Everyone wants to do their best at meeting life goals – especially when it comes to finding a career and really locking it down. This can be a great trait to have, but it can also really hold you back if you go overboard. In fact, there are times when being an overachiever can actually be harmful; it might even cause you to fail. Here’s why.
Being an overachiever may sound like a good thing, but in reality it can wreck your ability to succeed. Scale back your perfectionism to achieve success without burnout. See the full article to find out how overachieving can lead to failure and how to prevent that from happening.
Is Being an Overachiever Hurting You?
Overachievers are Never Satisfied
Have you ever begun working on a project only to decide your initial plans weren’t good enough? You may decide to rework the whole thing, spending more time than the project should take, only to end up with what you consider subpar results.
The problem is you may never be satisfied with what you produce. You might always feel as though you’re missing something or that some aspect isn’t as good as it should be. You inevitably see one more thing that could make your project better.
Overachievers find it hard to accept that no one can create perfection all the time. Perfectionism can hinder productivity, which in turn affects your time management on all the projects you need to handle. It can be hard to find a good balance when you are an overachiever.
Overachieving is Exhausting
When you are constantly working and reworking your plans, thoughts and projects, you wear yourself down. You want to create the best possible outcome with everything you do. You may often feel like a failure when you find yourself racing a deadline or rushing a job because you’ve “wasted” too much time planning it out.
You might be able to keep up for a while, but eventually your own feelings of failure and constant worry will wear you down. You will be exhausted, and rather than feeling as if you are performing at a lower level, you will actually be doing so.
Extra Becomes Your Baseline
Starting a new job, you might feel the need to impress your supervisor by doing a little extra to make your presentation really stand out. What this bit of “extra” does is set a baseline for your work that the supervisor will come to expect. This can make your “little extra” become more and more with each project.
Before you know it, you end up being the person doing all the work, even though this is not what your supervisor actually expects. You are putting this pressure on yourself because not only do you feel you have to do this, but you also may feel that others on your team won’t do it right. This is the overachiever causing you to increase your own workload.
Scale Back a Bit
It’s admirable to have drive and to always want to do your best, but it’s also important to get organized, manage your time and learn when to call something done even if you haven’t added that “one more thing.” Being an overachiever can be a good thing or a bad thing, it’s all in how you personally handle your challenges. The best thing about knowing and realizing this issue is that you can scale it back and succeed admirably.
While you may want to always give 120 percent, try shooting for just 100 percent and be satisfied that you’ve done the best you can in the time allotted. Now you will be able to give 100 percent to all your projects instead of dropping down to about 50 percent for the last items on your to-do list each day.
~Here’s to Your Success
