Arthur C. Brooks explains how children who receive love only after exceptional achievement develop a success addiction. When a kid's brain wires achievement to affection, dopamine spikes from winning feel like a drug. The result: adults working 80-hour weeks, terrified of failure, trapped in jobs they no longer love.
Super strivers are deeply afraid of failure, and they're deeply addicted to winning. And it usually starts when they're kids. They only really get attention and affection from their parents when they do extraordinary things, like all A's on the report card, like you made the baseball team, first chair in the orchestra. And their little brains wire in this period of unbelievably high synaptic plasticity, which you're— when you're a kid. Yeah. That love is earned. Love is earned from the people who matter the most. Your love is earned. And so that gets into this whole, like, the idea of you're not a human being, you're a human doing. This leads, if they're very gifted, into this success addiction where probably they get more dopamine from doing something that's extraordinary and getting the rewards, getting that sense of being admired, that sense of affirmation from people, just like other people do when they use drugs and alcohol or certain rewarding behaviors. And that becomes pathological. That turns into success addiction, a secondary manifestation of which is workaholism. So when I'm meeting somebody my own age, I'm in my early 60s, I meet somebody my age, they're like, I can't stop. I can't stop. I work 80 hours a week, and my employees, they don't love me. They're afraid of me. And I'm alienating my family. My wife and I are roommates. I have a cordial relationship with my children, and I don't even love my job, but I can't stop. It's classic workaholic behavior. I dig into the success addiction that's behind that, the self-objectification, the fear of failure that comes along. And there's almost always a kind of insanity behind that. There's a craziness, the sort of same kind of pathology as I would see with somebody who abuses drugs or alcohol.
