Back to School Season

On anxiety, achievement, and learning to define success for ourselves

The alarm rings and I wake up with a jolt. I am panicked. For a brief moment, I think I am back in school and late for a test that I didn’t study for. Then, after a few seconds, I breathe a deep sigh of relief and remember that I am not in school anymore.

Does anyone else still have these dreams?

I am a self-proclaimed nerd and genuinely loved the learning part of school (the test-taking part, not so much), so I suppose it makes sense that I had these dreams while I was a student. What surprised me was how long they continued afterward. Occasionally, I still have them.

This might be due to being in school until the 24th grade. That’s how I used to phrase it to kids, mostly because I loved watching the look of horror and amazement on their faces.

I definitely did not set out to be in school for that long, but in retrospect there was also something about school that felt safe to me. There was a syllabus that told me what I needed to learn, assignments and tests that told me how I was doing, and eventually a grade that gave me some indication of whether I had met the expectations.

This topic often emerges in my work with adults who became exceptional at figuring out the rules. Some were the straight-A students who went to the “right” schools, got the “right” jobs, worked hard and climbed the corporate ladder. Others were the enterprising ones who created businesses, became CEOs, built organizations, took risks or created significant wealth. They were ambitious, resourceful and incredibly capable of figuring out how to make things happen.

From the outside, we might describe them as driven. However, when we start getting curious about where that fuel came from, the answers are more complicated and layered.

For some people, there was a real love of learning, building or creating. There was curiosity and the satisfaction of becoming good at something. But for others, there was also fear woven into the motivation: fear of not having enough, of failing, of disappointing their families, of becoming dependent on someone else or wasting potential.

Fear can be an incredibly effective motivational system. But, not a sustainable one.

Sometimes these adults reach a point, often somewhere around midlife, when they start asking some version of: I did everything I was supposed to do. Was this all worth it? Or they finally reach the position they spent years working toward and realize it does not feel the way they imagined it would. Sometimes they did everything “right” and still encountered a glass ceiling, or discovered that the rules were never actually the same for everyone.

There is no syllabus for that.

And I have to wonder whether some of the perfectionism, anxiety and burnout I see in high-achieving adults is connected to spending years in environments where there were relatively clear expectations, external measures of success and someone else deciding whether we were doing a good job.

Then adulthood asks us to do something different. There is no grade telling us when we have earned enough money or achieved enough. At some point, we have to start deciding what “success” means without having someone else grade us on it.

This becomes especially interesting when these same highly driven, enterprising adults become parents.

I often hear parents ask some version of: How do I make sure my kids stay “hungry”? How do I motivate them when they have opportunities and resources I didn’t have? How do I keep them from becoming entitled?

I understand where those fears come from. If scarcity, pressure, uncertainty or fear were part of what propelled you forward, it makes sense to wonder what will propel your children when their environment looks very different from the one you grew up in.

And I think this is where the word “hunger” becomes interesting.

Hunger can come from many places. Curiosity can create hunger. Mastery can create hunger. Wanting to build something can create hunger. Meaning, contribution and a sense of responsibility can create hunger. Fear can create it too.

From a developmental lens, I keep coming back to the importance of helping young people experience early on that learning itself can feel good. There is a particular kind of satisfaction in finally understanding something that confused you, practicing a skill long enough that you can see yourself improving, or becoming curious enough about a topic that you keep reading even though no one is going to test you on it.

There is something powerful about realizing, I couldn’t do this before, and now I’m getting better..

I think this matters in families with resources because it is possible to become so focused on preparing children for success that another performance system gets created around them: the right schools, activities, internships, colleges and careers. A young person can become extremely accomplished and still have very little experience answering the question: What actually interests me when nobody is evaluating me?

This brings me back to an uncomfortable question I hear from high-achieving adults: If I stop pushing myself, what happens? Sometimes underneath that is an even more interesting fear: If I am not anxious anymore, am I just going to lay on the couch and do nothing?

For some people, anxiety and fear have been their motivational system for so long that it is hard to imagine another way of operating. If fear of failure, disappointing people, or falling behind has propelled you forward for most of your life, it makes sense that loosening your grip on it can feel risky. There can be a genuine question of, What if anxiety is the reason I have accomplished all of this? What if self-compassion makes me complacent?

I think this is where the question of “enoughness” becomes uncomfortable, because for people who have spent much of their lives being rewarded for more, there is very little external reinforcement for deciding that something is enough. Enough money. Enough achievement. Enough credentials. Enough recognition.

Ambition is something I understand and value. I like challenging myself. I like learning and seeing how far I can push beyond what I initially thought was possible. I also find myself increasingly interested in where that striving comes from and what it feels like internally.

What I keep coming back to is the difference between striving because something genuinely matters to us and striving because we are afraid of what would happen if we stopped. Those can look exactly the same from the outside.

Maybe that is part of the work of adulthood, and something we can help the next generation practice earlier: learning what motivates us, noticing what it feels like when effort comes from curiosity, contribution or meaning, and becoming more aware of the times when fear has taken over the job.