A few years ago, I was co-leading our hospital's efforts at eliminating central line infections. There are a lot of small things that physicians and nurses can do to significantly reduce the risk of a central line infection, and we were starting to see some really exciting results. There was even talk about one day actually having zero central line infections in our hospital! However, in all of my excitement, I forgot a key point - one of the significant risk factors for getting a central line infection is having a central line! In other words, getting to zero on our central line infection rate was only half the battle. Once we got there, we would have to stay at zero! As long as our patients had central lines, they would be at risk of getting a central line infection. I didn't know it at the time, but what I was experiencing is something known in psychology as the arrival fallacy!
According to Tal Ben-Shahar (the Harvard psychologist who apparently first coined the term), the arrival fallacy is "the illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness." We live in a goal-obsessed world (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself), and we often assume that when we finally reach our goal - whether that goal is graduating from school and getting our first job, finishing our research project, or even eliminating central line infections in a hospital - things will be great and we will be happy!
The arrival fallacy has been cited as just one causative factor in the epidemic of burnout among professionals, such as physicians. Consider that most physicians go to school for 16 years (through high school and college) before they even start medical school. After four years of medical school, they go on to spend anywhere between 3 to 7 years of post-graduate residency and fellowship training before they are able to practice their specialty independently. And once they get to that point, many physicians find out that the practice of medicine was far different than they had envisioned. Many of these physicians are disappointed or even disillusioned - over half of all physicians experience professional burnout and just under half (at least in one survey) would choose their profession if they had a choice to do it all over again.
Billy Donovan, who is currently the head coach of the NBA Chicago Bulls, won the 2006 and 2007 NCAA college basketball championship while coaching the University of Florida. Winning two championships in a row is not very common (only seven schools have accomplished this feat), so you would think that reaching this stellar achievement represented the ultimate pinnacle of success for Coach Donovan. Quite the contrary - when asked how becoming only the seventh school to win the NCAA tournament two years in a row, Coach Donovan answered, "It doesn't change your life one bit." He went on to say, "After that experience was over with, I was depressed. I lost sight of what it's all about."
The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his book, The Wanderer and His Shadow, "Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal;' and yet, as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal." In other words, maybe achievement isn't an end point to be reached. Maybe it is all about the journey to get there.
Coach Donovan went on to say, "At the end of the day, if it's all about the ring and the trophy, you lose the most valuable thing and it's the group of people and the relationships that are established of people working together to accomplish something they couldn't accomplish on their own."
I am not saying that we shouldn't set goals. What I am saying, and most experts writing about the arrival fallacy agree, that we shouldn't focus on our professional and personal goals to the exclusion of everything else. And we should never expect that finally reaching these goals is going to be the one thing that will make us happy and fulfilled.
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