The diploma arrived in my letterbox on an ordinary Tuesday.
I opened the envelope, pulled out the shiny certificate and sat down. Bachelor of Business Administration. Years of work. Late nights. Assignments submitted on borrowed time between shifts. It was all there, printed in formal font on thick paper.
I sat there, waiting.
Nothing happened.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I had been quietly expecting a shift. Something to feel different. More ready, more professional, more achieved. A before and after. Instead there was a brief flicker of something and then just — nothing. A Tuesday. Work tomorrow, the same as every other day.
For a moment I wondered if something was wrong with me. If something was broken. The only thing that had visibly changed was a new line on my LinkedIn profile under Education.
I put the diploma back in the envelope and stashed it in the closet with the rest of my certificates.
What is actually happening.
What I experienced that Tuesday has a name. The hedonic treadmill.
The concept comes from a landmark 1978 study that compared lottery winners with people who had been paralysed in accidents. The expectation was obvious. Lottery winners should be dramatically happier. Accident survivors dramatically less so.
They were not. Not in the long run. Both groups returned to roughly the same emotional baseline they had before their life-changing event. The conclusion was uncomfortable but clear. External circumstances, even dramatic ones, do not produce lasting changes in happiness. We adapt. Every time.
This is not a design flaw. It is how the brain was built. A regulatory system that absorbs both highs and lows and returns us to baseline. Designed for survival. Not for the particular kind of life most of us are trying to build.
Here is where it gets interesting.
Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky’s widely cited happiness model suggests that approximately 50% of our happiness baseline comes from genetics, around 10% from external circumstances, and the remaining 40% from intentional activities and how we choose to direct our attention.
Ten percent. That’s how much a salary rise, a promotion or hitting your KPI’s contributes to your happiness.
The remaining 40% comes from intentional activities and how we choose to think, what we pay attention to and the meaning we make of our experience.
Most high performers have been pouring everything into the 10%.
Your version of the treadmill.
In a corporate environment the treadmill looks like this. The salary raise arrives. The promotion comes through. The target is hit, the KPI nailed, the nemesis finally left behind. There is a fleeting moment of satisfaction at a team dinner, in a LinkedIn post, or in a brief internal acknowledgment that it happened.
And then, by the next morning, the goalposts have moved. The achievement has already lost its value. The emptiness has become too unbearable to stay still. So the next thing gets identified and the running begins again.
Not because something is wrong with you. Because the treadmill is running and nobody told you it was there.
The cruel irony is that the qualities that make someone successful — ambition, resilience, an ability to focus relentlessly on the next milestone — are the same qualities that make the treadmill spin fastest. High performers adapt quickly and move the goalposts aggressively. They are exceptionally good at achieving. And exceptionally efficient at adapting away from what they have achieved before the satisfaction has fully landed.
What actually resists adaptation.
If external achievement only accounts for 10% of lasting happiness, the question becomes obvious. What lives in the 40%?
Three things emerge consistently in the research as resistant to hedonic adaptation. They do not fade the way external achievements do. And none of them are what most high achievers have been optimising for.
Meaningful relationships.
Not networking. Not the transactional connections built on presumed responsibility or professional obligation. Those are everywhere and they leave most people feeling more isolated than connected despite a LinkedIn network of hundreds.
Meaningful relationships go a level deeper. They are built through vulnerability, openness and mutual understanding. And they produce something that achievements cannot; a sense of mattering to someone, and someone mattering to you.
Some of the deepest meaning in my own life has come not from what I achieved but from watching others grow. Colleagues I helped work through something difficult. Young people in restaurant kitchens who passed through and went on to build careers and lives. Coaching clients having a breakthrough. There is a particular kind of pride in having been part of someone else’s chapter that no certificate in a closet has ever come close to matching.
Experiences over achievements.
Research consistently shows that experiences produce more lasting happiness than accomplishments. Not because they are more impressive but because they are harder to adapt away from. They live in the body and the memory in ways that a title or a number cannot.
Last summer I hiked a mountain. The muscles burning on the ascent. Clean air that tasted different from the city. Paragliders taking off from the ridge next to freely roaming cows, which is exactly as absurd and beautiful as it sounds. Sitting at the top and just taking in the view. The people around me who had shared the same climb.
No promotion has stayed with me the way that afternoon has.
Achievements and experiences are not mutually exclusive. A mountain climb is both. But the part that sticks is never the achievement. It is the experience inside it.
Intentional practices — slowing down enough to actually be here.
This morning I caught myself mid-conversation with my manager. My shoulders were tensing, my mind was running through scenarios, the stress of the situation was already fully present in my body.
Except the conversation has not happened yet. My mid-year review is a month away.
I was standing in my kitchen. On a Saturday morning. Making breakfast.
This is what happens when we are not intentional about where our attention goes. The mind drifts to the future, to the problems, to the performance review a month from now, and the present moment disappears entirely. Saturday morning becomes a rehearsal for a stressful Tuesday in four weeks.
Catching that drift and returning to the present is not a grand practice. It does not require a meditation cushion or a morning routine that takes two hours. It is simply noticing where your attention has gone and bringing it back. To the kitchen. To the breakfast. To the Saturday.
Research by Emmons, McCullough and Tsang found that participants who wrote down five things they were grateful for each week were 25% happier than control groups after ten weeks. The mechanism is straightforward. Gratitude deliberately redirects attention toward what is already present and good rather than toward what is still missing or could go wrong. It is one of the simplest ways to invest in the 40%.
If you want to go deeper on all three of these practices, I wrote about them in more detail here — 3 Little Things With a Major Impact on Your Happiness.
The recalibration.
During my life coaching certification we were asked a question that sounds deceptively simple.
How do you define success?
I had always assumed I knew the answer. Career. Income. Status. The things you put on a CV and a LinkedIn profile.
But sitting with that question honestly, I realised my actual definition of success had nothing to do with any of those things. It was personal growth. Continuous learning. Experiences. Moving forward in a direction I had consciously chosen rather than one I had absorbed from the expectations around me.
That recalibration did not happen in one dramatic moment. It was a series of smaller realisations. The 3 Most Important Questions exercise. Noticing what actually lit something up when I paid honest attention. Gradually adjusting my habits, thinking and routines to support what I had found.
Like a compass being slowly realigned. The needle shifting until it pointed somewhere true.
I am still on the treadmill. Everyone is. But I am no longer running it at full speed chasing milestones that will adapt away before I have finished celebrating them.
The question worth sitting with.
You cannot step off the hedonic treadmill. It is part of how human beings are built.
But you can change what you are running toward.
If the salary, the title and the achievements only account for 10% of your lasting happiness, what is in the 40% that you have been neglecting?
New posts drop every two weeks. Subscribe to the blog and read them before anyone else.
Read more:
What Is Talent Hushing — And What It Is Quietly Costing You
Talent hushing is a new term for an old pattern — employees staying silent at work not because they have nothing to contribute, but because speaking up does not feel safe, worthwhile or effective. Only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work. This post is about the individual cost of…
What Are You Actually Afraid Of?
It comes out as a joke at the end of a meeting. Soon I will be out of a job anyway. Nobody picks it up, and the room moves on. One in three workers are thinking it, and almost none of them say it out loud.
Fractional Cxx Is Here to Stay, and It Is Not Really About the Job Title
Fractional CEOs, COOs and CFOs are suddenly everywhere on LinkedIn. This post looks at why, and at what it actually reveals about how professionals are quietly redefining what success means to them.