The Silent Epidemic Among High Achievers

Forgetting how to be human

Photo by My Profit Tutor on Unsplash

The conference room buzzed with that particular energy you only find when high achievers gather. Designer coffee cups cluttered the tables.
Phones lit up with notifications that no one dared ignore.

I stood at the front, watching them settle in. CEOs, executive directors, department heads, entrepreneurs. Each one had fought through packed calendars to be here.

“Before we begin,” I said, “I’d like everyone to pull out your to-do list. The real one. The one that keeps you up at night.”

The sound of papers rustling and phones unlocking filled the room. Some laughed nervously. Others sighed, that deep, bone-tired kind of sigh that speaks volumes.

“Now count how many items are on it.”

A woman in the third row started flipping pages. And kept flipping. Her neighbor peeked over, eyebrows raised. Soon the room filled with the soft chorus of comparison, murmurs, half-smiles, shared disbelief.

“Who has more than twenty items?” Nearly every hand shot up.
“Thirty?” Still up.
“Forty?” Most stayed raised.
“Fifty?”

That’s when I saw her. A leader from a prominent nonprofit, hand still high while others began to lower theirs. Pride flickered across her face, quickly followed by something that looked a lot like shame.

“Sixty?” I asked.

Her hand stayed up. Alone now.
“Sixty-five,” she said quietly. “Sixty-five pages of things to do.”

The room fell silent. Not the comfortable silence of reflection. The kind that feels like a held breath. The kind that says: Oh God, me too.

I let the moment hang there before asking my next question.

“Now, look through your list again. Does anyone have an item that says, ‘Appreciate myself’ or ‘Appreciate others’?”

Two hundred and fifty people scrolled, flipped, and frowned.
Not a single hand went up.

Not one.

The Great Transformation We Never Noticed

Somewhere between childhood and leadership, we transformed.
We went from human beings to human doings. The shift was so gradual and so rewarded that we never noticed when the metamorphosis was complete.

I thought of the woman with sixty-five items. I don’t know her story, but I know stories like hers because I’ve lived them.

During my years at General Motors, I juggled projects across 35 countries. I led cross-functional teams, delivered global systems, secured millions in funding. My calendar was a Tetris game of overlapping meetings. My inbox was a hydra: answer two emails, four more appeared.

And I was good at it. That’s the insidious part. We’re rewarded for doing. Promotions, bonuses, recognition, they all come from checking boxes, not from pausing to breathe.

No one ever got a performance review that said:
“You didn’t appreciate yourself enough this quarter.”

When I transitioned to education and non profit sector, I brought that same energy. I generated millions in funding. Grew enrollment. Expanded our faculty. Opened a new campus.

The achievements piled up like gold stars on a cosmic report card.

But here’s what wasn’t on any of my lists: noticing the morning light in the classroom. Recognizing the courage of a new teacher trying something bold. Appreciating my own evolution as a leader.

These things didn’t have deadlines or deliverables. They couldn’t be measured in spreadsheets. They didn’t impress at board meetings.

And so they disappeared.

The Drowning We Call Success

That woman with sixty-five pages of items was drowning.
But she was drowning in expensive clothes, in a corner office, with a title that commanded respect. So nobody threw her a lifeline. Instead, we handed her another project and told her what a rock star she was.

We’ve built a culture where busyness equals worth.
Where exhaustion is a badge of honor.
Where saying “I don’t have time” is code for “I’m important.”

I’ve sat in meetings where leaders compare calendars like battle scars.
“I had fourteen meetings yesterday.”
“Oh yeah? I had sixteen.”

It’s a strange contest where the prize is less time with your family, more stress, and a body quietly breaking down from chronic cortisol overload.

Our nervous systems were not built for perpetual urgency.
The brain confuses busy with safe. Every unchecked email and looming deadline triggers the same neural circuitry that once warned our ancestors about predators. The result is that we are living in a state of productive panic.

And yet, we keep rewarding it.

During my consulting work with school administrators, I often begin with this question:
“When was the last time you appreciated yourself for what you’ve already accomplished?”

The silence that follows is always longer than it should be.

What We Lost in Translation

Children understand something we’ve forgotten.
Watch a toddler. They don’t have to-do lists. They have moments. They appreciate the texture of sand, the taste of strawberries, the sound of their own laughter.

They are beings who occasionally do things, not doings who occasionally remember to be.

Maria Montessori understood this truth. Her philosophy was built around observation, curiosity, and respect for the natural rhythm of growth. Children need space to simply be.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I worked in an environment built on that wisdom while so often failing to apply it to myself.

We teach children to develop the whole person: intellectual, emotional, physical, social. Yet as adults, we shrink ourselves down to one dimension, productive.

We become characters in our own lives defined solely by output.

The Courage to Stop

After that workshop, the woman with sixty-five pages of items approached me. Her eyes were red-rimmed, maybe from tears, maybe from fatigue.

“I don’t know how to stop,” she said.

I understood.
Because stopping feels like failure when your entire identity is wrapped around doing. It feels irresponsible. Selfish. Weak.

But here’s what I’ve learned.
Appreciation isn’t a luxury item that goes at the bottom of your list. It’s the foundation that makes every other item sustainable.

When I started adding “Appreciate myself” and “Appreciate others” to my actual to-do list, not as afterthoughts but as non-negotiables, everything changed.

Not overnight. Not dramatically. But gradually, my doing became rooted in being.

I noticed when a team member went above and beyond and told them.
I acknowledged my own courage when I took risks.
I created space for gratitude alongside goals.

And here’s the irony. I didn’t become less effective.
I became more effective.

Appreciation is fuel. It sustains motivation. It restores coherence between heart and brain. It reminds us why we’re doing all this doing in the first place.

Human Beings, Finally

We’ve spent decades optimizing ourselves as machines, more efficient, more productive, more output per unit of input. But we’re not machines.

We are human beings who need connection, recognition, rest, and yes, appreciation.

The path back to being doesn’t require abandoning doing. It requires integration. It means adding two small but radical lines to that endless list:

Appreciate yourself.
Appreciate others.

Start there.
Not someday when the list is shorter, it won’t be.
Not after the next milestone, there will always be another.

Start now. Before you check off item number sixty-six on your to do list.

Because the day 250 leaders forgot they were human isn’t a story about them.
It’s a story about all of us.

Maybe it’s time we all flipped the page and wrote a new kind of list, one that begins not with doing, but with being.

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