Arthur Brooks

So 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 what satisfaction is all about.

That's why goals are incredibly important and struggle and pain are incredibly important.

That's what it comes down to.

These are the two things to teach your kids, is have goals,

accomplish stuff and struggle and don't be afraid of pain.

Those are the things that you teach your kids and 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.

when I finally get that thing.

So, you know, I've, I've, I've worked with Olympic athletes and, and, and it's funny because you'll often, they think they're alone in their struggles and you'll say, did you, when you won that gold, were you depressed afterward?

They'd be like, how'd you know?

Like, cause it's always true.

Every other gold medalist.

It's literally called gold medalist syndrome.

Yeah.

It's called gold medalist.

And what it is, it's all in, in, in my field in behavioral science is called the arrival fallacy.