Winning vs. Fulfillment: Why the World's Best Golfer Says “This Is Not a Fulfilling Life”

What Scottie Scheffler and Nikola Jokić teach us about the difference between winning and fulfillment.

We all know the exhilarating rush of a win, but what about the silence that follows?

We’re told that success, titles, and prestige are the endgame. Work harder, go faster, push more, and eventually you’ll feel whole. But as anyone who’s spent time at the top of the mountain will tell you, that’s not quite how it works. In a world obsessed with winning, it's easy to confuse accomplishment with fulfillment.

Just ask Scottie Scheffler. He’s been the #1 ranked golfer in the world for 112 consecutive weeks. He’s reached the pinnacle of his sport. And yet at a recent press conference, that I highly suggest watching, he had this to say:

“This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from the deepest places of your heart.”

Scheffler gets at a central tension of ambition and striving that the founder of capitalism Adam Smith outlined centuries ago.

As I outlined in my recent book, The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it. And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” Smith saw value in the drive to obtain wealth and status but also highlighted that it was a deception.

Smith wasn’t against ambition. He thought it was vital. As political scientist and author of Our Great Purpose, Ryan Hanley, told me, Smith thought, “It's good that people care about our results. It helps us achieve. At the same time, Smith believed it can be corrupting. It can be beneficial for society, but really dangerous for the individual if they lose themselves and lose a sense of their compass.”

In our achievement orientated world, we don’t talk much about that compass.

Scheffler did. “I’d rather be a great father than a great golfer...This is not the most important thing in my life.”

NBA superstar Nikola Jokić, a two-time MVP and recent NBA champion, said something eerily similar:

“I really wish my kid... really remember me as a dad, not as a basketball player.”
“Basketball is not the main thing in my life. And probably never gonna be.”

These are the people who won. Who have it all. And still, they’re telling us something deeply human: Success doesn’t automatically deliver meaning.

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The Outside World vs. the Inside Game

In my book Win the Inside Game, I talk a lot about how performance is an inside-out endeavor.

Yet…we live in a culture that pushes us to seek external validation. Likes. Applause. Championships. Followers. We make the mistake of the arrival fallacy, that if we just get to the top of the mountain, then we’ll feel fulfilled, content, and worthy.

If you don’t have something deeper anchoring you—family, values, purpose—then you end up adrift. When we have clarity on who we are, what we’re doing, and where we belong, we are resilient and robust. Sure, it looks better on social media to tell everyone you are going all-in, that you’re obsessed, and have a singled-minded focus on your ambition…

But in the real world, that makes us fragile. We walk into every board meeting knowing we have nothing else. We show up to every game thinking that if we don’t win, we’re not worthy. Our brain gets the message that our pursuit is the be all end all, that our literal sense of self is on the line. And I’m sorry to say this, but very very few people play well in that situation. Having your identity on the line is at the heart of choking and undeperformance.

This is the identity trap.

We need to care about our pursuits. No doubt. But if they become all consuming, we’ve made our inner alarm hypersensitive to threats.

We start thinking: I am my job. I am my PR. I am my GPA. I am my win-loss record.
And when something threatens that identity, it doesn’t just feel like a setback. It feels like a personal collapse.

It’s the nuance of performance that is a requirement in the real world, but never talked about in social media land:

You have to care deeply, but not so much that your identities at stake.

You have to pour your heart into something, without letting it define your self-worth.

You have to be obsessive, but without losing yourself.

If you mess up the balance, you end up burned out or miserable.

Scheffler and Jokić seem to have both managed to untether their identity from performance.

Those are two people who realize that the scoreboard isn’t the final measure of a life well lived. And that makes them more resilient, better performers.

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Getting Complex

Fulfillment doesn’t come from being perfect or any measure of external success. It comes from being whole. And you can’t be whole if your entire identity is wrapped around one narrow definition of success.

When we orient around values—when we know what matters most—it frees us to show up fully in our pursuits without making them the center of our lives.

Wholeness is messy. It embraces complexity. It means you can be both driven and compassionate, competitive and connected, excellent at your craft and still deeply rooted in who you are outside of it. When your sense of self expands beyond performance, you become more resilient. You stop riding the emotional rollercoaster of every win or loss. Instead of chasing external approval, you begin cultivating internal clarity. And that clarity is what allows you to sustain the pursuit of excellence without losing yourself along the way.

Researchers refer to this as self-complexity. When we can see ourselves through multiple lenses: Golfer, Father, Husband, caretaker, provider, runner, and so on. We see ourselves in a multifaceted way. When individuals score low on a measure of complexity, their self-worth is like a ping pong ball, bouncing back and forth, entirely dependent on whether that narrow self gets validated or rewarded or not. Higher levels of complexity buffer the effects of stress and any perceived threat to our status. We can withstand threats because our coaching self might be under threat, but our value of being a husband, teacher, or mentor provides us the security we need. We can be both content and determined, depending on the situation.

When life gets hard—when the pressure rises, when the spotlight’s on—you don’t want to be questioning your self-worth. You want to be rooted. You want to be able to say: “This is part of what I do. It’s not all of who I am.” You’re anchored to something deeper.

That kind of internal stability doesn’t make you less competitive. It allows you to handle the ups and downs without being defined by them. It leads to lasting, sustainable success.

Adam Smith told us the same thing many years ago. As scholar RyanHanley summarized to me, "Smith thinks when we're always chasing the externals, we develop a little bit in one way, but we also often suffer because we lose sight of what's actually going to make us happy as we're just chasing results."

True greatness is about embracing the messiness and complexity. It’s knowing that you have to be insanely dedicated, but that it can’t be your whole world. It’s understanding that the championship carrot dangling in front of you will never be fulfilling in the way that most imagine. So you better have something else.

Don’t fall for the pseudo-greatness pushed on social media. True greatness isn't about what you achieve; it's about becoming whole enough to handle the weight of it. Listen to those in the arena. They're not just showing us how to win, they're showing us how to live.

-Steve