The Achievement Oriented Life: And Why It Exhausts Me
Am I Getting Dumber? Lazier? Or just more intentional?
Many years ago, I experienced a tragic personal loss that no self-help book could help me process. A compassionate co-worker took me to the side and suggested that I seek healing from an alternative source – her psychic. “Just keep an open mind,” she implored me.
I felt a little silly sending a check in the mail to someone I had never met (again, this was a LONG time ago – no Venmo), who lived in another state and would connect with me psychically over the phone. So before I met with her, I paired the psychic with someone I trusted implicitly, who I always suspected had some psychic ability herself, and who would tell me if this person was credible: My mother.
I waited by the phone during the time I knew they were in-session. My mother called me shortly after it was over.
“Sorry for the wait, I just needed to write everything down,” she told me. “Hoo-boy it’s a lot!”
My mom read her pages of notes verbatim. The psychic had known that my mother had four children and offered her spiritual counsel on specific aspects of my mother’s life that resonated deeply. I was awestruck as my mom shared the psychic’s insights into my grandmother, father, siblings.
“And she had a lot to say about you, too, Jor…”
At this I started to feel nervously hopeful. Could this psychic tell me about the person I had just lost to suicide? On this topic my mother’s notes were, she admitted, quite thin. He was a newer soul, my mother explained, as she had been explained to, and still finding his way to the other side. She offered me the psychic’s advice on how I could spiritually nudge him to eternal peace and then got to the business of sharing more notes on the living.
“She wanted me to tell you something,” my mom said, “She knew you had sent me to her because you needed to know something. I mean, you don’t KNOW what that is consciously, but spiritually you do…”
At this, so many questions flooded my brain: Why did this person I lost, who came so quickly and powerfully into my life, have to just as quickly leave it? What did he want to tell me? What was I supposed to learn from him? What was the purpose of his death? What was my purpose?
My mom continued, “She says you are very, very tired, Jory. You just don’t know it yet. Deep down. Very, very tired.”
I have been in a state of career achievement since, probably, puberty. A lifelong achiever I gathered accolades like breadcrumbs, hoping they would lead me somewhere I hadn’t put too much thought into.
And as such my purpose has changed a lot over the years.
At various times these have been milestones of a life well-lived (in no particular order):
Earn the most girl scout badges
Get all A’s
Be Class President
Be a three-sport athlete
Get into my top-choice sorority
Travel in Europe
Watch every independent film listed in Time Out NY in 1998
Publish a book
Work at a Big Tech
Start and exit a company
Some milestones I don’t list here because I achieved them not knowing how badly I wanted them. For instance, part-way into the pursuit of “Start and exit a company” I realized I wanted to be a mother. After some struggle, I ultimately decided to hedge my bets and trust I would be sure of this milestone once it was achieved. It took a miscarriage, which in some small way I attribute to my ambivalence, and the despair that followed, that convinced me of its validity as a milestone.
I also had a poorly-conceived milestone around being famous enough to appear in People magazine. My mom had a subscription that I grew up consuming, and when I worked at Time Inc. in the 1990s, when national print publications were still the single source of cultural truth, copies were dropped into my in-box weekly. I assumed if I achieved the milestones above I would increase my chances of achieving this one. But then, reading a People magazine one day and seeing some poor celebrity skewered for looking less-than-fabulous while attempting to travel incognito at LAX, I decided that I should probably re-think that one.
Just as People magazine giveth validation, the Worst Dressed List taketh.
Similarly, I had a vague bullet point for wealth that I refused to nail down with specifics, as I didn’t want to limit myself to a number, citing inflation, and thinking, if I had the opportunity to be the wealthiest self-made woman on the planet I wasn’t going to turn it away because I had aimed for less. I wanted to keep my options open. I realized I should probably aim to achieve both wealth and renown on my own terms, and get a financial planner to help ensure I didn’t go bankrupt in the process.
Having achieved most of the above milestones (and I say that with much qualification), I can tell you that life box-checking ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t feel successful; I do feel experienced. And perhaps a tinge knocked-around. Maybe a little bit weary.
