The Arrival Fallacy

After last weeks edition on goal setting and how it shapes our days, a good friend sent me an interview with Scottie Scheffler. He went viral, and it had nothing to do with his golf swing.

Standing at the top of the world rankings, fresh off another victory, he was asked about celebrating his success. His response was, well… honest: "It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes... And then it's like, what are we going to eat for dinner?"

I had a laugh to myself as I found a lot of truth in it. That moment when you finally reach the thing you've been chasing, only to discover it doesn't feel like you thought it would.

This is maybe my favourite photo from the 2019 Kona World Championships. It's taken a few hours after the race, and I'm alone back at our house, staring out at the ocean. Not lonely- just alone with the strange quiet that follows years of noise. I'd learned by then that this moment, this anticlimatic stillness, was as much a part of the achievement as crossing the line itself.

The Greeks had a story about this. Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity- every time he neared the top, it would roll back down, and he'd start again. It sounds like hell, but honestly? It sounds like Tuesday. We build up some goal in our minds, convince ourselves that reaching it will create lasting satisfaction, then get there only to find ourselves looking around for the next mountain. Psychologists call this the "arrival fallacy"- the belief that achieving X will finally make us feel like we've arrived.

The cruel joke is that the bigger the goal, the shorter the euphoria, at least in relation. Spend six months training for a marathon, feel amazing for about thirty minutes afterward, then immediately start thinking how to “one up this one”- bigger, further, faster. Because apparently regular events are no longer sufficient for our increasingly unreasonable standards.

Scheffler puts it bluntly: "There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life and then you get there and all of a sudden you get to number 1 in the world and you're like what's the point?"

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. When we see someone at the top, it's easy to dismiss these feelings as "champagne problems”- a rich golfer wrestling with existential emptiness. Really? And fair enough. When you're grinding toward your first big win or trying to break a personal record, those incremental wins genuinely matter. They should.

But somewhere along the curve, the math changes. The goal you thought would fix everything becomes just another thing you've done. The dream job comes with dream job problems. The relationship status you craved brings relationship status complications. The bank account number you fantasized about just becomes... a number.

I spent years convinced that the next race, the next result, the next level would be the one that finally felt like enough. Spoiler alert: it never was. The medals collect dust while the anxiety about maintaining success works overtime, apparently unaware that business hours ended years ago.

Remember the movie Cool Runnings? "A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.” I must admit that I spent many years putting this in the “they have no idea” bucket.

This isn't about abandoning ambition or living some zen-master existence where you pretend not to care about outcomes. But after defining goals as destinations a few times over, I would argue that there are better ways.

The real magic happens in the daily grind nobody sees. The 6 AM sessions when your bed feels like a warm hug and the weather looks like Zeus hates athletes. The conversations with yourself when things get hard. The small moments of choice that slowly rewire who you think you are.

That photo above? I'm not disappointed or lonely. Alone maybe. Learning to sit with achievement without immediately reaching for the next distraction. Understanding that this quiet moment, when the crowd has gone home and the adrenaline has faded, this is actually part of the prize.

The irony is beautiful: the moments that actually sustain us are rarely the podium moments. They're the Tuesday breakthroughs when something finally clicks. The quiet satisfaction of showing up when motivation took a sick day. The surprising discovery that you're tougher than you thought, more patient than you expected, more resilient than you imagined.

Or in Scheffler´s words: "I'm kind of a sicko. I love putting in the work. I love being able to practice."

The work is the reward. The process is the prize. The becoming is the point.

So what do we do with this knowledge? Stop setting goals? Live in some enlightened zen-fog and just float?

Definitely not.

We still set goals — but with new expectations. We chase big things, not because they’ll complete us… but because they stretch us. We learn to love the push, knowing the boulder will always roll back down. And we understand that goals aren’t the destination- they’re the vehicle.

The arrival fallacy isn't that goals don't matter. It's that they matter differently than we think. And if you're lucky enough to realize this before you spend decades climbing the wrong mountain, well, that might be the most valuable achievement of all.

Keep pushing that boulder. Just remember to enjoy the view on the way up.

Jan

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