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B. The correlation between success, goal, and achievement
Achievement is crossing the milestone of the goal. Achievement is a feeling that our brain gets through increased dopamine levels. That is why it is said that “achievement gives you high.” Here, high is very high levels of dopamine hormone.
Therefore success is the emotion that contains the journey of setting up the goal, to working towards the goal, facing challenges, overcoming them, and finally achieving the goal.
When you set up the goal, you set your feelings to desire, hope, and want. You don’t have the goal now, but you want to have it. Goals serve one of the critical biological functions, that is thriving.
Why do we keep setting and chasing bigger goals?
You might have already observed in your life that when you completed your schooling, you felt like achieving a milestone in life. Then you set up a goal of cracking better colleges for your graduation. Once you get into a reputed top college, you might have set goals to achieve extraordinary scores in the semester examinations. Once you started achieving higher grades, you might have set your goal to crack the campus placement. Once you cracked the campus placement, you might have set the goal of getting a promotion immediately after joining your job.
All along, you might have felt successful in cracking a good college, cracking the campus interview, and so on. Whenever you will think about your success, you will think about your entire journey how hard you struggled, and how you overcame barriers and roadblocks up till the point of achievement.
However, because achievement is a feeling, and we already know that feelings are relative changes in the hormonal levels, once you get the high feeling, you will not stay in the high feeling forever.
However, dopamine is addictive. When dopamine goes higher you feel euphoria, above the world. Once you get that dopamine level, your brain wants more. The next goal you set and you achieve, the brain again gets high dopamine, so it wants more. Therefore we keep setting goals.
Again the sense of achievement is a feeling which is the relative change in the hormones. So if your dopamine levels in the second achievement don’t go higher than the first, then you will not feel high. In such a case, even though you set a goal and achieved it, and you might have worked hard for the achievement, you did not feel anything because your achievement produced the same level of dopamine as it did for the first time you achieved.
So, we keep getting larger and larger goals. If you think it is only you, then you would be wrong. Because setting and achieving higher goals serves the biological purpose of thriving, it is common across the animal kingdom.
For instance, when you take an anti-bacterial under a bacterial infection, the bacterial colony sets a goal of adapting to the antivirus and becoming immune to the new drug. This is how you become antibacterial resistant.
When lions get their prey like small pigs continuously, they set a higher prey target like a Bison.
Continuously setting, chasing, and achieving the higher goal itself become a habit, and one keeps running. This run is also called a rat race.