‘Is This It?’ When Success Isn’t Satisfying
Here’s how to truly savour the high of hitting a career goal
4 min
You got the job, won the award, launched the new project to accolades. So why don’t you feel better?
“You get the title and it’s, like, ‘Ugh. Is this it?’” says Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who leads a longitudinal study, started in 1938, on how people thrive.
Sometimes, getting the thing is just as delicious as we imagine. Other times, we climb and climb, only to be underwhelmed by what we find at the top: more work, political wrangling, the feeling of being a fraud. Or the success high wears off fast, replaced by that old panic we hoped the accomplishment would finally cure. Then we wonder: Where’s the next win?
We’re all sprinting on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. That is, we might get a hit of joy when we achieve something, but we eventually return to our baseline level of happiness (or unhappiness). Whatever heights we reach, we’re still, well, us.
“From the outside, people think, ‘Oh, my God, amazing,’” says Andy Dunn, who helped sell clothing retailer Bonobos to Walmart Inc. in a $310 million deal after 10 years as chief executive and co-founder.
Mr. Dunn, now 44 and based in Chicago, spent years strategising and fantasising about such a sale but says it was a mirage. Building the company brought him more happiness, he says, than the eventual payout. (The Walmart deal paid him tens of millions of dollars.) Now working on a new startup, he’s keeping his team small and not chasing big checks from investors.
“I learned that those are just illusory things,” Mr. Dunn says.
The pursuit of happiness
Plenty of us would be happy to try our luck with fame and fortune, complications be damned. And it’s hard not to crave stuff and status when so much in our culture—from Super Bowl ads to friends’ Instagram feeds—insists that’s where fulfilment lies.
Success itself isn’t inherently bad, notes Dr. Waldinger, who adds: “Just don’t expect it to make you happy.”
Studying the antecedents of happiness among hundreds of participants in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, Dr. Waldinger found people acclimate to the trappings of achievement—including plump paychecks—swiftly.
“The corner office just becomes the place you go and do your work after a while,” he says. “The shine wears off.”
Lasting happiness results from wins that foster deep relationships and are imbued with meaning—some bigger payoff beyond your salary. Think work that affects clients’ lives or bonds your team together. When asked to share what they were most proud of, many of the octogenarians in the Harvard study talked about being a good leader or a helpful mentor, Dr. Waldinger says.
The power of authenticity
Many find they need to be able to succeed as themselves, rather than moulding their personas to fit the goal, to enjoy it.
Steve Babcock moved to New York City from Colorado in 2016 for a top creative job at an ad agency. He went from managing 50 people at his old job to overseeing 200. Industry publications profiled him. Every compliment on his LinkedIn posts was a dopamine hit. But on his train rides home from work, he felt empty. Numb.
“I have to give up who I really am to be this thing,” he says he realised. He preferred to be funny and casual at the office, but suddenly he was the boss. Subordinates often didn’t speak candidly as they tried to impress him, leaving Mr. Babcock feeling disconnected. He was also pulled farther from the creative work that he loved.
“I was always so driven to be seen as important,” he says. “There was just this cost to that.”
Mr. Babcock left the job, moved back to Colorado and now works at a food-technology company doing creative work. He sometimes misses the money—he now earns about what he did a decade ago—and the high-profile projects. He says he’s recently turned down three offers to be a chief creative officer again, unwilling to put the mask back on.
The impostor trap
Sometimes a coveted step up comes with burnout. Sabrina Hua spent three years working toward a promotion, and two years pursuing a master’s degree. She achieved both over a few months in 2021, and felt more miserable than triumphant.
The new job, in a university fundraising office, came with long hours and high-pressure goals. The degree felt like a huge accomplishment until she started to wonder if she needed a PhD.
“I just felt so much anxiety about what’s next,” the 29-year-old says.
Last fall, she quit. She’s spent the months since living off savings, traveling and focusing on small joys. Learning to crochet brought more happiness than completing her graduate program, Ms. Hua says. She plans to start searching for a new job soon, with new priorities.
“I don’t want to be obsessed with titles,” she says. “I want to have time.”
You don’t always have to pull a Peggy Olson, jumping ship from your old gig as she did in AMC’s drama “Mad Men,” to change your mind-set. Ruth Gotian, an executive coach and author of a book about reaching the apex of success, says that professionals often fear they’ll be seen as a fake at the exact moment they’re killing it. Winning a big client or publishing a definitive paper, they brush off compliments and worry that the prize will be taken away.
“Just because it’s unfamiliar doesn’t mean that you’re a fraud,” she says. Try to reframe the discomfort as positive, a cue that you’ve entered a new stage in your career. Collect thank-you notes and records of your wins along the way, so you can pull them out when you’re feeling shaky.
“There is a whole trail, a whole history of things that led to this point,” Dr. Gotian says.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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