Setting goals to motivate you is one thing, but only allowing yourself to be happy once you achieve a life goal is a sure-fire path to misery. This mindset leads to one of two outcomes:

You set such unrealistic goals that you are never able to achieve what you deem necessary to make you happy. You become stuck, dejected and unable to move forward. You achieve ‘goal 1’ but you don’t feel anything close to the life-changing euphoria that you expected. So what happens? Onto ‘goal 2’ of course, then ‘3’, ‘4’ and so on. “Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there.” (Shawn Achor, “The Happy secret to better work”). In this sense, any happiness you promise yourself upon achieving something is soon regarded as an unwelcome distraction from the next goal.

The irony of seeing the pursuit of happiness in the here and now as an unwelcome distraction to achieving one’s goals is unfortunately lost on many. This happiness is almost considered fake, as if it has not been earned or deserved.

It’s no wonder that many of us have developed this flawed mindset, when you consider that it is implicitly encouraged by schools and companies. We are programmed to think that the harder we work the more successful we will be and the more successful we are the happier we will be. This is far from a new problem. In the 1800s, the writer, Charles Caleb Colton remarked:

“Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other — it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.”

Setting goals is not the issue

I would encourage everyone to dream big and strive towards achieving something marvellous, but we need to be aware of our relationship to these goals. In his 2009 Ted Talk, Srikumar Rao differentiates between ‘focusing on the outcome’ and ‘investing in the outcome’:

“Now, focusing on the outcome is fine. It gives you direction. Investing in the outcome means that you make the achievement of a particular outcome dependent for your well-being. And that is a surefire recipe for failure.”

So what can we do?

Just like with living in the past, the first step is to realise that you’re thinking this way. Each time you notice yourself falling into the ‘eternal achievement cycle’, question the logic of delaying your happiness until a time that may never arrive and whether it will truly eclipse the feeling of misery the other 99% of the time. When mental models become so ingrained in the way we live it can be very hard to accept their flaws, but all habits can be changed.

When you realise that you can choose to feel happier and more positive in the here and now, studies suggest you’ll even become more efficient in working towards your goals, as outlined by Shawn Achor:

“If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we’ve found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.”

Srikumar Rao suggests you invest in the process as opposed to investing in the outcome:

“You can invest in the process. That is, once you have determined, here is where I am, here is where I want to be, and that’s fine, you focus on the outcome only to the extent that it gives you direction, and then you invest yourself completely in the process. You say, here are the steps you want to take, and you put everything into it. And if you succeed, wonderful. And if you don’t succeed, still wonderful, because now you have a new starting point, and from that new starting point, you select another outcome and keep going. And when you do that, you will find that every day is a blast.”

I’ll leave you with this quote:

(See Lesson#3 about living in the present)