Talk:overachiever

Tea room discussion
Our sense is "one who overachieves", that is, achieves beyond expectations. An anon has added a sense "one who has overachieved, and expects to do so again". I think the most common sense is "one who tries to overachieve". Thoughts?—msh210 ℠ 19:28, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

How about simply "someone who achieves at a level exceeding expectations." Our previous definition forced a user to click to another entry for no good reason. It also invited the user contribution, which seems to reflect some psychological theory and represent a fairly arbitrary subset of the universe of overachievers. DCDuring TALK 20:08, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't think any of these ideas capture the concept. An overacheiver is not simply someone who achieves a high level of success, like a university professor, or more than would be expected, as in a rags to riches story. Neither of those cases are best labeled that way. An overacheiver is more like a workaholic, someone who works their pants off to do the most that they possibly can, someone who burdens themselves with success. Anyways, regardless of how you phrase the definition, it shouldn't be two lines. DAVilla 00:21, 22 July 2008 (UTC)


 * But that just seems like another species of narrowing the concept to fit a theory. I don't think it's yet clearly supportable even if the meaning is evolving in that direction. We could go that way if we had some cites, of course. DCDuring TALK 00:34, 22 July 2008 (UTC)