It's July 1992, and a 22-year-old has just won Wimbledon.
It's Andre Agassi’s first Grand Slam title, the thing he's trained for since he was a boy.
If anyone should feel on top of the world that night, it's him.
Years later, in his memoir Open, he wrote about what he actually felt.
He said it was like being let in on a secret...
...that winning changes nothing.
I can only guess what that night was like for him. The crowd, the trophy...
...and underneath all of it, the sense that something was supposed to arrive and didn't.
I don't think he's unusual.
Most of the men I work with can point to their own version. The deal that finally closed, or the promotion they'd chased for years.
For a day or two, they felt better. Elated, even.
Then the feeling went back to exactly where it had been.
I remember the day the sale of our business went through. I felt elated, as if life would never be the same again, and when the money hit my account I felt something close to awe.
Then, in the days that followed, came a series of comedowns. I realised that the mechanics of my life, with all its ups and downs, hadn't shifted an iota.
Here's where most of us go next. We decide the target must have been too small.
So we set a bigger one.
We go for one more year. We set ourselves an even bigger number.
And it happens again.
A study on monkeys helps explain why. I know... but stay with me on this.
In the 1990s, a neuroscientist called Wolfram Schultz recorded the brain cells that release dopamine in monkeys, while giving them sips of juice.
At first, the cells fired when the juice arrived.
Once the monkeys learned that a light meant juice was on its way, the cells fired at the light instead...
...and barely at all when the juice itself turned up.
I wouldn't stretch it too far. But it fits what so many of us feel. We get the excitement on the way to the thing. By the time it arrives, most of that feeling has already been spent.
What Agassi put into words is something plenty of successful men feel and keep to themselves, because it sounds ungrateful. 'I've got everything I wanted. What right have I got to feel flat?'
I'd say you have every right.
Agassi isn't the exception. If winning Wimbledon at 22 didn't do it for him, it's no wonder a great quarter didn't do it for you.
You're not broken.
The feeling you've been chasing was never going to come from the finish line.
Rather than asking what the next win is, here's a question I'll leave with you this week.
When did you last feel properly alive, without judging yourself against external criteria?
Matt
Sources: Andre Agassi, Open (2009) · Schultz, Dayan and Montague, 'A neural substrate of prediction and reward', Science (1997)