The Achievement Trap: What if Success was Measured by Service?

We name the cultural shift shaping student dreams and why “you can be anything” can quietly disciple kids into pressure and self-focus. We reframe ambition through a biblical lens so our kids pursue excellence as stewardship and service rather than upward mobility. 
• student aspirations trending toward visibility and independence 
• the hidden burden of self-creation language 
• spiritual gifts as kingdom capital on loan 
• early specialization and family sacrifice on the altar of achievement 
• kingdom ambition that pursues excellence for God’s glory 
• auditing success language at home after wins and awards 
• bridging the gap from “what about me” to mission 
• a practical calling tool using Ability, Affinity, and Affirmation 
• a simple kitchen-table exercise to start this week 

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This podcast is presented by Wayne Christian School- A Christ-centered community school whose mission is to assist parents and churches in the education of their children from a biblical worldview to impact their world for Christ. You can learn more at waynechristian.org 

Transcript

Student Dreams And Cultural Shift

Nate 0:00

If you look at the top ten lists for student aspirations in 2026, the data tells a very specific story. We've seen a massive shift away from the traditional vocations towards things like influencer, entrepreneur, and content creator.

Luis 0:17

It's a shift toward autonomy. The cultural North Star for our kids isn't just success anymore. It's visibility and independence. The message they hear from every screen is you are the CEO of your own life. Use your talents to build your platform, increase your following, and secure your own future.

Nate 0:38

And as parents, it's easy to buy into that. We want our kids to be successful. We want them to have the scholarship and the high-paying career. But if we aren't careful, we can accidentally disciple them into a worldview where their gifts exist solely for their own upward mobility.

Luis 0:57

The Bible offers a radical alternative. It tells us that our talents are not actually ours, they are kingdom capital on loan from the master. Today, we're talking about how to pivot our kids from a mindset of getting ahead to a mindset of giving back.

Episode 50 And Listener Requests

Nate 1:18

Welcome to Equipped for Impact, the podcast designed to assist Christian parents, leaders, and educators to raise up the next generation to stand firm in their faith and influence the world for Christ. We're your hosts. I'm Nate, and I'm Lewis. And we're glad you're here with us today, where we're in part two of a three-part miniseries called The Achievement Trap: How to Disciple Driven Kids. Today, we're looking at that idea of ambition. How can we move from upward mobility to outward ministry? Uh so before we jump into this, Lewis, congratulations. This is episode number 50 for us. This is the big 5-0. 5-0. 5-0. Almost as many episodes as you've been alive. Almost. No. No, a little bit more. The opposite. The opposite. Okay, there we go.

Luis 2:08

However, I have always said that 50 is old. So like that was my benchmark, right? Like as I was growing up. If you made it to 50, you were old. And anything above 50, like you're just old. You're really older. But now, as I'm closer to 50, I'm like, you know, 50's really not that old. It's not that old. As as you see it down the path. That's right. Closer. There we go. But 50 episodes is a lot of episodes.

Nate 2:39

It is a lot of episodes. Most podcasts die after, is it like six or seven or something like that? Maybe 41. Maybe 41. No, I think I think it's like 10. So we are doing good. I'm excited. And thank you to all of our listeners for helping us get to 50 because your feedback has been awesome. Speaking of that, uh, if you jump on whatever podcast, you know, tool you're using, app or whatever, and give us a rating, give us a review. We'd love to hear it, you know, just to help make us better, and maybe even shoot us an email so that we have more ideas for our next 50 episodes.

Luis 3:12

And we want to thank our millions and millions of listeners. Yep. Hyperbole. To borrow from The Rock.

Nate 3:19

The Rock? Millions and millions. Yeah. So he used to say I notice that he has to explain this to me. I know who The Rock is. I don't know anything else.

Luis 3:28

When he used to come out to the ring and he would, I guess, announce, he would say, to the to the millions and millions of The Rock's fans.

The Burden Of Self-Made Success

Nate 3:36

Okay. Okay. Do we have millions of fans? I'm sure we do. Probably. There's billions of people in the world, right? They just don't know that they're fans. They just don't know that they're fans. But you can help listener by giving us a rating and review and sharing it with someone you know. Okay, let's get back into this because here's here's the thing we're talking about with this ambition trap and and the achievement trap. We really want to help our students, our children work through this. And so the phrase we hear a lot in our culture is you can be anything you want to be. Which which sounds good, right? You talk to a little girl and just be like, you can be the president, you can be an astronaut, you can be a whatever. And it sounds like an encouragement, but from a biblical standpoint, that's actually a bit of a burden, right? Because it puts the weight of self-creation entirely on our children's shoulders.

