In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about how we can view everything we do as a success of some kind and view everything we stop doing as some level of failure, and I proposed that there are often activities that we don’t care much to succeed at and wouldn’t mind failing at: things we view as unfulfilling or wasteful. That was the easy case: where we can say, “Succeeding at X is not important at all when I really think about it, and I’d much rather commit more time to Y.” In this post, I want to write out some thoughts about the tougher situation in which we’ve already cut back on most of our wasteful activities and yet still feel like we’re spread too thin.

The Hard Case

I definitely had weeks and months in college where I would spend almost no time on useless activities but still felt like I was falling short of what I wanted to accomplish. I might have spent time on my studies and every one of my hobbies and extracurriculars, but I was giving inadequate effort to most of them, which made me feel disappointed in myself. 

Now let me stop for a minute and talk about feeling disappointed. Disappointment, like every other feeling or emotion, comes from one of two different places: either we are feeling it because of how we naturally relate to the events happening around us, or we feel it sympathetically from the people around us. There’s nothing wrong with feeling something sympathetically: what’s a celebration, if not a group of people sharing and feeding off of each other’s happiness? But sometimes it’s important to recognize that what we’re feeling is simply what the people around us are feeling. 

Let’s say you’re committing all of your time to some set of activities, and you feel like you’re spread too thin. Yet if you cut back in this or that activity, you’ll feel disappointed in yourself. Why? Is it because you’d be giving up something that’s important to you, or is it because you’d have to feel the disappointment of someone else? I am suggesting that the former case is usually more important.

As an example, I used to play in a jazz band in college, and I didn’t have time to practice on my own very often. I enjoyed our weekly practices because I liked playing jazz music and honing that skill, but I didn’t like it enough to overrule the other things I was doing with my time during the rest of the week. My band instructor was a serious jazz musician, and he thought it was perfectly normal for each of us to practice our instruments for, at the very minimum, an hour every single day. I couldn’t manage that kind of commitment, so I didn’t. At first it bothered me that I wasn’t meeting my instructor’s expectations, but I realized that even after weeks of this, I still wasn’t making any changes to my schedule, which meant that practicing every day was apparently not as important to me as it was to my instructor. So I thought, “If I’m happy with what I do with the rest of my week and I’m not going to start practicing more than I already am, why should I feel bad about it?”

If, at that point, my instructor had decided to replace me with a drummer who was willing to practice more, that would have been totally fair, and it would have been inconsistent of me to think otherwise. But he didn’t replace me, nothing tragic ever came of my lack of practicing, I continued spending my time on other enriching things, and I stopped feeling guilty about it. I gave jazz drumming exactly the share of my life that I wanted it to have. By accepting my failure to live up to someone else’s expectations, I was able to continue succeeding at my own.

Here’s a line you may have heard before: People want the most that they can get out of you –your time, talents, and energy. But, if you stick with your own goals and offer exactly what you can afford to offer and do so unapologetically, you’ll often find that people will settle for less.

So, to summarize my point: when you feel like you’re overcommitted, and cutting back in any area will leave you feeling even more disappointed in yourself, pick out those areas in which your disappointment comes from the opinions of others rather than yourself. Recognize that your feelings can be independent of theirs, and set your priorities accordingly. Let your sympathetic feelings of disappointment be answered by the truth of the situation: Your time and energy are limited, and doing what you truly believe you should do necessitates laying off some of the things that other people think you should do.

But what if I’ve already made those changes, and I’m still overcommitted to everything and have a genuine, unfulfilled passion for all of it?

You are the platonic form of a type-A personality, and I’m going to have to write another article for you, you tragic overachiever.

–pdf