What do you want to be when you grow up?” This is one of the first questions we ask kids, often before they’ve even learned how to tie their shoes. A kid shows a serious interest in building with blocks or Legos, and everyone cries, “Architect!” The same goes for the kids who love gardening, helping in the kitchen, and doctoring the family pets. While these propensities might indicate a true passion, it behooves no one to try pigeonholing a career before kindergarten. In fact, it behooves no one to pigeonhole a career ever.
We also expect first-year college students to declare a major. While it’s wise to recognize strengths and enhance them through education, it’s risky to become so focused on a destination that we end up moving through life on autopilot. After trudging through a series of steps we believe will lead to fulfillment, we arrive at the predetermined destination exhausted and wondering if we’ve taken a wrong turn or completely blown by our exit.
Megan Hellerer, the author of Directional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life, had checked all her boxes and “done everything right,” but she was miserable. Hellerer graduated from Stanford at the top of her class with a 3.9 GPA and then landed a job at Google, where she successfully worked her way up the corporate ladder. She was half of a power couple, traveled business class, lived in a trendy West Village apartment, and wore a to-die-for wardrobe. Hellerer thought these achievements would make her happy, but instead, she describes her state of discontentment as not only miserable but “panic attacks and SSRI miserable.”
Hellerer had started normalizing 15 minutes of anxiety-fueled crying in the shower every morning, and by normalizing I mean she set her alarm early to allow for this critical part of her day. She started having panic attacks at parties, on street corners, and in the aisles of CVS, and the first chapter of Directional Living opens with a poignant scene of her melting down on the bathroom floor at Google’s New York office, where she’s simultaneously giving herself a pep talk to pull it together and keep going while also crying out between sobs.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“How did I get here?”
“I’m sorry…”
Hellerer didn’t know exactly what she was sorry for or to whom she was apologizing, but like many people, Hellerer had worked so hard to get where she was and it was hard to admit her life wasn’t what she thought it would be. It was even harder to accept that she had to make some changes.
Okay, spoiler alert: Hellerer quit her job and created a new approach to success and achievement, which she calls directional living. After quitting her job and selling her Google stock (yes, bold), Hellerer gave herself six months on an “anti-career plan” to “test and learn” various things in what she referred to as a “Not-That Experiment.” Desperate for a roadmap out of the stuck spot she’d found herself in, Hellerer looked for clues about what to do next.
During that time, Hellerer went to museums and concerts, took cooking and photography classes, worked with a naturopath, and stopped drinking. She absorbed the teachings of psychologists, sociologists, academics, and spiritual leaders. She got a therapist. She tried The Artist’s Way. She meditated. She gutted her closet. All of it helped a little, but none of it moved the needle enough.
Hellerer discovered that the missing link had been within reach all along—she had to tell the truth. Letting go of pretending everything is okay is both terrifying and liberating, but once you do, it can be almost impossible to muster up the strength to continue the charade. Once Hellerer started telling the truth about her burnout, other people shared their unfulfilling life experiences, and she discovered an enormous population of brilliant, accomplished people who were secretly miserable.
Because so many people feel this way, Hellerer assumed there must be a term for it, but after coming up empty, she coined her own and the concept of the Underfulfilled Overachiever was born.
What is an Underfulfilled Overachiever?
Underfulfilled Overachiever (UFOA) (n.):
1. A constant striver who is living a great-on-paper life, has checked all the boxes, done all the “right” things, and amassed achievements and external success, yet still feels secretly dissatisfied, unfulfilled, and increasingly disconnected from their work, life, and self.
2. Someone who suffers from the foundational belief that achievement is the path to lasting fulfillment.
Hellerer knew she was a UFOA, but it wasn’t until she really started talking about the concept that she realized how common it is. One thing led to another, and she took a coaching course. When Hellerer started taking on clients for practice sessions and hearing more UFOA stories, she began comprehending the pervasiveness of the problem. Deeply rooted systems had created generations of UFOAs. They were everywhere, and they were lost. Legions of people asked vital questions like:
“What are we doing with our lives?”
“How the hell do we stop doing it?”
“What do we do instead?”
These may seem like esoteric, unanswerable questions, but they’re not. Hellerer has met UFOAs from all around the world in both rural and metropolitan areas. Some are just out of college, and others are on their third or fourth career. Some are legacy Ivy Leaguers; some haven’t attended college. They are professors, authors, chefs, surgeons, bankers, and artists. “We’ve all been told that achievement is the path to fulfillment, but work isn’t working,” Hellerer says.
You Were Taught a Lie
Hellerer has passed the point of mincing words and just comes right out and says it—”You were taught a lie.” Because UFOAs see success as an organizing principle and believe that working nights and weekends will earn them badges of honor, they believe the lie. Destinational living creates the mindset that leads people somewhere, though not necessarily to happiness or to a so-called “perfect life.” In many cases, it leads to a breakdown on a bathroom floor. (Why is it always a bathroom floor?)
