"My college professor told me he saw a poster for the movie Career Opportunities showing me in a tank top and Eighties hair, riding on a mechanical rocking horse. I was mortified because that person has nothing to do with who I am and is no way a reflection of my taste. 

"These movies I'd been making in no way reflect my taste as a moviegoer. It got to a point where I didn't want to work in movies anymore because it became too embarrassing and humiliating. 

"So I thought, 'I can either do something else or see what happens if I really invest myself in what I'm doing and take responsibility for what I'm doing.'" ... [imdb.com Celeb News 25th June 2003]

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Answer: Permission.

Somehow, all those dreamers know what they want to do, and they even know how to do it. But still they falter. Why? They just can't give themselves permission to live their dreams.

Take Ginny (name changed), a student I worked with in my Self Help Author's Crash Course. 

Ginny had a book she wanted to write; well, actually she had several. She felt so called to make a difference in people's lives, she'd quit the corporate rat race, taken life coach training, and was embarked on writing not one but four books at once.

In short, Ginny was stuck. When pressed, she wasn't sure how to move ahead with her books, or even what they were about. 

Still she had this burning mission in her gut. She knew she had to do something. ... This new life she saw for herself was so shining, and inspired, and right, it seemed almost like too much. 

Could she really live this powerfully? Could little Ginny have what she wanted in life? Did Ginny actually deserve it?

A lot of us assume we don't deserve what we want. We carry around this inner conversation about how limited, wrong, defeated, or defective we are. 

We believe we can't have all the joy we want in life because we made mistakes in the past. 

We assume somehow we can't get permission from otherwise unmovable others -- the hardened bosses, spouses and nay-sayers of the world. 

Many of us are still waiting for our long-dead parents to give us that critical permission.

And yet, the most important permission you often need is from yourself.

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Gifted underachievers in Adulthood: Designing a Life
NAGC Conference, November, 2003 [site]
Presenter: Linda Emerick, associate professor, 
Towson University College of Education

Summary: In 1992 Linda Emerick conducted a study of former underachievers. She looked at ten gifted underachieving students, both male and female, who had turned underachievement around.

One of Linda Emerick's subjects, "Laura," had had some rough years in elementary and high school. Due to her slow work speed, her performance in academics was erratic. 

She suffered from depression and at times had suffered psychotic episodes. As a freshman in high school, she won acclaim for solving a mathematical theorem while failing her other courses. 

Later in high school, she was a National Merit Scholar.

The same is true of work for her as an adult. At the age of 33 "Laura" works less than full time in her family's business so that she has room in her life for the things that matter most to her, volunteer work, science, and music.

Her parents question her life path. They feel she has not put her gifts to full use. 

She, on the other hand, describes herself as "satisfied" with her life. She feels that she's "emotionally involved in everything she does." However, she realizes that to other people, she appears to be an underachiever. 

Emerick explained that following up with "Laura" has had a major impact on her views. It caused Emerick to totally rethink her definition of achievement. 

Emerick found that "Laura" believes what she needs to do in life is to honor her talents and help others.

"Is she doing that now?" asked Emerick. "Yes, she is. Maybe that's what achievement is."

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excerpt from article 
Getting Yourself Back On Track
By Dianne Hales, Parade, March 28, 2004

Five years after graduation, an economics major still temps as a bookkeeper. A legal secretary has dropped so many evening courses over 20 years that she still doesn't have her bachelor's degree. An audio- visual technician finds himself in one dead-end job after another.

These men and women share a common enemy: themselves. By procrastinating, missing deadlines and engaging in other self-defeating behaviors, they routinely undermine their chances for success.

"But if you're a chronic underachiever, whenever you run into difficulty, you want to curl up and suck your thumb. You seek comfort rather than hard work. 

"You make excuses to avoid facing your fears. And you end up with a life that's unfulfilling, because you miss out on the satisfaction that only comes from tackling something hard."

Underachievement -- failure to live up to potential -- exists in every age group, at every job level and in every field, from sales to sports.

Christian estimates that one in four adults has the problem. But sufferers should take heart, notes psychologist Pamela Brill, author of The Winner's Way. 

"Underachievement isn't a permanent condition," she says, "but a mind-set -- a behavior pattern that you can change."

