistaking achievement for contentment.
Arthur C. Brooks explains why reaching your goals doesn't make you happy. Satisfaction comes from the struggle toward them, not from arriving. Highly driven people especially fall for the arrival fallacy, mistaking achievement for contentment.
How often do you think people are pursuing goals because they genuinely want them versus because they want approval?
Everybody pursues goals because human beings, Homo sapiens, only get satisfaction in their life when they're making progress. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress toward an accomplishment with struggle. That's why goals are incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important. These are the two things to teach your kids is have goals, accomplish stuff, and struggle and don't be afraid of pain, then they'll get a lot of satisfaction. Satisfaction is one of the macronutrients of happiness, to be sure. The trouble with that is that if it's somebody like you, highly intelligent, super hardworking, unbelievably energetic, then you can actually start fooling yourself into thinking it's actually not about making the progress and the struggle and the hustle and grind of life itself. It's actually about if I finally get that thing, then it's going to be okay. In my field, in behavioral science, it's called the arrival fallacy.
And the arrival fallacy is just like, I gotta get there.
And when I get there, I'm gonna feel that thing. Now, what is the thing I'm gonna feel? And this gets back to your question. I'm gonna feel like I'm worthy. I'm gonna feel like I'm something. I'm gonna feel like I'm special. I'm finally going to feel like I'm special. And you don't. And that's the problem. That's a big part of the survivor's curse.
