The human brain is wired to respond to success with positive feelings and emotions.
Without getting too deep into the chemistry involved, success is something that triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, a hormone that triggers a pleasure response.
It is crucial to harness this in a positive manner as there are many opportunities that are wasted as success is passed over.
This mechanism is very cleverly used in many walks of life, often by corporations who seek to leverage this reward system for financial gain. You can find it in places from Casinos to World of Warcraft and the reward system is the root cause of many addictions.
Using the harmless example of video gaming (I don’t want to get involved in a post on drug addiction!) this is now almost ever-present in games and the process is simple. The game awards you for completing things in the game, with a badge or achievement. Often these are completely meaningless, they over no tangible reward, no money (in-game or otherwise), no extra help in the game. The majority of them are simply to give you a goal to aim for and the feeling of success when you’ve reached that goal.
The clever part of this is the pace at which you reach the achievements, when you first start playing a new game they will come in rapid succession. You’ll get rewarded for completing the simplest things and yet this will still trigger the feeling of success. As your time with the game progresses, your achievements will get further apart and harder to manage. Chasing that initial feeling keeps you coming back to put the hours in.
Crucially, there is never a gap in the progress. You’ll never have that moment after success to think, “What next?”
The completion of one goal is followed immediately by the next objective. On the rush of success you’ll plunge headlong into the next challenge.
So, is this a bad thing? In the case of addiction, yes. But it doesn’t have to be. In the case of World of Warcraft it’s just very good game design and a very good business model.
Can we make it a good thing? Absolutely. Use this system in your daily life. Note all of your small successes, set a goal and reach it. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment and pride. But, as with the examples above, don’t stop there. Use that good feeling to head towards your next objective.
If you have a series of goals mapped out then you can move immediately from one success to another. It’s important to celebrate our successes but it can be easy to fall into the trap of using success as an excuse to delay the next project. Don’t let this happen to you!
Zealous Thinking 