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Choose joy over relief
Relief versus joy
If the only thing someone feels after an accomplishment is relief, the win has only let them exhale. Coach K worked hard to get to a place where something good happening brought joy instead. Aspiring only to a result that lets you breathe out is something to work on.
Joy at work
The same question applies to work. Every minute away from family is spent on something, and a job with no joy in it, from someone who brings none, makes each of those minutes feel worse. Enjoying yourself at work also helps with duration and with delivering.
The best moments at work come when a team accomplishes something and you get to see it through someone else's eyes as well as your own.
Why do wins feel like relief?
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's prospect theory, published in 1979, found that losses weigh more heavily than equal gains, often by a factor of about two. A favorite expected to win stands to lose more than it can gain, so a win can feel like an escape from a bad outcome. The pattern is called loss aversion.
Why does the thrill of winning fade?
Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation. In a 1978 study by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, 22 lottery winners did not report being significantly happier than a comparison group. People's sense of baseline tends to drift back toward where it started after both good and bad events. Brickman and Donald Campbell had introduced the term hedonic treadmill in 1971.
How rare was Duke's back-to-back title?
Duke beat Kansas in 1991 and Michigan in 1992, becoming the first team to win consecutive national titles since UCLA won the last of its seven straight in 1973. UCLA's run of seven titles from 1967 to 1973 is the longest in the sport.
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