overachievement

Failure is another emotion I cannot stand to feel, because in adult life I have conditioned myself not to fail at anything. Failure takes me straight back to the feelings of worthlessness I grew up with as a stammering, reclusive little boy.

But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.

Musicians, like golfers, have to put their minds in the right place _ trusting, confident, enjoying the pressure, being in present. And so forth. Otherwise, no amount of practice or __ime management_ will make them better. The same is true in all professions: if you__e stuck in the Training Mindset, evaluating yourself, or thinking in the past or future, you will not perform up to your potential. You will waste a lot of time, be an inefficient performer, and likely assume you need to manage your time better. In reality you need to manage your thinking better.

Many of us learned that keeping busy_kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves__ecoming overachievers & workaholics__s self esteem_But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice_If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.