The disease of the greater: why striving for the ideal is harmful

Players, like everyone else, dream big. First, such a big thing for them - winning the championship. But it soon becomes insufficient. They start wanting more money, more fame, more rewards, more favors. The psychological attitude of the team is changing. What used to be a perfect fusion of the skills of all players turns into a chaotic and fragmented effort. As a result, the team will fail.

Bigger is not better

In the 1980s, psychologists conducted a survey to understand what makes people happy. They gave pagers to a large group of people and asked them to write down after each beep:

How happy do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10?
What event in your life influenced this feeling?

Researchers have collected thousands of such records. The result was unexpected. Almost everyone rated the level of happiness at 7 points. I buy milk in the supermarket - 7. I watch my son play football - 7. Discuss with the sales manager - 7.

Even when some kind of misfortune happened, the level dropped briefly to 2–5 points, and after a while returned to 7. The same with joyful events. Winning the lottery, vacation, wedding - all this temporarily raised the mark, but soon the level of happiness still stopped at 7 points.

We are not always happy. But they are constantly unhappy too.

Regardless of external circumstances, we are always in a state of moderate, albeit not entirely satisfactory, happiness. Almost always, everything is fine with us. But we remember that it is better.

It constantly seems to us that very little is missing to complete happiness. We think that just a little more, and the level of happiness will rise to ten. Most of us live like this - in the constant pursuit of complete 10-point happiness.

As a result, such people spend a lot of effort and still feel unhappy. It seems to them that they are not moving. The pursuit of their future perfect happiness gradually devalues their present.

So you don't need to strive for anything? No.

We must be motivated by something else, not just our own happiness.

Self-improvement is just a hobby

We have all heard more than once that at the beginning of the year you need to write down your goals, analyze desires and aspirations, and then write down each step in order to achieve them.

But self-improvement just for the sake of self-improvement does not make any sense. This is just another much-hyped hobby. Something that you can occupy yourself with, and then enthusiastically discuss with like-minded people.

If something can be improved, it does not mean that it needs to be improved.

The problem is not with the improvements themselves. The important thing is why we want to improve something in ourselves or in our life. When we have no other goal than self-aggrandizement, our whole life turns into a fixation on ourselves, into an easy and pleasant form of narcissism. In the end it will only make us unhappy.

Life is not a constant improvement, but a constant exchange

Many people perceive life as linear growth and development. This is true at first. As a child, our knowledge and understanding of the world increases from year to year. In our youth, our skills continue to develop rapidly.

But when we reach maturity, become professionals in some field, life from constant development turns into constant exchange.

You have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in acquiring skills in your field. By changing the field of activity, you will not improve as a person, but give up certain opportunities that you could embody. Simply put, if a writer suddenly wants to become a musician, he will exchange the opportunity to write a new book for learning to play some instrument.

The same thing happens with athletes after an important victory. The time they would have spent training before they are now trading in advertising or buying expensive houses. They end up losing.

Finally

Be careful. Do not strive to develop only for the sake of development, do not dream of more in order to get more. Be careful when choosing new goals, otherwise you can lose the happiness and success that you have now.

Life is not a to-do list to tick off, or a mountain to be conquered. Life is a constant exchange. And you have to choose what to exchange without giving up your values. If you are ready to forget about them and get another 10-point mark on the scale of happiness, chances are you will end up disappointed.