I got the promotion I’d been working toward for over a year. The role I wanted, the recognition I’d earned, the validation that my work mattered. I found out on a Thursday afternoon via email, and my first thought was:

“Oh. Okay. Cool.”

Not excitement. Not celebration. Not the rush of achievement I’d been imagining. Just… a quiet acknowledgment that the thing I wanted had happened, and now I guess I’d start doing the new job.

I felt like something was wrong with me. Shouldn’t I be more excited? Shouldn’t this feel more significant? I’d been working toward this for months, thinking about it constantly, imagining how it would feel when I finally got there.

You achieve the thing you wanted and it feels… fine. Not transformative, not like you imagined. And now you’re wondering if something’s wrong with you or if this is just what success actually feels like.

TOMER ROZENBERG

And it felt fine. Good, even. But not life-changing. Not like I’d crossed some meaningful threshold into a different version of myself. I was the same person doing slightly different work with a slightly different title. The achievement that I’d built up in my mind as significant turned out to be… pretty ordinary.

That’s when I started paying attention to how other people talk about their achievements. And I noticed: almost everyone has this moment. The moment when you get the thing you wanted and realize it doesn’t feel how you thought it would feel.

The gap between how you imagined success would feel and how it actually feels when you get there—that’s one of the most universal experiences nobody talks about.

Order my new book: Strategic Life: How to Build a Life That Matters

The Way You Imagined It Would Feel

Before I got the promotion, I had this whole fantasy about what that moment would be like. I’d get the news and feel this surge of validation, proof that I was good at what I do, confirmation that the work mattered. I’d call my parents, tell my friends, celebrate. It would feel like a turning point, a clear marker that I’d moved from one stage to another.

I imagined that achieving this goal would change something fundamental. That I’d feel different—more confident, more established, more like I’d made it. That crossing this threshold would bring clarity about what comes next, satisfaction with how far I’d come, excitement about the future.

None of that happened.

I got the email, felt a brief moment of “oh good,” told a few people who said congratulations, and then went back to my regular life. The next day, I woke up as the same person with the same doubts and insecurities and questions about what I’m doing with my life. The promotion didn’t transform me. It just… happened.

And I think we all do this. We imagine that achieving the goal will feel profound. That success will change who we are, how we feel, what our daily experience is like. We think getting the thing will bring some kind of internal shift that matches the external achievement.

But it almost never does. Success—when you actually achieve it—feels surprisingly ordinary.

The Anticlimactic Nature of Achievement

I’ve watched friends get into their dream schools and feel underwhelmed. Reach relationship milestones they’d been anticipating and feel mostly the same as before. Hit fitness goals they’d been chasing for months and think “okay, now what?”

There’s this pattern: you work toward something, you achieve it, and the achievement is anticlimactic. Not bad—just not as significant or transformative as you expected.

Part of this is that by the time you achieve something, you’ve already been living in preparation for it. I’d been doing work at the level of the new role for months before the promotion was official. So when it happened, nothing actually changed about my day-to-day work. I’d already adjusted to the new reality. The official recognition just confirmed what was already true.

But part of it is something deeper: we expect external achievements to create internal transformations. We think that if we get the promotion, we’ll feel confident. If we hit the goal, we’ll feel satisfied. If we achieve the success, we’ll feel fundamentally different.

But confidence doesn’t come from promotions. Satisfaction doesn’t come from hitting goals. And you don’t become a different person just because your external circumstances change.

The achievement happens. And you’re still you, just with a different job title or bank balance or living situation. The core of who you are—your insecurities, your questions, your personality—all of that remains basically unchanged.

Why We’re Surprised Every Time

Here’s what’s interesting: this isn’t my first anticlimactic achievement. I’ve felt this before. And I’ll probably feel it again the next time I achieve something I’ve been working toward.

We keep being surprised that success doesn’t feel transformative, even though we’ve experienced this before. Even though we know intellectually that external achievement doesn’t change who we are internally, we keep expecting it to anyway.

I think it’s because the anticipation is so much more exciting than the achievement. When you’re working toward something, you can imagine all the ways achieving it will feel meaningful. You can project onto that future moment all the validation and satisfaction and transformation you want to feel.

But when you actually achieve it, reality sets in. It’s just a moment. Just a thing that happened. Not the magical transformation you’d been imagining, but an ordinary experience that passes quickly and leaves you basically the same as you were before.

And then you do it again. You set a new goal, imagine how achieving it will feel, work toward it thinking this time will be different, this achievement will be the one that actually changes how you feel about yourself.

