Summit Syndrome

It was a regular team meeting at work today. We were discussing the usual achieve milestones,meet deadlines, fix bugs, status updates....After half an hour, my manager started talking about doing a self-evaluation of performance once a week. He gave an awesome talk for about a half hour. Given a chance, I could keep listening to him talk for hours together. He's been in the industry for about 15 years now and he reads a lot. One thing he mentioned today really affected me and made me think a lot.

He talked about the term "summit syndrome", about which he recently read in a Harvard Business Magazine article. Summit syndrome is something that hits extremely talented, aggressive and intelligent people when they overcome their challenges, they find it extremely difficult to carry on with the normal routine. They lose the fire to perform and become obsessive with other things, like sudoku and crosswords at work. And this is very difficult to spot in the early stages. Some of the few effects of people affected by this, which he mentioned were very troubling. This could make people do grave mistakes for which they will repent their life-time, their personal life would be in danger, health problems, people just quit organizations for no reason and start focussing and diverting their attention on other hobbies which are far-less interesting.
So, he talked about how a best manager would be able to actually identify this syndrome before it becomes a threat and avoid it by exposing his employees to other challenging problems.

The talk has been on my mind for quite sometime now and it has sunk in pretty well. Work and personal life are inter-connected with each other, atleast for me and any small ripple in either one of them affects the other drastically. So, thanks to the good talk today, I have decided to do a self-performance evaluation every week, or every 3 days to assure myself that I love what I am doing and if things are going on track.

For people who are more interested, you can read the actual article here:
Harvard Article on Summit Syndrome