The Strategy Skills Podcast: Management Consulting | Strategy, Operations & Implementation | Critical Thinking

Brooke Taylor spent more than a decade inside high-performance environments, including leadership roles at Google, before turning her attention to a question that many accomplished professionals quietly wrestle with: why does achievement so often fail to produce a lasting sense of fulfillment? In this conversation, she examines what she calls the "success wound" — the tendency to attach self-worth to performance, recognition, and external measures of success. Drawing from her own experience with burnout, addiction recovery, career advancement, and entrepreneurship, she explains how these patterns develop and why they continue to shape behavior long after professional success has been achieved. Among the key insights discussed: The root cause of many workplace struggles is not a lack of capability but an unhealthy relationship between achievement and identity. When self-worth becomes dependent on performance, even meaningful accomplishments can feel insufficient. Many high achievers operate from a small se