The Big Lie About Success

Arrival: Success’s Biggest Con

There are a lot of myths about what happens when we “achieve success”.

The biggest one that I know is called The Arrival Fallacy, or the false assumption that once we accomplish a goal, we’ll have enduring happiness.

This one 🤦‍♂️. This one is so baked into our culture. So alluring. And such a crock of shit.

Now I’m not trying to get into a debate about how wellbeing correlates with wealth. While that’s a fascinating discussion to have, it’s not what I’m talking about here.

The arrival fallacy looks something like this: Once I’m successful enough/make enough money/achieve goal X, I will be enduringly happy.

The keyword? Enduring. It implies that the only thing between us and consistent and reliable happiness is an arbitrary external goal.

But that’s not how our psychology or our nervous system works.

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The mythical belief in arrival isn’t totally useless.

Believing in arrival is a useful motivator. We tell ourselves that something is missing and that I need to get my ass in gear to get what I don’t have. Me want something, me no have, me work to get. It’s fundamental—of course that’s a game we play.

The mistake happens when we say “once I have that, I’ll be happy. I’m not happy because that thing is missing”.

When you motivate in this way—reinforcing that something is missing—you’re not training happiness, you’re training scarcity.

Do you see that? You are training your nervous system to believe that something is missing. Expertly. So how do you expect to feel once you get that thing?

At first you’ll probably feel relieved. But pretty soon afterwards you’re going to feel an oddly familiar feeling: like something is missing.

That’s because happiness & contentment are a completely different skillset, muscle, neural circuit, than striving.

Believing in the arrival fallacy is like believing if I just train my arms hard enough, I’ll finally be happy with my legs. It doesn’t work that way.

If you want better legs, you need to work out your legs. And if you want to be content & happy, you need to work on contentment & happiness.

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The Arrival Fallacy is, at it’s best, a useful short-term motivator. At it’s worst, it’s a contract you make to have a bad relationship with yourself until you achieve a goal.

At the end, you’re left with an (hopefully) achieved goal and a bad relationship with yourself.

So how do you break the spell of the arrival fallacy? Well… honestly, I’m too lazy to summarize it here. But if you liked this and want to go deeper, including what to do about it, checkout Episode 10 of No Clear Answers. We discuss everything Arrival Fallacy. What to do about it starts at the chapter marker at 38:17 🙂

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

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Understanding Your Strengths

ICYMI — No Clear Answers episode 9 released on October 3rd and was all about strengths. We covered a lot of great topics:

• Why we’re frequently blind to our biggest strengths, and how to identify them

• Favorite methods to identify your strengths, including Gallup’s Strengthsfinder and 360 feedback processes

• Why strengths-based approaches require delegation, and how to think about delegating

• The difference between functional strengths and higher level “meta-strengths”

• Why being strengths-based requires being weakness-informed

• How to be strengths-based without stopping your growth and evolution

Catch the entire episode on your favorite platform:

Apple

Spotify

Youtube

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A shoutout for my friend Anil’s Newsletter, Learn + Grow

Anil Gupta is a friend and professional acquaintance of mine who is, frankly, a badass. Anil runs multi-million dollar wordpress agency Multidots, the Peaceful Growth Podcast (of which I’ll be a guest on soon!), and a newsletter I recommend checking out called Learn + Grow.

Learn + Grow is for you if you like bite-sized insights and easily implementable tactics for improving your performance, productivity, and energy. Check it out and consider subscribing:

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