A Letter to the Unimpressed Overachievers
I don’t auto-congratulate well.
In fact, I rarely congratulate myself at all. My default errs more toward dwelling long on failures and standing unfazed by success.
We have a saying in the Ferguson family, one of the many left to us by my grandfather, the late Charles Ferguson II:
“Don’t do anything half-assed.”
Sage? Certainly.
Eloquent? This came from a man who grew up in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl, made his way by working in canning factories, built up a profitable air conditioning business, cameoed as a world-class boxer, traveled the world with his bride, and laid the foundation for a loving, thriving family.
The only thing Papa could ever be accused of doing half-assed was never refining his catchphrase to be more quotable.
Then again, he wouldn’t have given a damn if it were.
Leave nothing unfinished... even one of Papa and Grandma's cupcakes
This value of giving it my all, expecting success, and receiving high marks pervaded through my developmental years. Expectations for performance were high; giving something up before giving it my all was not tolerated.
I thankfully found great success in almost everything I attempted from grades in school to high levels of physical fitness to even job descriptions that looked sexy on a résumé.
However, rather than feel joy when reaching those achievements, I only tended to feel relief that I didn’t fail.*
*Sure, this is probably something I could talk about with a therapist. Then again, writing is sufficient therapy for me these days.
As I’ve driven home ad nauseam, even success (just like novelty or productivity) began to lose its shine once accustomed to it.
What I wasn’t accustomed to was failure, and when life progressed into the “adult years”, stomaching a defeat (as there were plenty) would ruin me.
I was convinced that it was more important to look at the next challenge immediately even when I had just worked so hard to reach where I currently stood.
What of it all?
Principally, I know I’m not alone in this unbalanced disregard for success and weight of failure. I’ve met plenty who suffer from the same.
Secondly, I don’t find this to be at all crippling. I’ve come to appreciate it actually—an extreme self-criticism like this can be made into an advantage.
We auto-critics are the most equipped to push the limits of our self-development, in part due to evident insecurities, but more in part to only needing one person to use for comparison: ourselves.
Unmitigated self-criticism is in no way an ideal, but can you imagine a world where you need others to set the standard for you? That sounds even worse.
I once mentioned to a friend that I was considering running my first marathon.
It was an exciting prospect to me as it had been a while since I had last set a new physical challenge and the furthest I’d ran prior was half a marathon.
This friend responded rather disappointingly.
“That’s cool. But don’t you think that’s too easy of a goal?”
“What do you mean? A marathon seems pretty tough to me.”
“Maybe… I just see so many people running marathons on Instagram these days. It doesn’t seem that impressive. If it were me, I would just train all the way for something like a 100-mile ultra-marathon.”
“Yeah, but why should it matter if someone runs a marathon on Instagram if I personally have never run one? Neither have you. Why don’t you train for one with me?”
“No, thanks. I probably could, but I don’t like running that much. Besides, my goal would be that ultra-marathon anyway.”
This quippy interaction left me puzzled for a few days following. Although I knew he would’ve never accepted training for a marathon with me, I didn’t understand why someone would minimize the goals of another with hypothetically higher standards they’d never hit themselves.
Over time, I began to notice this to be a recurring trait in him and others I knew, and the pattern became more evident.
These types of people are in some ways the inversion of the auto-critical. Instead of standards for success coming from within, their standards for success are only set based on comparing themselves to others.
To justify this, when threatened with competition, the natural defense mechanism is to pull down or pull back their competition with discouragement rather than progressing by their own merit. The gain becomes one of relativity.
Why worry about motivating yourself when you can close the competitive gap by disparaging others?
Grind culture calls this a “crabs in a bucket” or “crab mentality”.
The story behind the name goes, when a bunch of crabs are in a bucket or a tank, you can observe one try to escape once in a while by climbing up the sides. The peculiar nature behind crabs though, is that if they see one of their own trying to escape, they will pull that ambitious crab back down into the tank. If the rest are doomed, they won’t accept one overcoming the odds.
Again, call it “crab mentality” or what have you. I call it an absence of courage, self-belief, and self-motivation.
Comparison is the thief of joy, yes, but there are still many who will joyfully tear you down to feel ahead comparatively.
I’m on better terms these days with my auto-critical voice. We’ve learned to make concessions for each other depending on the circumstances.
My default mode will remain one of self-criticism. When the bar is reached, I appreciate the automatic impulse to move it higher.
Likewise, I now feel much more content celebrating success, an act that I had previously convinced myself meant complacency, settling for a result, or a departure from personal progression.
Recognizing the journey undertook to achievement (and relishing for a bit in that achievement) is precisely what my aim has been for all of 2024, and I have no plans of halting it.
There are more of us out there—those who don’t relish in success yet get hung up on their defeats.
Embrace it.
Better to be your own worst critic though than deriving self-worth by diminishing others.
