The Importance Of Being An Over-Achiever

There is a project due in about a week. Let it be your most recent time intensive job. You plan your week accordingly in order to provide ample time to successfully finish this important task. Let’s say the average person may spend one to two hours preparing, creating visuals or a proposed script. Imagine being unable to complete this task in such a time. Instead, even after it being appropriate and acceptable you still find yourself finding imperfections and inexistent ‘holes’ in your acceptably fine work. This, overly prepared task-completer is me. Although my peers saw me as an ‘over-achiever’ I never thought myself as one and failed to save myself from years of misery. Many academic achievers find themselves in my same position, but why …show more content…
My week would have six sport practices, up to three games, more than seven club meetings, and several community service activities. By my senior year of high school, I was working twenty hours or more at my part-time job. Together, this accounted for forty or more hours of my week (not including my part-time job). Adding in school that’s seventy-five hours dedicated to activities outside of my home. When I was home for the remanding ninety-three hours, accounting in fifty-six hours of sleep leaves me with thirty seven hours of non-scheduled work. Factoring in travel time, and time I spent studying I am left with less than two and a half hours a day to myself and my family. To be completely honest, I don’t recall using that time efficiently, or wisely. When I did have spare moments I was eating, studying on the go, or planning for my next week. At times, I would set up my calendar for a solid hour solely figuring out how I would survive the next week. I may have had a lot of acquaintances from my activities, but I rarely hang out with friends out-side of school. No one was necessarily my ‘best friend’ only because I refused to commit time to social endeavors. Not having ‘friends’ didn’t bother me. But, friends serve as backbones when needed, objective bystanders and fruitful conversationalists. Throughout high …show more content…
Throughout the years in which everyone labels ‘the best four years of your life’ I dreaded almost every day. I was indeed pushed by my parents to be my absolute best, but even at times my mother would insist that I was “involved in too much”. She never made me quit anything, but insisted on some nights that finishing the project was less important than my sleep and wellbeing. If I wasn’t one of the highest scorers, I would have anxiety about what I did wrong; asking myself questions such as: What could I have done better? When could I have fixed such and such…? Where could I have gotten an answer to this? Even if the grade I received was the highest in the class, I was still unsatisfied. Which left me restless, staying up at nights completing ridiculous amounts of