The Emotional Promise of Achievement
Clinical psychologist Dr Matt Slavin on why high performers keep striving without arriving and what they're really chasing beneath the ambition.
"Perhaps wisdom is not the absence of ambition, but understanding what your ambition has been trying to solve all along."
There is an old Japanese folktale that I often return to. I have told it to clients in clinic, turned it over in my own mind during long walks, and found it in the room, during conversations about burnout, success, and what we are really doing with our lives. It is a simple story, as the most useful ones tend to be, and I want to tell it to you before I say anything else.
Once there was a stonecutter who lived in the mountains, chipping away at rock from sunrise to dark. His life was hard and humble, and he envied those who moved through the world with more ease than he did. One day, watching a wealthy merchant pass by in silks and fine leather, he felt the familiar ache of longing. A spirit, said to live in the mountain rock itself, heard him and granted his wish. The stonecutter became the merchant, draped in wealth, admired by all he passed. For a time, it seemed like enough.
Then a prince rode through, flanked by soldiers and attended by servants, and the merchant felt small again. The spirit heard him and he became the prince, carried in a royal procession through streets lined with bowing people. He was powerful. He was important. For a time, it seemed like enough.
And then, on a blistering afternoon, the sun beat down on him relentlessly, and he thought: even the prince is powerless beneath the sun. So he wished to become the sun itself, blazing and sovereign over everything below. He became it, he shone and he scorched. For a time, it seemed like enough.
Until a cloud drifted across his face and blocked his light. He wished to become the cloud, dark and vast, covering the earth and commanding the rain. He became the cloud and felt immense and for a time, it seemed like enough.
Until the wind tore him apart and scattered him across the sky. He wished to become the wind, unstoppable and wild. He became the wind and howled through valleys and bent ancient trees. He was invincible, and for a time, it seemed like enough, until he struck a great mountain and could not move it even slightly. So he wished to become the mountain. He became the mountain, still and enormous and seemingly eternal. Nothing, finally, could touch him. And for a time, it seemed like enough.
And then he felt it: a small, insistent chipping at his base. He looked down. A stonecutter was working away at his rock, patient and persistent, piece by piece. And so the mountain wished to become a stonecutter again.
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The story tends to land differently depending on where someone is in their life. I have shared it with founders running companies they no longer remember wanting, with executives who have everything on paper and feel oddly hollow in practice, with athletes at the peak of careers that no longer give them what they once promised. And what strikes me each time is not the irony of the ending - though the irony is there - but for what it may show us about desire, longing and the human condition… our ancient brains at work again.
This is, in my experience, the central psychological drama of high-performing modern life. Most of the people I work with are extraordinarily driven, perceptive, and capable. The difficulty is that the striving itself - all that energy, all that focus, all that sacrifice - is often pointed in a direction that has not been examined. The stonecutter never paused between transformations to ask what he was actually looking for. Neither do most of us.
Many people know exactly what they want to escape from. Far fewer can say clearly what they want to move toward.
Ask someone what they want more of, and you will often hear the familiar list: less stress, less pressure, less conflict, less anxiety, less guilt, less overthinking, less self-criticism, less exhaustion, less reactivity, less resentment, less overwhelm, less uncertainty, less loneliness, less shame.
I must have asked this question hundreds of times, and I usually notice the same pattern.
Most people begin by describing what they want through the language of removal. They want freedom from pressure, escape from exhaustion, relief from anxiety, distance from conflict, a less punishing inner voice, a life that doesn’t feel so heavy. And of course they do. When we are suffering, the first and most honest wish is, of course, for the suffering to stop.
But, when I ask people to describe where they are trying to get to in positive terms, I often find the same person, short of an answer.
It is one thing to know what you are trying to escape from. It is another thing entirely to know what you are trying to move towards.
When people do speak in the affirmative - when they try to name what they want rather than what they want to escape from - what they most often reach for is an emotion. They want to feel happy, or calm, or peaceful or inspired. And this is where things get more complicated, because no feeling, however hard-won, however deserved, was ever designed to stay.
