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Winning the award felt awful
The vow in the audience
Chelsea Ryckis co-founded Ethos Benefits, a firm that helps employers improve their healthcare benefits. In 2017 she and Donovan had just started it. She went to her first conference in the industry, sat in the audience as an absolute nobody making no money, and watched someone win the biggest award in the field. She told herself that one day she would be on that stage helping hundreds of thousands of people.
The award night
In 2024 she walked onto that stage and received the award. She was probably the youngest person ever to win it and the second woman. She and her husband were fighting a lot, and she had been ignoring the signals her body gave her. She had poured everything into work, and that work is what earned the award and grew the business. Sitting there, she hated herself, and the moment she had worked toward for years left her thinking only that this was it, and it was awful.
What changed afterward
From that day she has held that real scale in her business, her marriage, and her family life depends on feeling differently about herself. That means knowing who she is, no longer looking to outside validators, and listening when her body signals that it is time to slow down or make a different decision, even if that means skipping a meeting.
Why do big goals feel empty once reached?
Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the arrival fallacy, the belief that reaching a milestone will bring lasting happiness. He describes the pattern in his 2007 book Happier, where the relief of finishing is quickly replaced by a search for the next target. A related 1978 study by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners did not rate themselves as significantly happier than a comparison group.
Why do people ignore their body's warning signals?
The sense of the body's internal state is called interoception, and the insular cortex is one of the main brain regions that processes it. Attention is limited, so a person absorbed in a demanding task can register those signals late or not at all. Research by Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues has shown that people differ widely in how accurately they can detect their own heartbeat.
Why does outside approval stop satisfying?
Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, separates goals pursued for outside rewards from goals pursued for their own sake. In a 1993 study, Tim Kasser and Ryan found that people who ranked financial success and image as their main aims reported lower well-being than those focused on personal growth and relationships. The theory holds that outside rewards do not meet the needs for autonomy, competence, and connection. Deci's 1971 experiments showed that paying people for a puzzle they already enjoyed reduced the time they later spent on it.
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