Tom Holland Is Having the Best Year of His Life. Why Success Still Makes Us Want to Disappear for a While.

There are difficult years.

There are good years.

And then there are years in which you marry Zendaya, appear in two enormous films and discover that the latest Spider-Man has begun treating box-office records as though they are minor administrative inconveniences.

Tom Holland appears to be having one of those.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, in which Holland plays Telemachus, has sailed past $1.5 billion worldwide. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has crossed $1 billion and become one of the biggest films ever at the North American box office. Holland himself described The Odyssey earlier this year as one of his proudest achievements as an actor.

So what does a sensible person do after reaching the summit?

Apparently, go away for a bit.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige recently said Holland and Zendaya were taking what he called a "good and restful victory lap."

Which may be one of the wisest pieces of career advice to emerge from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Big Idea

We tend to understand the need for rest after failure.

You lose the account. The project collapses. The interview goes badly. Your presentation develops a technical fault precisely when you reach the only slide containing information.

Of course you need a weekend.

What we understand rather less well is the need for rest after success.

You get the promotion.

Finish the enormous project.

Publish the book.

Complete the qualification.

Deliver the event everyone has spent nine months talking about.

People congratulate you.

And somewhere inside, rather than immediately demanding champagne and another objective, a small voice says:

Could everybody please leave me alone for three weeks?

That response is not especially mysterious.

Success takes energy too.

The Arrival Problem

Positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar gave one version of this phenomenon a useful name: the arrival fallacy — our tendency to imagine that reaching the thing we have been pursuing will deliver a lasting state of satisfaction.

It usually doesn't.

Achievement can make us happy. But human beings are remarkably good at turning extraordinary circumstances into Tuesday.

The promotion becomes your job.

The finished project becomes the project people expect you to repeat next year.

The bestselling book becomes the awkward question: So, what's the next one?

Research on goals and wellbeing is more nuanced than the gloomy idea that achievement is pointless — attaining meaningful goals can certainly be associated with wellbeing — but the enduring satisfaction we imagine at the summit is not automatic.

Part of the problem is that while pursuing something, life acquires structure.

There is a deadline.

A plan.

A reason for saying no.

A next step.

Then you succeed.

And suddenly the scaffolding disappears.

This may explain why a quiet week after an enormous achievement can feel oddly disorientating.

You are not necessarily unhappy.

You are simply no longer being pulled forward.

Benedict Would Have Understood This

About fifteen centuries before anybody could announce a global box-office gross before breakfast, Benedict of Nursia organised monastic life around rhythm.

Work mattered.

So did prayer.

So did reading.

So did meals.

So did sleep.

The remarkable thing about Benedict's Rule is that it does not treat every unused minute as a productivity failure.

A monastery is not meant to operate like an Amazon fulfilment centre with Gregorian chant.

Activity has edges.

Work stops.

Attention moves elsewhere.

And that stopping is not an embarrassing gap between important things.

It is part of the important thing.

That principle feels unusually relevant now because modern professional life has become very good at eliminating endings.

Finish the report and Teams informs you that somebody has commented on it.

Reach the target and next quarter's target appears.

Get the promotion and LinkedIn immediately introduces you to somebody five years younger who has apparently founded a satellite company before breakfast.

There is always another hill.

Benedict's answer was not to stop climbing.

It was to build stopping into the climb.

The Victory Lap Matters

There is a phrase worth rescuing from sport.

Victory lap.

Notice what it isn't called.

Victory sprint.

Victory performance review.

Victory strategic planning session.

The race has finished.

You go around once more, slowly.

You notice where you are.

There is something almost countercultural about that.

We are much better at using success as evidence that we should immediately do more.

Perhaps we should occasionally use it as permission to do less.

Not forever.

Not because ambition is unhealthy.

But because an achievement that is never absorbed merely becomes another item removed from a list.

Holland and Zendaya are in an unusual position, obviously. Most of us will not emerge from the summer having starred in two gigantic films.

Although if your August has gone particularly well, congratulations.

But scale doesn't really matter.

Completing something that required months of concentration produces the same basic question:

What happens when there is nothing left to prove today?

Perhaps the answer is not to invent something.

Before Your Stop

Think about the last thing that went genuinely well.

Not adequately.

Not "nobody complained".

Something you were proud of.

How long did you allow yourself to enjoy it before converting it into another expectation?

An hour?

A day?

Did you even make it to lunch?

There is no virtue in deliberately becoming unproductive.

But there may be wisdom in allowing achievement to finish.

A good piece of work deserves a full stop.