Luis 4:30

And that's actually where scripture gives us a different starting point, right? Yeah, definitely. First Corinthians 12 reminds us that the Spirit distributes gifts as he wills. We aren't anything we want to be. We are exactly who God designed us to be for the sake of the body of Christ.

Nate 4:50

Yeah. And so our culture pushes this idol of specialization, right? We see kids as young as, you know, 10 to 12 years old to like specializing in something. Like I've got it to get ahead. They're already thinking, you know, 12 steps down the line. Yeah. And so by the time, you know, I'm a senior, I need to be ready to have a scholarship lined up for this college to do this thing. And so you see families sacrificing church and rest and community all on the altar of the grind towards this specialization. So they think that their kid is like the next MLB, you know, first round draft pick. Atlanta Braves, right? For the Atlantic. No, because they don't get to pick in the first round because they're too good to get a first round draft pick. That's what it is. No, but they they think that. And so they've got, you know, like I'm seeing some kids like with it's baseball season right now, you know. So I'm seeing like bags full of, you know, so much stuff because they think their kid's gonna be a a a pro baseball player one day. And it's not bad necessarily. Yeah. But if that's so much pressure on your kids, like that's a that's a struggle, right? So whether it's elite sports or high-stakes academics, all of this is in hopes of being, you know, having that 1% chance that they're gonna they're gonna make it, so to speak.

Luis 6:10

I remember reading about these schools that are popping up around the country and their and their homeschool schools, I guess, that are online platforms for kids to do their schoolwork in like two or three hours and then spend the rest of their day specializing in a sport or specializing in dance or specializing in some type of field where they can become masters at their craft. And so for these parents, they are doing homeschool, but it's not with the intention of academics, it's with the intention of their kid becoming the best at whatever it is that they're talking about. And then super specializing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the ultimate goal of that specialization is usually upward mobility, right? But Jesus stands that pyramid on its head. When we look at the gospel of Matthew, we see where Jesus says, whoever would be great among you must be your servant, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. And so if we use our talents just to get attention, that's consumerism. And we want to move our kids towards stewardship, towards seeing their gifts as something that God has given them for his glory, not theirs.

Nate 7:29

Yeah, yeah. I think that's really important. And and to be clear here, you know, we're not talking about mediocrity, right? You're not doing, you know, God's glory any favor by just being mediocre at whatever you're doing, right? You know, plenty of Bible verses talking against that, right? In Colossians, you know, whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, right? Is an example of that. So, you know, we're s we're not calling for mediocrity or I I hate, here's pet peeve, I'm gonna go down the rabbit trail. You know, like this whole idea, you know, the Christian movies, you know what I'm talking about? And especially when we were growing up, it it's like that was code for we're gonna settle for subpar like thematic experience because we slapped the Christian label on it. Like we don't want any of that in anything we do, yeah, right? But but we're saying, you know, we're doing this to you know impact the world for Christ, right? Yeah, it's a good kingdom ambition with that.

From Upward Mobility To Service

Luis 8:30

And that's like we you know, we want to be clear, like we need Christian doctors, right? We need Christian athletes, we need Christian actors. Absolutely. You know, I I've said to people here in our community about our school that like I want Christian plumbers, I want Christian welders, I want selfishly, I want Christian landscapers, and and that's why we exist, right? But we but we want people to be Christian in whatever field God has called them to. Right. And so Kingdom Ambition says, I will work harder than anyone else to be the best in my field, not so I can buy a bigger house, but so I have a bigger platform to display the character of God. And and really that's what we read in the parable of the talents in in the gospel of Matthew, right? The servants are not praised just for having the talents, they were praised because they put those talents to work for the master's gain.

Nate 9:29

Yeah. So parents, you know, what what you need to do, what we need to do is audit this success language in our homes, right? When your child succeeds, they come home with, you know, straight A's on their report card, they come home with, you know, a trophy from a tournament or, you know, a contest or whatever it is, a fine arts festival. It, you know, is our first comment about how much money they might make one day, or is it about how that skill can help them solve a problem to meet people's needs, right? There we've got a we have to bridge the gap from me and what about me to about the mission that God has called us to.

The Three Circles Of Calling

Luis 10:10

And that's absolutely critical because that's turning our culture on its head, right? Like, like you you don't hear that anywhere. Like, for example, right, parents get really excited when their kids say they want to be a doctor or they want to be an engineer or they want to become an attorney, right? Like, like those are things that we're like, yes, that's so good. But what about if your kid says, I want to be a pastor? Or what if they say, I want to be a missionary? Or what if they say, I want to be a homemaker? Or what if they say, I want to become a doctor and I want to use my gifts to work in inner city low-income medical field? Right? Or what if they say, I want to become an attorney, but I want to work for a nonprofit that serves underprivileged communities, right? Like immediately we're excited because our kid wants to be a lawyer for this megafirm in an urban area where they're gonna make a lot of money. But what if they're like, no, I want to be an attorney and I want to connect that work to to the kingdom? And so we're not saying that it has to be one or the other. So please don't hear what we're not saying, right? But what we are saying is, are we helping our kids to bridge that gap from me? What do I want to gain? What do I want to get out of this to the mission? And then that brings us right into a practical tool that I think is going to be helpful for you to help your child as they are unpacking this conversation. And so you'll remember that last week we unpacked this idea of the identity audit, right? Like helping your child identify what are the things that make them important, right?

