Have you ever fallen into this trap?

You work hard towards a goal, and then you achieve it. You feel happy for a day or a week. Then that’s it. Life becomes ordinary again. Like you never achieved something massive. Like it’s nothing that you paid off that debt or completed that race or got the promotion.

Enter: The Arrival Fallacy.

It’s that false belief that once we finish a goal, everything will change and we will be forever transformed.

Many champions who achieved world-record feats said they felt the sting of the arrival fallacy a few days after.

Here is a story that author Brad Stullberg shared in his book The Way of Excellence:

“For as long as he can remember, the basketball superstar Ray Allen dreamed of winning an NBA title. He was the consummate professional, never missing a practice. He spent hours upon hours refining his already world-class jump shot. He made all-star games, won three-point shooting titles, and even starred in a popular Hollywood movie, He Got Game. Only one accolade evaded him, and that was winning a championship. So when he finally won one in 2008, after twelve years in the league, you’d think he would have been elated. And briefly he was. But it didn’t take more than a few days for that feeling to change. “I felt empty,” Allen recalls. “It had to do with having always believed that when you win a championship, you’re transported to some new, exalted place. What I realized was that you are the same person you were before, and that if you are not content with who you are, a championship, or any accomplishment, isn’t going to change that.” “Allen learned the hard way a universal truth: Fulfillment, happiness, and satisfaction are not attributes you gain from achieving a goal; they are states that arise in the process of going for one.”

Does that mean we should keep moving the goalpost?

The finish line?

Should we not set specific goals to achieve?

Of course not.

Learning about the Arrival fallacy means two things for you:

One: When you pursue a goal, ask yourself: Is it a worthy goal? You determine its worth by considering the work you need to do on yourself to achieve it and the discipline you need to impose. Brad Stullberg says, “When you work on your goals, your goals also work on you.” How beautiful is that?

When your goals align with your values, the attributes you seek to embody in your life, and you work day in and day out toward them, you improve your skills, strengthen your commitment, and add joyous meaning to your life. Every day you practice, write, paint, knit, train…whatever it is, you gain these benefits, not just when you cross important milestones.

Two: When you achieve a goal, not everything changes. But at least one thing changes: Your belief in yourself and what you can do. If you could do this, what else can you do? Finish lines transform you that way. You trust yourself more. You gain self-confidence, and maybe you aim higher next time or to break your best record.

A sports star can hit the highest high of achievement; then what? Writer Brad Stullberg suggests taking a metaphorical forty-eight hours to celebrate, maybe a week or two, then getting back to work, back to practice. Same goes when we face defeat. We allow a limited window to grieve, then get back to work.

Because if we believe this is our life’s work, we never truly arrive. We just work on getting better. Even if that better is so small sometimes that only you notice it.

I promise you that our goals will change us, but it’s not the goals themselves that change us; it’s the pursuit of goals that does.

Here’s what that looked like in my own life this year.

My big, exciting goal was to do weekly podcast episodes, but I’ve never done that for more than 2 or 3 months a year since I launched it 6 years ago. This year, I set a goal to publish weekly podcast episodes, 40 total, by the end of the year, starting in April after the winter hibernation.

When I planned this goal, I realized my biggest obstacle was summer episodes because I had a rule not to work in summer to prioritize my family, as I have been doing every summer lately. Not to mention that waking up early in summer was out of the question, and there was summer traveling, which would make the process of writing and editing episodes harder than usual, so I thought that it was time to implement the idea I often talked about with Rania, my accountability partner, which is batch recording podcast episodes together. It was so much fun and effortless. On my part, editing one episode a week was an easy task, just as I predicted. In the weeks when we did not have recorded episodes, I managed to launch short solo episodes, which were also a hit. As I write this, I have already published 28 episodes, and by the end of this year, I will have shipped 40 podcast episodes in one year for the first time in 6 years since I launched my podcast.

To show you how big a deal this is, here is the historical breakdown for episodes launched per year:

• 2020 (First year): 13
• 2021: 24
• 2022: 10
• 2023: 10
• 2024: 20
• 2025: 10
• 2026: 28/40 done

The goal of 40 episodes has definitely been an exciting goal because it is double my best most recent year (2024), which was also an exciting goal at the time; those 20 episodes were all published in the first half of the year before my third baby’s due date.

What has this goal changed about me?

• I kept waking up early at least once a week in summer.
• Weekly podcast episodes provided content for my Instagram and LinkedIn, where I used each episode’s transcript to create posts, carousels, and reels.
• The podcast show notes became my Sunday Spark format for the summer. The Sunday Spark now takes me 30 to 60 minutes to complete compared to two hours in the past.

When I achieve the 40 episodes, will I stop?

I have not made that decision, but it does not look like it, I want to see what happens when I keep posting weekly episodes for a year. That was my attitude when I decided this goal, it was: “Let’s see what happens when I post weekly episodes!” I will do some analytics at the end of the year of listeners growth and I look forward to it.

What about you dear reader?

What are you willing to work on every day for the coming few months or even years?

What are you willing to give your all?

The journey is worth it and might surprise you.