A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.
So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.
A lot of people believe, basically, any kind of achievement is good because you got there in the end. But in fact maladaptive achievement is a whole cycle that leads to long-term breakdown, and it's a breakdown we have measured in learning science a lot.
I think there is a lot here that could be learned about how certain software teams function. In our Developer Thriving work, we focused on factors that predict *sustainable* achievement for this reason: flexible, celebratory, human centered.
