You have what you wanted. So why are you tired?

The business is growing. Clients find you on their own. Five years ago you would have signed up for exactly what you have today. And yet Sunday evening already smells of Monday, holidays last three days before the inbox takes over, and the satisfaction you expected never quite arrives. If you have ever wondered why successful people are tired – and why you seem to be one of them – you are in large company. The question became common enough that a course built around it is reported to be the most popular in Yale’s 300-year history.

The course is “The Science of Well-Being”, taught by psychologist Laurie Santos, and millions of people have taken it free online. Its central message is uncomfortable and freeing at the same time: our minds reliably mislead us about what will make us feel better. Here are the three misleads we see most often in founders and executives – and three small practices that help.

First answer: we get used to everything – including problems

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation. A new car, a new office, a bigger salary: the lift lasts a few weeks, then the mind settles back where it was. That part is well known. What is less known is that the same thing happens with bad things.

Think of the meeting that always starts ten minutes late. The colleague who replies to email in three days. The process everyone knows is broken. In the first week, it annoyed you. Today you no longer notice it. The problem hasn’t gone; your brain has simply stopped reporting it. Your body is still paying the bill.

So successful people are often tired from things they no longer even see. It isn’t one big problem that wears you down. It is twenty small ones you have got used to.

Small practice

Take a sheet of paper and spend five minutes listing everything at work that annoyed you a year ago and “doesn’t bother you” now. Then circle one thing you could remove this month. Just one.

Second answer: we want the wrong things

Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson called it miswanting. We are consistently poor at predicting what will make us happy and for how long. We overestimate both the good and the bad – and so we chase the wrong fixes.

In a founder it sounds like this: “Once we double revenue, I’ll rest.” “Once I hire one more senior person, things will calm down.” “Once we land the big contract…” Then revenue doubles, and so do the problems, because a company twice the size breaks the system that worked for the small one. The senior hire arrives and the tiredness stays, because the problem was never headcount. It was how decisions get made.

Money works the same way. Kahneman and Deaton’s well-known 2010 study suggested that day-to-day happiness stops rising above a certain income. Later analysis by Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers (2023) softened that: for most people, happiness does keep rising gently with income. But the effect is much smaller than we expect. The next million will not do what it promised.

Small practice

Write down one thing you believe will “finally make it easier”. Next to it, write what the last version of that same thing actually changed: the last big contract, the last senior hire, the last new office. The answer is usually short.

Third answer: rich in money, poor in time

Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School studies what she calls time affluence. Her findings are simple: people who prioritise time over money tend to be happier, and money spent buying time – paying someone else to do a task you dislike – raises life satisfaction more than money spent on things (Whillans et al., 2017).

Successful people are usually rich in money and poor in time. And they choose that poverty themselves, every day, in small decisions: “it’s quicker if I do it”, “I’ll just take a look”, “send it to me for sign-off”. Each of those sentences is an hour given to the company that the company never asked for.

Small practice

Open your calendar for the last four weeks. Count the hours you spent on work someone else could have done. Then pick one hour a week that you will “buy back” from now on – delegate it, pay for it, or simply drop it.

A small note on the science

The science of happiness has its weaker parts. The famous pie chart claiming that 40% of happiness depends on our own choices is now regarded as a rough estimate rather than a finding, so we don’t quote it. What stands firm is less exciting: gratitude, connection with other people, time, attention to the present moment, movement and sleep. None of it sounds like a secret. That is exactly why successful people skip it.

Why successful people are tired – and what we do with it in the room

We don’t run any of this as a “happiness workshop”. We use it in short moments on serious days, usually just as a leadership team is getting ready to defend itself. One study, one question, then back to work. When the partners of a firm hear that everyone gets used to their problems, it becomes easier to say “I stopped seeing that too”. No one to blame.

That is how we worked with the partners of Climate Lens Advisors on their strategic reset on the Una: the hardest conversations only happened once it became acceptable, in that room, to say they were tired. Read what came out of it →

We also give a 90-minute talk under the same title, “Why successful people are tired”, for business associations, chambers of commerce, boards and leadership off-sites – in English or in the regional languages. No text-heavy slides. One decision each person makes before leaving the room.

Start with one hour

Of the three practices, choose one. The best is usually the third: one bought-back hour a week, four weeks in a row. Note how you feel before and after. If it doesn’t help, write to us and we’ll be puzzled together. (We suspect we won’t have to be.)

If it does help, and you would like to do the same with your whole team – let’s talk.