Beware of the arrival fallacy!

Hi there guys, I'm very pleased and excited for one of my readers Choaniki who has embarked on a career change from healthcare finance! But without sounding too negative, I'd like to talk about the arrival fallacy and how I had fallen prey to that a number of times before. Firstly, allow me to define the arrival fallacy: it is when people set themselves a goal and believe that when they finally achieve that goal, they will be very happy and that doesn't happen. A classic example is when a poor man thinks, it sucks to be poor, I need to be rich and then I will be happy. So this man sacrifices everything - no social life, no relationships, no leisure activities, not even enough sleep just to achieve this aim of making as much money as possible but when this man finally becomes a millionaire, he still feels miserable because the journey to get there was horrifically difficult, there had been too many sacrifices made and the damage had been done; so even though this man is now rich, disappointingly, achieving that objective didn't bring him the happiness he had hoped for. This is actually so common in life and in today's post, I want to discuss this as I wish Choaniki every success in his new career. 

Problem 1: Allowing others to set your goals for you. 

This actually happens a lot with Asian children who are expected to either enter a profession that is deemed prestigious like medicine or one that can earn them a lot of money like banking. So we have the classic case of the good Asian daughter who becomes a doctor just to please her parents. On the day she becomes a fully qualified doctor, she thought she would be very happy but surprise, surprise - that joy just wasn't there. This was because the filial Asian daughter had been so focused on making her parents happy that she totally neglected to make herself happy. Now this seems pretty obvious when I explain it like that but she probably had assumed that her parents had her best interests at heart and thus trusted their judgment when it came to her career path. Since she had willingly gone along with their decision, they had simply assumed that she was totally happy with that career path. The Asian daughter would've been told, you want respect? Doctors so respected and it is seen as one of the most noble professions - what could be more noble than treating the sick? You want make a lot of money? Most doctors can earn a lot of money once they climb their career ladders and become specialists. All these arguments sound logical of course, but if the Asian daughter doesn't really want to become a doctor, then she is not going to find happiness working as a doctor. This happened in my family - my parents were under a lot of pressure to have a son because of their Chinese culture which placed so much emphasis on them having a son. After having two daughters, they were determined to keep going until they got a son and that was when I came along. But did it make them happy? No, in fact it made them more miserable. They had one more child to bring up and money was tight, we were a poor family. But more to the point, my parents were already fighting all the time and having a son wasn't going to fix all of those problems - I know my mother was thinking, "okay, now I've finally given my husband a son, so where's my reward then? Is life going to get better now?" It was a classic case of the arrival fallacy, they had pursued a goal someone else had set for them without actually considering what rewards it would actually bring, leading to disappointment and misery. Letting others to set your goals will make them happy, but not you. 

Problem 2: Expecting others to treat you better 

Staying with the case study of my parents, they had a lot of problems and were fighting a lot even before I was born and thus there was the expectation that somehow, once my mother had given my father a son, he  would then see her as a better wife/mother, treat her a lot better and their relationship would improve. However, they were in that bizarre situation where both parties were literally waiting for the other party to start treating their spouse better and of course, neither made the first move so nothing changed. You should never put your happiness in the hands of another person because the only person you can count on is yourself - if your happiness is contingent on the other party treating you better if and when you achieve a goal, then they may let you down. In an ideal world, of course we want others to treat us with the kind of respect we deserve but there's often no guarantee that we will be treated the way we deserve - instead, the only real safeguard against that is to promise ourselves that we are not dependent on that kind of validation at all, that we're more than capable of giving ourselves all the validation that we need. The way I would approach this is by promising myself real rewards when I achieve my goal, so for example: if I do really well in this exam and score at least 85%, I will go on this awesome holiday or buy those very expensive tickets to the concert of my favourite band because I have earned it. This way, you are removing any uncertainty out of the equation - that way if you get any validation on the way, that's a bonus but not a requirement. It is far easier to earn money than respect, now you can actually buy good customer service with money but that's not quite the same as respect. There's a huge difference in your customer experience when flying business or first class instead of economy class, but you're paying for that exclusive experience. If you really need to feel that sense of being respected after having achieved your goal, that's fine but just be prepared to spend a lot of money for that kind of experience rather than expecting it to be handed to you for free on a silver platter. So go ahead and treat yourself better rather than wait for others to do so, you must retain control of your reward system. 

