Welcome to “Beyond success”, the podcast for high-achievers seeking deeper meaning, fulfillment and purpose. Now, here's your host, world-renowned leadership coach and therapist, David Tian, PhD.
David: Welcome to the very first episode of this new podcast, Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers. Today, we're diving into something that if you're an achiever, you absolutely need to hear this.
In case you don't know who I am, I'm David Tian, a certified therapist and leadership coach. For almost two decades, I've been helping high-achievers find fulfillment, happiness and meaning in their professional and personal lives. Since 2011, over 200,000 students from more than 87 countries have gone through our online and live courses. [00:47.0]
All right, now, let's get into it. Here's the thing, the greatest tragedy in life isn't failure. It's succeeding in the wrong things, investing your time and effort in the wrong things. It's when you give your life over to achievement, thinking that the next win, the next promotion or the next milestone, is going to finally bring you happiness. But when you get there, what happens? You feel empty. You think, This is it? Why don't I feel better? Why am I not fulfilled?
This is what I call the achiever’s trap. You're told that if you just grind hard enough, hustle long enough and sacrifice everything else, you'll finally make it. But that's a lie. Achievement alone won't give you the fulfillment you're looking for. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest running study on happiness, proves this. What actually makes people happy and keeps them healthy isn't money, status or fame. It's the quality of their relationships. It's whether they're living a life filled with purpose and connection.
But when you buy into the achiever’s lie, you give all of that up. You sacrifice relationships. You neglect your own happiness, and you miss out on what really matters. If you stay on that path, the result is predictable—burnout, loneliness and a deep sense of dissatisfaction that no amount of success can fix. [02:14.5]
This isn't just my opinion. It's backed by science, and it's not something you want to realize too late. In this episode, we're going to uncover the tragic consequences of living a life that's all about achievement, but without fulfillment. If you're an achiever, you need to understand just how dangerous this trap is, because the real tragedy isn't in failing to reach your goals. The real tragedy is reaching them and realizing they were never the goals that mattered.
I've got five points here. Let's get into the first one. First, let's break down the illusion of success as fulfillment. A lot of high-achievers fall into this trap. They think that if they can just hit that next milestone, land that promotion, or get that big payday, then everything will fall into place, and finally, they'll be happy. They'll feel complete. But that's the grand illusion. It doesn't work like that. [03:12.7]
This isn't just some personal opinion. There's hard data behind it. I mentioned earlier the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It's the most groundbreaking research project on happiness ever conducted. Started in 1938, it's been tracking hundreds of people over the course of their entire lives and multiple generations within these families. It's now expanded to almost 2,000 subjects, and 85 years of hard data on what actually makes people happy, fulfilled and healthy, what makes them live longer—and spoiler alert, it's not career success, money or fame. [03:53.4]
The current directors of the study, the eminent professors, Dr. Robert Waldinger and Dr. Mark Schulz, have spent years digging into the data. What they found is pretty shocking for most people, especially for those people who spend their whole lives trying to chase success. The research shows that even the most professionally successful people often feel deeply unfulfilled if they don't have strong, meaningful relationships.
It turns out that if you give your life over to chasing external markers of success, then you end up missing out on the things that actually make life worth living. Sure, achievements can bring temporary happiness. You get the high from hitting that goal, that rush of satisfaction, but it fades quickly. What's left after that? If you've neglected your relationships, if you've sacrificed your emotional wellbeing in order to climb the ladder, then you're left with a long-term emotional void, and that void can grow into loneliness, anxiety, depression, you name it. [04:56.6]
So, what do we take from this? Success without addressing your personal needs is empty—and again, it's not just me saying this. It's the longest running study on human happiness ever done. The evidence is overwhelming.
Now, let's turn to Bertrand Russell, one of the most important philosophers of the modern era. If you don't know who he is, he was a Nobel Prize–winning philosopher and writer and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He wrote extensively on happiness, meaning and what it takes to live a fulfilling life, and his insights are as relevant today as they were when he first put them to paper almost 100 years ago.
Russell emphasized something that's crucial for achievers to understand. If you're pursuing success for its own sake, you're setting yourself up for dissatisfaction. Success by itself is not enough to create lasting happiness, because it neglects the deeper human need for connection and purpose. [05:56.7]
Russell talked about how chasing achievements without anything deeper, without love, without meaningful relationships, just simply leads to boredom and emptiness, and here's why—achievements are external. They're things you collect like trophies. You might enjoy them for a while, but they don't fulfill the core emotional needs that we all have.
