There is No Finish Line: Playing the Long Game
I came across an excellent post by CEO coach Matt Munson, a few months ago. It really triggered a lot of thinking. The title is perfect and has been a big struggle throughout my adult life: “Rethinking Ambition: How to navigate the tension between reaching high and living a more content life.”
He goes on to say:
“One key mistake I made was not aligning my work with a purpose I cared about. Another was approaching the work with a finish line in mind.
I hold ambition quite differently now.
There is no end game to our work at my coaching firm Sanity Labs. We know the change we exist to effect, but there is no arriving. And that is how we like it.”
Source: https://www.mattmunson.me/rethinking-ambition/
I’ve always been very goal driven. I’ve always been very type A-aggressive. It’s gotten me to where I am now. This is the formula that is driven into our brains growing up.
It’s our programming: “If I get X, then I will be Y.” A common example for many young people: “If I make a billion dollars, I will be happy”. Or If I get married, I will never be lonely and my life will be fulfilled.” You think your happiness and contentment will happen when you get there or meet your goal.
Yet like many people, when you hit your big goals, what happens is, surprise, surprise, you aren’t as happy as you thought you would be. So then you go pick new goals in the hope that this will fix that. But like any treadmill it never ends. You find out that when your happiness is dependent on these goals, you never end up being fulfilled.
As I’ve gotten older, gotten past old goals and learned more about myself, I’ve realized that there is no end goal except the end of your life. So the cliche of enjoying the journey becomes even more important. You can still have a mission, you can still have big ambitions and be goal oriented. But if you aren’t enjoying the path most of the time, with a big stress on “most of the time”, you are probably doing something wrong.
It’s not to see you have to become a complete hedonist or sybarite, you still have to grind, to do hard things that hurt and challenge you. Having massive sized goals does that for you. Humans thrive on challenge and hardship and this is what brings out the best of us. It’s that careful balance between ambition and contentment. That’s what true happiness really is about in life: Understanding that there is no finish line, except for death.
This has been a big relief to me personally and has allowed me to really enjoy my life. I believe this might help you too.