Overachievement Quotes

“Failure is another emotion I cannot stand to feel, because in adult life I have conditioned myself not to fail at anything. Failure takes me straight back to the feelings of worthlessness I grew up with as a stammering, reclusive little boy.”
― Jake Wood , Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.”
― Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse

“Musicians, like golfers, have to put their minds in the right place – trusting, confident, enjoying the pressure, being in present. And so forth. Otherwise, no amount of practice or “Time management” will make them better. The same is true in all professions: if you’re stuck in the Training Mindset, evaluating yourself, or thinking in the past or future, you will not perform up to your potential. You will waste a lot of time, be an inefficient performer, and likely assume you need to manage your time better. In reality you need to manage your thinking better. ”
― John Eliot, Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More

“But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach.”
― Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“While a necessary lesson, it was always a disappointment to discover he wasn't the fastest or smartest or best at everything.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Henry, Himself

“I gathered all my news of Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term--John Henryism--for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric