Sharing your thoughts through an email newsletter is a strange thing. Some of the time it feels like writing into the abyss: no response, no reaction. And then sometimes your words land with someone in a way that moves them to write back.

A recent issue of Underneath the Numbers received a surprising amount of feedback... well, surprising to me, anyway. (As a quick aside, if you missed any issues or want a refresher, you can read them ​here​).

One of the recent replies stuck with me:

"I can relate to the sense of finishing something and not knowing what's next. But I also feel a sense of letdown because the excitement from the achievement disappears so quickly. It's like a moment of joy, and then poof, like it never happened, and I'm back to feeling like I have to find that next goal."

Wow, did I feel seen by that.

I didn't get into this in the original piece, but it's meaningful enough to sit with now because I imagine a lot of you reading this have felt some version of the same thing.

I've talked with my coach about this a lot over the years, and what she keeps coming back to (and will probably have to remind me of again) is this: the goal was never the destination.

She puts it in terms of a mountain. Reaching the summit doesn't mean it's the last one you'll climb. And to start the next ascent, you first have to come down from the one you're on. The view from the top isn't a place you get to stay. Your drive to learn, grow, and build doesn't get used up when you hit a goal. It just gets you ready for the next one.

And when I think about that, it changes what a goal actually is for me. It becomes a checkpoint, not an endpoint. Not a destination you arrive at, but a marker you pass. A way to measure how far you've come and to see the ground ahead more clearly than you could before you started.

Checkpoints exist to show you what you couldn't see from lower down, including, sometimes, what you actually want to climb next.

So maybe the letdown isn't a sign that something went wrong. Maybe it's just what standing on a summit feels like when part of you already knows you're not meant to stay there.

That doesn't make the feelings shared in the reader's reply disappear. But it can change what you do with them.

Instead of rushing to find the next goal just to make the emptiness stop, you can let yourself come down the mountain. Rest for a bit, and trust that the next climb will make itself known.

And when it does, know you'll be ready for it.

~ Nolan