Russell argued that what people really need deep down is connection and purpose. Without those, life becomes monotonous, even if you're killing it at work. Think about it in this way. Imagine you've reached the top of your career. You've done everything you set out to do. But then what? If you don't have meaningful relationships to share it with, if you don't have a deeper sense of purpose driving you forward, then that success just feels hollow—and that's the tragedy of the achiever’s trap. You spend all this time and energy climbing the mountain only to find out the view isn't what you thought it would be. [06:56.0]
Russell's point about boredom is spot on. When your only focus is on achieving, it's easy to fall into a cycle where you're constantly chasing the next goal. You hit one target, and instead of feeling satisfied, you start looking for the next. You never stop to actually enjoy the moment, to connect with people, to find joy in the simple things, and that's why so many high-achievers end up feeling restless or even miserable. They're stuck in this cycle of achievement, but it never leads to lasting fulfillment.
It reminds me of this quote from the great Ferris Bueller movie, “So, let me be even clearer. The problem isn't that achieving things is bad. It's that achievement alone isn't enough.” It can't fulfill your deeper emotional needs, and if you spend your life or waste your life chasing it, you're setting yourself up for dissatisfaction. The data backs this up, and so does one of the greatest thinkers of the modern era, and if that doesn't make you pause and think, I don't know what will. [07:55.5]
Now let's move on to the second point. Let's talk about emotional neglect and relationship deprivation. When you're caught up in the grind, constantly chasing success, it's easy to let your emotional needs slip through the cracks. You focus on your goals, on getting ahead, and somewhere along the way, you start neglecting the relationships that matter most.
Maybe you tell yourself you'll make time for your friends and family later, or you'll focus on yourself after you hit your next milestone, but later never comes. And then what happens? Even worse, by the time you do wake up to this reality, you've already lost that precious time, which you can't get back, with your loved ones, especially your kids who are all grown up now and resentful of you because you were rarely around and you missed out on enjoying those young, cute versions of them that you literally can't get back later. Even without consciously noticing it, over time, you end up isolated, disconnected and emotionally starved. [08:54.8]
This is where things get dangerous health-wise. Emotional neglect leads to a kind of deprivation that high-achievers don't usually notice until it's too late. You might be crushing it at work, but inside, you're feeling empty, and it creeps up on you slowly, gradually. At first, you might just feel a little bit off. Maybe you start losing your excitement for things that used to energize you. You're pushing through each day, and that spark, it's gone.
This emotional deprivation isn't just a minor issue. It snowballs into serious mental health problems. Anxiety, depression, burnout, all of these are direct consequences of ignoring your emotional and relational needs. The Harvard study makes this painfully clear. It shows that people who deprioritize their relationships to focus solely on their careers, often end up feeling lonely, and not just any kind of loneliness, but a deep, chronic loneliness that eats away at them. [09:58.7]
And it gets worse. As the years pass, that loneliness turns into regret, a very painful regret. The people who once gave everything for their careers often look back and realize they missed out on the most important parts of life. They hit their goals, but when they reflect on what they sacrificed, there's a sense of emptiness. They gave up love, connection, friendship, and for what? A few more promotions? A bigger paycheck? It's tragic, and it's so common.
Emotional neglect doesn't just leave you feeling isolated. It makes all those successes feel hollow. You can have all the money in the world, but if you're not emotionally fulfilled, if you don't have people that you care about to share it with, then it's just meaningless. [10:47.5]
This isn't just some feel-good advice. We've got the research to back it up. The Harvard study has been running for over 80 years, and one of its biggest takeaways is that the quality of your relationships is the number-one predictor of long-term happiness and a long life. It's not how successful you are, not how much you accomplish. It's your relationships. Yet High-achievers often sacrifice these very relationships in pursuit of professional success, only to realize later that they've been climbing the wrong ladder all along.
Now let's bring into the discussion Irvin Yalom. If you're not familiar with him, he's one of the most influential figures in modern psychotherapy, especially in the field of existential therapy. His work focuses on the big questions, meaning, purpose, mortality, and how these existential issues affect our mental health. He has written extensively about how humans at our core, need connection and love. Without them, we face some harsh existential realities, like the meaninglessness of life and the inevitability of death. [11:54.0]
Yalom argues that when we ignore our emotional and relational needs, we end up facing these existential crises alone, and that's when things get really dark. Imagine being incredibly successful but feeling like none of it matters because you've got no one to share it with. You're left to grapple with the bigger questions of life, like, what's the point of it all? Why am I here? What happens when I die? without the emotional support and connection that make those questions bearable.