But it won’t be. Because that’s not how achievement works.

The Moving Goalposts

The other thing that happens when you achieve something: the goalposts immediately move.

I got the promotion I wanted, and within a week, I was already thinking about the next level. The achievement I’d been fixating on for months suddenly felt like just one step on a longer path. The thing that seemed like a destination turned out to be just another waypoint.

This is how ambition works, I guess. You achieve something, you recalibrate, you start working toward the next thing. The goalpost that seemed fixed and significant moves the moment you reach it, and suddenly there’s a new goalpost further out.

Part of me appreciates this. It means I’m growing, that I’m not settling, that I’m continuing to challenge myself. But part of me finds it exhausting. Can I just enjoy this achievement for a minute before I start chasing the next one?

But I don’t think I can. Because the achievement itself doesn’t satisfy—it’s the pursuit that gives meaning. Once you achieve something, the meaning drains out of it almost immediately, and you need a new pursuit to restore that sense of working toward something that matters.

So the goalposts move. And you’re already focused on the next thing before you’ve properly acknowledged the thing you just achieved.

Success as Relief, Not Transformation

What I’ve learned about success is that it mostly feels like relief, not transformation.

Relief that you didn’t fail. Relief that the uncertainty is over. Relief that you can stop worrying about whether you’ll achieve the thing because you’ve achieved it. But not transformation. Not a fundamental shift in who you are or how you feel about yourself.

When I got the promotion, the strongest emotion was relief. I’d proven I could do it. I wouldn’t have to wonder if I was good enough for this role—the answer was yes. The anxiety about whether it would happen was resolved. That felt good.

But it didn’t feel transformative. It didn’t change my fundamental sense of myself. I still had the same insecurities about other things. I still wondered if I was on the right path overall. I still had days where I felt incompetent and lost. The success in one area didn’t radiate out to create confidence everywhere else.

Relief is good. Relief matters. But it’s not the profound shift we imagine success will bring. It’s just the absence of one specific anxiety, while all the other anxieties remain exactly where they were.

What Actually Changes (And What Doesn’t)

When you achieve something, some things do change. Your circumstances change—you have a new job, more money, different responsibilities. Your opportunities change—doors open that weren’t open before. How others perceive you might change—you have new credibility, new recognition.

But the core of who you are doesn’t change. Your personality doesn’t shift. Your fundamental patterns don’t disappear. Your deepest questions about yourself and your life don’t get answered by external achievement.

I’m the same person after the promotion that I was before it. I have the same strengths and weaknesses. The same tendencies and blind spots. The same ways of thinking and relating. The external circumstances changed, but I didn’t change in any fundamental way.

And I think this is what creates the disappointment around success. We expect it to change us—to make us more confident, more satisfied, more certain. But it doesn’t. It just changes our circumstances while leaving the core unchanged.

The work of actually changing—becoming more confident, more satisfied, more at peace with ourselves—that’s completely separate from the work of achieving external success. You can do one without the other. And achieving success doesn’t automatically create the internal shifts we imagine it will.

The Success That Matters vs. The Success That Impresses

I’ve started to notice a distinction between two kinds of success: the kind that matters to me and the kind that impresses other people.

The promotion impresses other people. It’s legible success—something I can list on a resume, mention in conversations, use to signal that I’m doing well. It has social currency. It makes me look successful from the outside.

But the success that actually matters to me is harder to articulate and less impressive to others. It’s the work I’m proud of even though nobody else will see it. The relationships I’ve built and maintained. The small ways I’ve grown that have no external markers. The quiet satisfaction of showing up well in ordinary moments.

This success doesn’t come with announcements or titles or clear achievement markers. It happens gradually, in ways that are hard to measure or recognize. And because it doesn’t have the external validation of legible success, I often don’t even acknowledge it as success at all.

But it’s the success that actually affects my daily experience. The promotion changed my job. But the less visible successes—the relationships, the character development, the daily practices—those shape how I actually live.

And yet, I spend most of my energy chasing the legible success that impresses others rather than the meaningful success that actually matters to me. Because the legible success is what we’re trained to pursue, what gets recognized and rewarded, what feels like proof that we’re doing well.

The Comparison Problem

Part of why achievement feels anticlimactic is that by the time you achieve something, you’re already comparing yourself to people who’ve achieved more.

When I got the promotion, I didn’t compare myself to where I was a year ago—I compared myself to people who are already two levels above where I am now. The achievement that would have seemed impossible a few years ago now just feels like catching up to where I think I should already be.

