More Success Can Bring Fewer Problems Without Bringing Less Distress

External success can improve someone’s circumstances without making life feel easier. Chris Williamson opens with a concept he says he heard from positive-psychology researcher Martin Seligman: “conservation of dysphoria.” As Williamson describes it, some people keep their bad feelings at roughly the same level by magnifying smaller worries as their lives improve. There may be fewer serious problems, but the remaining ones take up more attention.

James Smith offers a related image: a single coin in a vase makes more noise than a pile of coins. When someone has several worries—career, money, relationships—their attention is divided. If most of those problems disappear, the one that remains can feel overwhelming. Trying not to think about it may make it more present, like the “purple elephant” people are told not to picture.

The images point to two related but different problems. A person may have fewer things to worry about and still feel no less distressed. And as other concerns fall away, the one that remains may seem larger simply because it occupies more of the field of attention. Williamson and Smith are not saying that every worry is imagined or that circumstances do not matter. They are describing how the amount of distress someone feels may fail to track the number or apparent seriousness of the problems they face.

That helps explain why a higher income or more comfortable life does not guarantee happiness. Smith remembers thinking, when he was younger, that people with money did not have real problems. He now sees money as one category of circumstance, not an exemption from unhappiness. A student laughing with friends and a millionaire laughing with friends, he says, experience happiness without an extra “Uber surcharge” for wealth. Yet people often judge sadness differently: they accept that a wealthy person can be happy, but question why that person would be sad.

Williamson points to the guilt that can accompany this: people with no obvious external crisis may feel they have no right to be upset because someone else has it worse. Their exchange does not suggest that circumstances are irrelevant. It distinguishes the kinds of problems people face from whether their distress is legitimate. Smith’s point is that people readily accept that money does not increase the amount of happiness available to someone; he thinks they are less willing to extend the same reasoning to sadness and grief.

The same diminishing returns show up in money and experience. Smith recalls aiming for $10,000 a month and being delighted when he reached it. A $100,000 month did not produce ten times the happiness. In his experience, the earlier milestone brought more joy; the later one brought less. He had heard people describe that pattern before and assumed they were wrong. Then he encountered it himself—and found that each new goal could still be made to look like the one that would finally deliver the feeling he wanted.

Williamson applies the point to travel and other pleasures. The first trip abroad with friends can feel extraordinary: the excitement of the airport, the first beer, the unfamiliarity of being away. Repeat the experience and the next trip may need to be bigger, or different, to produce the same effect. He calls this hedonic adaptation and argues that people should be wary of rushing through their imagined milestones. Once someone has bought the dream car or taken the dream holiday, he asks, what comes next? The concern is not that pleasure should be avoided; it is that reaching a goal may not settle the question of what to want.

Smith says he pursued hedonistic experiences “to excess,” but that he would not have predicted what became most important to him. His account of pleasure and ambition is not a neat before-and-after lesson: some experiences that once seemed central have lost importance, while something he had not been seeking has become a major source of happiness.

Smith says that becoming a father changed his priorities in a way he had not anticipated. He was indifferent to having children in his twenties and early thirties. He had books, tours, income and the trappings of a successful career, but children were not on his mind. Since becoming a father, he says, his son has become a “homing beacon”—a source of happiness he had not experienced before, and a reason he now wants to build wealth.

The change has also made Smith less ambitious in other areas. Earlier success had been measured by professional progress and recognition; now, he says, his definition of success is tied to his son and family. He describes wanting to be wealthy for his family and wanting his son to be “spoilt.” That shift is personal testimony, not a prescription: Smith is explicit that he is not telling people they need to have children.

