I’m glad I’m not and never have been an overachiever. Every one of them I’ve met has seemed miserable or has appeared to be compensating for some great deficit in personality or their life in general.

Don’t get me wrong – I am definitely ambitious. You don’t get to be CTO of anything by lack of ambition. I’m perfectly content, though, to rest on my laurels, to sit a round out, to not think about the next victory, to be lazy. Indolence is something I enjoy and partake in as often as I can.

You don’t need to be an overachiever to be successful. But you do need to be one if you care about other people perceiving you as a success, and I don’t care about that comparatively much at all. Overachievers are those who seem to need that constant validation that implies some huge hole somewhere.