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In backpacking, the phrase “false peaks” describes a point on your hike that appears to be the top of the mountain. But only when you reach it do you see another peak hidden behind it.
You might hike for miles believing you’re looking at your final destination. You get rest, food, and maybe a warm fire at that point. It’s the focal point of your cravings. You might tell yourself, “When I get there, I can’t wait to drop my pack and put on my camp shoes.” But then, as you summit and reach that peak you’ve been staring at all day, you see another peak rise over the horizon hidden behind the object of your obsession.
Everyone experiences false peaks in life, too. Most of us deny that a new peak has risen on the horizon. We’ve been watching that point all day. We knew it was the end. All we wanted to do was rest at that peak. That’s where we wanted to go the whole time. We don’t want to go and climb an entirely new mountain! Everyone gets inundated with thoughts and opinions about achievement and goals, the most ubiquitous being, “It’s not about the destination but the journey you took along the way.”
Except, I think that’s actually bullshit.
You only understand that it’s “about the journey” after you’ve made the trek to the destination a few times and realized another peak appears. You earn the knowledge by achieving the goal. Period.
Both the journey and the destination are important. However, the journey only becomes more important after you realize the destination isn’t the end—because another peak always appears. What we wanted, the craving that fueled us becomes irrelevant once we get it. It’s a phenomenon as real as gravity.
The person who started the trek is different from the person who finishes. The challenges we overcome and the lessons we learn shape us into new people. The person who wanted, who maybe even needed, that thing. We wanted to make more money. We wanted to travel. We wanted to become an entrepreneur. Only by taking action to achieve the thing do we become somebody new—someone who already is a world traveler, entrepreneur, or wealthy.
That does not mean there’s no value in achievement. My point is that the importance we place on achieving something evaporates the instant we achieve it. But our life is now in a new place. We’ve created motion, a defining characteristic of life.
It can be confronting to experience. Just like when the backpacker realizes they’ve been fantasizing over a false peak during their long trek, you reach your destination and realize that instead of relaxing into the achievement, a new peak appears. No on/off switch gets flipped the second the goal gets completed. The only thing to do is to set a new path and keep walking. Because if you attempt to sit on your achievement for too long, it will only create internal suffering.
This happened to me immediately after my business partner and I sold Investors Alley. This goal I’d had for years of taking a company, growing it, and having a successful exit was achieved. I checked the box. I wanted to feel finished. Goal achieved; let me bask in the feeling of achievement.
But I ignored the new mountain appearing over the horizon. I didn’t suddenly become a new person because I sold a company. I became a new person through the pursuit of the outcome. It took me a while to recognize that. The more I clung to the desire to be done, the more confusion, angst, and stress I felt. I watched as life continued to move forward (as it always does) when all I wanted to do was stay put.
The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida, a book I return to often, details this phenomenon well. People set goals and then fantasize about how their life changes once they achieve them. Except, that’s not how life works. Deida details a confronting process where there is no sitting in the celebration completing a life goal or achievement immediately afterward. The achievement immediately shifts into the rear-view mirror. It was for a previous version of ourselves.
When we sold the company, I so badly desired to live in the doneness of the achievement I’d worked toward for years. I had achieved the goal. However, life kept moving, and I became more distressed each day as I clung to that achievement, not recognizing the new person I had become.
Life is about looking forward to the future. There’s no freezing the moment and living in the achievement. Deida drives the point home with a metaphor about building your dream house. You spend years planning every detail. The design, the finishings, everything is perfect. Then, as soon as it’s finished, you realize the house you spent years creating was meant for a previous version of you. So you sell it and begin the process all over again.
What’s most important for me, however, was that I experienced it. I had read the book Way of the Superior Man multiple times before the acquisition. I’d read that chapter numerous times. Except, I only had an intellectual understanding of that concept. It didn’t make sense until I had lived it— until I had reached the peak and realized that another immediately waited behind it.
This leads me to think: where else in my life do I believe an end result, something I’m either working towards or avoiding based on an intellectual understanding rather than an embodied, lived understanding?
As I said above, life is about both the journey and the destination. The journey only becomes relevant after the destination is reached because only by reaching it do we realize that there’s always another peak hiding behind it. The journey is never finished. The only thing to do is to put our pack back on and keep hiking. There’s no other way to see that perspective until you reach the summit and watch your new peak rise slowly across the horizon.
So keep on hiking,
-Jared
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