The Art of Selective Underachievement

Less is more.

When I was 10, I wanted to be an astronaut, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and to win a Nobel Prize.

I won’t lie — if any of those things were to happen to me today, I’d be pretty chuffed (except maybe the Premiership — seems like a bad time to be at the helm of this particular ship, to be honest).

But, as often happens when one grows up, my goalposts have shifted. I’m now 21, and I don’t know what I want to do, quite frankly.

I mean, I’ve got a shortlist. Traveling. Working in a job I will (hopefully) love. Staying active and overcoming physical challenges like marathons or mountains. Spending time with people that I (hopefully) enjoy spending time with. Those sorts of things feature highly.

So far, though, I’ve spent my entire life in education. Though I’ve been actively involved (obviously) in every decision I’ve made, I nevertheless feel as though a life spent in education is little other than a life spent being educated.

Grammatically speaking, it’s a life spent not in the active mood, but in the passive.

And not only have I spent my life as a student — I’ve spent my life really going for it as a student. I’ve always lusted after the best exam results, the hardest courses, and the best universities. And, I have to say, looking back, I’m pleased about how I’ve done, on the whole. I have few regrets (other than the time spent in perfectionist overdrive).

What I’m learning, though, is this: there is an art to selective underachievement.

You (and I) don’t need to do everything, be everything, know everything.

That’s probably obvious to just about everyone — but knowing that is very different from living like it.

How many times have you caught yourself in the throes of the deep perfectionist overdrive, the kind that leads to a serious frustration every time you aren’t the best at something?

I’ve been in that place plenty of times — and, let me tell you, it really does suck the joy out of doing well at things, because good is constantly falsely conflated with best. You can never feel good if you haven’t been the best.

That’s where the art of selective underachievement comes in.

The Selective Underachiever does not, as some might think, perform poorly at something they can do perfectly well and which they should, by all rights, do perfectly well.

This is simply being lazy.

Rather, the Selective Underachiever does things at which they know they will undoubtedly be, in the grand scheme of things, pretty poor. The Selective Underachiever may also not do things they can do perfectly well if they would otherwise do them solely for the sake of being good at them.

It’s not just trying new things, or stepping outside of your comfort zone, or swimming against the current, or not following what you’ve always thought to be your preordained path through life.

It’s doing all of these things at once, in tandem, knowing that, no matter how hard you try, you will be comparatively crap at what you do choose to do, and you will not really ‘achieve’ anything (in the classic sense of the word).

I, for example, have entered a marathon in April of this year — about 14 weeks away now.

It’s going to really, really hurt.

Your first marathon, or so I hear, is completely mental, in both senses of the word: not only is it a crazy thing to do, but it’s also entirely in your head. You can have trained and trained and trained, done everything perfectly, hydrated yourself right during the race, and eaten well for 4 months leading up to it… and still, the last 6 miles will invariably be a pain like no other.

I won’t be setting records. I entered it, in part, because I want to underachieve, to run slowly, to ache, to hurt. I have zero standards — and I like that. It means I’m doing something worth doing because it’s all-new territory for me.

At the same time as I’m training for that marathon, I’m applying for jobs and figuring out what on Earth I want to do with my life for the next few years. Move abroad? Freelance? Settle down? Keep studying? (Unlikely, that one.)

The nature of the university I attend is such that there are plenty of very well-off individuals who are doubtless going to go into very well-paid jobs. They make no secret of that fact. For people like this, finance and consulting constitute not only their dream careers, but also their conversation starters, the common factor in their friendship circles, and, I hazard a guess, the stuff of which their dreams are made.

I (for the time being — I’m sure my twenty-nine-year-old self will disagree) couldn’t really care less about being a millionaire by the age of thirty.

I guess I could go that way: I could get a corporate job in a highly-paying field, battling it out with an army of similarly-qualified, starry-eyed recent graduates, working until my eyes fall out of my head, and retire early with a sports car, a mansion, and chronic fatigue.

But I won’t. Financially, relative to my peers, I will probably underachieve. That might be because I’ve taken a year or three out to see the world, or because I took a job that was entirely unrelated to my graduate status, or for one of a host of other reasons.

That’s because, for me, right now, careers are like marathons. I don’t want to do either for the sake of getting as far as I can as fast as I can. I don’t want to be burnt out 10 miles or 10 years down the road because I’ve got the most high-speed, high-flying, high-earning graduate job around.

As far as I can tell, life is about living well and having those experiences that are worth having with the people worth having experiences with.

It is emphatically not about seeing who can sprint the furthest on the corporate treadmill.

You see, the achievement is about what you value, and what you value does not have to be the same as what you think (or what you’re told) you should value.

I always thought I should value climbing the social ladder above all else — that’s why I wanted to be an astronaut, the Prime Minister, and a Nobel Prize winner. All three wishes would if they were to come true, see me at the very top of my game in some field or another.

What I have found that I actually value, though, is not academic attainment or political success — not really. Instead, it’s being fit. It’s exploring new places. It’s being able to run very slowly for a very long time. It’s making experiences happen. It’s cooking new, lovely, vegan food. It’s having time to do the things that I enjoy.

If I forget that in ten years’ time, and I’ve let my perfectionist alter ego dissuade me from being an emotionally healthy Selective Underachiever… then, please, remind me that I wrote this article.