It’s 3 A.M., and Mr. or Ms. More Will Meet With You Now
Is striving for success keeping you up at night?
Do you work for the merciless Mr. or Ms. More? More does not occupy a corner office. More lives rent-free in an achievement-oriented striver’s mind, proud of pushing you toward the success More wants and away from the fear of being judged inferior, fraudulent, or merely ordinary beside the peers you benchmark yourself against. More’s goals always stretch. Every achievement fails to satisfy for long, because without a current win you are not at your full potential. You call that drive. Arthur C. Brooks, PhD, has a more accurate name for the pattern: the striver’s curse.
In From Strength to Strength, Brooks describes what happens to people who build a life on chasing excellence. More success delivers less satisfaction. The inevitable leveling, then decline, of ability is terrifying. Personal relationships grow thinner than one’s résumé. Worldly benchmarks — money, power, admiration, titles — were never the source of lasting satisfaction or happiness. They were the dose. Brooks is blunt about the neurobiology. For the striver, success hits the same dopamine pathways as other addictions. You can care more about feeling impressive to relative strangers than about feeling well, or loved by the people closest to you. The striver’s goal cannot be met, because “enough” was never the point. Achieving more was. Brooks compares the endless achievement addiction to a hedonic treadmill: the belt speeds up as we naturally slow down.
Psychologist Janna Koretz, founder of Azimuth Psychological, names what happens when that inner boss stops evaluating performance and starts occupying the self. In her Harvard Business Review article, “What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity,” she borrows a clinical term usually reserved for blurred boundaries between people and applies it to a career. Enmeshment thins the line between who you are and what you produce. You begin to think you are what you do. A missed promotion, a bad board meeting, a layoff, or a quiet Sunday feels like a verdict on the person, not the role. Lose the job, and you lose the reason for being. Over-identification with work is not a moral failure. It is a structural risk. When the role disappears, and roles always end, too little of an authentic self is left standing in the wreckage of the broken pieces. Bitterness often sets in and keeps you stuck, relitigating the loss instead of learning from it and moving on.
Koretz works with founders and high-pressure professionals on this unstable and volatile merger of worth and achievement. Her team’s free Career Enmeshment Test takes a few minutes and asks the question that Mr./Ms. More will not: where does the job end and you begin? It looks at self-concept, time and energy, and emotional boundaries.
The executive coaching I do at AD Growth Advisers is not an argument against ambition or purposeful performance. It is a negotiation with the boss who treats rest as slacking and contentment as a threat to future success. Brooks points toward a better aim: earned success, the sense that your work creates real value, and service, the sense that it lightens someone else’s load. Those can survive a flat quarter. A self fused to the last win cannot. Busyness is not a sign of importance. It is often a symptom. Are you hurrying through what matters most so you have time for what does not matter at all?
If Mr./Ms. More has been running your calendar, ruining your sleep, and your sense of worth bounces around like a penny stock, we should talk. Bring your Career Enmeshment Test results. Enough can be enough if you define it carefully and stick with it. Want to talk about defining what is enough for you? Contact me for a coaching conversation.