His own circumstances make the subject less abstract. Smith was adopted and had never seen a blood relative before his son. Holding the child, and wondering which traits came from him and which from his fiancée, carries a significance he says he had not anticipated. He also says he and his fiancée are experiencing difficulty conceiving a second child. They conceived their first child quickly. At the time of the conversation, Smith said his sperm numbers were good and his fiancée’s egg count was great, according to the information he had from their IVF clinic. He described the situation as a “beta region paradox”: because the results looked good, he said, the clinic had told them to keep trying rather than start IVF. He noted that the situation might have changed by the time the conversation was heard.

That uncertainty informs a question Smith has put to friends in their mid-thirties who say they want children but plan to wait until they have bought a house or secured more financial stability. He asks them to consider how they would feel if they knew it would take two years to conceive. If they would start trying now under that condition, he says, they should recognize that they do not know how long it will take in reality. This is advice grounded in his own perspective and circumstances, not a general medical recommendation.

Williamson connects the change in priorities to purpose beyond the self: parenthood can shift attention away from the demand to keep finding new ways to satisfy oneself. Smith’s point is not that everyone will experience that shift, but that a person who feels indifferent now may not know what the experience will mean to them later. For him, family has become the central source of happiness, while other achievements have lost some of their claim.

That is a counterpoint to the pursuit of ever-larger pleasures. Smith says people can get enjoyable feelings from games, social media and streaming, and reflects on how readily those forms of entertainment can fill attention. He recalls a discussion with writer Will Storr in which Storr challenged Smith’s assumption that scrolling on a phone before bed was necessarily bad: if someone enjoys it, what exactly is the problem? Smith does not settle that question. He wonders whether readily available entertainment leaves people with fewer reasons to turn toward other activities. Williamson adds a line he learned from Dr. K: “Growing up is abandoning what works over and over again.” Smith offers a related observation: parents may have felt like “old teenagers” who were still guessing their way through life.

Smith’s stories about backpacking make the distance between youthful risk-taking and his later caution concrete. He says he spent six months travelling in Asia on £3,000, and recalls the period as a time when he would do almost anything. In Laos, that included drinking cheap whiskey that he says left him feeling poisoned the next day. He describes tubing in Vang Vieng: floating downriver on an inflated inner tube, stopping at bars along the banks, and drinking before continuing downstream. Rope swings, changing water depth and the distance from a hospital made the activity dangerous. Smith says the tubing became tamer after too many people were injured or died.

The setting, in his telling, was part of the experience. He remembers the cafes in town playing Friends throughout the day, with workers who could speak along to the show. Travellers would come in hungover, eat, watch the episodes, and then head out again. The detail is less a claim about travel than a glimpse of the rhythm he remembers: an unfamiliar place organized around a familiar television show, with another night out always available.

His account of travelling with a girlfriend is more cautionary. Smith says his mother warned him that going travelling with his partner was a mistake; they argued, and he would sometimes respond by getting drunk. In Thailand, after drinking heavily, he blacked out. He woke with much of the skin gone from his shoulder and leg, having apparently come back from an accident, though the moped he owned had no damage. He and the people with him could not establish what had happened during the hours he was gone.

Smith remembers being frightened by how easily the episode could have ended worse. He had no helmet and could have broken a leg or suffered a head injury. Another crash in Vietnam gave the lesson a sharper edge. He had put his helmet under the seat while packing bags, then put it on because he needed to move the moped and did not want to lose it. A local driver hit him as Smith turned. Smith says he remembers his helmet hitting the ground; the bags he was carrying also helped protect him. He now tells people in Bali to wear helmets.

The change is not presented as a clean conversion from reckless to wise. Smith describes a young man who repeatedly escaped serious consequences, and an older man who now warns other people about the risks he once ignored. He also says that the one time he wore the helmet in Vietnam was when the crash happened. His point in telling the story is not that caution would have prevented every accident, but that he can now imagine what might have happened without the helmet.

Williamson and Smith trade advice about the small negotiations that shape relationships. Williamson recounts a suggestion he heard from married men: when a partner is deciding what to wear, praise the first outfit, ask to see a second, and then say the first was better. The joke is that the couple can avoid several more outfit changes. Smith immediately points out the problem: if both partners hear the advice, the tactic is obvious. Williamson agrees that the maneuver depends on one person not knowing what the other is doing.

