“It’s never enough.”
I’ve been hearing that phrase more and more from my clients these days. They’re successful, driven people. They’ve had a clear path in life, dedicating themselves to their career, their business, or a sport.
Each and every one of them reaches goal after goal, hitting higher and higher levels of achievement each time.
Yet, it seems like it’s never enough; they feel the need to go further, reach higher. They start comparing themselves not to their peers, but to those further along in their career. They are always looking up the ladder, never able to appreciate how much they’ve achieved.
All this leaves them in an uncomfortable position – they can’t ever enjoy their success. Taking time away from their career or business becomes a terrifying prospect, worried they may fall behind.
They have a hard time taking vacations, always on their phone and checking their email when they should be enjoying the beach. Their health suffers, their relationships suffer. It seems as though chasing goal after goal is all that matters in life.
The Batman Syndrome
What I’ve found in almost all cases is that each one has a “Batman Origin Story,” an intolerable situation growing up, whether living in a chaotic household, lacking financial or other resources, or just being different and never able to connect.
At some point, they developed a talent that gave them a way out, – sports perhaps, or entrepreneurship, or a skill that got them a good career. They dragged themselves out of a dire situation and have been running from it ever since.
Billionaire entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson wrote about this dynamic in his recent book, “Never Enough.” Andrew grew up in a relatively poor family, where money was a constant source of stress and conflict.
He reasoned that if he could make enough money, that would solve all those problems. He worked his way up from being a barista making $6 per hour to becoming a billionaire, but that stress and anxiety he felt never went away.
More than that, he saw the same issues in his peers making 10s to 100s of millions of dollars per year.
Alex Hormozi, another successful entrepreneur whose portfolio of companies make over $500 million per year in revenue, often talks about building a stack of “undeniable proof” that you are who you say you are. Somehow, that stack is still never big enough.
It’s About Measuring Up
Why does this happen? The key to finding “enough” is recognizing that the root of the problem is a question of self-esteem and deservedness.
To counteract feeling like we’re not good enough –to prove to ourselves that we do deserve things, that we are valued – we find something we’re good at and get to work honing our skill. We set goals to measure our progress and work hard to reach them.
Unfortunately, that feeling never goes away. No amount of success seems enough. We keep moving the goalposts, however, if the target keeps moving, there’s no way to ever reach the end. No way to win that game.
We need to find a different way to measure up, to be deserving, without relying on external measures. Here’s how.
- Recognize that your past environment isn’t a reflection of you. When we can’t get what we need growing up, it’s not about what we deserve. It’s about what was available in our environment, whether that’s love and support, money, or something else entirely. We’re dependent on our parents to provide those things, and often they’re just not equipped to do so. Nothing we could have done would have changed that. It’s not about us.
- It’s up to us to decide our value and what we deserve. Who chooses the goals we are chasing? Who chose how to measure our success? Who decides which opinions about us we’ll pay attention to? The answer is we decide. Even when we allow others to judge us and our worth, it’s still us making that decision. Others cannot decide what we deserve, only what they’ll give us.
- Contrary to popular belief, self-esteem and self-worth do not come from accomplishments. Stop measuring your value by past circumstances and beliefs and make the choice to live your life based on who you truly are, not the victim of your past.
Psychology talks about having an internal or external locus of control. By chasing goals and external measures of worth, we’re placing control of our lives outside of ourselves.
By taking that power back into our hands, by making our worth and deservedness a choice we make, we take back control of our lives.