I’ve been catching up on my blog reading since returning from vacation. While I was gone, I missed Penelope Trunk’s post about what a load of BS the idea of living up to your potential is. As someone who spent years turning herself inside out with over-achiever stress, I tend to agree.
Only twice, in all my years of striving for perfection and what I saw as my ultimate goal of the most excellent, marvelously achieved(diff word), fully potentialed version of me, did I ever feel satisfied, content or happy. Both instances were fleeting: the four months I spent traveling, and my senior year at Evergreen. Within a month of completing each of those, I was jumping into new plans and insane goals and could never seem to hold on to the feeling that I was done or that it was okay for me to stop. No matter how hard I worked, I never seemed to get any closer to being complete.
I painted such a golden portrait of what I saw as the future me. I conceived that image of myself when I was still in high school. I have a few pressing bits to attend to in my past should I ever have a few moments alone with a time machine, but if the powers that be ever decide to slingshot me back to high school for five minutes, I will happily find 1990s me and tell myself that life has the potential to be an enjoyable adventure, so ease the hell up, dammit.
I’m now a reformed over-achieving spaz, and have somehow managed to figure out how to be: a productive member of society while remaining calm and happy; a good parent, wife, friend, and human being; content with what I have at this point in time because life is short and sucking the life out of myself in order to win some imaginary race is a crappy way to mark time until I get squished by the proverbial bus. I’ve done the research, and happy is better.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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I have noted in reading Ms. Trunk’s blots that she seems to be speaking primarily to people who quantify their worth as humans with measures of economic and/or organizational success: salary/earnings; salary/earnings of people supervised (maybe excluding Gen Y;) and/or number of people supervised/managed/…. The obvious falsifiability of these measures is the difference between a “self made man” (pray excuse the genderism) and an eldest son. To be meaningful the measurement space has to be normalizable.
I would recommend as a counter Dick Feynman’s What Do You Care What Others Think? for a less quantitative but sounder (IMHO) view: that what counts is what we think counts. Despite his current unpopularity, I would draw your attention to the gravestone of Thomas Jefferson; the list thereon has some correlation with what he thought he did that mattered.
Comment by Simple Country Physicist 09.06.08 @ 10:25 amI doubt it’s a coincidence that Ms. Trunk’s book and blog are both titled “The Brazen Careerist”.
As far as countering with Richard Feynman, I would highly recommend any of his books to any human. I read “Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey” by Ralph Leighton first, and quickly read everything else Feynman had written. I still haven’t gotten to James Gleick’s book about Feynman, “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman,” but it’s on my list. I love Gleick, too–he got me with “Chaos” when I was in middle school. Blew my little eighth-grade mind. I had to read it again when I was in college to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it all.
And as for Mr. Jefferson, slavery is unforgivable and there’s no way to get around that part, but I think his life, mind and contributions make excellent arguments for trying to see the world in more shades of grey that in simple black and white and right and wrong (as I am prone to do).
Comment by alexa 09.10.08 @ 11:03 am[…] Ive been catching up on my blog reading since returning from vacation. While I was gone, I missed Penelope Trunks post about what a load of BS the idea of living up to your potential is. As someone who spent years turning herself inside out with over-achiever stress, I tend to agree. […]Read More… [Source: Educated Nation | Higher Education Blog] […]
Pingback by » Living Up To Your Potential Is BS 09.15.08 @ 1:20 amLeave a comment
One thing I’ve noticed, as a reformed over-achiever, is that I’m not only happier when I relax, but more productive! Once I focus on the goals that I really want to get done and stop letting myself get distracted by doing too much, I actually make a difference in the world…
Comment by Mark Truman 09.04.08 @ 12:08 pm