They also discuss a tactic for choosing where to eat. If someone cannot decide, tell them you have picked a place and let them guess; agree to the first suggestion they make. Williamson calls it manipulative, then wonders whether it might also cut through indecision. The exchange leaves that tension unresolved: the tactic can be understood as a way to simplify a choice, but it also involves steering someone without telling them.

Smith offers a maxim from his father: “The key to a long, successful marriage is accepting you’re wrong even when you’re right.” Williamson says simply conceding can come across as dismissive; it matters whether the apology seems sincere. Smith replies that his father has been married for 52 years. The anecdote gives the line weight for them, but they do not present it as a universal formula.

Their discussion of eating and exercise shifts from jokes to a practical constraint. Smith says that in his coaching experience, when one partner wants to lose weight and the other does not, the second partner may undermine the first—offering food, suggesting a “cheat” meal, or otherwise making the change harder. Williamson calls this a “fitness gap relationship.” Smith’s claim is that partners need to be on the same page about health and fitness if one person is trying to change their habits.

The conversation also veers into deliberately outrageous jokes about secretly administering weight-loss medication to a family member. They are not offered as real advice. The more serious point the two return to is that a partner’s habits can make another person’s effort easier or harder, and that shared routines matter when one person is trying to change.

Smith’s early record gives force to his argument that a person’s present is a poor forecast of their future. At 13, he and a neighbour used air rifles to shoot at passing cars. They thought of it as messing around and did not grasp the damage or danger they were causing. One day a pellet struck a passenger in a car, missing the passenger’s young son and leaving the man with seven stitches across his face. Smith says he and his neighbour did not know which of them fired the shot.

The police came to Smith’s home. His mother identified him rather than denying knowledge of what had happened; his father told him not to say anything until he had spoken to a lawyer, though Smith says he had already explained himself. The next day, at the station, Smith says he was arrested. Police took his fingerprints and DNA and photographed him. They walked him through a ballistics report that described how the pellet entered the car through an open rear window and struck the passenger. The officers told him that the driver, the child or another road user could have been hit, with far more serious consequences.

Smith says the police understood that the boys had not set out to hurt anyone. He met the injured man and apologized; Smith says the man did not pursue a conviction. Smith received a police reprimand that remained in place until he turned 18. He understood that if he got into trouble again, the consequences could be serious. When friends were drinking and police told them to pour out their alcohol, he complied.

That experience did not make him immediately disciplined at school. He had four GCSEs, one fewer than the usual threshold for sixth form. He was allowed to continue on the condition that he behave, but was removed two weeks later after being caught smoking and messing around in a drama hall. His mother took him to a job centre and told him not to come home without a job. Smith says she smashed his Nokia phone on the road as they walked in.

At the job centre, he found a route back into education: a sports BTEC at Berkshire College of Agriculture. He did well in a setting built around sport, played rugby and formed a good relationship with his lecturers. Later, he completed a foundation degree and went on to a top-up year at Hartpury College. His parents had initially refused to let him go to university because they expected him to fail and take on debt. He ultimately did attend—but says he barely attended classes, did not complete his degree properly and spent much of the time drinking.

A bout of mumps interrupted his first year at Hartpury. Smith says it left him ill for weeks, cost him eight or nine kilograms, and eventually affected his testicles. When he returned to campus, he expected someone to ask where he had been. Instead, students stared as if he had entered the wrong room. Embarrassed, he turned around and left. He says he never went to another lecture.

He avoided being removed from campus by submitting blank coversheets with his coursework, having heard that this would prevent the university from kicking him out. At the end of his rugby career, a coach recognized him as “Jimbo” but did not know he was also James Smith—his dissertation supervisor. Smith says he had never logged into the university account where staff had been emailing him.