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Mostly, says psychiatrist Edward Hallowell of Sudbury, Mass., they have a "severe case of modern life." But their distress is very real, and their organizations are suffering too, he adds.

"The more constant phenomenon is simply impaired performance and a workplace that becomes toxic in a hurry," he says. "They may be meeting their numbers, but they're not as creative, flexible, humorous or innovative as they might be."

Cynthia McClain-Hill, a 46-year-old attorney, law firm owner, mother of two, wife and civic activist, multi-tasks with a vengeance.

But the steel-trap memory that got her through law school without ever taking notes — and that helps her order dinner for her extended family without any prompting — is showing signs of wear and tear.

"I often find myself unable to remember my five phone numbers," McClain-Hill says. "That's one of my silent frustrations." And there are more occasions now when she enters a room and realizes she has forgotten the purpose of the trip.

For many women McClain-Hill's age, such bouts of forgetfulness are attributed to age and the effects of changing hormones. 

Indeed, complaints of forgetfulness among women in their 40s and 50s are so prevalent that Peter M. Meyer, a biostatistician at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, in the late 1990s conducted a study intended to gauge how deeply the hormone changes of menopause disrupt women's memory.

Instead, he got a lesson on women and multi-tasking. The tests of short-term memory and verbal memory stubbornly showed that women of this age, though they complained of forgetfulness, were not missing a step. 

Their forgetfulness appeared to be a function of depression, stress and "role overload" -- the multi-tasking of many roles at once -- Meyer concluded.

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The actress shyly admits that she was drawn into the cool clique of friends at school. 

"We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to."

"Some of these things were going on when my mom was a teenager, but.. it's just so much darker now.. it's so deeper to the point where being dark and screwed up is becoming a trend. For instance, blood has become cool and it's just really getting out of control.

"Thirteen should scare [teenage girls] if they can relate to the character because you really see at the beginning how she's having fun but you also see her hit rock bottom and you see everything blow up in her face. It should just be a kind of warning."

This drive is often misunderstood by this type of client and can be subverted by self-defeating psychological beliefs.

A very talented client had attained enormous success as a working actress and doing voice-overs for commercials and cartoons. 

She also wrote and performed a cabaret act featuring songs and her own original jokes. 

She crashed into a wall of frustration and depression several years ago and sought to understand why she couldn't seem to break through into larger public recognition despite her driving hard work and the critical acclaim she received for her cabaret act.

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It became apparent to her that she was trapped in an obvious set-up for her creativity to be linked with struggle and disappointment.

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Graham [James Spader, above] : I wish I didn't have to live someplace.

John (laughs)  What do you mean?

Graham : Well, see, right now I have this one key, and I really like that. Everything I own is in my car. If I get an apartment, that's two keys. 

If I get a job, maybe I have to open and close once in awhile, that's more keys. Or I buy some stuff and I m worried about getting ripped off, so I get some locks, and that's more keys. 

I just really like having the one key. It's clean, you know?

Graham looks at the keyring before returning it to his pocket.

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Old Anarchist (Louis Mackey) : And remember: the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.  ///

Having a Breakthrough Day (Denise Montgomery) : I've had a total recalibration of my mind, you know. I mean, it's like, I've been banging my head against this 19th century type, um, what? Thought mode? Construct? Human construct?

Disgruntled Grad Student (Scott Rhodes) : Every action is a positive action, even if it has a negative result.

[reader :]  Linklater has accurately captured a subculture of post-college self-preoccupied fringe people who rattle on, airing pretentious musings to anyone in earshot including the deaf. 

Somehow I know these turkeys: the guy in the second hand book store with the most complete collection of self-published books about the assassination of JFK, the juvenile philospher who regails his completely unreactive cabdriver with alternative scenarios had he, the passenger, not chosen to ride in the cab...

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He has seen successful writers suddenly start abusing spouses, squandering their money, dumping longtime associates (especially agents), abusing drugs and alcohol and, perhaps worst of all, stop writing.

"One didn't pick up a pen for three years before she finally came to me," he said.

He tries to get his clients excited about the writing process itself and less concerned about the tangible rewards of making it. Ironically, he said, success often comes as soon as it no longer seems all important. 

He also encourages his clients to find more sources of pleasure in their everyday lives. "The last myth among artists is that your pain is necessary to your creativity."