Is Your Drive to Succeed Getting in the Way of Your Success?

A focus on well-being underlies the large body of research and theory that makes up positive psychology. In your own life, as you ponder the way you feel about yourself and your life, it is most likely well-being that you seek. However, there is a “dark” or flip side to well-being known as “ill-being.” Rather than making you happier or more fulfilled, the qualities that contribute to ill-being continually frustrate and upset you. As much as you’d like to shake this unpleasant state, it’s hard for you to leave these sources of misery behind.

Perhaps surprisingly, it may be precisely those qualities that you think should make you happy that become the primary sources of ill-being. As Australian Catholic University’s Emma Bradshaw and colleagues (2022) observe, quoting an earlier paper (Kasser and Ryan, 1996), there is a “dark side” to the so-called “American Dream,” which views wealth and material objects as the key to happiness. The more people try to achieve that “dream,” the more unattainable it becomes.

Intrinsic Satisfies and Extrinsic Frustrates

The problem with the belief that the so-called “extrinsic” needs for wealth and objects (along with, relatedly, fame and beauty) is that, Bradshaw et al. note, you can never have enough of them. The more you slide up the scales on each of these qualities, the more you start to bring in unfavorable comparisons between yourself and those who possess even larger amounts of each. In the words of one of the originators of positive psychology, this is the phenomenon of “escalation of expectations” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, p. 823).

Another way to put this, Bradshaw et al. suggest, is that “even when achieved, extrinsic aspirations are perpetually out of reach because people require an increasing dose of ‘the remedy’ to keep receiving its ostensible benefit” (p. 2). The frustration piece arises out of the process you engage in when you try to gain more wealth, fame, and so on. Rather than focus on what gives you inner feelings of pleasure based on expressing your abilities and interests, or what’s called “intrinsic” motivation, the never-ending search for extrinsic fulfillment sets you on a path in which you leave those inner needs behind entirely.

Think about the situation from a slightly different perspective. Perhaps you decided to embark on a new hobby that you saw demonstrated in an online video. It looked like fun and seemed to be within your range of capabilities. After a few evenings of attempting to master the skills needed to succeed at that hobby, you’re feeling pretty happy with yourself. It wasn’t a masterwork, nor was it even perfect, but it allowed you to develop a new side of yourself.

Now imagine that you decided to try this new hobby because you thought you could make some products to sell at a local craft exhibit or even an online shop. Each one could net you a tidy sum. Putting yourself on a production schedule, you now sit down to each evening’s “work” in somewhat of a frenzy. The more you complete, the more you’ll earn, so you’re going to need to proceed quickly. Indeed, the money will be nice, you figure, but so will the admiration you receive from potential buyers. No longer do you think about how much fun you were having but, instead, about the never-ending production cycle you need to fulfill.

Looking at the Big Picture of Ill-Being

The paradox of ill-being, or the idea that making more can detract from your happiness, has driven several decades of research within the framework of Self-Determination Theory (SDT). The ideal state of motivation, in SDT, is one in which your needs for competence, autonomy (ability to control your fate), and relatedness are simultaneously met. The intrinsic–extrinsic distinction comes into play in both competence and autonomy. When you are trying to satisfy your desires to express yourself, you fulfill your need for competence, and when these desires are ones you feel you control (i.e., are not extrinsic), you’ll fulfill your need for autonomy.

Beginning with a set of 4937 potential studies conducted within the framework of SDT, Bradshaw and her collaborators embarked on a meta-analysis, or examination of effects from a large number of studies, on a final sample of 105 individual studies based on more than 70,000 participants. The framework for the meta-analysis allowed the Australian authors to test the connections between both intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations to well-being, and intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations to ill-being. If it’s true that intrinsic satisfies and extrinsic frustrates, that “dark side” to the American Dream would show up across the broad pattern of all the studies.

The findings supported this dark-side prediction. In the words of the authors, “No matter who or where one is, focusing on extrinsic life goals is linked both to decreased flourishing and increased floundering” (p. 19).

You might wonder whether it matters if you actually achieve either category of goals in terms of the ultimate price you might pay in ill-being. Tracing the statistical pathways through importance vs. attainment, Bradshaw and her co-authors were able to demonstrate that, even when fulfilled, extrinsic goals exacted a cost in terms of higher ill-being. Whether or not people achieved their extrinsic goals, if these outweighed the intrinsic drivers of their behavior, “the effect is detrimental.”

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Returning to the example of your new hobby, the findings don’t mean that you shouldn’t try selling your wares, especially if you’ve produced enough to make this worthwhile. The meta-analysis does suggest that if you enter into the arrangement with the intention of making money, regardless of whether you enjoy the activity or not, you’ll wind up feeling that something is missing from the whole affair.

How to Leave Your Ill-Being Behind

By now, you may already have a pretty good idea of how to avoid that malicious cycle of ever-expanding and unfulfillable expectations. Focusing on what you enjoy, not what will bring you external rewards, will turn ill- into well-being, according to the Bradshaw et al. findings.

At the same time, everyone needs a certain level of material goal fulfillment, if for nothing else than to feed and house you and those you care about. Here’s where the matter of emphasis comes into play. It’s the focus on extrinsic rewards of money, fame, and beauty at the expense of those needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness that will set you up for a life of dismay and disappointment. As the authors conclude, “Happiness appears to be of the heart strings, not the purse strings” (p. 21).

To sum up, you needn’t spend all of your time and emotional energy analyzing each and every decision you make about trying to attain a certain goal. If you want to engage in a hobby for money rather than fun, that might be fine in the short term but not as a life strategy. Over the long term, it’s that delving into your true sense of self and the experiences that make you “you” that will ultimately set you on the path toward fulfillment.