I think we’ve been told a lie. That lie: the goal in life it to be happy. In order to be ‘happy’, we need to chase pleasure and avoid pain. That isn’t sustainable.
Brad Stulberg argues in The Way of Excellence, genuine excellence is fundamentally different from the pursuit of happiness (Stulberg, 2025). While happiness often involves striving to experience pleasure and avoid pain, excellence represents a commitment to something deeper, a devotion to process, growth, and the willingness to embrace discomfort in service of meaningful goals.
Read that again.
If happiness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, then it’s reactive and fragile. It depends on conditions. It disappears the moment life gets hard.
Excellence is different.
Excellence is a commitment to something deeper than how we feel. It’s devotion to process. It’s showing up when you don’t feel like it. It’s choosing growth over comfort. It’s willingly walking into discomfort because life demands it.
Happiness says: “How do I feel right now?”
Excellence asks: “What does this moment require?”
The Trap of Chasing Happiness
If your aim is happiness, you’ll constantly negotiate with discomfort.
You’ll skip the workout because you’re tired. Avoid the hard conversation because it feels awkward. Delay the bold move because uncertainty creates anxiety.
You’ll protect your comfort instead of building your capacity.
And ironically, the more you chase happiness, the more anxious you become. Because you start treating pain like a problem instead of a teacher. Pleasure becomes the metric. Pain becomes the enemy.
This becomes especially problematic in recovery contexts. When we train ourselves to avoid all discomfort, we lose the very capacity we need to navigate the inevitable challenges of sustained recovery and performance.
Excellence Is a Different Game
Excellence isn’t about suppressing emotion. It’s about aligning your actions with your values, not your feelings.
The research on expertise development supports this distinction. Anders Ericsson’s groundbreaking work on deliberate practice demonstrates that expert performance across domains — from music to medicine to athletics — is not primarily the result of innate talent or pleasurable experiences, but rather the product of sustained, focused effort that deliberately pushes beyond one’s comfort zone (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Expert performers don’t practice because it feels good; they practice because improvement is the goal.
You don’t train because it feels good, you train because health is a value. You don’t repair a relationship because it’s easy, you repair it because family matters. You don’t pursue mastery because it’s comfortable, you pursue it because growth is part of who you are becoming.
Ericsson’s research reveals that what distinguishes elite performers from average ones is not the quantity of practice alone, but the quality of engagement with discomfort. Deliberate practice involves “a sustained focus on tasks that [performers] couldn’t do well, or even at all” (Ericsson, Prietula, & Cokely, 2007, p. 116).
Excellence builds identity, happiness chases sensation.
The Paradox
Here’s the twist: when you commit to excellence, happiness often shows up anyway.
Not the shallow kind, dopamine spikes, or temporary highs. But something steadier — a quiet sense of meaning, a grounded confidence, a respect for yourself that doesn’t disappear when things get hard.
Stulberg (2025) argues that this phenomenon occurs because excellence aligns us with our deeper human drive for growth and contribution. We feel fulfilled because we’re living in alignment. We’re not trying to avoid pain. We’re learning from it.
3 Daily Practices
Drawing from Stulberg’s framework and the deliberate practice research, here are three concrete practices to shift from chasing happiness to building excellence:
1. Start with the Question, Not the Feeling
Each morning, before you check how you feel, ask: “What would excellence look like today?”
Write down 2-3 specific actions that align with your values, regardless of comfort.
This practice mirrors what Ericsson found in expert performers: they don’t wait for motivation or inspiration; they structure their practice around objective goals for improvement, independent of their emotional state in the moment (Ericsson, 2008).
2. Embrace Productive Discomfort
Identify one area where you’ve been avoiding friction and lean into it deliberately. This could be a challenging project, a skill you’re terrible at, or a conversation you’ve postponed.
The practice isn’t about suffering, it’s about building your tolerance for discomfort in service of growth. As Stulberg (2025) emphasizes, genuine excellence requires us to “challenge ourselves in worthwhile endeavors” and push beyond the convenience and distraction that characterize modern life.
Track not how you feel, but whether you showed up. Research on deliberate practice consistently shows that expert development requires “immediate feedback, time for problem-solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior” (Ericsson, 2008, p. 988).
3. Measure Process, Not Outcomes
At day’s end, review your actions, not your emotions. Did you do the work? Did you honor your values?
Excellence is built in the repetition of small, often invisible actions. Ericsson’s research demonstrates that expertise accumulates through thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice—not through occasional bursts of inspired effort (Ericsson et al., 1993). When you measure what matters—effort, consistency, alignment—you build a foundation that doesn’t crumble when results are delayed or feelings fluctuate.
A Better Question
Instead of asking “How can I be happier?” ask “What would excellence look like today?”
Then do that. Even if it’s inconvenient. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s invisible.
Happiness is a byproduct. Excellence is the aim.
And if you build your life around the aim, you won’t need to chase the byproduct.
References
Ericsson, K. A. (2008). Deliberate practice and acquisition of expert performance: A general overview. Academic Emergency Medicine, 15(11), 988-994. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00227.x
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.100.3.363
Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., & Cokely, E. T. (2007). The making of an expert. Harvard Business Review, 85(7-8), 114-121.
Stulberg, B. (2025). The way of excellence: A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world. Harper Wave.
For more insights on performance, addiction, and recovery, visit www.anthonyeisenman.net
Leave a Reply