This is one of the central ideas in Russ Harris' The Happiness Trap, that we can spend enormous amounts of energy pursuing a stable emotional state, as though happiness were a destination we might one day reach and then permanently inhabit, rather than a kind of weather that moves through us whether we invite it or not. The trouble with chasing an emotional state is that even when you catch it, you cannot hold it still. Even the best feelings shift and pass. Even the ones that arrive after years of real effort. The feeling visits, and then the feeling moves on, and if you have built your whole sense of forward motion around finally securing that feeling, the departure can leave you more lost than the wanting did.
I have sat with people the week after they reached a goal they had spent a decade working toward. And sometimes there is genuine joy in that room, pride, relief, a real and hard-earned satisfaction. But often, shortly after that, there is a return to the same dissatisfaction and emptiness they carried in with them.
I’m not trying to be cynical and I am not arguing that achievement is hollow. I am saying something from my years of observation, that if you have been using achievement as a way to resolve something deeper - to finally feel safe, or worthy, or enough - it will tend to fall short of what you needed it to.
Often, people are not chasing the thing itself. They are chasing the emotional promise attached to the thing.
The stonecutter was not really chasing power. He was chasing something he imagined power would finally allow him to feel. And because he never named what that feeling actually was, never examined whether power was even capable of delivering it, he kept transforming. Mountain to merchant to sun to cloud, each new form holding the same unresolved longing in a different costume.
Values are a different order of thing altogether. A value is not a feeling you hope to arrive at; it is a direction of movement that gives meaning regardless of outcome. Contribution, mastery, connection, integrity, creativity, service, family, growth, these are orientations rather than destinations. They do not require a particular achievement to be honoured. They can be lived in the smallest moments and the largest ones alike. They are, I would argue, the only kinds of desire that genuinely scale with a human life - because they do not depend on external circumstances remaining fixed in the way you hoped.
Someone who values mastery does not stop finding meaning when they reach the top of a field. Someone who values connection does not arrive at a level of connection, where they have had their fill for a lifetime. Someone who values contribution does not peak. There is always more to give. Values do not insulate you from difficulty or pain or failure. They are not promises of constant happiness, but they provide something that emotional states cannot: a direction that remains meaningful even when the weather inside you is rough.
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Just in case you hear this differently than I intend, let me clearly state that I am not suggesting that ambition is a problem. I am not recommending that you diminish your desire, lower your standards, or retreat into some calmer detached life, freed from desire (yep, I heard the 1997 smash hit from Gala just then too). The stonecutter's desire to become the merchant, to have more than he had, to grow beyond his current circumstances is enormously human and often enormously productive. What I am questioning is the unconscious shape-shifting that happens when striving is detached from any clear understanding of what it is actually serving.
Ambition is not the problem. Unexamined ambition is.
What I see is that the people who are most sustainably high-performing - the ones who are still genuinely engaged and alive in their work decades into it, rather than grimly executing - are almost always people who have done some version of this work. They have, at some point, examined not just what they want, but why they want it.
They have, in other words, developed a kind of compassion for their own ambition. Compassion in the clinical sense: the ability to see themselves clearly, without excessive judgment or excessive avoidance, and to ask honest questions from that place of clarity.
The goal is not to stop striving. The stonecutter's problem was not his ambition. It was that every new shape still carried the same unanswered longing, and he never paused long enough to ask what the longing was actually about.
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As always, feel free to message with reflections or questions.
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Matt
Dr Matt Slavin
Clinical & Performance Psychologist · Auckland · Online
Dr Matt Slavin is a clinical and performance psychologist working with high-performing individuals, executives, and organisations globally
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, the psychology of ambition, striving, and what drives high achievers sits at the heart of his clinical and consulting work - across therapy, leadership development, and workplace wellbeing keynotes worldwide.
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