He still remembers that period fondly. “Best year of my life,” he says, though he did not get the degree. He also describes himself as a liability until 23 or 24: a young man drinking heavily, drawing on windows with deodorant, and getting into trouble. The gap between that person and the co-founder of a drinks business is not, in his telling, the result of a carefully executed plan. It is evidence that a messy beginning does not fix the ending.

The immediate occasion for this reflection is an 18-year-old university student who, six weeks into his first year, was already wondering whether he should abandon his business degree. He wanted freedom and worried that studying business would teach him less than trying to run one.

Smith told him that at the same age he had not even been allowed to go to university. At 20, he was doing Freshers’ Week; at 21, he was failing his third year while having what he calls the booziest year of his life. After that came door-to-door sales, a year in corporate work and, at 24, personal training. He says he did not become a trainer because he had a grand entrepreneurial plan. He did it because he hated his previous jobs and saw a way to earn enough by training three clients a day.

Williamson argues that young people often treat the present as a verdict on their future. School grades and early sporting achievements are among the few visible measures available, so a teenager may assume that the students doing well now are the ones who will succeed later. He says that comparison intensifies during puberty, when people start looking around at their peers and judging where they stand.

Williamson also worries that young people now encounter visible examples of very young people with money, businesses and expensive lifestyles. He contrasts that with his own youth, when knowing about a desirable car or athlete did not necessarily mean calculating what income would be needed to afford the car. Smith separately argues that the status signals have changed. In his father’s generation, a child could count as a greater accomplishment than books or money; when Smith told his parents they were going to have a child, his father cried. The success markers young people see now may be luxury cars, public success and the apparent ability to build a business at an early age. Smith says those images can encourage young people to reverse-engineer a business as the route to status.

Smith’s career suggests a less direct route. In a corporate sales job, he was required to meet a call target. After he hit his commission ceiling early in the year, his manager told him there was no way to increase it; she still needed him to complete the required calls. Smith says he spent the remaining months gaming the activity measures, including leaving a call connected to a council phone menu. Williamson describes doing something similar in a telesales job, leaving calls open after the other person had hung up to improve his figures.

Both remember those jobs as tedious. Smith says the enforced boredom was worse than the busy periods of his life. But he now sees a lesson in having found a way to meet targets even in a job he hated: “If I have this mindset to a job that I love, I can do incredibly well.” He says he needed the dull work and the bad fit, rather than being able to skip straight to a successful business.

The conversation’s answer to the student is not that university is always the right choice, or that someone should stay on a path that is clearly wrong for them. Smith and Williamson instead resist treating six weeks of uncertainty—or a poor academic record, or a first job—as enough evidence to predict the rest of a life. Smith’s own progression was not a strategic ladder toward the business he eventually built. Personal training began as a way out of work he disliked, and the skills he later used developed through repetition and experience rather than a plan he had made at 18.

Smith has also described a way to reduce the pressure of being self-employed: calculate the monthly amount needed to keep “your head above water”—rent, car payments and other essential costs—and make that the first target. A rowing coach he knows marks the month with champagne when he and his wife earn enough to cover their needs. If they reach the number on the seventh, the rest of the month feels different; if they reach it on the twenty-ninth, they still reached it.

Smith says meeting that threshold has made him feel less vulnerable to other people’s offers and expectations. When an early brand deal came in, he could refuse it because he had £1,300 in his Monzo account. The threshold changes with a person’s needs and circumstances. His point is that a concrete survival number may be less intimidating than an imagined destination far off in the distance.

This threshold also connects to the larger question of why more success may not make someone feel more secure. If the standard for “enough” stays far ahead of what a person has, the gap can remain a source of anxiety even as their circumstances improve. Smith says people may fill that gap with depression, anxiety and reasons to feel unhappy. He admits he does not always follow his own advice, but argues that it can help to identify the line that would mean basic needs are covered. More than that line can still bring useful or enjoyable things; it need not become the minimum condition for feeling safe.

