What It Means If Your Accomplishments Don’t Feel Like You’ve Accomplished Anything
Success is always cause for celebration.
DimaBerlin | Shutterstock It's often difficult to view your own accomplishments in the same light that you view other people's. Something that you would gladly celebrate for someone else — whether it's a graduation, promotion, or another win — feels like the bare minimum in your own life. Why is that?
Brand designer and content creator Claire Grucella shared a quote in a recent TikTok that perfectly explains this phenomenon.
She shared a quote that explains why your accomplishments don't feel like you've accomplished anything.
“If you’re good at things and have high standards, you assume that you should always do well, which means that success is not a cause for celebration, but it’s the minimum level of reasonable performance,” she shared. “Anything less than victory would be a failure, and victory itself becomes nothing more than acceptable.”
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Simply put, if you have high expectations for yourself, you expect those expectations to be met. So when they are, you don’t celebrate whatever it is you accomplished. Instead, since it’s merely your expected outcome, you just move on.
The quote Grucella shared clearly resonated with her fellow TikTokers. The video currently has over 456,000 views and more than 1,000 comments.
“This is actually just the eldest daughter’s code of law,” one person wrote with a crying emoji. “I might as well just show my therapist my FYP at this point,” another commenter joked.
For some people, accomplishments just don’t feel as good as they should.
Dr. Lance Dodes wrote about what he termed “unhappy achievers” for Psychology Today. “The problem is that, for some people, achievement leaves them feeling empty to the core,” he said. “It can make them depressed, anxious, even angry. They rarely understand why.”
According to Dodes, this is often connected to one’s childhood. “This problem typically starts in childhood, with parents who (usually inadvertently) teach kids that their value as people ultimately comes down to their achievements and what they do … not who they are. Although it isn’t intended, the dark side of this message, of course, is that who they are is not enough,” he explained.
Although it seems counterintuitive, if you believe that all of your worth comes from achievements, then you’ll likely feel no pleasure from these things. You’ll merely feel numb and empty as you seek your next victory, without taking any time to acknowledge what you successfully accomplished.
If you relate to this feeling, work on properly recognizing your achievements.
Similarly, Jill Lynch Cruz of JLC Consulting called this the “overachievement trap.” “Like the mythical Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill for all eternity, this relentless pursuit of our ‘good enoughness’ becomes an exercise in futility with no ending in sight,” she wrote.
Cruz shared some suggestions for overcoming this trap. She said it’s important to know why you’re trying to achieve something and what you think it will do for you. Additionally, you can choose to focus on your larger journey instead of just the end result.
Although recognizing your accomplishments for what they are isn’t always the easiest thing, you should take some time to celebrate them. You really do deserve it.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.