Are High-Fliers Wrecked by Their Success?

Rat race. Lonely at the top. Deal with the devil. Gain the world and lose your soul. Across many cultures and time periods phrases like these suggest a pervasive belief that success exacts a heavy toll. Depictions of the ruination that accompany worldly success are prominent in literature—think Jay Gatsby and Lady Macbeth. Also in film—"Citizen" Kane and Michael Corleone. Sigmund Freud coined a phrase to describe this phenomenon: "wrecked by success."

Despite the commonality of portrayals of extreme achievement being accompanied by extreme distress, it remains a bit of folk wisdom that has never been subject to scientific study. This isn't surprising—it's hard to find even a few extremely successful people, let alone a large enough number of them to produce scientifically valid results. Luckily, we had access to a large group of people who, according to previous research, grew up to be exceptionally successful in their careers. They were participants in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth—people who scored very high on the SAT when they were only 12 or 13 and have been followed by researchers ever since. Now in their 40s and 50s, they were at or nearing the peak of their careers when we realized that this group was ideal for asking whether very successful people are wrecked by their success. With data from 1,826 participants, we sought to answer that question.

Defining success is tricky. For the sake of simplicity and comparability across careers we decided to focus on participants' incomes. The participants' incomes were already much higher than the American average, so to ensure we were truly capturing the very highest achievers in their careers we defined those with incomes in the top 25% of the group as "exceptionally successful" and the remaining 75% as "less successful." Then, we compared the exceptionally successful and less successful groups on a host of quality-of-life outcomes—from mental and physical health to life and relationship satisfaction.

The findings were unequivocal: The exceptionally successful participants were not "wrecked by success" based on their responses to the dozens of questions they answered. Not only were exceptionally successful participants not less physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy than less successful participants, they were usually healthier than the less successful participants—the exact opposite of what might have been predicted by Freud and countless writers, artists, historians, and musicians across thousands of years and many different cultures!

We were surprised that our results contradicted such well-established folk wisdom and decided to see if we could repeat our findings in a different group. Our second study looked at 714 participants who attended top science, technology, engineering, or math graduate programs in the early 1990s and had been followed over the ensuing decades. Like the participants featured in our first study, we knew from prior research that this sample was comprised of many individuals who were highly successful in their careers. As before, we divided the participants into exceptionally successful and less successful groups, then looked for potential differences in their physical, emotional, and mental health. And, as before, exceptionally successful participants in our second study were not wrecked by success. Instead, the pattern was again clear: Very successful members of the group were at least as physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy as less successful members—and typically healthier. Yet again, our findings repudiated folk wisdom and Sigmund Freud.

What do our results mean? They mean that great success in people's careers may not be so closely tied to ruination in terms of their health and personal lives as conventional wisdom might suggest. Does this mean that everyone who is highly successful in their career is also happy, healthy, and wise? Not at all. Indeed, our groups were majority White and born and lived in the United States, so we need to see how generalizable our results are to members of different cultural and ethnic groups both in the United States and in other countries. And there is also more to success than money. But our results do offer at least preliminary evidence that success in the wider world does not inevitably exact a heavy toll, as might be expected based on frequent depictions of melancholy sovereigns, lonely executives, and tortured artists.

For Further Reading

Freud, S. (1957). Some character types met with in psychoanalytic work. In J. Strachey (Ed. &
Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 309–333). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1916)

Kell, H. J., McCabe, K. O., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2022). Wrecked by success? Not to
worry. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(5), 1291-1321. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211055637

Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2006). Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth after 35 years: Uncovering antecedents for the development of math-science expertise. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(4), 316-345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00019.x

Harrison J. Kell is a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Education and Career Development in the Research and Development division of ETS. His research focuses on psychological individual differences and their relationship with performance across the lifespan.