And now, having cleared this riff raff of seeming life obligation I’m forced to ask the question, Now what? This has made determining my life’s purpose very, very difficult. Having been so achievement-oriented I naturally turn to my work to answer that question. But while some may derive clues on their life’s purpose by examining their career ladder, try doing so when you’ve built something more like a career labyrinth of passion projects, startups, and fractional roles.
The only thing I can say for sure something has shifted. I’m finding little strangenesses – behaviors I never would have exhibited ten, 15 years ago at the height of my frequent flier status. Back then, “succeeding” was a numbers game, and the more activity I logged in the name of work, the higher the likelihood I would be successful. Sure there would be failures, pathways that yielded nothing, but so long as I stayed in motion I stayed successful. More to the point: I stayed alive.
In my summer vacation book “From Strength to Strength” author Arthur Brooks argues this is a common strategy for most “strivers,” in any field. Whether you are composing music, making scientific discoveries, or building companies, you are capitalizing on some extraordinary form of capability, or intelligence, you possess by doubling down on it, generating momentum in the form of accolades, awards, Twitter followers, money, achievements.
But, as explained by Brooks, this form of “fluid intelligence” that strivers tend to capitalize on inevitably declines. And this decline is not just in your head, it’s an actual, biological phenomenon.
The silver lining is that alongside this decline is an incline in “crystallized intelligence,” or “the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.” As Brooks explains:
“When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.”
In my experience, I had noticed less a decline in my ability to churn out facts, or opportunities, than an impatience with the motions required to generate them, and an aversion to roles requiring the same unquestioned executional fervor, often with diminishing results.
In my career adolescence I was a windup toy that you could point in the direction of a goal to achieve and I would go after it with an electric zeal, sometimes into a wall, but then I would course correct and find a new route. Evidence of this strategy includes hundreds of plane ticket stubs (which I used to keep, perhaps, as Proof of Movement–PoM), a calendar full of external-facing meetings morning to night, and a career path littered with startups that pursued big ideas, swung for the fences, and outgrew their realities.
Today, wind me up, and it’s a tossup what I’ll do. I might go towards a goal, but more slowly and deliberately. I might stall, wondering what’s the point of wasting energy only to hit a wall, and wait for my inner voice to be convinced. I might do something completely inefficient and meet with friends who have no direct link to the opportunity at hand but who make me laugh or think. Or I might stand completely still.
Some of these behaviors, I’ve reasoned, can be attributed to wisdom gained over time, but others I’m not so sure. Where once I could attend a conference and instantly generate a heat map of ideas to pursue, I am much more interested now in staying in one place, listening to someone intently, and offering thoughts that may or may not fit their expectation of helpfulness. I don’t seek out opportunities so much as I prefer to attract – or even better, create – opportunities. This lowers my at-bats for success, to be sure; it also minimizes the sorting for opportunities that are worth the effort.
I am working on a project that I hope will become a major cobblestone in the bumpy, uneven, pathway of my life’s work, and even as I see the chaotic, necessary scuttling of colleagues and collaborators in service of a mission, a scene I have actively participated in – if not instigated – for nearly 25 years, I continually question our movements, the calls I’m asked to attend, our assumptions behind our efforts. I ask: Is this really necessary, or are we just moving in place?
In the past my strategy was to explore every opportunity, seize upon any that smelled promising, and out of those opportunities forge a pathway. Today, that strategy exhausts me.
This new strategy, easier as it sounds, requires INaction, something that feels foreign to me. It often feels wrong.
But then I remember the alternative: Moving just to move. Just to prove something. Being scared. Being tired.
Of course, a friend pointed out to me, being able to carve a living out of purely meaningful matter is a privilege, a luxury. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills, she said. Sometimes you just have to wind yourself up and go towards something because you are paid to move.
I understood. I understand.
“Work smarter, not harder!” my daughter says to me, witnessing my distressed efforts at many things these days, from organizing my inbox to fumbling in the kitchen formulating a meal that could have been easily completed by popping leftovers into the microwave. She’s parroting a phrase I’ve said often, not realizing that my capacity for being smarter has a limit.
I may just want to cook a damn meal as I envision it, from scratch, with my mistakes, with love.