Breaking My Achievement Loop

I once had a “someday” dream of moving to Nice, France. It wasn’t a serious plan – just something I would casually mention from time to time: someday, I would move there.

At the time, I thought the Nice dream was about a place. I imagined slower mornings, time spent outside, and a life that felt less consumed by work.

Looking back, though, I can see that Nice was never really about Nice. Instead, Nice was about wanting a different pace of life, more space to think, room for hobbies and curiosity, and permission to live differently than I had been living.

The South of France was a symbol for a way of living I thought I could only find somewhere else, someday.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this “someday” thinking was an early signal of something I couldn’t yet see clearly: I had begun questioning whether the way I was working still fit the person I was becoming, and whether the definition of success I had inherited was still the one I wanted to pursue.

For years, my relationship with work felt completely normal. For an academic, my hours were fairly reasonable. I was efficient with my time, which allowed me to accomplish a lot, by academic standards. But what I didn’t notice was how consistently my thinking stayed attached to work.

There was always another paper, another project, or another opportunity. Not necessarily because I felt pressured to produce those things, but because that momentum had just become part of how I operated.

One accomplishment naturally led into the next. One paper led to the next project. One project led to the next opportunity. One opportunity led to the next expectation.

When you are inside that cycle – an achievement loop, essentially – it doesn’t necessarily feel like a problem. In many ways, it feels like success. And for a long time, it worked for me – until it no longer did.

Sometimes achievement loops culminate in burnout that leaves us feeling stuck or lacking enthusiasm for our work. This, in turn, can prompt us to start asking questions about how we want to work.

The role of pauses

As academics, we have more opportunities for time away than many other professions. We have breaks between fall and spring semester. We have summers. Every so often, we have sabbaticals.

Back when I was deep inside my achievement loop, I took normal pauses (or breaks) in my work. I’d go on vacation, and I’d even put an out-of-office email reply up every now and then. At the time, these pauses didn’t feel significant. They just felt like normal parts of academic life.

At some point, though, I started to lean into breaks. Periodically keeping my laptop shut helped a lot, but even when I kept working over winter or summer breaks, I started to let my mind wander more – just giving myself permission to be curious.

Looking back, I can see that this openness allowed me to create enough space where I began to notice things I couldn’t see when I was constantly moving from one goal or task to the next. Travel, especially slow travel, opened my mind to different ways of living.

Over time, I became curious about what an academic life might look like where work – and a particular version of it – was not always at the center.

I started noticing not only how I was working, but how my academic work had become the primary lens through which I saw my self-worth. And I wasn’t sure I wanted that anymore.

Redefining success

For a long time, success in work had a fairly clear shape to me. This was especially true once I began a career in academia: more research, more progress, more milestones. The structure of academic life on the tenure-track makes that view of success feel self-evident at times.

That idea of success worked for me for a long time. It gave me purpose and direction, and it made progress feel tangible. But once I started to recognize the loop I had been in for years, I started to notice something else.

My definition of success in work had become incredibly narrow.

With such a narrow view of success, there wasn’t much room anything else in my work. Things like pursuing curiosity without a guaranteed output, or thinking about how to utilize my knowledge for impact beyond traditional measures.

That realization didn’t lead to an outright rejection of my work. I still care about traditional measures of success in my work. But I care about them in a different way than I did before.

Today, I’m actively choosing what success means to me – and recognizing it can mean different things to different people, at different career points – rather than inheriting a definition from the system around me.

Redefining success in work is risky. As an academic, if I no longer fully subscribe to “more,” I might leave behind opportunities for awards or other milestones. But what I’ll receive in return – more time to pursue work with deeper (and varied) impact, more time for hobbies and non-work interests, and more time to mentor others because I genuinely want to – has far greater meaning to me at this point in my life.

Alongside this, there was something less obvious I had to come to terms with. The achievement loop I was in for years created structure. It meant that even if I didn’t know exactly what I’d be working on in a few years, I could trust that something would follow from what I was doing now. Because it always did. There was a built-in continuity to it – a sense that the next thing would always emerge from the current thing.

Stepping out of that pattern meant letting go of that predictability. Not just in a practical sense of not knowing what comes next, but also in a deeper sense of no longer having a default structure to define direction.

It was up to me whether that realization felt like a loss or relief. For me, after more than a decade of looping through a pretty similar routine over and over again, it felt like relief.

Success in work can mean outputs, awards, promotions, and titles. But success can also include space, rest, and slowing down enough to notice what you actually want at this particular point in time.

For me, my new view of success means choosing to live and work in a way that isn’t organized around the next assumed achievement. Not because those achievements don’t matter, but because they’re so clearly not the only things that matter.