When achievement becomes your identity, nothing is enough.

Success can be reenvisioned by how you live your days, not what you produce in them.

You don't need to abandon your goals, but you can redefine how you approach them.

For as long as I can remember, I was an achiever. At school, I aimed high and measured success in grades. At university, praise became a powerful motivator, and I committed to being one of the top students in my year. This pattern followed me into adulthood as I built a meaningful career, set ambitious goals, and learned to keep going no matter how tired I felt. I was productive, driven, and deeply invested in doing my best at work, in relationships, and in sport.

From the outside, my life looked successful. And in many ways, it was. But beneath the momentum sat a quieter truth I hadn’t yet admitted to myself: the goalposts never stopped moving. No achievement felt satisfying for long. There was always another target waiting. Over time, striving became more than ambition. It became the way I felt safe. The way I felt valuable. The way I reassured myself I was enough.

There’s a psychological explanation for this: something called hedonic adaptation. As humans, we adapt quickly to success and to improvements in circumstances. A success that once felt extraordinary soon becomes normal. Satisfaction rises briefly, then settles back to baseline. It explains why achievement can feel both rewarding and strangely empty at the same time. The relief is real, but short-lived. And so the striving resumes.

I didn’t realise how tightly achievement had wrapped itself around my identity until my life began to change. I moved from the pace of London to the quiet of the French countryside. I stepped back from my coaching business and focused more fully on writing. I slowed down and found myself unexpectedly uncomfortable. Restlessness surfaced. Guilt followed. The urge to prove myself returned quickly, as though slowing down might undo everything I had built. Instead of rushing to fill the discomfort, I stayed with it.

With fewer external pressures, I began to notice how often I evaluated my days by output alone. How uneasy it felt to be present without turning the moment into something productive or useful. How quickly my mind leapt to the next milestone, even in moments meant to be enjoyed. Gradually, I loosened the grip. Not because achievement became unimportant, but because I no longer wanted it to organise my life. Something in me sensed there was another way to live, even if I couldn’t yet name it.

Psychological research supports what many people discover for themselves: long-term well-being depends less on what we achieve and more on how we live. A sense of autonomy, connection, and meaning predicts long-term fulfilment far more reliably than external markers of success. Yet culturally, we continue to reward busyness, optimisation, and visible wins.

At the end of life, this imbalance becomes especially clear. Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware observed a recurring regret among those in their final days: not that they hadn’t achieved more, but that they had worked too much and missed the life they were living.

Achievement itself isn’t the problem. Humans are wired to grow, learn, and create. Purposeful effort can be deeply fulfilling. But the difficulty arises when achievement becomes compulsive and the thing you rely on to feel worthy, calm, or secure. In that state, success brings temporary relief rather than lasting satisfaction. Each milestone briefly soothes the nervous system, only to raise the bar again.

Many people recognise this pattern not through burnout, but through subtler signs: feeling anxious when not being productive, struggling to enjoy success once it arrives, measuring self-worth by what has been accomplished that day, or finding stillness vaguely threatening. If this feels familiar, you’re not broken. You’re likely very good at what you do. But you may also be tired in a way that rest alone doesn’t resolve.

Loosening the grip the achievement treadmill has on you doesn’t require abandoning your goals. It begins internally, by separating who you are from what you produce. In practice, this can look small: allowing something to be good enough, resisting the urge to optimise every moment, and noticing when the mind jumps to the next goal — and gently choosing not to follow it. At first, this can feel unsettling. When achievement has long acted as a stabiliser, loosening it may bring guilt, fear, or the unnerving question: If I’m not striving, who am I?

That discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong. Often, it’s a sign that something new is emerging.

Over time, something begins to shift. Presence replaces pressure. Depth replaces speed. Work becomes more intentional; not less ambitious, but less frantic. Creativity flows more freely when it isn’t constantly being asked to prove itself.

One of the hardest parts of this shift is learning to tolerate “enough.” Enough effort. Enough success. Enough for today. Our culture trains us to believe that more is always better, but psychologically, growth doesn’t disappear when striving softens. It simply becomes less about constant expansion and more about depth. It shows up in quieter ways: learning for curiosity rather than advantage, improving without urgency, and allowing progress to unfold without needing to prove its worth.

I still work, write, and care deeply about what I do. But I no longer organise my life around achievement. I focus more on the process than the outcome. Alignment matters more than productivity alone. My life is quieter now, but not smaller. Achievement still exists; it’s just no longer in charge.

And perhaps that’s the quiet courage of stepping off the treadmill: not abandoning ambition, but redefining success as whether you were present and aligned in your days, not simply productive in them.

Brickman, P. and Campbell, D.T. (1971) Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In: Appley, M.H. (ed.) Adaptation-level theory: A symposium. New York: Academic Press, pp. 287–302.

Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (2000) ‘The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior’, Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), pp. 227–268.

Kasser, T. (2016) ‘Materialistic values and goals’, Annual Review of Psychology, 67, pp. 489–514.

Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2017) Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. New York: Guilford Press.

Ware, B. (2012) The top five regrets of the dying: A life transformed by the dearly departing. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

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