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My Life as an Unhappy Overachiever
The idea for this book began when I gave a speech at my alma mater, Brown University. I was nervous before the speech (as was the Brown Alumni Relations staff!) because I planned to get raw. In front of a room of two hundred successful women, I was going to share the story of how I became happy at work only after I realized that the idea of who I wanted to be was making me anxious, destructive, and depressed.
I was nervous but also elated as I approached the podium. As I began to command the large hall Iâd walked by many times as an anxious, and often sad, undergraduate, I felt free. âIf you knew me at Brown, I donât think youâd have expected Iâd be keynoting the dinner,â I opened.
âI have the dubious distinction,â I continued, diving in, âof being an ambitious risk taker who also struggles with anxiety and depression. This has forced me to learn some very helpful coping mechanisms, and I want to share some today with you.â
But first, I told them, there were the panic attacks. That time sophomore year I couldnât get out of bed for a week. Hiding in my dorm room, and then, when I graduated, in my apartments. How I sought geographical cures, moving to different cities, like London, and even farther-away continents, like Africa. How I did a fair amount of drugsâthe worst of which, ironically, were by prescription. (Okay, I didnât mention that in the speech.)
I talked about how, as a young woman, I wanted so badly to be liked, and to do everything right. I felt it was expected of me. I had been the kid who cried at sleepaway camp and wouldnât let my mother and sister leave my first night at college. I only wanted home, and comfort. Instead I dealt with its absence like many young people do: through eating, drinking, and hookups.
I told them how, because I was very ambitious and driven, I went for every big job and opportunity I couldâhow I ran marketing for Europeâs largest online travel company when I was twenty-five. How I kept getting promoted, and I kept being miserable. The work was easy, but the office politics, the hours, the pace, networking, and rules of getting ahead rubbed up against my very temperament. I was living out someone elseâs climb up the ladder, and I was fighting a losing battle.
I had quit nine jobs, I wasnât even thirty, and I cried in the bathroom almost every day.
I talked about the day I realized that who I was and what I was doing every day were completely mismatched.
It was during my final corporate job, when, under the ubiquitous fluorescent lights, I realized I was allergic to them. They give me migraines. And as long as I had to show up and sit under those lights for ten-plus hours a day simply because I was expected to, I could never be happy.
âI see now,â I told the audience, âthat I was caught in a cycle of achievement, of working hard for someone elseâs dreams or expectations, and not my own.â It was only when I accepted that I needed a quieter life, needed to reframe success on my own terms, and figure out the tool kit I needed to get there, that I could find joy at work. Becoming âless successfulâ set me free.
Not exactly your typical go-get-âem womenâs leadership speech.
I looked around the room and was terrified. Would the undergrads and alumnae think I was a nutjob? I had worked so hard on the speech, and it was the first real keynote I had delivered. (Itâs still one of the few.)
The speech got a standing ovation, and I felt like Oprah.
Many of the women in the room came up to me. Some were crying. Thank you, they said. Weâre so anxious all the time, and no one tells us the truth.
Iâll never forget one young woman, a senior who was an economics major. She said to me: âIâm just so tired of trying to be this perfect person.â Like me, and many in the audience, she was on both antidepressants and antianxiety medication.
I felt her pain. Growing up, I was sent to the best private schools, and it never occurred to me to do anything less than achieve. Those of us fortunate enough to be raised with expectations of academic or financial success learn that when we achieve, we garner praise and positive attentionâeven if weâre faking our own enjoyment. Through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, we keep achieving, craving the external validation that comes when we get all As or are chosen to captain the team. I was, and am, extremely ambitious. But the more we achieve in order to win the approval of others, the further we get from our own goalsâand happiness.
In the twenty-two years since I entered college, it has only gotten worse. The achievement pressure starts at birth, and snowballs from there. When a good friend, my commiserator in the high-stakes process of applying to private kindergarten in Los Angeles, visited her alma mater, the admissions director told her, âYou wouldnât recognize the program. Itâs much more challenging than it was when you were here.â
For similar reasons, even to this day, I donât like to visit college campusesâand my husband is a professor! I can feel the echoes of anxiety and profound loneliness so strongly. And itâs not only me. A recent Duke study found that women who graduated in the 1970s were much happier than those graduating now, and had far more self-confidence. The report concluded that the women who graduated in the seventies cared less about what people thought about them, and were able to take risksâsuch as pursuing a nontraditional career or starting their own business. In fact, women seem to be increasingly less happy, even as they achieve more professionally.
Ambitious and privileged young people on the path to college are raised with a narrative of achievementâa surround-sound, multifaceted versionâthat no generation has experienced before. Do the most extracurriculars. Have the perfect internship. Get a great first job. Build your personal brand. Run that marathon. Eat organic. Get perfectly hairless and smooth. Fuck perfectly. Navigate dating. Enter your thirties, find a partner, conceive, and give birth (naturally, of course). Make your pregnant body the perfect temple for your perfect newborn, who will become a precociously perfect toddler. With the addition of social media, youâre supposed to share it all, tooâas you suffer the FOMO of watching everyone else seemingly sail through life.
Iâve found that it is especially hard to achieve in a traditional career ladder scenario if you are an introvert, and if you need more control over your space, pace, and place of work than others. Let me be clear: this has nothing to do with laziness, or lack of ambition. Your need for a different kind of workday has nothing to do with the level of effort you will put in, or the drive you possess. Thatâs ingrained in who you are just as much as your need for quiet or alone time. When you work differently, it may even mean you work harder than someone whoâs spending plenty of time at the office surfing Gilt.com. I may be a hermit who rarely eats lunch with anyone, but ask anyone who knows me and they will agree: I work hard and I am driven as hell. (They donât know Iâm usually working in bed.)
THE OVERACHIEVER INDEX
Are you addicted to achievement? No score needed here; you know it when you see it.
You regularly get nine hours of sleep, and you feel guilty.
Youâre really sick. But no one needs to know. (Cough.)
You only got 720 on your GMAT.
You lost five pounds. Time for the next five.
Youâve actually made up boyfriends for your parents. Theyâd worry if you were single.
Work isnât enough: you need to join a board or volunteer or start a nonprofit.
You hired a designer for your three-year-oldâs preschool project.
You donât let anyone over unless the house is perfectly clean.
Nothing store-bought will tarnish your Thanksgiving table.
After your (99 percent glowing) performance review, you canât stop thinking about the one piece of negative feedback you got from your boss.
Reading about your former college roommateâs new start-up totally ruins your day, but you obsessively search Google for more news.
THE TWIN PLAGUES: FOMO AND ACHIEVEMENT PORN
Youâre sitting in your home office, scanning Facebook. Friends and colleagues are giving TED Talks, being featured in interviews, and posting pictures of fabulous events. Youâre not even dressed. Another day, another professional conference, keynote, or viral event thatâs not yours. Why arenât you out there? Whatâs wrong with you?
FOMO is the curse of our social media moment. According to Wikipedia1 (and who better to define the digital age?) itâs a âpervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.â (As Mindy Kaling succinctly puts it, âWhy is everyone hanging out without me?â) You always know what colleagues and competitors are up toâas long as itâs good.
When I launched my podcast series for Forbes, I obsessively tracked how many âlikesâ other hosts got on their social media. At least once a week I lie on my bed in the dead silence of my workday and...
