If you believe a material object like a Lamborghini will solve your problems, achieving it can be crushing. When you're poor and sad, you still have hope. When you're rich and sad, that hope is gone, forcing you to confront deeper issues.

Chasing goals for the ego—like being number one or the best—is a recipe for unhappiness. Once a goal is achieved, the ego immediately creates a new one or instills a fear of losing its position, preventing any lasting peace or satisfaction.

We believe reaching a major goal (like a weight target or financial milestone) will bring lasting joy. However, due to brain homeostasis, we quickly return to our baseline. This "arrival fallacy" reveals that fulfillment is found in the progress and journey, not the often-hollow destination.

Achieving goals provides only fleeting satisfaction. The real, compounding reward is the person you become through the journey. The pursuit of difficult things builds lasting character traits like resilience and discipline, which is the true prize, not the goal itself.

Despite being the best in the world, Agassi felt a profound, lifelong hatred for tennis. This reveals that world-class excellence and deep personal fulfillment are not inherently linked; one can exist without the other. This contradiction was the core of his life's struggle.

Like astronauts who walked on the moon and then fell into depression, hyper-achievers can struggle after massive successes. They forget how to find joy and adventure in smaller, everyday challenges, leading to a feeling of "what now?" and potential self-destruction.

Major achievements often feel anticlimactic or even negative. True gratitude and positive emotion are sparked not by the peak moment, but by contrasting it with the memory of the difficult journey—revisiting the places and feelings associated with the struggle provides the real emotional payoff.

Agassi discovered that personal achievements, like becoming world number one, left him feeling empty. In contrast, an act of generosity—setting up a stock nest egg for a restaurant manager's kids—provided a profound sense of connection and purpose that his tennis victories never could.

A paradox exists where those who've "made it" report that success isn't the key to happiness. This message, while likely true and widely shared by achievers, can be deeply despondent for those still on the journey, as it ruins the promise they're chasing.