The modern world is competitive, and the importance of being ‘the best’ is drilled into us from an early age. Parents, teachers and wider society emphasizes this to us pretty quickly: we are told that being the best and brightest through education will get us a good mark; this will get us into a prestigious university and a high-flying career, leading to a successful and happy life.
We understand that this experience of striving for grades at school is stressful, painstaking and can often be a little excessive. And whilst we accept that perhaps judging people at the age of 13 for their end of year exams may be a little premature, we can justify that this is part of a grander scheme of teaching individuals to strive for greater things. In practice, the outcome can be pretty mixed. It’s only in later in life that we realise that what we thought were extremely important things, such as exams are only marginally so.
We come to terms that there are things that we could have done with learning earlier through school, but accept this as a fault in the system. Unfortunately, what we do not realise is the negative effect this whole experiences causes. Constant striving for greater achievements is actually harmful: both for ourselves in our wellbeing and in our professional career.
Firstly, for those that did not ‘achieve’. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why giving people as young as twelve the message that they are a failure for getting a C in their science class is problematic. We learn from parents, teachers and peers that we are simply incapable in this domain, which is now a fact of life for us. It is no wonder why people grow up thinking they are unintelligent; after all, this is simply what they have been told throughout their schooling life.
But what about those who did achieve at school? Unfortunately a different set of unhelpful life narratives develop. High-achievers often define themselves by their higher grades at school, and get branded the brainy ones (or even more unhelpfully are told by aunts and uncles that they will be the next Prime Minister). This means that these high-achievers find they build their self worth by how they are ‘graded’ at school, which carries over into a sense that having a prestigious job title equates to success and doing well. They are also weighed down by the pressure put on them.
This comes crashing down when the realities of the job market hit, and suddenly these ‘high-achievers’ at school who learned to define themselves by their successes are not, by society’s standards, successful as they desperately try to find gainful employment. I’ve spoken to many people who get hit at this stage by a large bout of imposter syndrome – wondering whether everything up to this point was simply a fluke and now they are being found out.
And ironically, this unhealthy defining of ourselves by achievement is also extremely counterproductive in the modern world, as it instills a fear within us of being bad at any skill. And in a world where the world is ever-changing and new skills are needing to be learned every decade, we find ourselves populated with high-achieving and bright individuals paralysed at the idea they are not good enough and scared to be found out about it.
So whilst the solution to this issue is bringing young, bright intelligent people to learn new skills to equip them for an ever-changing future, this is an extremely difficult emotional journey. To do this, we will need to first un-learn many unhelpful life narratives that we have been taught about their own value as individuals being based upon what we are good at, rather than our inherent values and beliefs. We will then need to learn how it is okay to be bad at things, and be able to improve upon them through hard work and dedication.
This will not be an easy ride, but we owe it to explain these realities to those coming through the education system expecting big and bright things society has promised them, only to find an impossible job market.