Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Notes From Overachievers
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
A wry coda to an essaylet from my colleague Eric:
"So I'm going to be thinking about these concepts. Figure out where I want to be getting results, and therefore what I should be paying attention to. Spend time on self-reflection in order to identify areas of improvement, and then determine how I can use deliberate practice to attack those deficiencies. Of course, the problem is that it requires self-discipline to do all of these things and that's one of the areas of improvement. So we'll see how things go."
And a note from a former federal prosecutor. The Bush Administration really does not grok overachievers. Tracy Flick, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, what have you. How much of an overachiever do you have to be to make it to that level of play? How much would it burn you, and destroy your loyalty, to see your former bosses malign your competence? Of course they fought back.
