Labor Day, observed on the first Monday in September, celebrates the social and economic achievements of American workers. Everybody loves a good worker, but very little is written about the problems of overloading, overworking and overperforming—all of which can undermine career success. Chronic performance is the constant attempt to get every task done as flawlessly as possible, and then some. Eduardo Briceño, co-founder of Mindset Works and author of the new book, The Performance Paradox, says you can ask yourself four questions to see if you are caught in the chronic performance trap:
- Are you always racing to check tasks off a list?
- Do you spend most of your time trying to minimize mistakes?
- Do you suppress your uncertainties, impressions or questions to try to appear like you always know what you’re doing?
- Would you rather walk over hot coals than get feedback?
The Chronic Performance Trap
While it may seem like minimizing mistakes is a reasonable use of our time or that appearing decisive is a wise career strategy, these habits can have a devastating impact on our skills, confidence, jobs and personal lives, according to Briceño. “Chronic performance could be the reason you might be feeling stagnant in some area of your life,” he told me by email. “You might be working more hours or putting more effort into tasks, yet you never seem to get ahead. Life feels like a never-ending game of catch-up. That’s chronic performance—throwing more energy at tasks and problems yet staying at the same level of effectiveness.”
The ‘Never Enough Cult’
Manisha Thakor fell prey to chronic performance that she calls the “Never Enough Cult” in her new book, MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your “Enough.” Thakor coined the term “moneyZen” to describe a brand of financial well-being that focuses on financial health as a precursor to emotional wealth. Thakor spent decades building a successful career in finance, managing up to $6 billion in assets and jetting around the country every week. She was also a workaholic who was unraveling in private, at several points landing in the hospital with stress-related illnesses. Now she dedicates herself to educating people about their finances and how it relates to their time and quality of life.
I spoke to Thakor, who told me she remembered that crisp spring day when she accepted the yellow pills from the elegantly dressed woman in a few rows behind her on a flight to New York, sealing her initiation into the Cult of Never Enough. “That fateful day on the plane, when I took the yellow pill, I embraced my new religion: the Cult of Never Enough,” she remembers. “Ever dutiful, I followed the Never Enough code with gusto: When you think you can’t go on, you must find a way. For me, that meant forgoing sleep, ignoring family, self-medicating—whatever it took to just push through and get it done.” Today, she says she’s crystal clear that the reason she got so deeply sucked into her work was that she was desperately trying to fill a pit of shame and self-doubt that was at the core of her existence.
Work Addiction
The chronic performance trap and the never enough syndrome closely resemble the traditional term, work addiction, which is characterized by all the signs of both the chronic performance trap and the never enough syndrome. Work addiction has ten other indicators, some of which relate to these two conditions: hurrying, control, perfectionism, relationship problems, binges, inability to relax, brownouts (memory lapses due to preoccupation with performance or never enough), impatience and irritability, self-inadequacy and self-neglect.
“Most of us go about our days assuming that in order to succeed, we simply need to work hard to get things done,” Briceño points out. “That’s what we’ve been told all our lives. So what’s the problem? Doesn’t hard work lead to better performance? The answer is a paradox—one I call the performance paradox. Maybe you’re a busy professional trying to learn a difficult new skill, like giving masterful presentations, motivating colleagues or resolving conflict, yet no matter how much you work at it, you don’t seem to be getting better.”
He cautions that the performance paradox can trick us into chronic performance, which leads to stagnation. “The performance paradox is the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we want to improve our performance, we have to do something other than just perform,” he explains. “No matter how hard we work, if we only do things as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, we get stuck at our current levels of understanding, skills and capabilities.” He notes that when we feel pressured, overwhelmed and underwater, the answer seems to just work harder and faster, but the way to improve our results is not to spend more time performing. It is to do something else that is a lot more rewarding and, ultimately, productive. “We get stuck in a hamster wheel in our work, as well as in our relationships, health, hobbies and any aspect of life,” Briceño acknowledges. “It can feel like we’re doing our best, when in fact we’re missing out on discovering better ways to create, connect, lead and live.”
Chronic performance leads to work-life imbalance, as does the never enough cult and work addiction. No matter what label you use, all three mask a deeper, underlying problem and often lead to the same place: job burnout, serious health problems and derailed relationships. Research shows that workaholic marriages, for example, have a higher divorce rate (40%) than non-workaholic marriages. And in some cases, work addiction leads to death—the Japanese call death from overwork Karoshi—if not controlled in time.
The Tides Are Turning
In a recent story in The New York Times, Jessica Grose calls corporate honchos, who have been allowed to define what makes a “good employee,” to task. “In their estimation, it’s ‘morally wrong’ (Elon Musk) to work from home, because a good employee is one who wants to ‘hustle’ (Jamie Dimon), working long hours in the office every single day. Joan Williams, the chair and director of the Center for WorkLife Law, has called this the ‘ideal worker’ norm—a set of beliefs that assumes labor will be performed by full-time employees with no caregiving responsibilities or life outside work, continuously for 40 years.”
But there’s a new sheriff in town, and the tides are turning. Younger workers—unwilling to sacrifice their mental and physical health, compromise their intimate relationships or die for their jobs—are not buying into chronic performance, the never enough cult or allowing work addiction to chain them to the desk. They are changing the standards, rallying against the hustle culture of earlier generations with the buzz phrase “Lazy Girl Jobs”—a redefinition of a more balanced worker. They know that burnout prevention and work-life balance aren’t “lazy.” As Grose wisely points out in her piece, “It should be the basic way we think about work.”
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