London, May 2026. An evening cocktail in Westminster, for the Harvard Law School Association of Europe reunion. I’m standing with four colleagues, drinks in hand, and I say: “You know, sometimes it’s hard to be surrounded by such great professionals. It raises the bar for everyone.”
One of them looks at me.
“You know what? It always comes back to that HBR article.”
“The one about the insecure overachievers?” I say.
“Exactly. Because that’s what we are. Insecure overachievers.”
The phrase isn’t ours. It comes from research by Laura Empson into elite professional firms: people who are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, while at the same time quietly convinced they are not good enough.
Look at our LinkedIn profiles. Harvard, Oxford, Cravath, BCG. Big names, big firms, big universities. Scroll down and the headlines pile up: ex-Meta, ex-McKinsey, ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-this, ex-that.
At first, you think it’s about catching attention. But often it is about something quieter. It is a way of saying: I belong here. I deserve to be in this room. I have the credentials to prove it.
A big consulting group, a big law firm, a big university, a big company. According to that article what we are really chasing is external appreciation, external validation, something outside ourselves to tell us we are enough.
*
Boston, August 2016. Fulbright Seminar before the start of the academic year.
All of us heading to the various schools were asked to take the Gallup Signature Traits assessment (that later became CliftonStrengths). Each of us came out with five signature traits.
My traits: Strategic, Belief, Activator, Restorative, Responsibility. Basically, I’m a natural healer, wired to take responsibility for a better world. Quite accurate.
Why am I writing this? Because one of the traits was Achiever. And I still remember when a friend of mine, who later became my peer at HLS, shouted across the room, pretty disappointed by his results. Achiever was not among them, and he badly wanted it to be. For him, Achiever was a badge of honor.
*
Back to the reunion. Two lines from two speeches stayed with me.
“We are the ones who go with the plan, not the mood.” That was one speaker.
“We are the ones who strive for excellence, not perfection.” That was another.
And I found myself wondering: is this insecure overachievement?
I’ve asked myself many times whether I belong to either category. Or both. The insecure one. The overachiever one.
I like to tell myself the destiny version of the story. I went to Harvard chasing a dream. I walked my first Camino de Santiago chasing a dream. I came back to Harvard as a visiting researcher chasing a dream. So I’m a dream-oriented guy. But the honest version is that maybe my dreams are shaped by my own restlessness, and by the path I happened to walk.
So I don’t know. What I do know is this: for me, it is never a 5K. It is always the marathon. And I’ve never done a triathlon, but I know that one day I’ll do an Ironman. Never the small club. Always the stadium.
So yes, the risk is real.
But at some point, I stopped asking myself the question. Because the only thing that matters is: who cares?
The real question was never whether we’re insecure, or whether we’re overachievers.
It’s what we do with the inner drive we carry.
The drive that keeps us working long hours at the firm even when our bodies and minds are telling us to stop. The drive that has us fixing a slide at 2 a.m., just because very good is not enough. The drive that makes us honor every deadline and every plan, sometimes at the cost of our health, sometimes at the cost of knowing when to walk away.
So the core of it may have little to do with who we are, and everything to do with what we build with that drive.
Did we make something good? Did we make the lives of the people around us better? Did we leave the world in better shape?
Because the point may be just one: to make sure that, while we are running, building, fixing, proving, striving, we are not only feeding the wound. We are also leaving something better behind.
