11 Struggles Of Being An Ambitious Introvert
1. It’s not even just easy to let work take over your life, it’s the default you revert to if you aren’t careful. It’s hard to strike a balance when you kind of don’t care about your social life as much as you do your work life. People say it’s unhealthy, but is it healthier to balance out things you don’t care about with things you do? These are the things you wonder.
2. You make “taking criticism personally” into an art form. It’s basically impossible for you to separate your work from who you are as a person – when one is failing, both are (and vice versa).
3. You want people to know about everything you’ve accomplished, but you have no idea how to communicate it without either underplaying it or sounding like an ass. You feel uncomfortable honestly sharing how much you think you’ve accomplished (who is actually comfortable with this, though???)
4. If you could hire someone to network for you, you would. You don’t have that savvy social butterfly gene, yet you still need to make those connections work for you somehow. *Cue alcohol-fueled “work events.”*
5. Whenever your boss says “hey, could we talk?” your little hyper-active, people-pleasing, success-craving brain hears: “you’re fired, it’s over, your career is done.” Introvertedness is to self-awareness what the Kardashians are to contouring.
6. Because you’re always trying to improve yourself, it’s hard for you to learn how to appreciate what you have accomplished, and what you do have. A lot of this is fueled by knowing that you could do better, and you could do more (so why aren’t you?!?)
7. You feel like you always have a foot down on people who want to send a dozen emails to people in their field and find getting coffee with strangers invigorating. You’ll just Google the “how to” and hope it suffices, no?
8. If you don’t keep yourself in check, you’re prone to getting hyper-competitive. To you, success is individual, and so it’s easy to let yourself slip into the idea that it’s comparative.
9. You’d rather work alone, but like, teamwork makes the dream work and all that nonsense. Remember when you had to do group projects in school and it was the worst? Yep well every grown up day is kind of like that! Welcome!
10. Most of your “goals” and “dreams” are just to create a better life for yourself or for those around you. You don’t need the spotlight, and you don’t need recognition, but you do need to go to bed at night knowing you’re doing something you are about, and you’re doing the best you can at it.
11. Self-promotion is your living, breathing, Tweet-fueled nightmare. And unfortunately, a lot of the time, your success will have a lot to do with that, even if it’s just being able to sell yourself to an employer.