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The Hard Life of High Achievers

Unhappy Success

Fear, envy, regret, or greed can keep you in the perpetual pursuit of success that does not bring personal fulfillment. Basic needs and emotional well-being are often compromised for wealth or recognition that yields temporary satisfaction at best.

Pursuing external success without inner well-being leads to emotional fatigue, burnout, and life dissatisfaction. Here’s why.

Successful people appear content, and high achievers are generally happier than people who struggle. However, success is not the cause of their well-being. It’s the outcome. The masses misinterpret this relationship between well-being and success.

The link between well-being, happiness, and success is complex. According to research, well-being positively affects success, but not the other way around. Career success contributes little to well-being. Instead, when we fine-tune our hearts and minds, success comes with more ease. When we see high achievers, we don’t see the fine-tuning. We only see their success.

The Career Trap

Six, seven, and eight-figure earnings make you a high achiever, but it doesn’t make you happy. That reality has been tested time and time again. But people must see for themselves.

Across professions and socioeconomic status, people use their careers as an identity in search of happiness. Their job titles become who they are instead of what they do. People build lives around their careers based on earnings, fame, or power potential in hopes that it will also bring them fulfillment. That can happen, but it rarely does.

Success enhances what you have within. Pursuing success in the absence of well-being will not grant you well-being. If your well-being is secondary to your career, you are at risk of being perpetually dissatisfied.

Success provides more resources to hide pain, but it is not an elixir. Just because pain is unseen doesn’t mean it’s unfelt. Biographies of famous people often verify that emotional distress is an unwavering companion to success.

If your well-being is secondary to your career, you are at risk of being perpetually dissatisfied.

Will Smith and Viola Davis’s autobiographies are two of my favorites that make this point. What people see of them and what they feel inside couldn’t be more conflicting. No amount of success could make them heal themselves.

Both actors reveal meaningful relationships with therapists to address the pain that followed them from childhood into their careers. Their stories confirm success is no match for unaddressed pain. Pain reveals its power in due time.

There is also power in resilience where survivors of adverse experiences become alchemists and turn unresolved pain into a passion that produces excellent career achievements. Accomplishments that reflect expertise and purposefulness give strength — and take it away.

Success does not leave you drinking yourself to sleep every night or partying all night to avoid feeling your discontent. It does not leave you bitter and alone or afraid of abandonment. It leaves you the way it found you.

Unfortunately, accomplishments can make us cling tighter to career identities. Rather than growing into authenticity and transparency, successful people often grow deeper into their titles and roles. The higher you achieve, the more tempting it is to define success based on your accomplishments.

The insatiable thirst for achievement is a theme of Will Smith’s autobiography. Each record-breaking film left him wondering what would have given him bigger success. Despite outperforming everyone in the film industry at one point, he wanted more — money, fame, and recognition.

There are not enough accolades to make up for a heart shattered since childhood. Nothing is enough when you don’t feel like you are enough.

The struggle for success can augment its value, as demonstrated in the Viola Davis autobiography. The more you struggle for career recognition, the stronger your identity with it, and the more likely you will define success by it. You sacrifice everything for one thing. Your efforts intensify your desire for success and vice versa.

Nothing is enough when you don’t feel like you are enough.

Davis struggled in her career for many years, which she attributed to her appearance. When many of her peers gave up, her unwavering efforts were tied to her fear of failure. Eventually, she became highly successful. However, inevitable fame and fortune did not heal the holes in her heart.

When it comes to the relationship between success and well-being, the writing is on the wall. Not literally, but it’s on the pages. Biographies of the rich and famous remind us of the limitations of success. Will Smith and Viola Davis are just two examples of ultra-achievers who confess that inner struggles forced them to redefine or expand their definition of success.

Success does not leave you drinking yourself to sleep every night or partying all night to avoid feeling your discontent. It does not leave you bitter and alone or afraid of abandonment. It leaves you the way it found you.

Success is a Good Diversion

It’s not just the rich and famous who define success by career achievement. Managers, administrators, and CEOs cling to their work identities. When work is going well, they feel well. When work isn’t going well, they don’t feel well.

Insomnia, over-eating, depression, and anxiety take over when budgets are cut, employees under-perform, or deadlines aren’t met. Of course, these are serious issues. But they are not personal issues. They are work issues. You show up every day and do the best you can. Sometimes you fall short of reaching your goal.

When you fall short of your goal, you should not fall short of self-love, self-appreciation, or self-care. On the contrary, where there is self-love, appreciation, and care, there is also self-compassion. You have invested enough in yourself to sustain emotional well-being during life’s storms.

While some people use careers to define success, others use alternative statuses, such as relationships. Being the best parent of the best child or the perfect wife is an identity as strong as a CEO. Rather than a personal identity with achievement, some people’s achievement is attached to those they love. The outcome is the same.

Success and Well-being

Success includes achievement but is more complex. It is personal. No one may ever acknowledge your success, and you can live successfully without accolades. Waking up with a thirst for life every day is success.

