A Knockout Technique for Achieving More Happiness
The best lesson from Mike Tyson’s boxing career is not about ring craft; it’s about having the right goals in life.
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Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on September 7, 2023
Mike Tyson is one of the greatest boxers of all time. Over his career, “Iron Mike” had 50 wins, including 44 knockouts, and only six losses. Coming from a difficult childhood, during which he was surrounded by crime and poverty, he escaped his circumstances through a laserlike focus on his dream of athletic greatness. And he realized that dream by becoming the world heavyweight champion at the age of 20, in 1986.
Despite his success and fame, Tyson was dogged by crises, failed relationships, and legal troubles, including allegations of domestic violence and nearly three years in prison in the 1990s after he was convicted on a charge of rape. He achieved all his ambitions of riches and renown, but a happy life seemed to elude him.
This might seem ironic or contradictory to some. To Tyson, however, it was neither. “You almost have to give your happiness up to accomplish your goals,” he reflected in a 2020 interview.
That is what we might call the Tyson Paradox. Building a good life requires us to have goals that keep us focused, enthusiastic, and out of trouble. But actually attaining those goals might not give us the payoff we imagined, and could in fact bring us misery. Although most of us will never see the highs and lows that Mike Tyson experienced, we can all easily fall into our own version of the same trap.
To have an ambitious goal in life is a good thing, as psychologists since the 1970s have shown. It provides structure and meaning, and leads to higher satisfaction, as long as you can make progress toward your goal. As a result, the notion that “attaining this goal should also have a positive effect,” as the psychologist Bettina S. Wiese writes, has gone largely unquestioned.
Yet most of us can think of many little counterexamples of our own. If you have ever tried to lose weight and succeeded, you know the satisfaction that comes from seeing the scale fall—it makes the sacrifices in what you eat feel worthwhile. But after that, what’s the reward for hitting your target weight? Not eating what you love ever again, just to keep it there. The sacrifice no longer delivers that sweet progress; it devolves into avoiding the chagrin of seeing the scale go back up. This effect may help explain why one review of diet research found that roughly 35 percent of dieters seem to develop pathological dieting behaviors, and 20 to 25 percent of those people end up with partial or full eating disorders.
The problem behind the Tyson Paradox is called the “arrival fallacy”: the assumption that once we hit a goal or reach a destination, the bliss we get will last. This is impossible because of our evolved inability to maintain any strong emotional state: We move back to our emotional equilibrium quickly (a tendency called homeostasis) to be ready to process whatever new circumstances we face. The problem is less that we “can’t get no satisfaction,” pace the Rolling Stones, and more that we can’t keep no satisfaction.
Researchers have demonstrated the arrival fallacy in various creative ways. In the past, I have written about how athletes encounter this goal-attainment problem. In a field of endeavor that is closer to my professorly heart, my colleague Dan Gilbert and several co-authors surveyed young university professors on how happy they expected to be if they attained tenure—a huge goal for every aspiring academic—compared with how happy they actually were when they got it. The professors systematically overestimate their happiness, by about 13 percent. (I remember this, in fact: The day in 2004 that I was granted tenure at Syracuse University, my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate, and spent the evening fretting over the fact that one of our children had bitten another kid at preschool that day.) On the bright side, those denied tenure are 27 percent less unhappy than they expect to be.
For some people, the trouble with goal attainment goes beyond simple disappointment. For those with bipolar disorder, goal attainment can provoke a mental-health crisis. Scholars writing in 2000 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that the attainment of a life goal can trigger a manic episode. Although most people coast after they realize a goal—commonly experiencing some sense of anticlimax—manic individuals may spiral into intensified goal-seeking behavior. One possible explanation for this finding, based on recent research, is that dopamine, a chemical found in the brain that governs the anticipation of reward, seems to be higher in people with mania; the system of anticipation and reward may simply get stuck on.
Reading all of this, you might conclude that the solution to the Tyson Paradox is to give up on your life goals. They’re all anticipation and no payoff, right? Not quite. There is a way to defeat the paradox. It just requires setting the right type of goals.
A clue as to how comes from research on job satisfaction published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Scholars collected data on hundreds of individuals who were asked whether their professional goals were extrinsic (involving material rewards, such as pay and prestige) or intrinsic (intangibles, such as fun and enjoyment, especially when shared with other people). The people who concentrated on intrinsic professional goals were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those who didn’t.
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This finding is consistent with other research showing that, in general, relationship goals bring greater well-being than achievement goals. People who have an ambition to foster deeper friendships, a better marriage, and closer connections with their children and their parents tend to be happier than people working for worldly rewards.
Even within achievement goals themselves, we can see a reinforcing pattern. Psychologists showed in 2017 that there are two kinds of achievement: mastery (excelling at your job) and performance (obtaining objective results, such as earning more money than others). Performance goals brought happiness only when participants were compared favorably with others. This suggests that in the times when, inevitably, such favorable comparisons are not available, the goals will make you unhappy. In contrast, mastery goals can raise your satisfaction regardless of comparison with others.
In short, the goals most likely to defeat the Tyson Paradox are social and relational, about giving and getting love. Achievement goals are more likely to lead to the arrival fallacy, especially if they involve peer juxtaposition. This is, of course, at odds with most self-improvement literature, which promises to teach you how to be rich and powerful.
If you are a hard-charging striver, all of this might make you feel uncomfortable about your decisions—as though I’m saying something absurd like “trying to be 5 percent richer than your neighbor might not be a good reason to neglect your kids.” If this is the case, and you feel that uneasiness, that may be because you are a “success addict,” someone who has put being special before being happy. I have seen this in hundreds of cases in my research. I strongly suspect that this was true of Iron Mike himself—and that is what he means in saying that your goals can be at odds with your well-being. Greater awareness of this conflict can enable you to adjust your priorities in life.
I have one last lesson to offer about goals; it comes from an old Zen Buddhist proverb concerning a junior monk whose monotonous job in the monastery was summarized in four words: chop wood, carry water. He dreamed of achieving the sort of enlightenment the older monks possessed. One day, he asked his master, a senior monk with a “Buddha nature,” to tell him how his life would change when he was finally enlightened as well. The senior monk contemplated the question, and answered matter-of-factly, “Chop wood, carry water.”
An American version of that proverb might be: Remember that the reward for winning a pie-eating contest is usually more pie.
This is probably the most important insight we can all use to defeat the Tyson Paradox. Having goals in life is human and healthy. To provide direction and purpose, a journey requires a destination. But the journey, not the destination, is what gives us the satisfaction and meaning we truly need.