I've been reading Andre Agassi's autobiography. Considered one of the most successful tennis players, Agassi appears to be a troubled soul and not at all a happy-go-lucky kind of person. At four years old, his father had him hit 5000 balls a day. Long before he was born, he had decided that his son would become a tennis champion and he did everything in his power to make it happen. He was a tyrant, to putting his son through long hours of training, to the detriment of everything else even academic work.
Agassi says he hated tennis, but since he never learned to do anything else in life (he dropped out of school at the age of 14), he couldn't imagine doing anything else with his life.
A turning point in his career, was in 1992, when he won his first grand slam championship at Wimbledon. He describes the joy he felt, after years of struggling to win a big tournament. After his victory, he dropped down on his knees and then on his stomach, and began to sob uncontrollably! From that moment on, he became an international star, being invited to V.I.P. events. Hollywood stars, such as Kevin Costner, fascinated by tennis, invited him over to their houses. After years of working hard, but being criticized by the media and journalists as being a fraud, he was finally acknowledged for his abilities.
What I find interesting, in terms of happiness, is that Agassi himself writes that reaching that goal didn't change his happiness level: "But I don't feel that Wimbledon has changed me. I feel , in fact, that I've been let in on a little secret: winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad feeling. Not even close."
It reminded me of the 'hedonic adaptation' theory argued by positive psychologists, which postulates that after experiencing major positive or negative events, human beings tend to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness.
In other words, attaining your goals is not what is going to give you long lasting happiness... It will give you an unbelievable rush when it happens, but you will quickly return to what psychologists call your 'set point of happiness'. So what is more important than reaching your goals is enjoying the ride and making the right and 'happy' choices along the way.
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