This is why Yalom’s work is so powerful. He shows us that ignoring our emotional needs doesn't just lead to loneliness; it leads to a deeper sense of meaninglessness, a crisis that many high-achievers don't even realize they're heading towards. Success can't shield you from these existential issues, and in fact, it often brings them to the surface.
When you neglect your relationships and focus only on your career, you're not just risking loneliness. You're risking your mental health, your emotional wellbeing, and ultimately, your sense of meaning and happiness in life. [13:01.1]
Okay, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's move on to the third of five points, which is the cost of burnout and the toll it takes on your physical health. The achiever’s trap doesn't just mess with your emotional wellbeing. It wreaks havoc on your body, too.
You've probably experienced it yourself, late nights, early mornings, skipping meals, surviving on caffeine and adrenaline just to get through the day. It feels like you're invincible at first. You push yourself harder and harder, chasing that next level of success. But here's the reality—your body can't keep up that forever.
Chronic stress is a slow killer. It builds up over time and quietly chips away at your health. You might not notice it right away, but eventually the cracks start to show. You feel exhausted, but you keep going. You get sick more often, but you power through. You tell yourself you'll rest when you have more time, but that time never comes, and before you know it, you're completely burned out. [14:00.0]
I've seen this happen so many times with clients, and the cost is massive. Take one client I worked with a few years ago, let's call him Mark. Mark was a successful executive at a big tech company. He was driven, ambitious and always on the go. He had sacrificed a lot to get to where he was, long hours, weekends at the office, many missed family events, but he was proud of his success. He thought he could keep going like that forever.
But then things started falling apart. Mark began having trouble sleeping. His energy levels tanked. He was constantly tired, but couldn't switch off. His work was suffering, and he started getting sick all the time, nothing major at first, just colds and flu that seemed to hang around longer than they should. But then came the migraines, the stomach problems, the constant aches and pains. [14:50.7]
Mark tried to push through it, but his body just wouldn't cooperate. Eventually, he hit a wall. Mark had to take a step back, and that's when we started working together. What he hadn't realized was that years of chronic stress had caught up with him. His immune system was shot, his sleep was a mess, and his body was crying out for rest. The relentless pursuit of success had taken a serious toll on his physical health, and it wasn't something he could just power through anymore, and it wasn't something he could make up for with just a few extra nights of sleep.
The research from the book The Good Life backs this up. I highly recommend The Good Life book to everyone. It's written by the directors of the Harvard study and it's aimed at a general audience, and it reports the main findings of the 85-year Harvard study. The Harvard study shows that strong relationships, not professional achievements, are what predict better health and longevity.
The people who have deep, meaningful connections in their lives, friends, family, loved ones, tend to live longer, healthier lives, those who prioritize their careers at the expense of their relationships, they're more likely to suffer from burnout, chronic illness and even a shortened lifespan, which for men is as much as 12 years less. [16:10.3]
Burnout isn't just feeling tired. It's a full-body shutdown. Your immune system gets weaker, and suddenly, you're picking up every bug that's going around. Your stress levels skyrocket, which leads to inflammation in the body, a known factor in heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. Let's not forget sleep. Chronic stress disrupts your sleep patterns, and without proper rest, your body simply can't recover. It's a vicious cycle that keeps dragging you down until you're forced to stop.
Mark eventually made a full recovery, but it took a lot of work. He had to radically change how he approached his work and life. He had to learn how to set boundaries, how to prioritize his health, and most importantly, how to reconnect with the people that mattered most in his life. [16:58.1]
The good news is that once he did, his energy returned, his health improved, and get this, his work performance skyrocketed. It turns out, taking care of yourself doesn't mean you have to sacrifice success. In fact, it's the only way to sustain your success over the long term.
The point is, when you're trapped in the relentless pursuit of success, you're trading away your health without even realizing it. And the irony? You're often doing it in the name of getting ahead or being productive, but if you burn out, you lose everything and there's no achievement worth that.
Now let's move on to the fourth point, the trap of perpetual dissatisfaction and escalation. Here’s how this works. You set a goal, something big, something that feels like is going to change your life. You hustle, grind and sacrifice until you finally reach it, and for a brief moment, it feels great. You feel accomplished, proud, maybe even on top of the world. But then it fades. That feeling doesn't last. [17:58.6]
Instead of basking in your success, you start thinking about the next goal. You tell yourself, “Okay, now I need to go bigger,” so you raise the bar and chase after the next achievement, and that cycle just keeps going. You're never satisfied. No matter how much you achieve, it's never enough. There's always a higher bar, a bigger goal, something more that you need to prove to yourself and to others. You're trapped in this constant state of striving, thinking that the next win will be the one that finally makes you happy and complete, and this is the escalation trap. It's a major part of the achiever’s trap.
