It’s tough at the top…
A study conducted by Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has found that people with a high level of self control such as those who remember birthdays, take on extra work and who generally have their life in good working order may actually suffer in the long run.
According to the study, although these types of people tend to be far better off financially and make better partners in relationships, there’s one major drawback to it.
“People always talk about how having high self-control is a good thing,” said researcher Christy Zhou Koval, a Ph.D candidate and author of the study.
“Go-getters get what they go after. They’re better at goal pursuits. They make very good relationship partners.”
It turns out that being this kind of person makes people expect more of you, therefore increasing pressure on you, even if such expectations are fair or not.
In one of the studies people were asked to judge how good a fictional person was at their job solely based on how good he was at saving for a new apartment.
In another they were asked to assess how well a subject would do academically depending on whether or not they had binged on music from the iTunes store.
In both cases, the more each subject demonstrated self-control, the more people expected from them.
The study found that while we tend to delegate the most work to people with more self-control, which is only natural as they seem more capable of getting it done, but it turns out it’s not any easier for them to do the work, even if it appears that way.
They’re just willing to work longer and harder to get the task done, they don’t actually find the task any easier than a person with less self-control.
The conclusion is that high-self-control people feel more burdened by their work than their less disciplined colleagues. It affects their personal lives and they ultimately have to make sacrifices for their job, even at the expense of their own personal goals.
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