Problem 3: Focusing on the goal and not the journey

Allow me to give you an example: I am now spending quite a lot of effort doing Instagram reels for my gymnastics specific Instagram profile and the results are pretty random. Sometimes I can put in a lot of effort and get a couple of hundred views at best, but then some other videos can have a few thousand views and one even went viral - it got 12,500 views in about 48 hours despite the fact that the sound quality on that video was quite poor and it was hard to understand every word I was saying. I accept that there is something random going on, something that I don't quite understand with the algorithms that determine why one post gets so little attention whilst another goes viral but I really enjoy the process of brainstorming the ideas for a reel, scripting it, rehearsing it, shooting it and then editing it. I just love this whole creative process where I start with an idea or a theme and then I develop it, do my research, look for inspiration and try to come up with something unique that only I can do. Of course, this is something I do for fun and it's quite easy to adopt an attitude like that when it comes to the way I participate in social media but when it comes to your job, some people can lose their focus. I have been guilty of this in the past as I always felt the grass was greener on the other side of the fence. When I wasn't in finance, I longed for a job in finance and thought that would make me happy. When I finally got a job in finance, I thought I was in the wrong role - I was in sales but really wanted to be in either marketing or product development, I thought if only I could switch roles, I would be much happier and when that finally happened, I still struggled with some other aspects of the job. But the answer to that problem was actually a lot simpler than you might imagine - instead of looking for the greener grass, I simply focussed on becoming really good at my job so that I would feel a lot more confident in my ability to do my job very well. Oh just think about how much time I wasted trying to seek the greener grass somewhere else instead of just focussing on improving myself and enjoying the journey. Yes you need goals for your careers but it is also important to focus on your journey rather than your ultimate destination.

Problem 4: After the party is over, what next? 

Allow me to use an analogy from the world of gymnastics - a gymnast (let's call her Katrina, not her real name) has a dream of winning an Olympic gold medal, she sacrifices everything in order to achieve her dreams. She drops out of high school to train full time as a teenager, she battles through numerous injuries and has had so many surgeries. She hardly has any social life and her life is so focused on making her dream come true: every single decision is made with her Olympic dreams in mind. So Katrina finally makes it to the Olympics, wins that gold medal and retires from the sport as she simply cannot push her injured body any further. But that's fine, she thought, I have achieved my objective - I can now relax. When she returns home with her gold medal, there's plenty of attention and parties; she becomes a minor local celebrity for a while and is invited on various TV programmes to talk about her Olympic experience. But as the months pass by and the seasons change, those Olympic games become a distant memory and people stop recognizing Katrina in the streets. She doesn't quite know what to do with herself as she hasn't prepared for life after the Olympics and so she turns to the one thing that she knows best - she starts coaching at her local gymnastics club but found training the kids there boring and frustrating. The kids simply weren't as motivated as her or as talented either - most of them were not as focused as she was on becoming a champion. Katrina falls into deep depression as she wasn't happy at all with her life but she doesn't know what to do to find that happiness she had at the Olympics. She thought, I was just 21 years old when I won that Olympic gold medal, is my life just downhill all the way from here? She even contemplates trying to make a come back for the next Olympics but her injuries made that impossible. Yes, winning that gold medal made Katrina extremely happy, but that happiness didn't last and she made the mistake of not planning what to do next. After achieving her primary goal, Katrina needed to then set herself a new goal, a different goal, maybe pursue a different career, a new life outside gymnastics, seek new ways to challenge herself and that's a mistake that we all need to avoid. 

Problem 5: Not being flexible enough with your plans. 

It is so important to be flexible and adaptable enough when circumstances change. Whilst we need to be clear about our objectives and these are usually something quite generic like happiness, success or wealth. Allow me to give you an example from my own life: when I was 28 years old, I decided to finally give acting a go. I did set myself a new goal then to try to make it in this industry but after a while, I decided okay I've probably gone as far as I could go - it's time to get a proper job to ensure financial security whilst just doing a little bit of acting on the side. It is fun of course but I am never going to get enough work as an actor to sustain myself financially. A person actually attacked me here on my blog and called me a 'failed actor' who didn't work hard enough to follow though with my original plans to make it in showbiz. Whilst that person is entitled to his opinion, I would argue that I didn't start out with all the right information about what working as an actor would entail and it was a steep learning curve. After having gained a lot more new information over the years about how this industry works, I do think I am fully justified to change my plans in light of this new information. Admittedly, I had made some incorrect assumptions in the early days when trying to break into showbiz and I am now in a completely different stage of the process now with so much more experience and accurate information. Thus it would've been foolish not to use this new information when I became wiser. Whilst tenacity and perseverance are vital traits when it comes to achieving success, being stubborn to the point of ignoring new information when your circumstances change is pure stupidity. When I found out that my chances of making it in showbiz were low, I knew that this was not the route to pursue if I wanted to achieve any kind of success and so I changed my tactic, relegated it to a part time hobby and chose different goals instead to achieve the success, wealth and happiness that I wanted. I have met real 'failed actors' who are in their 50s and 60s, still waiting for their big break and struggling to make ends meet - that's the price you pay for not being flexible enough with your methods to achieve your goals. The arrival fallacy in this case is when you are so fixated on one path to happiness, you ignored all other alternatives, including much better ones. 

So there you go, that's it from me on the arrival fallacy but what do you think about this issue? Have you ever fallen prey to the arrival fallacy before? Have you observed this pattern of behaviour in others around you? Furthermore, how could we try to prevent ourselves from succumbing to this then? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.