The Arrival Fallacy: Why Winning Never Feels Like It
Hitting your biggest goals rarely delivers the relief you expected, and psychology explains exactly why.
A note on why the next milestone never quite feels like enough, and what to do about it instead.
I want to tell you about the exact moment I realised hitting a goal doesn’t feel the way you think it will. It happened to me a few years back, and it’s stuck with me since.
The day when I finished a 10K run under 60 minutes. That’s, I guess, the top 1% of the crowd or maybe top 3% of all the runners around the world.
I expected a wave of something. Relief, maybe. Pride. Instead I refreshed and went back about my day.
That’s the arrival fallacy.
A term coined by Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology researcher who taught at Harvard, to describe the mistaken belief that reaching a goal will bring lasting happiness.
It doesn’t. Not because the goal was wrong. Because happiness was never sitting at the finish line waiting for you.
Nobody warns you about this part before you start chasing something big, something beyond you.
The finish line moves the second you touch it.
Get your first customer, you want a hundred. Reach $5000 in savings, you want $15000 next, close a seed round investment, you want to get to series A faster.
and from my founder experience. We got into Y Combinator, we wanted Demo Day to go well. Then close our seed raise. Then the next hire. Then the acquisition offer. So on and so forth.
I’ve watched this pattern in founder after founder, myself included. We treat every milestone like a summit. It isn’t one. It’s a base camp.
The Base Camp Thinking
Climbers don’t sprint from base camp to summit in one push. They stop. They acclimatise. They let their body catch up to where they are before pushing higher. They even climb down, and then climb back up. It’s only natural.
But most of us skip the acclimatisation step completely. We touch a goal and immediately start scanning for the next one, without ever letting ourselves feel like we arrived.
I recommend you try this instead the next time you’ve achieved a milestone. When you hit something you’ve been working toward, stop for a full day. Not a mental note to “enjoy it later.” An actual full day. Tell someone about it. Write it down in your journal. Let it be real before you let it become old news, before it becomes stale.
You’re allowed to decide a moment is enough, even when your ambition insists it isn’t.
I didn’t do that the day I finished my 10K run under 60 mins. I regret it more than almost any other decision that year. So I made a rule for myself: no new goal gets set until the last one has been sat with for at least 24 hours.
It’s a small rule but effective. It’s changed how the wins actually feel, it sits with you longer than you think.
Until next time, sit with your wins a little longer than feels comfortable.
— Rayn
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