Many people wake up with contempt for what they must get done for the day. They are prisoners of their own lives, even high achievers.

The COVID-19 quarantine allowed everyone to redefine success. People whose well-being was tied to their jobs suffered the most. Many people realized that their jobs were just that — a job. Their job titles left them empty and isolated when their role could not be fulfilled.

People who invested in well-being, not just achievement, suffered less during quarantine. Well-being is the success that is well-rounded enough to sustain you in difficult times. If one area of life gets depleted, the other areas counterbalance.

Specifically, anchors of well-being include a reliable social network, managed health, adequate resources, and inner peace.

  • Reliable social network: A group of diverse people in your life support all your efforts, not just your career efforts. Your social network goes beyond your family. You have communities where you share your interests, religious beliefs, or hobbies.
  • Managed health: Your psychological and physical health are well managed. Whether you manage alone or with professional help, you take good care of your body and mind. You live with authenticity and transparency because you are not hiding shame and are free from abuse.
  • Adequate resources: You have resources to secure your basic needs with ease. You feel safe in your physical environment and have reliable nourishment. As your career advances, your resources expand. But well-being requires only essential resources.
  • Inner peace: Your mind is free to make good decisions without fear or emotional pain. You pursue emotional healing as necessary for inner peace. Psychological trauma isn’t latently waiting for the next trigger. Vulnerability can be your strength.

Reality of Success

COVID-19 quarantine uncovered the lack of success for many high achievers. Many invested in their mental or physical health for the first time. They bonded with their family members over neighborhood walks. Counselors were booked out for weeks with first-timers.

The quarantine anxiety wasn’t just about how people would pay bills. It was just as much about emotional well-being. People craved to be noticed, feel important, and be recognized. They had to find such fulfillment outside their jobs for the first time.

I once assured my daughter that the only thing I wanted her to be when she grew up was happy because that was the most important job she could accomplish. It has proven to be the most challenging job for humans.

My daughter was concerned about disappointing her parents, who both earned Ph.Ds. I assured her I preferred to be disappointed, and her be happy rather than the other way around.

Happy means her heart is at peace. Peace means that her mental state is undisturbed by daily circumstances. She should feel like an active agent in life, not a victim of her parents’ expectations.

I want her to own her choices, be accountable for her actions, and live with grace when she doesn’t like the outcomes. I knew if she did those things, she would build a happy life, not just a career.

The Success Journey

If life is a journey, well-being drives the car, happiness rides shotgun, and success is the backseat driver. Well-being is a steady driver.

In the absence of well-being, your mind feels a perpetual sense of lack of wealth, recognition, family, or support. The mind is always in pursuit. Reaching a goal doesn’t validate success. It triggers a greater awareness of lack. A new success goal comes immediately.

Success is the intoxicated driver that drives erratically. Its distorted perception lowers the chance of you reaching your destination without injury to oneself or others. It’s clumsy and careless. If success is your driving force to navigate the world, you may notice these symptoms.

Your support system is weak or nonexistent because you have little life balance. You are consumed by one identity that you derive from success. You derive a sense of success from the difficulty of your tasks even though you perpetually complain about how hard it is.

Your carelessness yields unwanted consequences that you don’t take responsibility for. Instead, you feel like a victim. You don’t understand why things don’t turn out as you think they should. Your worldview is narrow because you are trying to build a world around a single identity.

You feel emotionally drained from trying hard to make life go your way. When life goes your way, you are happy. Conversely, when it doesn’t, you are unhappy. You are riding an emotional rollercoaster and feel exhausted.

If you are depressed or anxious from a lack of success, change your definition of success. Invest in your inner self so you can experience well-being that is not tied to external validation.

Well-being is the relationship with oneself, not the external world. Self-concept, self-efficacy, self-acceptance, and self-reliance are well-being essentials. When you pursue success with these essentials, happiness flows. Well-being invites you to release the struggle.

References

Abele-Brehm, A.E. (2014). The influence of career success on subjective well-being. In: Keller, A., Samuel, R., Bergman, M., Semmer, N. (eds) Psychological, Educational, and Sociological Perspectives on Success and Well-Being in Career Development. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi-org.libproxy.uccs.edu/10.1007/978-94-017-8911-0_2

Curry, D. (September 6, 2022). Clubhouse revenue and usage statistics. Business of Apps. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clubhouse-statistics/

Davis, V. (2022) Finding Me: A memoir. Harper Collins

Girouard, S., & Forest, J. (2019). A career path leading to Well‐being and success. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 36(2), 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1488

Manson, M. (2021). Will. Penguin Press

Morales-Rodríguez FM, Espigares-López I, Brown T, Pérez-Mármol JM. (2020). The relationship between psychological well-being and psychosocial factors in university students. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(13):4778. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17134778. PMID: 32630816; PMCID: PMC7369745.

Samuel, R., Bergman, M. M., & Hupka-Brunner, S. (2013). The interplay between educational achievement, occupational success, and well-being. Social Indicators Research, 111(1), 75–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9984-5

 

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