Overachievers Anonymous
Many of us play Wordle, a word game published by the New York times each day. I have the NYT app on my phone so I can play Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee. I am not a Sudoku fan—I like words and letters more than numbers, but Sudoku abounds, too.
I remember playing what we called the five-letter word game using pencil and paper when I was a child (yes, it was a different time) where one player would choose a five-letter word and the other player would try to guess the words by guessing five letter words to see which letters were in the secret word. We used a hangman format, where the word creator drew a scaffold, a noose, and body parts of man being hanged each time the guesser guessed wrong. The guesser had to guess the word before all the part of the hangman were drawn. It was a bit morbid and brutal but, as I said, it was a different time. But Wordle was brutal in a different way—you only get six guesses in the online version!
I didn’t jump on the Wordle bandwagon right away. I had subscribed to Spelling Bee—a paid subscription—and I didn’t want to be distracted by a free game. I watched as Wordle took off in the online world, resisting its siren song for as long as I could, but one play was all that took for me to fixate on it. Alas, Wordle only offered one game per day, and, as you got better at it, it was over far too quickly. I began looking for similar games because one Wordle game just wasn’t enough!
My kids directed me to Worldle, where you guess the name of a country by correctly identifying its silhouette, without size or context. After experiencing a couple of solutions that were so obscure that they were not even included in my atlas, I abandoned Worldle.
Then I discovered Quordle--four panels of five letter words that you guess simultaneously over nine turns. Forget Wordle. This was a steroid-enhanced alternative that not only quadrupled Wordle’s complexity, but it also provided unlimited practice games as well as the single daily play. Seriously—it is a free game, and you can play it as many times as you like!
One day, I explored features of my new favourite game and saw that Quordle has an Achievements section and even a Practice Stats section showing win percentages, current streaks and maximum streaks—milestones to reach and targets to smash for overachievers and, as you may have guessed, I am an overachiever.
When I first consulted the Practice Stats section, I saw that I had a 96 %-win rate. Pretty good, you may say, but overachiever that I am, I thought that if I could get 96%, maybe I could do even better—a 97, 98 or even 99% rate (acknowledging that I had some losses that might make a 100%-win rate impossible, unless I download the game to another device and cheated, and I do have some standards!)
So, I began playing Quordle Practice Games compulsively to improve my win rate. Every few games, I would click on the Practice Stats section to see how I was doing. I was winning a lot of my games, but not all, and no matter how I tried, my win rate began to drop. I felt like Wile E. Coyote flailing his legs trying to gain purchase as he hurtled over a cliff edge. Ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three…. And then I slipped below 90%.
I reached a plateau at 88% after having played more than 650 practice games, and I deeply regretted my arrogant impulse to see if I could raise my win rate above 96%. I began to fixate on my win percentages, checking my practice stats every time I lost a game to see if I had dropped yet another percent—an unhealthy and demoralizing action. I knew, at some level, that Quordle is an inconsequential game I play on my phone when I needed a few minutes (or more) of down time, and I told myself that it doesn’t define me (since my wins percentage was dropping!)
The good news is that being an overachiever can be managed through awareness and making conscious decisions to chill out. Overachievement in and of itself is not dangerous unless your competitive nature affects your friendships.
But when you pair overachievement with insecurity (insecure overachievement), it can become dangerous when you are constantly trying to overachieve to defeat feelings of inadequacy. You may be able to defeat some feelings of inadequacy or insecurity, but the relief only lasts while you are actually engaging in your overachievement or briefly basking in your success.
When I realized that my overachiever tendencies had kicked in playing Quordle, I recognized signs of being an insecure overachiever, a term coined by British researcher Laura Epsom. You see, insecure overachievers are common in law and other professions, and while I approached my Quordle stats with a bit of arrogance, I am quite insecure by nature, and my success ratio was engaged to help me feel more confident.
Professor Epsom’s article “If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?” should be required reading in law school and by practicing lawyers.
According to Professor Epsom, insecure overachievers are the lifeblood of professional services firms, embodying the old Avis Car Rental’s famous “We’re number two—we try harder!” campaign, even when they are actually in first position. In sports, we hear of coaches who prefer a slightly less talented player who is coachable over superstars who won’t take direction, and I think that, over the years, I have seen that principle play out in law firms, too—firms want the people who are keen to do whatever it takes to earn approval from the firm powers-that-be.