This is the trap of comparison. The goalpost isn’t fixed at your own growth—it’s always moving to match whoever’s ahead of you. So no matter what you achieve, it never feels like enough, because there’s always someone who’s achieved more.

And social media makes this infinitely worse. You achieve something, and instead of feeling good about it, you immediately see someone else achieving something bigger. Your promotion feels small compared to someone’s company launch. Your accomplishment feels minor compared to someone’s major life milestone.

The comparison robs the achievement of its significance before you even have a chance to feel good about it.

Permission to Feel Underwhelmed

Here’s what I want you to know: It’s okay that your achievements don’t feel how you thought they would. It’s okay to work hard for something, achieve it, and feel mostly the same as before. That’s not a sign that something’s wrong with you—it’s just what achievement actually feels like.

You’re allowed to feel underwhelmed by success. You’re allowed to get the thing you wanted and think “oh, okay, that’s it?” You’re allowed to be happy about your achievements while also recognizing they didn’t transform you the way you imagined they would.

This doesn’t mean the achievement doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue goals or work toward things. It just means you should have realistic expectations about what achievement actually provides.

Achievement changes circumstances. It doesn’t change who you are. It opens doors. It doesn’t solve internal struggles. It provides external validation. It doesn’t create internal transformation.

And that’s okay. That’s just how it works. The disappointment comes from expecting achievement to do something it can’t do—fundamentally change who you are or how you feel about yourself.

Link to My Book: New Day, My Way, Your Life

What Success Actually Gives You

So if success doesn’t transform you, what does it give you?

It gives you new circumstances to work with. New opportunities to pursue. New problems to solve—often better problems than the ones you had before, but still problems. New choices about what to do next.

It gives you proof that you can do hard things. Evidence that effort leads somewhere. Confirmation that you’re capable of more than you thought. Not transformation, but evidence.

It gives you relief from one specific source of uncertainty or anxiety. Not peace, not satisfaction, not confidence in general—just resolution of one particular question.

And it gives you the experience of achieving something, which teaches you what achievement actually feels like. Which is useful information for calibrating your expectations about future achievements.

None of this is life-changing in the way we imagine success will be. But it’s real, and it’s valuable. Just not in the transformative way we expect.

The Real Work Happens Separately

The real work of becoming more confident, more satisfied, more at peace—that happens separately from external achievement. It happens in how you talk to yourself on days when nothing special is happening. In the relationships you build and maintain. In the values you practice when nobody’s watching. In the ways you show up for yourself and others in ordinary moments.

This work is slower and less dramatic than chasing achievements. It doesn’t come with clear markers or impressive announcements. But it’s the work that actually changes your daily experience, that actually shifts how you feel about yourself and your life.

You can achieve tremendous external success while doing none of this internal work. And you’ll keep feeling underwhelmed by your achievements because you’re expecting them to provide something they can’t provide.

Or you can do both—pursue meaningful external goals while also doing the internal work of becoming who you want to be. And when you achieve the external goals, you’ll be able to appreciate them for what they are—nice validations that don’t define you—without being disappointed that they didn’t transform you.

Celebrating Without Expecting Transformation

I’ve learned to appreciate my achievements differently. Not as transformative moments that change who I am, but as nice confirmations that I can do hard things and that my work matters.

The promotion was good. I’m glad it happened. It gives me new opportunities and challenges. But it didn’t make me a different person, and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

The success that actually matters to me is quieter and harder to measure. It’s the relationships I’ve built. The ways I’ve grown that nobody else sees. The values I practice in ordinary moments. The person I’m becoming through daily choices, not through achievements.

Both kinds of success matter. The external achievements are worth pursuing. But they’re not where the real transformation happens. And expecting them to transform you is setting yourself up for the disappointment of anticlimactic achievement.

So pursue your goals. Work toward things that matter to you. Achieve what you want to achieve. Just don’t expect the achievement to change who you fundamentally are. Appreciate it for what it is—a nice thing that happened—without needing it to be the transformative moment you imagined.

Because the transformation, if it happens at all, comes from somewhere else entirely. From the daily work of showing up well in ordinary moments. From the relationships you build. From the values you practice. From the person you choose to be when nothing special is happening.

That’s the success that actually changes your life. Even though nobody’s there to congratulate you when it happens.

---

Subscribe to my newsletter:
Join 600,000+ readers who get wisdom from ordinary experiences delivered twice a week.