[commandlinefan]

Well, the article makes it look like striving for accomplishment necessarily makes you miserable, and makes the comparison to alcoholism. If so, it's a very deeply buried, unconscious misery: alcoholics wake up and go to sleep feeling horrible and will tell you out loud that they're miserable whenever they're sober and wish that they could stop feeling so awful. Pursuing excellence doesn't (in and of itself) ravage your body or destroy your sleep.

I'm fascinated by computers, and I like to spend time learning more about them. This doesn't make me miserable, it makes me happy (and, lucky for me, I can turn this into money too). It does make the people around me uncomfortable: they figure that if they were reading a book about programming computers, they would be miserable, so they try to talk me out of "punishing" myself.