Professor Epsom tells us that it is difficult for knowledge workers (management consultants, accountants and lawyers, to name a few) to know their value. Firms often have up or out promotion systems, which effectively turn one of your most important support systems—your colleagues—into the competition. Does this sound familiar?
She states that insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable, fiercely ambitious, self-motivating and self-disciplining. Does that sound familiar, too?
Not surprisingly, law firms prefer to recruit insecure overachievers. Firms promote themselves as elite and impose social controls, making newbies fear being exposed as not good enough—imposter syndrome in a nutshell. What can you do if you fear that you are not as smart as your new colleagues and that you will be let go if you don’t constantly prove your worth? You work harder to earn your place, you conform, and you normalize the unhealthy behaviour that is being promoted.
Insecure overachievers believe that they are working hard (or overworking) by choice and that they have autonomy. They blame their own self-professed inadequacies for challenges they encounter. And they don’t confide in their colleagues, who seem to be coping, because of feelings of inadequacy. As Professor Epsom states “They do not talk honestly to their colleagues about their problems, thus perpetuating the myth of the invincible professional, which encourages their colleagues to feel inadequate in turn.”
And, as you may have guessed, when insecure overachievers move into leadership positions, they replicate the system that trained them, complete with social control and overwork.
I had a bit of awareness about my overachievement tendencies in university and law school, but I thought I would be free from them when my academic career ended—I thought that my insecure overachiever feelings were only engaged about grades. I graduated from law school determined not to chase the allure of prestige and money—the tangible ways that overachieving lawyers overcome our insecurity--that came with high billable hour quotas, but I fell down the rabbit hole anyway, signing on for 1800 billable hours in my second lawyer job.
I attribute my first maternity leave—four whole months!-- to straightening out my thinking. I assessed how my values had shifted and identified what I needed to do to become the person and the parent I wanted to be, even if it meant not being the lawyer my firm wanted me to be. Vacations, sabbaticals and leaves of absence can give you space to consider where you are and what you want out of life. I recognize that a period of time away from work is not available for everyone—but if you are concerned about whether innate insecurity is chaining you to a treadmill of working harder and harder, you are part way there already. Recognizing the issue is the first step.
Professor Epsom has three suggestions if you believe you are an insecure overachiever. You are unlikely to be able to change your insecurity, which she believes is rooted in childhood experiences, but here are three practical actions you can take:
- Learn to recognize your own triggers, how your organization may be trying to manipulate you, and which colleagues cause your anxiety to increase.
- Learn to define success in your own terms, and not according to other people’s definitions. Quitting a job that doesn’t work for you shows that you are emotionally mature and have good sense.
- Celebrate your successes—do not discount your achievements! Keep track of how you overcame challenges to ensure that your self-perceptions are accurate.
In a subsequent article, “Are you an insecure overachiever?”, Professor Epsom quotes a lawyer who had been a senior partner at a global firm. He likened practicing transactional law to being the ringmaster of a large circus:
And if you’re good at it and you enjoy it, that’s very stimulating… You can render a large bill at the end which is paid by a grateful client and you’ve got a very tangible number on the page illustrating the value that you’ve added. And then the phone rings and you’re on the next one… It’s almost like a drug….this flow of excitement….and if you are good at it there are a lot of positive rewards that come from that.”
We need to recognize when our insecure over-achieving tendencies engage—for our own health as well as the health of our colleagues and our profession. We can work through Professor Epsom’s strategies, and we can tell our friends when their behaviours seem to be caused by the damaging combination of insecurity and overachievement. Can we change the culture of the legal profession, moving away from a focus on profit, whatever it takes, to space where we maximize well-being and alignment with our personal values?
If you are having trouble quieting your need to overachieve, please remember that you can meet with an Assist counsellor for one-on-one strategies and support. You can read articles on our website, and you can talk to a peer support volunteer who strives to minimize insecure overachievement. Like most lifestyle changes that we try to make, there will be good days and bad days—and we have to learn to brush off the bad days and recite a mantra that we will start fresh tomorrow.
I dealt with my Quordle overachievement by mentally banishing the stats function. I still play Wordle and Quordle and sometimes Octordle—eight screens of five-letter words—but I choose to live in the moment of the game I am playing. But here’s an interesting fact: I checked my Quordle stats to see how I was doing while writing this blog, and guess what? Since abandoning my obsession with winning and win percentages, not only am I enjoying the game more, but my win percentage has steadily increased.
What if the same were true of practicing law, that we would produce better products and enjoy it more when we take overachievement off the table. Dare to dream.
Loraine