Can we solve an urgent need for constant productivity?
Author tries to get to the bottom of her own ‘achiever fever’
Claire Booth’s debut book is perfectly timed for January, the start of the commitment-to-change season.
Instead of the typical New Year’s resolution targeting exercise, weight or healthy living, Booth aims to fix a problem that was her personal affliction for years and is evidently quite common within the entrepreneurial demographic.
Booth says formerly, she was a sleep-deprived wreck, a habitual planner, list-maker and worrier who was anxious, preoccupied, competitive, infected “with an unrelenting need to strive, improve and grow,” and tormented by an inner voice that routinely criticized her for failing, not trying hard enough, or going nowhere.
She finally woke at age 40 to the fact that additional hours at the office and longer to-do lists were not effective solutions to her daily misery and eyes dry from insomnia. Curing “achiever fever,” as the business owner and UBC lecturer named the condition, required far more than prescription pills and a tropical vacation.
Applying the market research methodology of her job to herself — a “mesearch project” — Booth began exploring the roots of her urgent need for constant productivity. Her book, the end result of the process, is a lively and candid account of successes and setbacks, missteps and happy accidents.
For fellow sufferers of this fever (she also calls them “high achievers” but appears to mean “people operating businesses”), her four-year project report features a concluding chapter titled “Practice” that surveys the assorted techniques Booth found to work best at transforming her from someone who thought about work 95 per cent of the time to someone with greater balance.
Her journey begins with a fortuitous meeting with a climbing coach and takes several unplanned turns. She studies, interviews fellow high achievers, and ultimately winds up — despite deepseated skepticism — embracing Buddhist ideas and, in intermittent bouts, meditation.
Between some yoga classes (comically rendered) and a silent retreat, Booth explores various theories, including behavioural economics, ethnography and cognitive bias. After initial reluctance, she visits self-help shelves and synthesizes a program of ideas adapted from spiritual thinkers Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie.
Her book does stumble on a couple of key points. When Booth claims “the cause of my unhappiness was me,” she totally overlooks an entrenched culture that both encourages and rewards long office hours and fierce dedication to work. Clearly, any work environment that values or expects 24/7 devotion plays an integral part in nurturing this fever. It’s a factor, if not a cause.
Further, Booth’s palpable excitement at increased revenues after she has finished her “mesearch” and the “many, many times” when rage, worry, impatience, insomnia and indigestion return raise the question about her “cure,” since by her own account, achiever fever is a manageable chronic condition for which there appears to be no cure.
If you stay in business, that is.