Michael Smoak

I have a hard time celebrating my achievements because in my mind it was my obligation to achieve it.

It's strange.

I think people that have high standards assume that they should always win.

They should always succeed.

And that turns success from a cause for celebration into the minimum level of acceptable performance.

Success simply becomes what's expected of you and anything less than success would be a failure.

And yeah, it's the habituation that we see.

Hedonic adaptation, people talk about it for you buy a new car and it's all exciting and then pretty quickly you get used to it.

You move into a new house and you're thinking about it for so long and you were looking on Zoopla and Rightmove and you were comparing it and this is what we're...

And then it's just the place that you put your shoes at the end of the day after a while.

But a much more sort of pernicious place for this is in personal growth.

It's in your own capacity.

So previously, your old PR that you celebrated at the time is now a warm-up set.

And the same thing goes for the status that you have and your precision with the way that you do your art form, the...

speed at which you can complete a particular task, whether you're a salesperson or you manage a retail store or you write a blog or whatever, you want to permanently be pushing the limits.

And as you raise the bar, that means that you will always feel like you suck because your standards continually outstrip your ability to deliver them.

And that's good in some ways because it keeps forcing you to progress, but it does mean that you live in this gap.

You don't live in the gain, the comparison between where you were and where you are.

You live in the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

That's not where you could be because sometimes you can want to be further than where you could be.