Let’s take another look at the Adult Underachiever and what all this means.

(I am putting together a formal series on this, and if you want to know more about that publication, just drop me a note.)

The first thing is a big question:

What is a Adult Underachiever?

There are lots of people who think that they are underachievers but aren’t. What they really are is folks who have chosen a different lifepath than the one that is accepted as the best way to live in our society. (I’m in America, but probably still true in Australia and the UK. It’s less true in Europe. If you’re somewhere else, you’ll have to figure out if this is relevant for you.)

Maybe an example will help.

Last July, Maye Rain lamented her status as an underachiever (”Shoot Me, I’m an UnderAchiever!“). I don’t know her in any way and this is entirely based on the information that she has made public on her blog.

She makes it clear that she chooses her life:

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Let’s face facts: RO means that a lot of people (1) aren’t as “smart” as they think they are, and (2) the system in which they have succeeded is built on sand. And that’s a big reason why RO doesn’t succeed. When people read about work levels and RO, especially the CPA and Elliott Jaques’s & Kathryn Cason’s Human Capability, the implications for their own lives is too severe to even contemplate.

Need an example?

How Brian Dive, who lets the cat out of the bag in his The Healthy Organization: A Revolutionary Approach to People & Management:

The subjective interviewing approach of Jaques and Cason was not readily transferable to hundreds of executives charged with assessing their subordinates’ potential. It smacked a little of ‘playing god’ [sic]. Furthermore the Jaques, Cason and [Gillian] Stamp approach was rooted into the limited assessment of strata according only to time span of discretion.

As a final check, a number of my staff and I were subjected to this interviewing methodology. We found it unconvincing. [170]

Need a translation? How about “We didn’t like the results because it meant I was never going to be CEO of the company and I wasn’t a level above most of my direct reports.”
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