True happiness doesn’t come from achieving goals — A hard lesson in life.

I always thought everything in life was about living large. Have big aspirations, achieving all of them and just nailing each and every one of them to the coffin and cherishing it like there’s no tomorrow. But that just doesn’t work. And it took me a good couple of years and a huge growth in maturity to understand it.

Last year, I ran 12+ competitive races, helped a friend build his internet footprint (infrastructure) for his company in the early year, and got into a school for a medical program, also doing all this while maintaining my physical health and getting siht my work at my day job. All in all, I should feel happy, right? Well, no. Achieving all that did not change my mood at all. It was a startling revelation — the more I achieved, the less fulfilled I felt. Each accomplishment, rather than adding to my happiness, seemed to leave a void, a question of “What now?” It was a cycle of reaching a goal and then feeling an unexpected emptiness.

But rather it made me sad because now I didn’t have much to do, I have achieved almost everything I wanted to achieve. And then the question of what to do next arose, which made me feel a bit depressed. This sense of aimlessness crept in, filling the spaces where goals used to reside. The achievements that I…