Nate 11:52

Listing those five things. Well, we and then what we talked about last week was what happens if those things were to go away. Yes, right. And so if you've got that good foundation of who am I, not because of what I do, but because of who God says I am, that's your starting point. So if you miss that, go back to last week's episode and check that one out because we're building on that today.

Luis 12:13

Absolutely. And so we said that your student needs to know who they are before they can figure out what they're for. And then this is where that idea becomes really practical.

Nate 12:25

Yeah, so so one of the pastors here in North Carolina, a pretty big church, J.D. Greer of the Summit Church, uh, I love the way he frames it. It's around what he calls the three A's, okay? Ability, affinity, and affirmation. Okay. Think of these like a Venn diagram, they're overlapping circles, and right there in the middle where all three meet, is the sweet spot of what we're kind of looking for as far as as calling goes with this tool.

Luis 12:55

And that's right right there in that sweet spot is where the calling is going to live. So so let's walk through each one of these together, right?

Nate 13:04

Yep.

Luis 13:04

So ability is simply what you're good at, it is your raw, God-given wiring. These are the skills and experiences where you naturally succeed. And here's the honest part, right? It also means acknowledging where you don't. Like, yep, for example, growing up, I was pretty fast. Interestingly enough, we recently had a race that I was a part of. We did have a race. And people were very surprised by how fast I was and still am. Still over the the width of a football field. Over the width of a football field. That was the race. That's right. But I'm not as fast as I used to be. But growing up, I was, right? I competed in a hundred-meter dash. That wasn't that was a natural ability. I didn't have to train.

Nate 13:52

So hold on, hold on. Before we move any further, okay. Are you ready to acknowledge who actually won that sprint across the football field?

Luis 14:00

I Tito, I think it's still up for debate. It's still up for debate. It's still up for debate.

Nate 14:06

There may be pictures and videos to show who was the first across the line.

Luis 14:10

But we live in a world of AI, deep fakes, you know.

Nate 14:14

We're going that direction now. Who knows, right?

Luis 14:16

But there's things that people are naturally good at, right? I I'm not naturally good at basketball. Me neither. And so I don't like I I was never a good basketball player, but I was pretty fast. Um I've always kind of naturally been a just kind of a good project manager. Like, you know, if we had group projects as cool, I just kind of rose to a project lead, and those gifts were just natural to me. And and so, and so that's what ability is, right? It's those skills experience where you naturally succeed. You don't have to work really hard at it.

Nate 14:51

Yeah. And I think it's important to put this in here, depending on the age of your child, one of your important roles as a parent is to help them discover this. Because, you know, I we tell our kids all the time like, you don't know till you try. And even if you try, you're not going to be good the first time you do something. And so this is where, and I guess, you know, as an educator, this is my philosophy of education showing, like the over-specialization we've already talked about on this episode. I think that you know, limits our children's opportunities in the long run because we don't give them the opportunity to try out different things. Yeah, try out different sports, try out fine arts. Like, no, you're not gonna like you're gonna be nervous, you get up and sing in front of a group or you know, try some art. And so, like giving your child a a plethora of opportunities where they can discover what they're good at is really important, especially in that phase. I mean, even all the way up into high school, they're still figuring that out. Yeah. And so it it's important to kind of like leave this as an open circle, so to speak.

Luis 15:59

So what you're saying is that if my toddler picks up a baseball with their left hand does not mean they're gonna be the next great left-handed pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. Not necessarily.

Nate 16:10

It could be because they had a cookie in their right hand and they didn't want to put the cookie down to pick up the baseball.

Luis 16:16

Got it.

Nate 16:17

Yeah. Or maybe it was a slice of French toast at like 11 o'clock in the afternoon. Oh, that's right. And they needed to use their left hand to pick up the baseball. That would be disappointing. Would it? Uh yeah. Okay. Well, I'm glad that we could add that extra uh jab in there about our abilities.

Luis 16:32

Tell us about affinity. What is affinity?

