#115: Who cares about achievement?
Do you ever feel that, unless you achieve the things you think you should be achieving, you'll cease to exist? That you'll fade away, become invisible, fail to be a fully-realised human? If so, you're in good company. For many of us, living a fulfilling life is inextricably linked with achievement, striving, productivity, winning.
I'm not here to tell you not to care about achievement. But I am going to tell you that you're wrong if you think that the only life worth living is a life that prioritises achievement. And not only do I have Aristotle in my corner to back me up, but there's some fascinating recent research on what Gen Z care about that ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that if they're not achieving, they're failing.
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References:
Suzy Welch, 'CEO: One stunning data point explains the "Gen Z stare"—and why it's going to backfire on them', CBNC, 17 July 2025.
Melissa De Witte, 'What to know about Gen Z' (interview with Dr Roberta Katz), Stanford Report, 3 January 2022.
André Dua et al., 'What is Gen Z?', McKinsey & Company, 28 August 2024.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Greetings, once again, imperfectionists. I hope your July is going well so far. Here in the UK, this time of year comes with a weird kind of pressure for academics. Summer is here, teaching has finished for another academic year, and there’s a weird, contradictory, Schrödinger’s cat style character to the period before teaching starts up again in September, where we feel simultaneously that we should finally be catching up with all the stuff we let slide during the term, while also resting and recuperating ready for plunging back into term-time chaos in September. Despite the fact that it’s not possible to do both - at least, not to the extent we demanding lot tend to expect of ourselves - people in academia can be pretty brazen about pretending that there’s no conflict here. You’ll get emails at the end of one academic year wishing you a ‘productive’ summer, and emails at the start of the next academic year hoping that you’ve had a restful time. Some people even go all-in with this kind of cognitive dissonance and say it in the same email - ‘I hope you’ve had a productive and restful summer’ - and, of course, reading that sort of email is a good way of dialling the anxiety right up to 11 before you’ve even had a chance to write anything in your brand new academic diary - if people still use academic diaries these days.
The pressure we put on ourselves to achieve, to be productive, to win, to stand out, eh? Here’s a probing question for you. Do we really need to care so much about it? If your answer to that is, ‘duh, yeah, obviously’, then, friend, this episode is for you. I mean, of course we care about achievement. There’s an obvious logic to it, isn’t there? We’re trying to make it in an increasingly competitive field, so we can’t afford to take our eye off the ball when it comes to achievement - we constantly need to be thinking about ways to get the edge in that next job interview, grant application, journal submission, and so on. But that obvious instrumental value of achievement - I mean, the fact that achievement is necessary for us to do well in our chosen field - disguises another really common way of relating to achievement - one that I see a lot in coaching sessions, and which I experience myself too. Achievement, productivity, standing out, winning - whatever you want to call it, is a form of self-realisation for many of us. In an important sense, it’s through our achievements that we exist. If we stop achieving, we fade away, become invisible, turn into something … if not exactly sub-human, then at least not the sort of human we want to be. We’re into slobby Rebecca territory again, aren’t we? There’s a conviction that if we stop achieving, we turn into something that eats and sleeps but doesn’t do much else. We see achievement as the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: it’s how lots of us do self-actualisation. And because of that, when we feel anxious about not writing enough, not being competitive enough, not keeping up with all the things we think we should be keeping up with, we’re not just anxious about whether we’ll be able to get or keep a job or grant, although we invariably are anxious about those things. There’s also a sense that unless we’re achieving, we have no purpose. We still exist and we’re still alive, the way plants are alive, but we’re not living in the whole-hearted, fully human way we think we ought to be.
For lots of people, this becomes clear when they reach a position of security: a permanent job, enough money, the peak of their career, or whatever. While you’re still trying to ‘make it’, in whatever sense of ‘make it’ applies here, anxiety about achievement makes sense: you need to achieve so that you can achieve the goals you’re working towards. But I’ve spoken to lots of people who have made it - reached the goals they set out to reach - and find that they still care a lot about this achievement thing, and they’re puzzled by it, because caring so much about achievement strikes them as directionless, somehow. They come for some coaching and say things like, ‘I made full prof last year and yet I still can’t relax - I feel as guilty about taking it easy as I did when I was first on the job market, what’s going on?’ Sometimes, what’s going on is just habit: they’ve spent so much time prioritising productivity that they have trouble changing tack. But usually it’s not just habit. If it were, then they could just work on that - they could remind themselves that it’s ok to relax. But there’s often a reluctance to do that. The focus on achievement is part of who they are, and they feel all wrong if they try to distance themselves from it. Achievement is part of their identity.