Williamson offers a related formulation: “Wealth is just reality minus expectations.” Someone who is exceeding what they expect from life may feel wealthy; someone whose expectations keep moving ahead of their reality may feel poor despite substantial resources. They say the comparison group has expanded as online visibility makes other people’s money and status easier to see. Smith urges people to notice what they already have, including a lasting relationship or a family, rather than treating income and career as the only forms of success.

Williamson describes the arrival fallacy as the expectation that reaching a goal will resolve the dissatisfaction that motivated the pursuit. From the top of the mountain, the view may not feel as good as it looked during the climb. But telling someone still climbing that the view is disappointing can sound privileged and unhelpful. The challenge is to acknowledge both truths: achievement can matter, and it may not cure the underlying restlessness.

He lays out three possible responses. One is to decide the achievement was not large enough and pursue a bigger version: the national role instead of the regional one, the higher degree instead of the bachelor’s. Another is to reject the whole system as broken. A third is to look inward and ask why dissatisfaction persists even after the desired milestone arrives. Williamson says his “bro science brain” currently favors that third route, while acknowledging that he and Smith are still building a large business themselves.

The first response can look like a rational adjustment: perhaps the goal was too small, so the next one will be enough. The second turns disappointment outward. Williamson says this can make people “spiky” about the world around them. He is not arguing that social conditions never constrain people; he is describing a reaction to discovering that success did not deliver the promised feeling. His third option is to ask what, in the person’s own expectations or habits of comparison, keeps the dissatisfaction alive.

Smith has a framework for keeping achievement in proportion: treat social-media success as game points. Some days you play well and gain points; on others you do not. That does not need to determine your worth. Williamson connects this to a line he attributes to Joe Hudson:

The game analogy also gives Smith a practical account of how to improve. In a game, a player can level up a character, gain access to new equipment and skills, and cooperate with teammates. Those ideas map onto work: improve the tools, prepare, study what others are doing and practice. But Smith says that none of those improvements replaces volume and repetition. A new controller or a change in settings may help, but playing repeatedly is what develops mastery. For a podcast, he says, advice cannot substitute for making 400 episodes.

Better equipment or preparation can improve the conditions for performance, but it cannot substitute for doing the work. Smith’s examples include upgrading a microphone or camera and researching before a podcast; his point is that practice still has to follow.

Teamwork matters too. Players pursuing the same objective from different roles may do better than people acting alone, and Williamson adds that cooperation makes wins more enjoyable and losses easier to bear. In a game, dying on a level does not have to ruin the day: you get another chance. Smith’s point is not that work is literally a game, but that the frame can make setbacks easier to treat as part of practice rather than as a verdict on the person.

The analogy does not mean every form of polish is an improvement. Smith challenges Williamson’s comparison between speaking and playing piano. A more technically perfect way of speaking can create distance; a listener may find a speaker’s precision less relatable. He suggests that communication can become too smooth if it loses the speaker’s idiosyncrasies. Williamson agrees that mastery is not the same as removing every imperfection. He recalls a period when consciously monitoring his speech—his tongue position, his lisp and his filler words—made him a worse communicator.

The discussion turns to who is best placed to teach. A black belt has more experience than a purple belt, Smith says, but a blue belt might learn more easily from someone who remembers what it was like to be a blue belt. Williamson calls this “model the rise, not the result”: learn from someone who remembers the stage you are at, not only from someone who has already moved far beyond it. Smith’s point is not that the most experienced person has nothing to offer. It is that someone closer to the learner’s current position may remember the steps and obstacles that are no longer visible from the top.

Progress can involve practice, better tools and collaboration; contentment may require something different from another round of the same pursuit. Smith and Williamson do not claim to have solved that tension. They argue instead that achievement is one part of a life—not a reliable measure of a person’s worth, and not a guarantee that the next milestone will finally make the problems go away.