Anecdotally, there is a long-held belief that people achieve career success at the cost of their personal relationships and their mental and physical health; Freud (1917) used the phrase “wrecked by success” and Riesman (1961) noted “success is fatal.” Recent popular (e.g., Joiner, 2011) and academic (e.g., Michel, 2012) work suggests this idea currently enjoys widespread appeal. This attitude is personified by columnist Cindy Adams’ quote: “Success has made failures of many men.”
Despite broad belief in the “wrecked by success” phenomenon, little empirical research has addressed it. This may be due to the difficulty of finding a sample with a large enough number of individuals that could reasonable be termed “highly successful” in their careers to generate statistically stable findings. We used three cohorts from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), all of whom scored at least in the top 1% of cognitive ability when they were identified as young adolescents. The link between cognitive ability and career success is well-documented, as are the high rates of accomplishment among SMPY participants.
In Study 1, we treated income as an indicator of career success, and examined its functional significance across a variety of health outcomes in 1,159 participants at age 53. We created “highly successful” and “less successful” groups and analyzed men and women independently. Across 44 objective physical health conditions (e.g., asthma, depression, hypertension), 68% were LESS prevalent among highly successful men than less successful men (z = -2.26, p = 0.02). We also observed that more successful women were healthier than less successful women, although the difference was non-significant (z = -1.08, p = 0.28). Across multiple subjective indicators of psychological well-being (e.g., flourishing, positive emotionality), there were few significant differences between the highly successful and less successful groups (across both genders), but when significant differences were found, they generally favored the more successful groups. A larger proportion of highly successful men were married than less successful men (88% vs. 76%), whereas the opposite pattern was found among women (73% vs. 78%). Yet, relationship satisfaction was nearly identical across success groups in both genders.
Because income is not necessarily the best indicator of high/low success in some occupations (e.g., artist, professor), we also examined hours worked and conscientiousness, inasmuch as these two variables are related to success in essentially all careers. Among men and women, outcomes were generally more positive among those who worked more hours and who were more conscientious.
In Study 2, we replicated the findings for career success (as a function of income), conscientiousness, and hours worked in a second cohort of age 48 SMPY participants (N = 491). We will attempt to replicate these results in a third SMPY cohort of profoundly gifted participants (top .01% in ability, N ≈ 250), before the ISIR conference in July. Data are currently being gathered and will be ready for analyses in early April.
For now, across two intellectually precocious cohorts at midlife, highly successful men and women were largely physically and psychologically healthier than less successful men and women. These results cast doubt on the belief that highly accomplished people are often “wrecked by success”.
