The High Achiever's Paradox
Why the traits that make you successful make it impossible to enjoy your success
I hit 100,000 followers last week, and it didn’t feel the way you might expect.
After seven years of struggling to come up with unique ideas, to post consistently and on time, to collaborate and educate and entertain, and admiring people who had accounts with large dedicated followings... after I finally hit my milestone, I didn’t feel overwhelming joy. I didn’t cry happy tears. If I’m being completely honest with you, it felt a little hollow.
And there was (is?) a part of me that wants to hang up my hat and quit it all. Part of me wants to stop trying, and the other part of me wants to go for 200K.
If you’re a high-achiever, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you don’t, you’re about to understand why the people who look the most successful often feel the most empty.
As a psychologist who works with high-achievers, I’ve watched this exact pattern play out hundreds of times. We finally get the thing we’ve been chasing: the promotion, the milestone, the recognition, the body, the relationship... and instead of satisfaction, we feel empty. Restless. Sometimes even more anxious than before.
I call this the high achiever’s paradox: The very traits that make you successful are the same ones that make it impossible to enjoy your success.
Let me explain what’s actually happening in your brain and nervous system when achievement stops being enough.
The Paradox Explained: Your Wiring Is Working Against You
Here’s what most high-achievers don’t realize: We’re not wired like everyone else.
We have a unique relationship with dopamine, the brain’s “do it again” chemical. Research shows that high-achievers don’t get satisfied or rewarded as easily as others. Our dopamine receptors are different. We need more intensity, more challenge, more novelty to feel that same sense of reward.
This is why we’re incredible at starting businesses, crushing goals, and solving impossible problems. We thrive on intensity. We love the challenge. We’re engineered for the climb.
But here’s the paradox: We’re really good at putting out fires, but when the fires are out, we’re also the first to strike a match. (I first heard this from my friend Rob, who either came up with it himself or read it somewhere, I can’t be sure, but whoever said it resonates deeply within my soul.)
When we finally reach the summit (when we hit the milestone, close the deal, get the recognition) our brain doesn’t celebrate. It recalibrates. The goal posts immediately move. 100K becomes “well, 500K is where it really matters.” The promotion becomes “but I’m not at the executive level yet.”
The achievement we were certain would finally make us feel “enough”? It changes nothing. And that realization can be terrifying.
Why Achievement Never Feels Like You Think It Will
I’ve sat with enough people in therapy rooms to recognize three patterns that show up over and over when high-achievers finally “make it”:
Pattern #1: You’re Chasing the Wrong Thing (And Don’t Even Know It)
You think you want the milestone. The follower count. The title. The revenue goal. But what you actually want is what you believe the milestone will give you.
You want to feel worthy. Valuable. Like you can finally stop proving yourself. Like you matter. Like you can rest.
Achievements don’t grant permission to feel those things. They just give you another standard to maintain, another performance to uphold, another metric to optimize.
The hollowness you feel when you hit your goal isn’t because you chose the wrong goal. You asked the goal to do something it was never designed to do: make you feel okay about being you.
Pattern #2: You’ve Become What You Do (Instead of Who You Are)
Somewhere along the way, you learned that you were more lovable, more valuable, more worthy when you were producing results. So you kept producing, and producing, until the production became you.
You stopped being a person who achieves things and became an achievement machine.
When achievement is tied to survival, stillness doesn’t feel like peace—it feels unsafe.
This is why hitting a major milestone often triggers a nervous system crash. Your brain has been running on intensity for so long that when things slow down, when you actually get what you wanted, your system doesn’t know how to regulate. You feel foggy. Agitated. Aimless. Not because something’s wrong, but because your brain literally needs that intensity to feel okay.
Pattern #3: You’re Avoiding the One Question That Matters
The real reason achievement never feels like enough? You’ve been using it to avoid the question that terrifies you most:
Who am I when I’m not performing?
As long as you stay busy climbing, building, optimizing, proving, you never have to answer that question. You never have to sit with the uncomfortable reality that maybe you don’t actually know who you are underneath all the accomplishments.
The moment achievement stops being enough isn’t a crisis. It’s a reckoning.
What I’m Learning from Inside the Paradox
I’m writing this from inside the weird emotional aftermath of a milestone that was supposed to feel better than it does. Of course I’m incredibly grateful for 100K followers who care enough about what I’m sharing to want to stick around. I’m also (at times) exhausted by the constant performance required to maintain it. I’m proud of what I’ve built. I’m also terrified that I’ve become nothing more than what I’ve built.
Both things are true. That’s the paradox.
But here’s what I’m discovering, both personally and from the people I work with who’ve successfully navigated this:
The solution isn’t to achieve more. You need to remember who you were before achievement became your entire identity.
This means creating reward loops that aren’t tied to your main achievement. Working on increasing marathon dopamine (high effort, delayed gratification), not donut dopamine (low effort, instant gratification). Building multiple identity anchors so your whole sense of self doesn’t collapse when one area struggles. Learning to feel stable and worthwhile even when your performance isn’t perfect. Connecting to purpose beyond performance: what you’re here to give the world that can be expressed through many different means.
The most successful people I know aren’t the ones who achieve the most. They’re the ones who’ve learned to build lives that still feel like home when the achievements fade.
What to Do Right Now
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, here’s where to start:
Ask yourself: What did I love doing before anyone told me what I should be good at? Pick one thing from your childhood that brought you joy for no reason at all. Not because it was productive. Not because you were good at it. Just because it was fun.
Try it again this week. Just to remember what it feels like to do something for pure enjoyment and NOT for making money.
That’s step one of remembering who you are underneath all the accomplishments.
There’s More in Today’s Podcast
In today’s podcast episode, I go deeper into what I couldn’t fit here:
Why your nervous system crashes after big wins (and how to plan for it)
The exact childhood reconnection exercise I use to help clients rebuild identity beyond achievement
What happened when I lost my campus pastor role and thought I’d lost myself
The four cornerstones that create an identity strong enough to survive any transition
How to build multiple reward loops so you’re not dependent on one source of dopamine
If you’ve ever felt like you’re just one more milestone away from finally feeling okay about yourself, this episode is for you. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, or click here to listen.
The Way Forward
The high achiever’s paradox isn’t something you solve. You learn to work with it.
Your brain’s wiring isn’t a flaw. It’s given you the capacity to build extraordinary things. But that same wiring can trap you in a cycle where nothing ever feels like enough.
I’m still figuring this out in real time. I’m asking myself the question I should have been asking all along: Not “what do I need to achieve next?” but “who am I underneath all of this?”
Maybe that’s the question that actually matters. Not the milestones. Not the metrics. Not the proof that we’re enough.
Just the quiet, uncomfortable work of remembering we already were.
The most important thing you’ll ever build isn’t a business, a following, or a resume. It’s a life that still feels like home when all of those things disappear. When the inbox is empty. When the next big thing hasn’t arrived yet. When the fires are out.
You deserve a life like that. We all do.
Have you experienced the high achiever’s paradox? That moment when you got what you wanted and felt nothing? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.
P.S. I wrote this on a Tuesday morning, already thinking about what content I need to create for the rest of the week. Already planning how to get to 200K. The paradox doesn’t just go away because you can see it. But at least now I can catch myself in the act and ask: What am I really chasing here? That’s something.