I remember being promoted to full professor at the age of 30 which I thought was quite an accomplishment that I worked very hard for. I remember roughly four minutes of genuine elation, a message to a friend, and then a feeling akin to depression settling over the rest of the afternoon. The thing I was certain would change how I felt about  life turns out to change it for about a week.

The psychologists call this the arrival fallacy. What is more interesting to me is where the satisfaction actually was because it was not absent. It was distributed thinly across the years of work leading up to the moment. It was the journey and not the destination. But being a young whippersnapper, I was busy looking at the finish line.

This is not an argument against ambition. It is great and perhaps even necessary to have goals. Once you accept that the pursuit is the reward, some practical things follow. Choose work whose daily texture you actually enjoy, not merely work whose destination looks impressive, because you will spend a thousand days in the former and an afternoon in the latter. So, as a reflection for today: what are you currently telling yourself you will feel once you get there? And what would change if you knew the feeling would last a week?