Constantly searching for achievement has made enjoying the present a difficult task.
By MARIA LAGUNA
Back in my senior year of high school, my daily routine during the fall semester was brutal.
I would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to begin my Advanced Placement assignments, go to school from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. while leading club meetings during lunch period, work on college applications until midnight and then do it all again the next day.
Even with my ridiculously full calendar, I struggled to say “no” to any new opportunity that arose. Completing my to-do list became a Sisyphean task due to my continuous addition of activities and events. As soon as one laborious project ended, I had already started two new ones.
However, my overachieving thought process turned my love for academic and professional validation into a rationale. In other words: If I was succeeding in furthering my career while impressing my peers and authority figures, why on Earth should I slow down?
Perhaps my psyche was harmed from an early age after I solely consumed pop culture with ambitious female leads. Flashback to when I heard Amy March (Florence Pugh) say “I want to be great or nothing” when “Little Women” (2019) premiered in theaters — a truly life-altering experience.
After hearing such a fierce declaration of ambition, one so stark in its determination to succeed, an ideology of excellence snapped right into my brain. While this piece of media wasn’t the only item that made my work ethic, this quote is one I’ve referred back to time and again to remind myself what I was working toward: greatness, or at least something close to it.
On the other hand, maybe I was born this way. A 2016 study from the University of California San Francisco psychiatry department found the “structure of the brain circuitry known as the corticolimbic system is more likely to be passed down from mothers to daughters than from mothers to sons or from fathers to children of either gender.” Therefore, I inherited my incredibly work-driven mother’s network of brain structures that have the crucial roles of emotional regulation and decision-making. Combine this fact with me being the first-born daughter, and we may have more reasons for my workaholic practices.
Being the eldest daughter comes with its perks — mastering responsibility from an early age — but there are many downsides — perfectionistic tendencies stemming from anxiety — the latter expanding into a new phenomenon known as “Eldest Daughter Syndrome.” While I’m not saying that birth order will directly affect one’s work habits, I will say that I definitely empathize with the fear of failure that other eldest daughters experience in their journey for “greatness.”
In all honesty, my high school greatness paid off, because after spreading myself thin to get into a top college, I was accepted into USC in January 2024. One might think that after hardly sleeping for five months, I’d take a break and ease into my undergraduate studies at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Well, this wasn’t the case for me.
Since my strenuous agenda got me accepted into USC, my addiction to academic and professional validation — in tandem with my inability to sit still and simply enjoy my achievements — only increased.
In early September 2024, I had barely settled into my dorm and classes had just started, yet I had already decided that I needed a new goal to work toward. As I walked around campus, still unsure where my classes were exactly, I decided I would work toward getting into an even more selective graduate program.
I had not even begun to celebrate my achievement of getting into college before deciding I could do better. I started working toward filling my schedule and résumé with even more competitive and ambitious items that would grant me the validation I sought.
It’s truly an insatiable and never-ending cycle for two reasons. For one, I have made my agenda reflect a practice of me working at maximum speed, so if I’m not actively moving toward leveling up in my career, my time is being wasted. Then, as soon as I complete a task and gain the addictive validation that follows, the hunger for more of that validation creates internal and external expectations that now I must fulfill.
Especially at a place like USC, there are so many opportunities for club engagement and career development that not taking advantage of everything I could possibly sign up for feels wasteful.
As Amy March ideated onscreen, mediocrity is not something I wish to settle for; I want to reach those high standards I’ve set for myself. As I ignore the sunny Southern California skies by staring at my LinkedIn, I ponder if I’ve committed myself to enough activities my freshman year to appeal to those future selective graduate school application graders. With each scroll, creeping doubtful thoughts of “Is this enough?” permeate my mind.
Maybe I’m afraid that if I’m not always working toward that idealized version of my professional life, I won’t be able to reach it because I’ve disappointed someone — even if that someone is myself.
Maybe as I quickly move from meeting to meeting, application to application and job to job, the speed at which I’m moving prevents me from pausing to realize how exhausting it all is. Looking at the present becomes a difficult task to manage when all my plans revolve around the future.
But through journaling and therapy, I have begun to realize that earning these accolades shouldn’t feel like a relief. My love for work should stem from pride in my achievements, not from self-obligated expectations. My spirals about getting into a competitive graduate school shouldn’t stem from trying to one-up myself, but from actually desiring to further my educational journey.
My first step toward recovering from this constant need for academic validation was understanding my botched separation of self-worth and professional success. My constant search for academic and professional validations fulfilled me, but for only a brief period. As soon as the hourglass of fulfillment ran out, it was back to feeling the hollowness of self-doubt and the pressure to do better.
The fulfillment and value of my work should be felt every day as a positive thing, not a stressful one. I love what I do: extensively reading to prepare for Thematic Option discussions, engaging with the media world by working at the Daily Trojan and devoting hours to service projects with the USC Helenes.
Deep down I think I’ll always be a bit of a yes-man when taking on responsibilities — I am the eldest daughter after all — but I need to make the effort to be present when enjoying these commitments and not just multitasking so I can move onto the next “big win.”
Celebrating all my achievements, from participation grades to landing internships, is what’s important. Removing the self-imposed pressure and obligation to take home the gold will, at the very least, prevent burnout or, at best, help me sit still more often.
Whether a student is highly ambitious or just tormenting themselves to be that way, I encourage all readers to take a minute — yes, you do actually have one to spare — and feel how far they’ve come since they first started moving at full speed toward their goals. It surprised me to see how little time has passed, yet how different my daily routine is now from my torturous one back in high school.
I am the happiest and the busiest I have ever been. I’m making more efforts to physically sit still and silently admire the campus — a win which I can gain healthier validation from. If my mind begins to wander and think of the applications I could be filling out or the work that could be done, I remind myself that work will always be there, but my time at USC gets shorter by the day. I want to take it all and make my time here worthwhile, but not at the expense of being proud of myself.
Feel free to take a pause to sit with me and remind yourself why you’re working so hard. It might remind you of all the amazing things that you’ve simply come to regard as your daily routine.
