Effectivity

Are you an achievement junkie?

How would Pavarotti enjoy singing Carols by Candlelight with a few dozen tuneless amateurs?  Do you imagine that Lance Armstrong looks forward to riding his bike down to the shops to buy a newspaper?   Once we get serious about any form of achievement, we can get to the stage that anything less than high performance is not good enough.  Ordinary life seems somehow disappointing and less valuable. 

It is only natural to enjoy high performance living but our lives start to head down hill when we see the signs of an insidious and dangerous addiction to achievement?

Achievement is wonderful and the only way to realise the life that you want, but what happens when the need for achievement takes over your life?  A lot of people who start out on the road to self development, end up with a real problem - achievement addiction.

The reality of life is that sometimes we achieve things and sometimes we just live.  The problem shows up when we decide that we have to be achieving things all of the time, that just living is not enough.  We subconsciously believe that if we aren’t achieving something then we must be failing.

How to spot if you are an achievement junkie?

1. You won’t allow yourself time off from the pursuit of your goals.
2. You aren’t happy unless you are being productive.
3. If something comes in the way of your goals you take it personally.
4. Your progress brings negative emotions like jealousy, greediness, contempt.
5. You can no longer enjoy doing things that involve just being.
6. You regularly judge your achievements against others.
7. Your life is losing balance .

As an example, let’s see how this affects Tom O’Leary, when it hits me. 

I am a highly motivated achiever.  However, I often teeter on the balance of achievement addiction.  How do I know when I am loosing that balance?

• I get agitated and restless.  My underlying emotion becomes stress and I am happy with it, at that time.  From my perspective as a junkie, I see the stress as productive enthusiasm and positive intentions.  Later, from a more rational perspective I can see the stress as a sign of my addiction.
• I become easily frustrated.  If something stands in the way of an achievement, I lose my normal tenacity and tend to dwell on the negative side of the problem.  I take the attitude that this blockage is causing me harm, that it is not fair, and that I have worked so hard to get to where I am.  In essence, I revert to childish defence mechanisms, that are both counterproductive and selfish.
• I get frantic.  I channel my frustration into action.  This would normally be a good thing, except when I am in a state of achievement addiction, my action starts to become desperate and unproductive.  I behave like a drug addict, who reverts to stealing money from a charity donation box, knowing full well that the money won’t be enough to make a hit.  I perform actions just so that I can feel like I am going somewhere.  Seldom is this action productive, often it is harmless, but sometimes it is exhausting, self defeating and destructive.
• Finally I return to my senses and realise what I am missing out on by being addicted to achievement.  I return to the state of truly living rather than just focusing on achieving.  The revelation often comes over night.  When I wake up in the morning, it is like I have woken from a week long coma.  Every thing seems clear and I can see what an idiot I have been.  From this new clarity, I am able to see that for the last few days or a week, I have been working for my achievements rather than them working for me.  I have had it all upside down, and it has not been healthy.  On the day that I see it all come back together, everything seems new again.  I feel refreshed and hopeful.  I am energised and focused.  I enjoy every little detail, every breath of fresh air.  And I know that this is how I want to live.

I believe that achievement addiction is the biggest and most common trap for anyone pursuing their own life development.  It has the power to rob us of the life that we are working so hard to build, while leaving us feeling empty and frustrated.  It stops us from enjoying the real essence of life as we frantically churn through the undergrowth, stepping over and on top of all sorts of priceless experiences.  My appeal to you today is simple and it is the same appeal that I make to myself:

Don’t let achievement addiction steal away your life

Thanks

Tom