Everybody likes some excitement in their world. But the heights of feeling good are usually followed by the depths of feeling bad.
A successful life is not to be found in one exciting day but in a steady, productive, fulfilling career.
Tony and Carla made it through the lean years. He was still in school. She worked hard to pay for their expenses and then came home and worked hard to cook meals and keep their home in order and generally makes things as nice as she could for Tony.
“Back then,” Carla remembers, “it was an uphill struggle, but it was our uphill struggle. And we just kept on going, with each other.”
And now, degree in hand, Tony has reached new heights. Financial struggles are gone. In fact, almost everything of their early married life is gone. Instead of expressing satisfaction, he rants against the fact that Carla hasn’t become a new person to match the new person he is.
Carla worries about what it means. “I don’t want everything to change. I don’t want to be a new person. I don’t want to live every day anxious about whether I’m good enough or I’m going to do something that disappoints him again.”
Tony tells her she ignored the part about marriage being for better not worse, and she’s ruining the better.
Carla, for her part, longs for the time “when our lives were steady. It was hard, but it was steady.”
Long-term studies of corporate leaders find that seven in ten of those who survive longest in their jobs downplay both the best and worst outcomes they experience and keep their feelings relatively steady. They have what psychologists call a “focus on an acceptable average,” not on the extraordinary, which is useful because almost every day turns out to be more average than extraordinary.
Ingram 1998