Achievers get caught in this loop of perpetual dissatisfaction. They think that achieving more will solve the problem, but it's the constant chasing that's the problem itself. The more you achieve, the more you feel the need to keep achieving. It's an endless vicious cycle of doing more, working harder, pushing yourself further, but never feeling like it's ever enough. [19:01.2]
The Harvard study lays this out clearly. The people who chase external success, whether it's money, status, fame, they often feel a constant need to prove themselves. They're always looking for validation, but it's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. No matter how much they pour in, it never fills up. Emotionally, they're left drained and disconnected from the things that actually bring happiness, things like relationships, love, and personal fulfillment.
Here's the worst part. That constant chasing doesn't just leave you exhausted. It leaves you disconnected. You lose touch with the deeper sources of happiness, like meaning, connection, and joy. You're so focused on the next achievement that you don't even realize what you're missing. Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize–winning philosopher I mentioned earlier, had a lot to say about this. He argued that when we pursue success for its own sake, when we chase it blindly without stopping to ask ourselves what we really want, it leads to this endless, insatiable desire for more. [20:06.3]
You get into this mindset where you're constantly thinking, Once I get to the next level, I'll be happy, but it never works. Russell was clear on this. If you don't take time for personal happiness, you'll never find contentment. You'll keep wanting more and more, and no amount of success or achievement will ever satisfy you.
Russell's insight is as relevant now as it was when he first wrote it. We live in a culture that worships achievement, that tells us, the more we do, the more we're worth, but that's a lie. Success without happiness, without fulfillment, is empty, and the more you chase it, the more disconnected you become from yourself and the things that really matter.
The trap of perpetual dissatisfaction isn't just exhausting, it's dangerous. It prevents you from finding peace, from being present in the moment, and from experiencing real joy. Instead of living a life that's meaningful and rich with connection, you end up chasing something that doesn't even exist, a sense of “enough” that's always just out of reach. [21:14.0]
I've seen so many clients fall into this trap. They achieve incredible things, things most people would only dream of, but they still feel empty, and when they come to me, it's often because they've realized that no amount of success has been able to make them happy in the long term. They're stuck in this cycle of escalation, chasing the next thing, never pausing to ask themselves what they really want or what would actually make them feel fulfilled.
The truth is, no amount of external achievement will ever make you feel whole. If you're constantly chasing success, you're missing the point. True fulfillment comes from within. It comes from living a life that's aligned with your values, from building meaningful relationships and from finding joy in the everyday moments, not just the big wins. [22:06.3]
In the next episodes, we'll dive into how you can start breaking free from the cycle, but for now, remember this—if you're always chasing the next big achievement, you'll never be satisfied. There will always be more to do, more to prove, and if you're not careful, you'll spend your entire life in that trap, never realizing that happiness was always right in front of you, but you never grasped it.
Now, the fifth and final point, the existential crisis. Here’s the truth about the achiever’s trap. It's not just about burnout or loneliness, or a lack of satisfaction. It actually goes deeper than that. If you stay in this trap long enough, you'll hit a wall, and that wall is what I'd call an existential crisis. You start questioning everything. “Why am I doing this? What's the point? Is this really what my life is about?” [22:56.3]
Here’s where it can get scary. You could have all the success in the world, the money, the status, the fame, but if you haven't invested in your relationships or in your own personal fulfillment, all of it will feel hollow. You’ll start realizing that success hasn't given you the meaning you thought it would, and that can lead to a profound crisis of identity and purpose.
This isn't just some philosophical idea. It happens to a lot of high-achievers. They work so hard, sacrifice so much, and then once they've made it, they're left feeling empty, almost as if they've been living someone else's life. They don't know who they are anymore, because their identity has been so wrapped up in their achievements, which are empty.
Even worse, as Irvin Yalom has written extensively about, if you don't have meaningful relationships and personal fulfillment, you're left to face life's ultimate realities alone, and those realities, like death, isolation, responsibility, are heavy. They can crush you if you don't have a strong emotional foundation. [24:01.1]
Now, this might only resonate if you're intelligent enough to reflect on your life in a deep way, if you're just following rules blindly going through life like a lab rat, then this won't hit you. But for those who take the time to think about their life, their purpose and their relationships, the absence of meaning becomes glaringly obvious.
The achiever’s trap doesn't give you the tools to handle life's big questions. Instead, it distracts you with endless tasks, goals and to-do lists, making you believe that if you just achieve more, then everything will be fine. Spoiler, it won't.
