Surprising Disadvantages of Being Successful
Being successful in the office can be good despite all the pats on the back and approval from your boss. But there is a fine line between how you do your best work and constantly exaggerating, which can turn out to be bad luck for you. This is why you might want to rethink the “I can do it all” attitude.
However, if you are chronically successful, it is not enough to be adequate. Sometimes it’s best to give your job something extra, but if you make it a habit, your overachievement will become the new baseline for your job. Sounds good, but can actually lead to serious problems. Some of these problems can actually interfere with your work, cause even more stress and burnout, or even make you hate what you do and whoever you work with. The worst part is that it can prevent you from achieving something; and this in the first place undermines the goal of achieving overachievement.
You will strive for excellence instead of performance
It’s impossible to be perfect, of course, but if you’re successful, you won’t always think that way. Perfectionism , or the active drive to do your best, can be a part of every task you undertake. The new basic work plan you set for yourself by constantly overdoing your work can turn even the simplest things into an opportunity to strive for excellence.
So what’s wrong with being as accurate as possible? According to psychologist Adrian Fernham , perfectionism is actually considered a flaw in the field of psychiatry because perfectionism can lead to massive procrastination and mis-prioritization. According to Gail Miller of ERE Recruiting Intelligence , overachievers are paralyzed by analysis:
It is difficult for successful people to prioritize because everything is equally important. Choosing to focus on one project at the expense of another can be a huge mess. After all, there is no excuse for being careless about any task, no matter how far down the priority list it is. This dilemma often causes gifted professionals to get stuck; It can be too difficult to make these painful choices about what not to do ideally. This way of slipping reduces personal productivity.
On top of that, the overly successful perfectionist’s job never ends. There is always “one more thing” or something you “should” do. If this sounds familiar, you have set rules for yourself that only excite you. Chances are, no one asks you to do more or tells you that your work is inadequate. Change the rules you set for yourself and break the cycle by deliberately doing less important things imperfectly . If you are successful, you will be over-promising and under-fulfilling, which makes you look bad, even if you work harder than ever. Remember, perfection is the enemy of good .
You Can Become Human Buddy
Successful people strive to please. They want to please their boss, they want to please their colleagues, they want to please their family. And while these people may consider you reliable, some will take advantage of this fact.
We teach others how we want to be treated. If you teach your boss and colleagues that you are always ready to do the work that “someone else has to do,” you will always be the one who has to do it. Over time, you can turn into a slacker who does not want to let anyone down, so you do all the rough work; convincing yourself that you are the one who wants to be your boss when you actually just hung a work bee sign on your back.
Take a moment to think about what your real responsibilities are. If you’re not sure, sit down with your boss and ask him. Your boss may not even expect you to do half of what you do. They will appreciate it getting all done, of course, but they cannot appreciate the fact that you are the one who does it all. Hell, they might not even know. Learn to say no, ask others to help you, and start thinking about what completing certain tasks gives you. Ask yourself literally, “This is what I have to do, and what is the use of it if I do it?”
You could have missed promotions
If you thought lazing around at work was bad, then overdoing it might also prevent you from getting promoted. Seems backwards? The sad reality is that the hardest working don’t always get promoted. To get promoted, you need to show your worth. It usually boils down to two things :
- The less your boss worries about you, the more he values you.
- The more value you bring to the firm beyond your assigned work, the more likely you are to move to the next level.
Number two may sound too successful and you’d be right, but in a good way. Bringing more value “beyond your assigned work” does not mean doing everything and everything that needs to be done. This means that you have to come up with new ideas and projects and then implement them without giving direction. This hard work can probably be done by anyone, so you just do it “by nobody” and the “androids” don’t get promoted. Instead, focus on creating value for your place of work, not just satisfaction.
On his LinkedIn blog, Slade Sundar, Chief Operating Officer of Forte Interactive, suggests that there is a big difference between high-performing people who are promoted and poorly successful people:
- High-performing strategists know when to wait, when to attack, how to sacrifice, and when to change direction. They can position the company to achieve victory in different ways and move in non-linear paths.
- Successful people are brute force: they have one mission – to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible within the prescribed rules. They focus on completing as much as possible, in a linear fashion, until there is nothing left to complete.
If you feel like you have nothing to show, consider what kind of work you are killing yourself for. You can give your colleagues the extra time it takes to develop a strategy and obtain increased from under you . You could be doing ten times more work than your peers, but that doesn’t really matter if you’re just brute force at work. Buzzing, buzzing, working bee.
You may start to resent your coworkers.
The work is hard enough, and much worse when you hate your colleagues . But how many of them, and how many of you? When you are the only one who works to the limit, you may start to resent your colleagues for not working as hard as you, even if you needlessly push yourself. Psychologist Bridget Ross explains :
Resentment about others not working that hard or hard can easily overwhelm, infuriate, and overwhelm the overachiever … The best ones also exhibit a sense of humility that leads others to interpret their success as luck – and then, of course, the overachiever can laughing with a touch of indignation at others not seeing how much he / she works just to appear lucky.
Not only can coworkers misinterpret your hard work, but they can assume that you enjoy doing it too: “Oh, I’ll leave that to Jerry. He likes to do it. ” This resentment only grows stronger if they get promoted over you. You do all this extra work that nobody else does, but who asked you to? If you think all your coworkers are lazy, chances are good that you are simply doing more than you need to. Let your coworkers take on some of this weakness, and you might like them better.
Failure can hit much harder
Failure, however necessary, can be a tough pill. Especially for the overachiever. You work to the core, so when something goes wrong, you can start to question everything you are trying to achieve. Juliet Vedral of The Wheelhouse, a self-proclaimed overachiever, explains :
Not only are we worried that failure will somehow expose us as scammers, but our ideal consistent track record will have a nasty A and lower our life GPA. It doesn’t matter that no one else follows our permanent records. We keep our files safe in triplicate because that’s what helps us succeed.
Overcoming failure becomes more than learning. It becomes a painful acceptance that you are not as capable as you thought. In truth, overfulfillment is likely to lead to more failure overall because you are overthinking and unable to devote all your energies to tasks and projects. You don’t have to settle for just being adequate, but there is nothing wrong with regular achievement either. Doing something harder, faster, and more abundantly does not always lead to success. As the famous turtle once showed us, “the slow and tenacious wins the race.”