The Arrival Fallacy - Why Winning Olympic Gold Can Make You Sad

Concentrating too hard on a big goal can harm your happiness - even if you achieve your dream.

If you read my last newsletter you’ll be aware of the anguish some Olympic silver medalists feel up there on the podium (and often for months and years afterwards). Some silver medalists can’t enjoy their success, because they can only compare their own performance unfavorably with the achievements of the gold medal winner.

So winning gold must feel great, right?

Well, not always.

During the Tokyo Games last summer, I saw an interview with a retired British diving champion. Chris Mears had just left the sport and was reflecting on how winning isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

Chris had been diving since childhood – putting his mind and body through the rigors of practice and the stresses of competition. A training accident even ruptured his spleen, nearly killing him and almost ending his career. And yet, he was back on the board representing his country in just 18 months.

Then at the Rio Olympics in 2016, Chris and his synchronized diving partner, Jack Laugher, took gold. It was the first time his country had won a diving gold medal.

Was Chris delighted?

“It all came crashing down,” he says.

“For years I told myself: ‘I’ll be happy when I get this… I’ll be happy when I get that. When I get to this position, I’ll be happy.’ And I got it… and I wasn’t.”

The situation Chris was facing is familiar to many of us non-athletes too. One of the biggest wellbeing mistakes we make is to believe that our happiness depends on achieving one, large goal. It could be landing our dream job, or getting married, or winning the lottery. But this, it turns out, is a bias - one that researchers call the arrival fallacy - we think that achieving that big goal will be great, but it turns out we’re wrong. Getting to the top of that goal mountain never feels as good as we think.

We fall prey to the arrival fallacy for two reasons.

First, we are incredibly bad at accurately predicting the future. We may pin our happiness hopes on a single, much-anticipated event… but our imaginations don’t fully map out all the realities of our dream coming true.

For example, you may think you’ll be happy when you finally buy a house. You may be able to picture your ideal home, but not the neighbors who hold noisy parties every weekend or the raccoons who raid your trash every night.

So life’s big ticket items aren’t always the unadulterated joy we predict. But even happiness-inducing events can’t make up for all the other parts of our lives that aren’t so satisfying. A dream home won’t change a job you don’t like or a relationship that’s in trouble - it’s just a more comfortable place to sit when you feel bad about those things.

Another problem with concentrating on big goals is the opportunity costs they entail. Training for a gold medal, planning for a lavish wedding, or saving for a vacation home all involve making sacrifices and trade-offs.

It could be that the thousands of hours you spend perfecting a Forward 2 ½ Somersaults 2 Twists Pike off the 3m diving board caused you to miss a ton of family meals, road trips or nights out with friends. All those events could have brought you joy – but instead you bet everything on the possibility of feeling great when the gold medal gets hung around your neck.

Now I’m not saying that the arrival fallacy means you should stop planning a nice wedding or training for the Olympics – but what the research does suggest is that you should start to think of happiness as a path to walk, rather than a destination.

Stop doing what Chris Mears did, stop saying to yourself: “I’ll be happy when I get this… I’ll be happy when I get that.”

You should try to maximize your happiness each and every day.

When I think of how to do this, I’m reminded of my meeting with the awesome champion figure skater Michelle Kwan. She classes herself as a pretty happy person and I tried to discover how she avoided the sorts of feelings Chris experienced.

Michelle trained super hard and made all the sacrifices top athletes make… but she never got fixated on the final goal - that medal and the podium - as some Olympians do.

She actually loved the gruelling training schedule. “I thrived,” she said of the days spent on the ice going over her routines, getting better and better until she was “flying”.

Michelle loved to hear the ice swoosh under her skates during competition and the applause of the audience. She remembers thinking: "This is why I do what I do."

Winning a medal was secondary to all that.

“It's not about the result,” Michelle told me. “It's about the journey.”

As a nugget of happiness advice, that’s pure gold.

Stay safe,

Laurie