Nate 16:34

So affinity, right? This is something like you can look at it different ways. Uh on the one side, it's just something that you enjoy doing because you may be good at something, but not enjoy it at all. Like that is very possible. Especially, you know, adults listening to this, yeah, they understand you can get good at a job, you can get good at a talent or something, and still not enjoy it, right? So so do you even enjoy it? Yeah. Another thing to think of it is what is it that breaks your heart? Right? This would be like the burden that God has placed on you for a specific need or a specific type of person. And a lot of times that burden is shaped by something you've personally walked through. Yeah. So again, you know, your children are still figuring this out. You know, they they are still accumulating life experience where where God is shaping them and molding them. Again, I've I've heard JD Greer talk about this in his sermons where he he says, you know, not everything that comes from heaven has your name on it. That's really good. But something does.

Luis 17:34

Yeah.

Nate 17:34

And so, like, you know, homeless ministry and, you know, orphans and widows or international ministry or whatever, like we should, as believers, have a heart for all of those things just in general, right? Yeah. But there's gonna be one thing, or maybe a handful of things that really breaks your heart that that your child is really burdened for. And they're gonna pick up these burdens as they do different things and experience different things. And so just have that conversation of what is in that affinity circle? What is it that God has laid on your heart? Again, going on missions trips, being involved in service, like that's gonna help them see like God's gonna open their eyes to a certain need that breaks their heart.

Luis 18:17

And then there's affirmation, right? This one matters because we all have blind spots. And affirmation is when the people around you, your community, those closest to you, maybe even those who aren't close to you, but who see you in this, they they say things like, when you do this, God moves, right? Or when you do this, it makes a huge impact. And people are impacted. That external confirmation, that affirmation is part of how God reveals calling.

Try The Kitchen Table Audit

Nate 18:46

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I love that from uh the book of Acts, we see that. You know, it's right there in the Bible where the people were serving and praying, and in that moment, God used the church to call out Barnabas and Saul, later called the Apostle Paul, to go serve, right? And so God was using his people to affirm his calling on these people's lives, right? And so here's the thing that every parent needs to hear, right? You don't need to wait on some mystical sign for your child to know what God's calling is, right? There's not gonna be an audible voice, he's not gonna spell it out in your Cheerios, mostly because it's only one letter, right? Maybe in your alphabet soup. I don't know. I don't eat that, but you just need to get started, get serving, yeah, and God will reveal the next step as you are actively serving him where he's given you, right? And it's gonna be somewhere in the middle where those three circles of ability, affinity, and affirmation meet.

Luis 19:47

And so here's parents what you can do this week with your child sit down with them at the kitchen table, find a piece of paper, find ten minutes, draw those three circles, and walk through each one together. What are they genuinely good at, right? What breaks their heart, what draws their attention, what do they enjoy, and what have people in their life affirmed in them? And then let them answer. You might be surprised at what you find out.

Nate 20:17

Yeah. And the goal is to get them asking a different question, right? It's not what can my gifts do for me, but what has God wired me to do for others, right? That's the shift. It's it's a really different way to look at life. And it moves them from just having talent to actually living on mission. You know, the there's again several different biblical examples of this, but you think about in Proverbs, it talks about, you know, do you see a man skillful at his work? He will stand before kings. He will not stand before obscure men. And I like, I love that proverb because the example is like in our culture, we got to do these things to get ahead and make lots of money, right? Yeah. But that proverb and other examples too show if you do good work that loves your neighbor like God has called us to, like the rest of it'll take care of itself. God will put you where you need to be. And so that's that's the shift for our students that they need to take. So, Lewis, what you know, as we wrap this one up, like what encouragement would you give parents as they you know are walking through this with their children and helping them navigate this ambition or achievement trap?

Luis 21:28

Look, what we're talking to you about today is different from what they're hearing from their peers, what they're hearing on YouTube, what they're seeing on TikTok for social media. It's different from what they're seeing in movies and TV shows. You're helping them discover where God wants them to serve and where God wants to use them. This is a discipleship moment. So when you sit down with your student, when you walk through these circles, you're doing something counterculture. You're telling them that their gifts are not. Them. Their gifts are about something bigger. And that's the shift that we want, right? Not from ambition to being passive, but from upward mobility to outward ministry. We want kids who are driven. We want kids who are talented. We want kids who are excellent at what they do and who wake up every morning knowing that excellence has a purpose beyond their own name.

Nate 22:27

That's great. And this is this is a great remember reminder of just, you know, we're raising our children, not for a career, right? Uh, but for eternity. Uh so thank you all for listening today to Equipped for Impact. And if this episode encouraged you, please share it with another parent who could use this resource and and last week's as the the first two parts of our three-part series. Uh be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode as we're wrapping up this series uh with the the idea of the impact phase, right? Moving from being consumers to creators. Uh, and until then, keep leading the next generation to stand firm in their faith and influence the world for Christ.