Dealing with hyper-achievement

Or, when can I stop competing with myself and everyone else?

For most of my academic and professional career, I had the perspective that my hyper-focus on achievement was a great asset, essentially the engine room for my motivation and a primary source of my success. I now think that perspective was largely wrong.  I will tell you why, with a few illustrative examples.

I started lightweight rowing my freshman year of college, in an era where one could walk onto a rowing program without prior high school or club experience and still have a decent shot at making the varsity (with a lot of hard work).  I had been a good 3-season athlete in high school (soccer, swimming, track) but wasn’t quite good enough to compete in those sports in college. But I loved athletics and wanted to do something in college, and rowing represented a new challenge.

I rowed for four years and loved it but after my first year, when I was in the first freshman boat, I never made it into the “first boat” at the varsity level. I rowed in the second or third boat, and although we had a great time together and amassed a dominantly winning record over the three years of racing at the varsity level, I somehow still felt I hadn’t fully succeeded.  It was so ingrained in me that first (in anything) was best, and anything less was a disappointment to myself and others.  And yet I would be hard-pressed to find anyone caring about what boats I raced in.

In addition, I used fear and manufactured hatred of other crews to fuel and focus my energy.  Crew has an extreme ratio of training time to competition time (up to 500 hours of training for 1 hour of racing, depending on how you calculate), so I had a lot of time to visualize what the races would be like.  In our freshman year, we beat another crew in a collegiate rivalry that went back over 100 years.  The tradition in men’s crew is as follows: after the race, while still on the water, the winning and losing crews pull their boats together and each oarsman in the losing boat strips off his race jersey and hands it, as a spoil of war, to his counterpart in the winning boat.  The losing boat then rows back to the dock barebacked, while the winning crew returns, triumphant, with a tangible marker of the victory slung over their shoulders. Say what you will about the tradition, but that was the expectation. 

So, I visualized that happening after we won this race.  That is not what happened.  Instead of pulling up next to us, the other crew rowed back to the dock and took their boat out of the water, refusing to acknowledge us.  Later, their coxswain came over to our area and handed us a box of cheap generic cotton tee shirts with their collegiate logo printed on them. At that time, and with that custom in place, we took it as a huge slap in the face and it colored my impression of that crew for my entire collegiate career. I never took the opportunity to get to know any of them.  I demonized them and thought about them in every practice, how petty, disrespectful, and shameful they were, and what poor losers they had demonstrated themselves to be. I used those emotions to drive me at the gym and on the water and in future races against them.  We beat them numerous times in the next three years – I still have some of those cheap tee shirts up in my attic, 40+ years later.  In reality, those oarsmen probably had little or nothing to do with the pettiness of their organization, and I would likely have enjoyed getting to know some of them.  They were probably a lot like us, but I didn’t seek them out because I needed a villain.

In retrospect, I think I paid an unacknowledged price for my hyperachievement focus. I ask myself now what was so important about winning those races and being unhappy about not making first boat.  I realize that instead of being an unalloyed asset, my competitive streak was actually a saboteur.  It drove my thinking – that I had to be the best at everything I did, that I shouldn’t bother doing things unless I could excel at them, that I was worthy of love and respect only as long as I was successful and as long as others thought well of me.  As a result, I shoved my feelings down and didn’t express them.  I rowed most of my sophomore year with a lower back injury and in considerable pain (which came back to haunt me in my 30s with a painfully herniated disk).  I feared failure more than I loved success.  I only briefly allowed myself to enjoy winning races, which I was convinced was some form of humility, when in fact it was my hyperachievement saboteur telling me that I would never be enough unless I kept winning.  All these feelings created a ton of stress for me when I could have been fully enjoying the beauty of the sport of rowing.

I don’t regret competing as a collegiate rower.  I truly value the experience, the discipline, and the lifelong friendships that I gained from participating. But as I reexamine those experiences, I feel like I could have been a better version of myself then, more connected to those around me and more connected to myself, if I had found motivation less in fear of failure and more in the positive emotions of my inner sage – first and foremost using the power of empathy (for myself and for others) to drive me.  I believe I could have achieved more, in the broadest sense, if I had approached the whole rowing experience from a different perspective.

Many of my clients have some elements of the hyperachiever saboteur.  They may have grown accustomed to the attitude that they are not allowed to fail or are unwilling to risk failure.  The problem with this is that this can lead to people not approaching or testing their limits or trying new things.  This can rob people of valuable personal growth, fulfilling experiences and healthy relationships. It can also lead to the inability to enjoy personal achievements, which can alienate them from their work and pastimes.

The first step in improving a situation like this is to recognize these impulses as sabotaging one’s sense of well-being and fulfillment.  That recognition alone weakens the strength of these inner tendencies. The second step is to strengthen the signal of the inner leader, or sage, which is motivated by more positive emotions.  Doing these simultaneously, while increasing one’s self-command through a series of mindfulness exercises, can help reorient one’s approach to various aspects of personal and work life.

Inquiry:  Do you consider yourself highly competitive? Do you find yourself avoiding activities or pursuits in which you feel like you might not be top decile?  Do you tie your self-worth to your externally recognized achievements?  If any of these questions create a spark of recognition, you might find it interesting to take the Positive Intelligence self-assessment, which is available at this link and is free to all.