The Achievement Complex
When I began writing for and about startups nearly a year ago, a pretty crazy thing started happening — dozens of friends began approaching me with ideas to start their own businesses or live out an unconventional lifestyle.
It made sense that they would come talk to me — I was talking to people carrying out these lifestyles nearly every day — but the reason why surprised me. They weren’t looking for advice or asking for an opinion on their idea. Instead, it was as if they were searching for someone to give them permission to go for it…
This got me thinking… with all of these ideas floating around, why don’t more people take the leap — start their own business, join the Peace Corps, travel for a year?
I think the answer lies in how we have been programmed to think about success, starting at an early age. In life, we constantly strive to achieve and for much of our lives, our achievements are very easy to measure.
Success is defined for you
Once we begin school at the age of five, there are always simple, defined measures of success that follow us wherever we go. In grade and middle school, we take report cards home to hopefully get hung on the fridge. In high school, this only gets magnified with class ranks, SAT scores, varsity letters won, and college acceptance letters earned.
These accolades make it easy to measure success, but they also make it easy to measure ourselves against everyone else.
This Achievement Complex reaches a whole new level when we are in college — get the best grades, join the most clubs, humblebrag about how little you sleep (seriously, this needs to stop), get an internship, and have a job 10 months before you even graduate.
Through this process, many of us grow accustomed to measuring ourselves against our peers. It becomes easy to gauge our sense of self-worth by comparing ourselves to others.
This continues once we graduate, except we no longer have grades or clubs to quantify our success.
One of the only ways we have remaining to measure our success is how much money we make. Our salaries are what we report back to our schools for their statistics, what our friends ask us about, and what our parents complain about because they didn’t make that much money back in the day.
There are other options
Being an entrepreneur, volunteering long-term, spending time traveling the world — these all ask you to be okay with that number being $0 or close to it. And that can be scary. And deflating. And embarrassing.
Not only that, it brings up a ton of questions.
How do I pay student loans? There are so many zeroes…
How do I afford food? I really need Chipotle once a week. Maybe twice…
How do I avoid having to move back home? I just… can’t…
Luckily, we live in a world in which answering these questions is becoming easier and easier. There are programs to help entrepreneurs defer their loans and talks of many more on the way. Never has it been easier to make some money on the side to keep yourself afloat by freelancing on Upwork, driving for Lyft, or delivering for Postmates.
Define your own success
But it is still on us to realize that our self-worth is not defined by how much money we take home. Don’t lose sleep comparing yourself to your friends with full-time jobs, struggling with the stigma of a lack of immediate success, or being worried about disappointing your parents.
Take the time to define success for yourself. Is it seeking out and earning genuine happiness? Is it achieving total freedom of where, when, how, and with whom you work? Is it defined by helping others as much as you can?
Define what your road to success looks like. And then dedicate every ounce of your energy towards traveling that road. Even if it is a little bit different than everyone else’s.
You don’t need permission to choose the road less-traveled. Buy the ticket. Take the ride.
