“I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” – Andy Bernard, The Office
One night last summer, a friend and I sat around a fire until the small hours of the morning, reminiscing about our early days as entrepreneurs.
In my own case:
I was 19 years old, living in a mouldy student house basement, sleeping on a mattress on the floor next to my desk so that I could (literally) roll out of bed and start working — pretty much until I fell asleep again at night.
It wasn’t pleasant, and it wasn’t comfortable…
…But man, did I feel alive.
And as we stared into the glowing fire, we both agreed:
Those gritty early days of our entrepreneurial journey were some of the most exciting days of our lives.
But here’s where it gets weird:
Once our businesses took off, and we finally achieved the success we’d been chasing…
…We both fell into a depression.
Chasing the goal was exhilarating — I couldn’t roll off of that floor-mattress fast enough in the morning — but actually achieving the goal was, honestly, kind of deflating.
We got the thing we thought would make us happy, only to realize that the process of getting it made us happier than actually getting it.
And once we got it, we were both left wondering…
“What now?”
Even weirder, nearly every entrepreneur I’ve ever met went through the exact same thing.
So, what gives?
Are we just acting like ungrateful little kids who need to buck up, look around, smell the roses and say thank you?
Or is there something more to this phenomena…
…Something we can learn about the way the human mind works that can unlock far deeper levels of success and satisfaction?
Enter:
Dopamine.
The molecule of motivation, drive, and bigger, brighter futures.
When we’re in hot pursuit of a goal, dopamine sets us on fire and sends us flying towards our vision.
Dopamine loves that feeling of bubbling anticipation, of imagining a better life and charging towards it.
That’s dopamine’s job:
To drive us to do things that will make the future better than our present.
But once the future becomes the present, dopamine’s job is done, and it shuts down…
(and “present” chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin, etc take over)
…Leaving us wondering why the reward isn’t nearly as exciting as the path to the reward.
That’s because, according to dopamine:
The path is the reward.
Literally:
Dopamine doesn’t care about the reward, because the reward happens now, and dopamine is all about the future.
Suddenly, all those old clichés about journeys and destinations make perfect sense:
It’s not armchair philosophy, it’s biology.
And if we don’t want to spend our lives doing things we don’t like for the sake of rewards that won’t satisfy us, we should probably understand how that biology works:
How it drives us, how it rewards us, and how we can harness our biology to build lives worth living.
I think that’s what we’ll do tomorrow…
– T
P.S.
If you’d like to go even further, I highly recommend reading The Molecule of More…
(refreshingly fun and well-written, for science book)
…And / or watching Andrew Huberman’s “masterclass” on dopamine.
And of course, stay tuned for tomorrow 🙂
I’ll see you then.