It’s painful to have this sort of relationship with achievement. Caring so deeply about achievement means never being enough. The goalposts are always on the move. However much you are, whatever impressive things you’ve done, there’s always more striving to do. And it’s tempting to think that this is inescapable. If you want to live a satisfying life - the life of a human rather than a plant - then you need to be in a constant state of striving.
Actually, though, that’s not right - or at least, it’s one way to live, but it’s not the only way. The idea of achievement as central to being fully human isn’t even especially widespread. Aristotle, famously, thought that living well consisted in living in accordance with the virtues, and he identified a dozen or so virtues, but achievement didn’t make the list, and neither did productivity, winning, going the extra mile, and various other things that people I see in coaching sessions tend to obsess about and tie their sense of self-worth to. And in case you’re thinking that things were different in Ancient Greece and that Aristotle is a bit out of date and if he were trying to make it in today’s fast-pace world, he’d need to up his game - achievement isn’t an inescapable aspect of living well in modern times, either. Not everyone views achievement as inextricably linked to a life well-lived.
I was fascinated, a week or so ago, to read an article by Professor Suzy Welch, who is the director of NYU’s Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. Part of her research involves surveying people to find out what their core values are, using a 100-question tool called the Values Bridge. It’s available online and anyone can have a go at it - I’ll link to it in the episode notes, but just a heads up that you need to register at the end of it in order to get a partial overview of your results, and you need to pay if you want access to the full picture. Anyway, apparently, over 30,000 people have taken the test since May, and here’s an interesting insight that’s emerging: gen zed - sorry, I’m not hip or American enough to say ‘gen zee’ - doesn’t care very much about achievement. Let me quote what Welch says about this in her article:
‘Gen Z ranks Achievement, defined as the desire to be seen as successful or impressive, shockingly low. On average, they place it 11th out of 15 values. Even more telling? 65% of Gen Z respondents say Achievement already plays too much of a role in their lives. Let that sink in. Not only is Gen Z less motivated by winning, competition, and status — they're actively pushing it away.’
End of quote. Welch describes how prioritising achievement - a value whose importance often seems to be taken for granted by older people - can be downright baffling to younger people. She reports being asked by a college student at a focus group she was running, ‘Not to be confrontational, but … why does business need to win all the time?’
So, if gen z don’t care about achievement, what do they care about? According to Welch, one or both of two things: eudaimonia (which Welch defines in the not-quite-Aristotelian terms of ‘self-care and inner balance’) and voice (which is ‘self-expression and authenticity’).
Welch and her team aren’t the only ones making observations about value shifts between generations. Dr Roberta Katz, part of a group of researchers at Stanford University who set out to try to understand gen z, said in an interview that (quote), ‘a typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity and non-hierarchical leadership, and, while dismayed about inherited issues like climate change, has a pragmatic attitude about the work that has to be done to address those issues.’ End of quote. And an article by McKinsey & Company reports that, compared to the previous generation, gen z are more pragmatic, more pessimistic, more interested in belonging and community, more individualistic, and more politically and socially active.
Now. These are huge generalisations, of course. Generations are artificial groups, there’s individual variation with them, and to the extent that there are differences between generations, we’re talking about a spectrum. It’s not as if everyone born before midnight on 31st December 1996 cares about one set of stuff, and then there’s a sudden shift and everyone born after that - or whenever you take gen z to begin - cares about something else. But, actually, none of that matters to the point I want to make here. The reason I’m talking about generational differences in values is to make the point that that view I see reflected in so many of the people I talk to - that achievement is not only important, but somehow fundamentally entwined with what it means to live a worthwhile human life - is just one of many ways of viewing the world and our relation to it. And, not only are there people out there living satisfying lives who reject this preoccupation with achievement, but many of those people are a bit baffled about why anyone would care so much about it in the first place.