Let's talk about what happens when you hit this point. You've spent years, maybe decades, focusing on external success. You've been laser-focused on your career, on climbing the ladder, on being “the best,” but at some point, you start feeling like something is missing. It's like a nagging voice in the back of your head that grows louder the more successful you become. That is if you're intelligent. [25:02.4]
You might start feeling restless, uneasy or disconnected from your own life, and that's the beginning of the existential crisis. You start asking questions you've never had the time to ask before, like, “What does it all mean? Why am I even doing this? Is this what I want for the rest of my life?” This is exactly what Yalom was talking about. When you're caught in the achiever’s trap, you haven't developed the emotional support system to handle these questions. You don't have the deep relationships or the personal fulfillment that could give your life meaning and help you navigate these existential challenges. You've been so busy trying to make it that you haven't stopped to figure out what “it” even is.
Robert Waldinger's research in the Harvard Study of Adult Development backs this up. His findings show that without a fulfilling personal life, people often face a bleak emotional existence. Sure, they might be professionally successful, but when it comes to the bigger challenges in life—death, loss, and loneliness—professional success doesn't provide any real comfort. It's like having a mansion with no one to share it with. It's empty and it feels pointless. [26:13.5]
The hardest part for achievers is admitting that success isn't enough. It feels like a betrayal of everything you've worked for, right? You've been told your whole life that success is the goal. When you get there and realize it's not giving you the meaning you thought it would, it can shake you to your core, like you've been lied to. That's the crisis, this deep sense of disillusionment that hits you when success doesn't fulfill you.
The good news is it doesn't have to end there. Yes, the achiever’s trap can leave you feeling empty and disconnected, but there's another way forward. You can find fulfillment and still achieve even more success than you did before. Only, this time, it's success that feels real, that feels enjoyable, that doesn't come with all the stress and burnout. You don't have to sacrifice your happiness for achievement. You can have both. [27:05.8]
How? That's what we'll dig into in the next episode. We're going to talk about how to escape the achiever’s trap. How to start living a life that's both successful and meaningful, and how to build relationships and habits that support your emotional wellbeing. It's not about throwing away your ambition. It's about aligning your ambition with what actually makes life worth living.
For now, just sit with this idea—success alone isn't enough. If you're feeling empty, if you're questioning your purpose, if you're wrestling with these big questions, that's not a failure. It's a sign that you're waking up to something deeper, and that's where the real journey begins.
All right, let's recap what we've covered so far.
We started by talking about the illusion of success as fulfillment. So many high-achievers think that if they just hit that next milestone, they'll finally feel satisfied, but that's not how it works. The research is clear, success alone doesn't lead to lasting happiness. [28:04.3]
Then we dove into emotional neglect and relationship deprivation. In the chase for achievements, people often neglect their emotional needs and relationships, leading to isolation, anxiety, and burnout.
Then we moved on to the physical toll of the achiever’s trap. Chronic stress from constant striving doesn't just affect your mental state. It also wrecks your body. Burnout is real and it can leave you physically broken.
Then we cover the trap of perpetual dissatisfaction, this constant feeling of never enough. No matter how much you achieve, it never satisfies, and you keep raising the bar, thinking the next goal will do the trick.
Finally, we touched on the existential crisis when you realize that all your success doesn't provide meaning. Without strong relationships or personal fulfillment, you're left to face life's biggest questions—death, isolation, and responsibility—alone, and that's where things can get really dark. [29:07.3]
Let me give you a quick example of how this plays out in real life. I had a client, let's name him Jake. He was a high level executive in finance. He worked insane hours for years, always chasing the next promotion, the next raise, the next big deal. On paper, he had everything—money, status, a nice house, the works—but when he hit his mid-40s, everything started to unravel. He was burnt out. His marriage was on the rocks, and he was constantly anxious.
Jake had fallen into the achiever’s trap. He had sacrificed his relationships and his health for success, but when he looked at his life, all he saw was emptiness. He felt like he had no purpose. He couldn't understand how he had worked so hard and still ended up feeling so unfulfilled.
Here's the thing, Jake's story is not at all unique. It's my story. It's the story of so many high-achievers. The good news is that it doesn't have to end like that. There is a way to find fulfillment and achieve even more success than you ever did before, but in a way that actually feels good and is sustainable. No more burnout, no more emptiness. [30:13.4]
In the next episode, we're going to dig into that. I'll show you how to break free from the trap, how to find true fulfillment, and how to start living a life that's both successful and meaningful, so stay tuned and come back to the next episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm so excited to kick off this new podcast series. Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out.
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