Hedonic Treadmill

"The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive us onto the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there."

Success ≠ happiness

• Naval's own arc: achieved material/social success, found peers who were achieving more weren't happier. "I'd very quickly get used to anything."
• Conclusion (admittedly trite): "All real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances."
• "Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose."

Why we stay on the treadmill

• Biological hardwiring — survival/replication don't switch off.
• Glib "just turn it off" doesn't work; your own life experience eventually pushes you to the internal path.
• The wealthy who become unhappy: "the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. You can't turn it off."

Naval's "real winners"

• Not the game-winners (top athletes, founders).
• The ones who step out of the game entirely. Don't even play. Have such internal self-control they need nothing from anyone else.
• Examples Naval names: Jerzy Gregorek (his trainer), Buddha, Krishnamurti.
• Blaise Pascal: "All of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself." Thirty minutes happy in a room alone = success.

Concrete signal

• Past a point, more money won't fix anything you'd want to fix.
• Choose to "get off the treadmill" before adaptation makes it harder.

Related

• Desire as Chosen Unhappiness — the contract that powers the treadmill.
• Long-Term vs Status Games — winning games is the addictive part.
• The Meaning of Life — Three Answers — what's actually worth aiming at.

Sources: [Almanack pp139-141]