I’m not trying to say that, if achievement is important to you, then you’re wrong. I mean, what would that even mean? If you care about achievement, then you care about it. There’s no right or wrong here. Where you might be wrong, though, is if you are under the impression that you have no choice but to care about it. That’s a belief, and it’s a misguided one. You’re wrong if you think that a life that prioritises achievement as a central value is the only sort of life worth living. Realising that there are satisfying, fulfilling ways to live that don’t place such a strong emphasis on achievement - even if you can’t see your way to embracing such an approach yourself - is a way of introducing some helpful perspective. For a start, it loosens the grip of that uncomfortable conviction that so many of us have, that in a sense we stop existing if we stop achieving. And it also opens up the possibility of some potentially enlightening thought experiments. Next time you find yourself fretting about the fact that you haven’t achieved everything you think you ought to have achieved, ask yourself this: if I cared less about achievement, and more about some other value, how might my outlook on life be different at this moment? So, for example, how might your outlook be different if you were to channel the stereotypical member of gen z, and prioritise happiness - I mean happiness now, not later - belonging, and engagement with worthwhile causes? Would you feel differently, in that case, about your runaway email inbox, your incomplete task list, and the fact that your colleague just got that job you’d set your heart on? How would you go about your day, your week, your year, with that alternative set of values? What might your brand of happiness and fulfilment look like, in that case? How might you talk to yourself? That sort of thought experiment might not stop those things from bothering you, but perhaps it might help you see that you’re not a failure, or less of a fully-realised human, just because you haven’t met your own high standards with regard to those things. Your viewing them as failures or disappointments makes sense only against a framework of values that you are allowed to reject, if you want to - and that plenty of smart, thoughtful, fulfilled people do reject, voluntarily and whole-heartedly. The values you have aren’t the only set of values available, nor even the best set.
There’s another interesting and helpful insight brought out the research done by Suzy Welch and her colleagues, and it’s this: the set of values that guide your life aren’t necessarily working together. Sometimes, prioritising one thing you care about comes at the expense of prioritising another. You might care about both achievement and family - but investing in one of those things means less time and energy for the other. That sounds very obvious, but its obviousness doesn’t stop plenty of us feeling guilty about not being able to do everything to maximise every value we care about. But, of course, not being able to maximise every value all the time isn’t a personal failure. We really can’t have it all. I think this point is linked to the insight that, contrary to what so many of us assume, we really are free to reject or downplay the values that we have. If it really were true that the values we have are the values we have to have - if they’re simply part and parcel of what it is to be a human - then it’s tempting to think that the reason we’re here is to realise those values. There’s that sense of ‘if I’m not realising this value, there’s no point my being here’ again. That makes every time you fall short of realising those values a personal failure. But if, instead, our values are a bit of a mish-mash - things we’ve picked up from our upbringing, our culture, formative experiences, trauma, people we’ve encountered, our own reflections and reasoning, and so on - then it’s easier to understand how there’s some chance in the set of values we’ve ended up with. There’s some messiness. And given that, why would we think that the values we’ve arrived at are going to work harmoniously together? Why would we think that there’s a way of living our lives that’s comparable to the role of a skilled conductor in an orchestra, where our role is to ensure that the values we have - which are designed to complement each other the way that the parts of different instruments in a symphony are designed to complement each other - all play nicely together? You’re not living a symphony. You’re more like someone with diverse musical tastes, who sometimes enjoys listening to a bit of classical, is sometimes in the mood for jazz, and who has moments when only Finnish death metal will hit the spot. It’s not in any sense unreasonable or wrong to enjoy all those things - but it would be unreasonable to expect that, if you were to play them all at the same time, you’d enjoy the result. The fact that you happen to like them all individually doesn’t give you any reason to expect that they would in some sense complement each other, nor does it entail that you’re failing as a connoisseur of music if you struggle to create a classical/jazz/Finnish death metal mash-up that anyone would want to listen to. It’s the same with your values. Perhaps some of them do play nicely together, in which case, great. But there’s no reason to expect that. Conflict, noise, discord - none of these means you’re doing it wrong.
So. Stop telling yourself that you’re nobody if you’re not achieving the things you think you should be achieving. Try, instead, asking yourself - with genuine curiosity - who you might be if you cared a little less about those things. Next time, gang.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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