Does Exceptional Success Require Sacrificing Other Things?

We have all heard that “you can’t have it all” and that we must ultimately choose between “love and duty,” to steal a line from the classic movie High Noon.

Fictional caricatures of hard-driving individuals whose single-minded pursuit of excellence leaves behind a trail of divorces, bad parenting, mental health crises, and drug and alcohol abuse are a familiar pop culture touchstone, and there are certainly enough exemplars of famous people who have crashed and burned to convince us that it all must be true.

The Success Syndrome

Think of the many hard-living rock stars who died too young and the sad endings suffered by so many other exceptional people. Celebrity chef and global wanderer Anthony Bourdain, who died of suicide at the age of 61, reflected on his conflicted relationship with success by saying that he worked really hard “to not ever think about my place in the world.” Similarly, Steve Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple, who changed our world in a way that few others have, once confessed, “In some others’ eyes, my life is the epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy... all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in have become meaningless in the face of my death.” (Jobs died of cancer at the age of 58.)

This alleged dark side of the American Dream has been called “Success Neurosis” or “Success Syndrome” by those who have examined it.

So, can too much success really destroy your life?

What Does the Research Say About Success and Well-Being?

The research on this question is surprisingly thin, as it is difficult to do carefully controlled studies on the real lives of real people. Having said this, intriguing recent research by a team from the Educational Testing Service, Carleton University, and Vanderbilt University suggests that there may be much less to Success Syndrome than we have been led to believe.

Their first study looked at over 1,800 individuals from three cohorts of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth who were all identified as being in the top 1 percent on cognitive ability at the age of 13. These people were invited to participate in this new study when they were 50 years old.

This was clearly a select group of highly talented folks, so rather than compare them to other people, the researchers compared the “exceptionally successful” members of this group with the rest of the sample who were deemed to be “less successful.” Income was the marker that separated the top quartile of the group for comparison to the lower 75 percent of the group. Income is an admittedly flawed measure of “success,” but its consistent positive relationship with other success measures and the ease with which it could be determined led the authors of the study to select it as the main grouping variable.

Each participant in the study filled out a range of questionnaires that assessed physical and mental health, life satisfaction and purpose, positive feelings, self-esteem, attitudes toward aging, relationship and family status, and health-related behaviors such as exercise, smoking, drinking, and sleep patterns.

The results indicated that the exceptionally successful group was, on average, physically and psychologically healthier than the less successful group and that they were just as satisfied with their lives and their relationships. In fact, the highly successful men were more likely to be married and had more children than the less successful men; women exhibited the opposite pattern.

Curiously, the highly successful individuals drank more alcohol than less successful people, but they were not significantly different on other health behaviors.

The authors of the study replicated their results with another group of 496 elite STEM doctoral students who completed the same battery of questionnaires when they reached age 50. The group identified as being highly successful in this sample scored higher on measures of psychological health and showed the same patterns of marrying and having children that were discovered in the previous study.

The surprising conclusion from this work is that “Success Syndrome” does not appear to be real. There are relatively few differences between the most successful talented individuals and talented people who do not quite reach the same dazzling heights, and when such differences do show up, they tend to favor those who are exceptionally successful.