Before We Succeed, We Must Decide

With summer at the University just around the corner, the campus feels less like a place of reflection and more like a recruiting fair. Everyone is in a rush to secure the next internship. No, really, when did getting an internship stop being about gaining experience and start feeling like a prerequisite for existing? I once spent 40 minutes choosing between two verbs on my résumé. Not because either described what I actually did, but because one sounded more impressive. Apparently, I didn’t attend meetings. I spearheaded initiatives. I opened LinkedIn for five minutes and left questioning every decision I’ve ever made. Half my peers are “founders,” the other half are “consultants,” and I am…refreshing the page. Somewhere along the way, we started pretending that having a five-year plan at 19 is a sign of maturity. Bonus points if you figured it out in high school and stuck with it through and through, as if clarity equals success and ambiguity equals failure.

But maybe the problem isn’t ambition. Maybe it’s the definition. We talk about success as if it were a universal metric that is stable, measurable, and agreed upon. Internship secured. Offer accepted. Plan confirmed. Yet rarely do we pause to ask who defined that metric in the first place. In a world that is increasingly complex and ambiguous, we cling to clarity as proof that we are in control. The earlier we can declare our direction, the more ahead we must be. But what if that clarity is not maturity, just compliance?

As Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey argue in “An Everyone Culture,” “The mental demands of modern life have increased dramatically in the last half century.” If the world is asking more of us cognitively and emotionally than ever before, perhaps our obsession with early certainty is less about ambition and more about anxiety. Kegan and Lahey suggest that thriving in this complexity requires more than external accomplishment, it requires an internal shift. Instead of relying on inherited definitions of success, prestige, productivity, or predictability, we have to construct our own system for making sense of what matters. That kind of growth is slower. It’s less visible. It doesn’t fit neatly into a LinkedIn headline. But it is far more demanding than simply complying with expectations.

If we don’t define success for ourselves, someone else will do it for us. And increasingly, that someone is a culture that equates achievement with worth. Think about the last time someone asked, “How has school been?” or “What have you been up to?” On the surface, these questions feel harmless. But they often function as quiet checkpoints, subtle evaluations of how far along you are in the race. No one wants to be that one guy with nothing going on. So when your peer mentions working in a lab researching musculoskeletal disorders while you’re keeping up with your monthly binge of “Bones,” it’s hard not to feel behind.

In Dismantling Toxic Achievement Culture, Jennifer Breheny Wallace argues that many young people internalize the belief that their value depends on performance and external validation. As a result your choices and decisions change. Maybe the student who loves watching “Bones” doesn’t pursue theater production and misses out on where that interest could have taken him, because it doesn’t sound impressive enough at dinner. Instead, he pivots toward the lab, not out of curiosity but out of comparison. The danger isn’t that he works hard. The danger is that he confuses someone else’s admiration for his own ambition. But this culture of comparison is not just a social habit, it is measurable. Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill have found that socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others expect you to be perfect, has significantly increased among young people over time. In other words, it’s not simply that we want to succeed. It’s that we increasingly believe success is demanded of us.

When success is defined externally, the pressure never stabilizes. There is always another credential, another leadership role, another internship to secure before someone else does. Even achievement loses its satisfaction because it functions less as fulfillment and more as temporary relief. You don’t feel proud; you feel safe at least until the next benchmark appears. Just long enough to update your résumé and convince yourself it finally looks impressive.

Badu Smart is a member of the class of 2029 and can be reached at bsmart@wesleyan.edu.