The marathon blues, and a twenty billion dollar version of it
What the day after a marathon will teach you about business
The days after a marathon are supposed to be the best, but more often than not, they tend to be the worst.
The first days are a celebration. You eat everything you denied yourself for months. You drink a cold beer with no guilt. You sleep like a king. There is a deep relief that the mountain is finally behind you. No more 5 a.m. alarms, no more weighing every gram of food.
Then, a few days later, it hits. They call it the marathon blues, and it is very real. The motivation drains out of you. You do not feel like working, but you do not feel like going out either. Some runners slide into something close to depression. One day, you are on top of the world, and the next, the floor drops out from under you.
Part of it is chemistry. Months of training flood your brain with dopamine every single morning, and then the tap shuts off. But the deeper reason is purpose. Viktor Frankl noticed, in the worst conditions a human being can face, that the ones who endured were not the strongest. They were the ones with a reason to look forward, a future worth fighting for. Strip the goal away, and the fuel goes with it.
That was the lesson that humbled me. The finish line was never the point. The struggle was. The climb was.
When it gets real
A few weeks ago, Chamath Palihapitiya described the exact same crash, just with a lot more zeros.
A company he helped start ten years earlier, Groq, had just sold to Nvidia for twenty billion dollars. Total validation. Career-defining success. And he felt, in his own words, super down. He turned to his wife and told her he thought he was depressed.
“I’ve felt the happiest before something great has happened. Before the Facebook IPO, before the Warriors won a championship, before the Slack IPO. And then afterwards, I feel worse than before.” Chamath Palihapitiya
This is the marathon blues in a business suit. The joy was never waiting at the destination. It lived in the climb, in the messy middle, when the goal was still ahead and every day mattered. The win is a single afternoon. The pursuit is constant. If you save all your happiness for the moment you arrive, you are signing up to feel empty the second you cross the line.
Worth your time
Read The Arrival Fallacy, a short piece on a trap the psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar named after his own years as an elite squash player. You win the match you were sure would make you happy, and the feeling evaporates within hours. His fix is the whole point of this issue. As he puts it, happiness is not reaching the peak, nor is it wandering the mountain aimlessly, it is the experience of climbing toward the peak.
Final thoughts
Chase the goal, by all means. Ambitious goals pull the best out of us. Just do not store all your happiness in the moment of arrival, because that moment is smaller and shorter than you imagine, and it is gone by morning. Learn to love the early alarms and the hard middle miles. That is where the life actually happens.
Thanks for reading.
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