School teaches us to get permission from an outside authority to know whether or not our work is good enough. In order for this to happen, committees in other states develop standards that all people at specific ages are expected to meet, complete with rubrics and corresponding numbers indicating a scale of achievement levels from lowest to highest that determine next steps for each student. Districts are allocated funds by how well (or not) their students perform to these standards.
Forget for a moment whether or not these standards have anything to do with the world going on outside the school’s walls. What’s become most important in education for several generations is not so much mastery of skills that will give chops to a person navigating the complexities of life (things like creative thinking, how to have a face to face conversation, what parenting is really like, and how to manage money) but rather, satisfying government mandated benchmarks for the sake of keeping the school’s lights on — and the government in business.
As such, the majority who grow up attending their local public schools learn not to trust themselves when it comes to figuring out whether or not what they’ve created, built, or discovered has any value. The hard lesson here is that we come to believe that in order to know what we’ve done is good, we must wait for validation outside of ourselves. The constant need for outside approval, what I call the “gold star syndrome,” limits the achievements of many a well-intentioned soul and leads to countless cases of anxiety, worry, and bad night’s sleep.
Those who can’t take it buck the system and rebel. Modern history is full of examples; several of America’s recent titans of industry dropped out of prestigious universities in order to follow their calling and give themselves their own gold stars. Just below the ranks of folks like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are countless other entrepreneurs, artists, writers, small business owners, actors, and parents who also said:
Enough.
But even those who are self-proclaimed renegades, who have forged successful paths and are living authentic lives, struggle from time to time with the lingering desire to feel the comforting warmth of external recognition. To this day, I have to catch myself when, in vulnerable moments of self-doubt or sheer exhaustion, I feel the need for someone else to pat me on the back and put a sticker on the chart of my accomplishments.
To arrive at a place in our lives when doing what we do for the sake of doing the thing — and doing it without waiting for someone else to pull the trigger on the starting gun — is no small task. Some arrive at this place early. Others struggle a lifetime to find it. Some never make it at all.
And once there, the only way to improve is to make ourselves do better work. Not wait for someone else to tell us when or how to do it. Not wait for permission to move forward. To give ourselves the gold star for not stopping short, for keeping our own lights on, for recognizing we can do better, is a responsibility that is ultimately ours, and ours alone. And can go a long way towards sleeping better at night.
