As an entrepreneur, it’s very possible that you fall into the psychological category of being an overachiever – this group of people tend to be highly effective and successful individuals that achieve a lot due to having very high standards for themselves and dreaming big.
In this sense, being an overachiever is a very positive thing, yet sometimes people use a sense of ‘achievement’ in an attempt to fill an emotional void, or mask over an unresolved emotional issue – thinking outer success will solve their internal challenges.
If you can relate to being an an overachiever, it’s important to realise there’s nothing wrong with being motivated to succeed and achieve, indeed it’s a very admirable and healthy quality… but like with most things in life, there has to be a balance, and if you feel an insatiable need to achieve and succeed in business – it might be worth considering where this hunger comes from, and what it is, on an emotional level that’s fueling this drive.
A lot of the most successful entrepreneurs have managed to turn their pain into power, meaning they have been in a bad financial situation, or perhaps were abused and neglected when growing up, thus felt powerless – meaning they have used the pain they experienced to drive them to turn their lives around, as a fuel.
Now, this is a very positive thing to do, but “success” in and of itself isn’t necessarily the answer… as we’ve all met people who have achieved great things and have an abundance of wealth yet are totally miserable and insecure.
See, today, we live in such a success focused world that we think we NEED to be successful in order to feel and be “enough”; meaning we often feel we need to achieve a ton of things in order to be worthy of receiving love, respect and admiration.
Society is plagued with a feeling of not being “good enough” – and as humans we are, by our nature fundamentally insecure… and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, this insecurity is what pushes us to achieve, improve, and evolve, yet, there’s a healthy range, and sometimes what people lack in self-love and deep internal self-confidence they try to make up for through the medium of achievement; be that financially, by making money on a platform like cex.io or by launching a high growth business.
The challenge, with not feeling “good enough” deep down, is that if people are lacking in this area of self-esteem, self-worth and self-love it means whatever they achieve in the external world is unlikely to fulfill them and provide the internal sense of emotional security they crave.
The missing ingredient, for most entrepreneurs and high achievers, could therefore be found in the area of “self-worth”.
The key point is that our feeling of self-worth and self-confidence should ideally come from a place of self-acceptance and from loving ourselves for who we are, deep down, not due to what we achieve in life… as this puts us on a never ending treadmill of always craving more.