[HN Gopher] Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry
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Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry
Author : barry-cotter
Score : 19 points
Date : 2022-06-20 23:34 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| robocat wrote:
| Weird that it is split into two parts: "Study 2 served as a
| constructive replication of Study 1 but used a different high-
| potential sample: 496 elite
| science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM) doctoral
| students identified in 1992 and longitudinally tracked for 25
| years."
|
| Study 1 seems difficult due to sampling bias - if you only look
| at successful people you are missing anyone wrecked by success. I
| only read the abstract - so they must have a way of dealing with
| that issue within the paper.
|
| The people I have seen damaged by success is mostly due to
| unbounded ego: being humble seems like an antidote although is
| that cause (naturally humble) or effect (does trying to be humble
| also work).
| cryptica wrote:
| I think the real problem with success has nothing to do with
| psychological issues. It's that it often shields you from having
| to confront your blind spots, neglectful attitudes and delusions.
| Not having to face reality seems more like a positive thing in
| terms of mental health. It's like religion, it creates mental
| comfort. It's a comfortable abstraction which makes things seem
| better and simpler than they are.
|
| When you fail, you are forced to confront the causes of your
| failure; the things you didn't see or anticipate (your blind
| spots) and you start to see the world in higher resolution. After
| enough failures, starting anything can become difficult because
| you can see all the things which can go wrong and you realize
| that there are so many of them that you have almost no control at
| all over your own success. Almost all the variables are against
| you; if any of them doesn't line up exactly right, it's over.
|
| When you're successful, most of the variables tend to work in
| your favor, even those you don't see or understand... That's why
| most wealthy people still don't understand that the fiat monetary
| system is broken, for example.
| bobthechef wrote:
| zamfi wrote:
| Super anecdotal, but most people I know that fit your
| description had one success early in their careers and then
| rode that wave to future successes. That is definitely some
| people, and perhaps even many of the people who are the most
| visible (since that visibility is one way to ride the wave).
|
| But by far most of the successful people I know have confronted
| a _ton_ of failure as well, and adapt to it quickly: they treat
| it as a noisy data point, take what they can from it (like
| updating blind spots, etc.), and move on. You don't make 100%
| of the shots you don't take, and precisely _because_ there are
| so many variables you can't control, you need to take many
| shots.
|
| The folks who see failures as inevitable and as barriers to
| success and who as a result don't even bother to try...almost
| by definition cannot succeed.
|
| I think you may have the causality pointing the wrong way here.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > We examined the wrecked-by-success hypothesis. Initially
| formalized by Sigmund Freud, this hypothesis has become pervasive
| throughout the humanities, popular press, and modern scientific
| literature. The hypothesis implies that truly outstanding
| occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological,
| interpersonal, and physical well-being. Study 1 tested this
| hypothesis in three cohorts of 1,826 high-potential,
| intellectually gifted individuals. Participants with
| exceptionally successful careers were compared with those of
| their gender-equivalent intellectual peers with more typical
| careers on well-known measures of psychological well-being,
| flourishing, core self-evaluations, and medical maladies. Family
| relationships, comfort with aging, and life satisfaction were
| also assessed. Across all three cohorts, those deemed
| occupationally outstanding individuals were similar to or
| healthier than their intellectual peers across these metrics.
| Study 2 served as a constructive replication of Study 1 but used
| a different high-potential sample: 496 elite
| science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM) doctoral
| students identified in 1992 and longitudinally tracked for 25
| years. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 in all
| important respects. Both studies found that exceptionally
| successful careers were not associated with medical frailty,
| psychological maladjustment, and compromised interpersonal and
| family relationships; if anything, overall, people with
| exceptionally successful careers were medically and
| psychologically better off.
| andreilys wrote:
| This makes sense to me. The literature on status indicates that
| high status individuals/animals experience all kinds of
| positive effects on their health (especially when benchmarked
| against low status peers).
| elefanten wrote:
| Ah, but did they look at exceptionally successful _enough_
| careers?
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