A decade of achievement taught me what success amnesia is. Play taught me how to get out of it, writes Dara Simkin.
It took me 39 years to feel real pride. Not the fleeting pat-yourself-on-the-back kind of pride, but the kind you can genuinely believe and feel in your body.
For a decade I was running at full speed. A Ferrari with bicycle brakes some would say. I wrote a book, ran two conferences, won a multi-million dollar contract with a huge global brand, had a child, bought a house, presented to Fortune 500 companies, worked alongside people I’d long considered heroes. By any external measure, I was succeeding. I just couldn’t feel it. Every win landed for all of three seconds before I was already moving on to the next thing. Never a pause or exhale. Just the urgent, relentless pull of what hadn’t been done yet. On to the next, on to the next, on to the next.
It wasn’t until my ADHD diagnosis that I stumbled across a name for what I’d been living inside. Success amnesia is the tendency to quickly forget, downplay or disregard achievements usually immediately after they happen. It forces a constant focus on future goals rather than past wins. You quite literally forget what you’ve achieved.
The moment I read about it, I felt something shift. Not a revelation — a recognition. I’d been doing this my entire career, and I finally had a name for it.
But you don’t need an ADHD diagnosis to experience success amnesia. You just need to be a high achiever operating within a system that equates value with output and wears busyness as a badge of honour.
Getting to the root of it
Success amnesia is a symptom of something larger. Researcher Michael Simmons calls it achievement syndrome — the point at which external markers of success hollow out the internal experience that made the work worth doing in the first place. You’re no longer building the thing. You’re building the identity of someone who builds the thing.
It builds slowly and in stages. First you learn that love has conditions, that value is earned with gold stars, trophies and the quiet message that being exceptional means being safe. Then your identity fuses to your output. Then you start optimising everything, including joy. Then the wins get bigger and the satisfaction shrinks. Finally comes the moment you can’t schedule: the win that lands completely flat, or the slow ache of not recognising yourself in the mirror.
I wonder sometimes whether women carry a particular flavour of this — not as a statement, as a genuine curiosity. We spend so much energy proving ourselves in rooms not designed for us that the achievement drive becomes both armour and trap. We usually have to work extra hard to be taken seriously, and so we double down on our performance and lose ourselves in the process.
An honest look
Achievement syndrome rarely announces itself loudly. It’s more like carbon dioxide — silently filling the space until you can barely breathe. This achievement audit is a quick guide to help you benchmark your current relationship with achievement.
Rate each statement from 1 (never) to 5 (always):
| The Achievement Audit |
| 1. I feel restless or guilty during unscheduled time. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 2. My mood depends heavily on how productive I’ve been. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 3. I struggle to enjoy activities that don’t lead to improvement or progress. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 4. I compare my achievements to others regularly. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 5. I feel constantly behind, no matter how much I accomplish. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 6. I postpone rest or fun until I’ve ‘earned’ it through work. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 7. My relationships suffer because I’m distracted by work or goals. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 8. I experience physical symptoms of stress — tension, headaches, disrupted sleep. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 9. I feel more comfortable talking about what I do than who I am. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
| 10. I fear that slowing down means falling behind. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 |
Scoring:
10–20: You’re likely maintaining healthy boundaries.
21–35: Yellow flag — some achievement syndrome patterns are emerging. 36–50: Red flag — achievement syndrome has a significant grip on your life.
Most high-achieving women I know, myself included, score yellow or red. Not because we’re broken or doing the wrong thing, but because the cultural operating system we’re in was designed to produce exactly this — efficiency, output, productivity.
The simple question I didn’t know I needed to answer
A few years ago I went through what I’d now call an identity collapse, not quite burnout, something deeper. I was anxious, exhausted and ungrounded. I’ve been helping organisations fix the conditions that suppress their people’s capability for a decade, applying research about play, bandwidth and human capacity to boardrooms and leadership teams. My own cup was basically empty.
So I finally turned the lens on myself and asked one simple, uncomfortable question: where is my energy actually going?
Energy isn’t created. It’s transferred. It flows toward things and away from things. Until you map where yours is going honestly, you can’t make intelligent decisions about how to protect it. For me the answer was confronting. The phone, the scrolling, the dopamine trap of an ADHD brain in the age of infinite content. It was affecting my work, sleep and presence. My relationship with my son was suffering badly, and I’d been too depleted to see it clearly.
We can often confuse poor conditions with a lack of discipline or a resilience problem. It’s neither. We ask ourselves why we can’t just do more, what we need to optimise. The curiosity is misguided. We don’t need to do more — we need to do less in order to recover. A frazzled nervous system is incapable of being effective, creative or curious, which every high-achieving woman needs. You cannot optimise an empty cup.
So I redefined success as ease and made it my number one priority — not a reward for productivity, a design principle. I put energy into my fitness, friendships and being genuinely present with my kid rather than performing presence while mentally elsewhere. Five months later my son told me I was the perfect mama. I cried. Not because it was sweet, though it was. Because I knew something had actually shifted.
This is where play comes in
I’ve dedicated a decade of my life to working with individuals and organisations on this. The research is consistent: most of what looks like a people problem is actually a conditions problem. A houseplant doesn’t suffer because it’s a bad plant. It’s the soil, the temperature, the water, the sunlight. Fix the conditions and the plant does what it was always meant to do — grow.
Culture Hero’s research across nearly 1,000 professional participants globally found that when three specific conditions are present, people report stronger connection, improved wellbeing and genuinely new thinking. Not as side effects — as direct outcomes. Those three conditions are:
Permission: the explicit or implicit signal that it’s safe to be fully human here, not just fully productive.
Space: actual room, cognitive and physical, to exist outside performance mode.
A spark: something that shifts your state and invites genuine engagement.
Together, those three things create the conditions for play. Not play as a reward or a team-building exercise. Play as a neurological reset — the way an exhausted nervous system gets to come back online.
Play is the thing most high achievers resist hardest and need most. It feels threatening precisely because it has no optimisation potential. It produces nothing measurable. It proves nothing. And that’s exactly why it works. It reconnects you with doing something for its own sake — the only sustainable antidote to a life built entirely on external proof of worth.
If you want to go deeper on your own conditions, there’s a full assessment across four domains: relational, physical, information and work at culturehero.co. But you don’t need a framework to start.
You just need the question.
Where is your energy going?