Hellerer explains that this way of thinking is outdated. It doesn’t work in our current world, and she doubts it ever really worked. It can be hard to accept that you may have a life that looks great on paper and still not feel like you’re living your life, but living a life that doesn’t feel authentic to you will never be fulfilling.
While many people relate to this, not everyone does, and thankfully, there are droves of people who feel perfectly satisfied and fulfilled. If this is you, congratulations. But if you’re unsure and need clarification on whether or not you’re a UFOA, there’s a quiz on Meganhellerer.com to help determine if you’re already living directionally or if you need a roadmap to help orient your compass.
Where Am I Actually Going?
Hellerer’s website borrows a quote from E. L. Doctorow on writing. Directional Living is like “driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Hellerer uses this quote to illustrate what she calls the big direction. For some people, a big direction might feel perilously close to a destination, but the nuance is between orienting ourselves toward something versus being attached to an outcome. “It’s a beacon versus a goal,” Hellerer says.
Hellerer says the headlights represent our curiosity. “We want to follow our curiosity and our interests,” she says, taking the analogy further to say that if we’re on a road trip between New York and Los Angeles, we can get started on the road without knowing the exact destination.
“The big direction would be the West Coast, but we don’t need to know the address in L. A. and we also don’t need to know how we’re getting there,” Hellerer explains. “But it would be useful to know we’re going west versus north or south.” At the beginning stage, we just need enough structure so that we’re not driving around the country in circles wondering why we’re not getting anywhere. Hellerer adds that she’s a big fan of aimless wandering if that’s what someone needs. “Absolutely wander until you figure out the big direction.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of Hellerer’s most famous coaching clients. “Her big direction was public service. We didn’t need to know if it was running for office, community organizing, or some other iteration, but we did need to know that the big direction was public service versus hospitality, publishing, entrepreneurship, or public health,” Hellerer explains. “My big direction is coaching and writing, but now it’s also helping underfulfilled overachievers find fulfillment.”
The Road Map
Whether you already know your big direction or you’re still trying to figure it out, Hellerer outlines five actionable steps to help you get started on the path to directional living. The book goes into greater detail, but here’s a preview.
1. Break Up with the Achievement Lie
The achievement lie taught us that achievement is the path to fulfillment. If we just worked hard enough and made the “right” choices, it says, we would be successful and therefore live happy and secure lives. But, as most of us learned the hard way, it just doesn’t work like that. Achievement does not inherently lead to fulfillment.
2. Direction, Not Destination
Most of us were taught to focus on the destination—the outcome—instead of the direction. But, this will rarely, if ever, lead to fulfillment, even if we achieve everything we set out to achieve.
To create a truly fulfilling life, we want to focus on the direction we’re moving in instead of the predetermined destination we think we want. Ask, “Is this directionally right?” instead of “where will this get me?”
3. Aligned Ambition, Not Blind Ambition
Ambition is not the problem. Ambition, which is really just desire to have an impact and make a contribution, is one of the greatest strengths of UFOAs.
Aligned ambition is inner-directed (vs. externally dictated) ambition, that incorporates your own personal authentic preferences, talents, joys, curiosities, and experiences to create a career and a life that is well-suited to you.
4. Forget Your “Purpose;” Follow Your Curiosity
Many of us get stuck thinking we have to “find our purpose” before we start living it. But, in reality, we find our purpose by living into it.
Instead, we want to follow our curiosity. Our curiosity is the best proxy we have for purpose. It’s not a distraction; it’s a clue to the most aligned and fulfilling path forward.
5. Launch and Iterate
Instead of picking our destination and reverse-engineering our path, we want to approach our lives with an experimental mindset, where we are testing and learning and launching and iterating, acquiring information and data and refining as we go. Think of it like the scientific method—but for life!
Hellerer Walks the talk
A key concept of directional living is a willingness to pivot, even when it means doing things you never would’ve expected or doing things you might’ve said you’d never do. Hellerer walks this talk.
Despite getting caught in the grind, Hellerer never intended to move out of New York City, where she was born and raised, but she rented a cabin in Woodstock to finish working on her manuscript in 2021 and loved it. The following year, Hellerer and her husband rented a house in Hurley for the summer, and something clicked—they didn’t want to leave.
It seemed impossible—Hellerer’s husband is a professor at NYU—but the thought persisted. The owner of the home they rented offered them six more months to try out living upstate full-time—which coincided with Hellerer being pregnant with their first child—and they realized that living in the Hudson Valley was the right next move for them. They found a more permanent home in Tivoli, where they still live.
Megan Hellerer will be at speaking at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck on November 14 at 6pm about her book and her philosophy for creating a life of maximum fulfillment and purpose.
This article appears in November 2024.
