I still remember the day when I was in my mid-20s that Cate, my best friend from college, told me her cousin had gotten into Harvard.

She laughed as I expressed my congratulations. “She doesn’t know that it’s all downhill from here,” she said.

I’ve thought about this exchange many times in the course of my adult life. It came to mind, most recently, when I read Sara Rimer’s intriguing piece in The New York Times last Sunday about the “amazing girls” of Newton North High School.

These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.

I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.

And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.

Let me be clear: I am not one of those people who knee-jerkedly proclaim that girls like Esther Mobley and Colby Kennedy, the two profiled in the greatest depth in Rimer’s piece, are on the road to immediate psychological ruin. I don’t think that working hard, dreaming big, striving and struggling are, for each and every teen, such a bad thing. For those who have a taste for such ambition, it can be a great pleasure.

But I do think that figuring out at 18 – and not at 28 or 38 or 48, when the stakes are so much higher – that achievement for achievement’s sake is basically a zero-sum game is a very good thing. That increasing numbers of college-bound seniors are being forced to come to that realization is perhaps the one upside to today’s all-but-random college admissions game.

That is, if they have the eyes to see it. And some clearly do. I defer here to the words of Kat Jiang, a Newton North senior, who dismissed her precollege experience – and her perfect 2400 SAT score (“I was lucky”) in a video interview that accompanies Rimer’s piece online: “You can be good at a lot of things or bad at a lot of things, and it has virtually no impact on whether or not you are good at life,” she said.

Wish someone had told me that when I was her age.

Of course, when I was her age things were easier. Everyone will tell you that these days: those of us who got into top colleges in the 1980s would never get in today. Be that as it may, I’ve spent most of my life in the midst of (admittedly lesser) versions of today’s young female amazings, and Kat is right: there’s little correlation between being the “perfect” college candidate and living a good life.

A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists — from Alice Miller to Madeline Levine — have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career.

Many, I think, never figure out how to handle the emptiness that comes when the rush of achievement fades away, or the loneliness — the sense of invisibility — when no one is there to hand out yet another “A.” The fact is: when you are narrowly programmed to achieve, you are like a windup toy with only one movement in its repertoire. You’re fine when you’re wound up; but wind you down, and you grind to a halt.

I think this is partly why so many grown-up amazing girls with high-earning husbands find themselves having to quit work when they have kids. They simply can’t perform at work and at home at the high level that they demand of themselves.

I know exactly how they feel. And soon enough, I fear, this rising generation of superachievers may, too. And they’re not going to solve the problems merely — as optimists say — by doing a better job than my generation has done in advocating for policies that promote work/family “balance.” They’re going to have to balance some things out in their own minds. They’ll have to realize that — no matter what our culture shrieks, no matter what their college counselors push them to do in the name of achieving “well-roundedness” — they can’t be all things to all people, at all times, and still have something of meaning left over for themselves.

We could help them, perhaps, by listening to the college admissions officers who, reflecting upon the record numbers of applications they’d received this year, said they’d rejected some students with perfect test scores and grade point averages in favor of others who showed signs of some kind of “passion.”

We could also make the extraordinary article on the Harvard admissions Web site “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation” required reading for all parents, starting when their kids are in preschool. “Even those who are doing extraordinarily well, the ‘happy warriors’ of today’s ultracompetitive landscape, are in danger of emerging a bit less human as they try to keep up with what may be increasingly unrealistic expectations,” the authors, who include Harvard’s dean of admissions, write. “[T]he only road to real success is to become more fully oneself.”

We should also maybe — and I can feel the rumble of disapproval starting already — take another look at our boys. They’re said to be failing, wretchedly falling behind the girls in the great grades race. Yet they still account for half the admissions to top schools. (The trend toward the “feminization” of higher education doesn’t hold up in the Ivy League; in Rimer’s piece the two who made it into Brown and Harvard both were named Dan.) And their elders still, in the long run, out-earn and outperform our girls. Is it possible that they’re onto something, like the fact that in the long run getting perfect grades and winning all the top prizes doesn’t really matter? That what really matters is how you live your life after graduation and how you function in the world, channeling your energies at the right time and place and when the right people are watching? Time will tell.

I would never for a moment dream of telling girls that high achievement isn’t a good thing. Success — pretty big success — is increasingly a necessary thing, because life in many parts of the country, like Newton, Mass., has become so extraordinarily expensive. But I would also advise them against buying into the magical belief that doing everything just right will pave the way to the best kind of life.

“The best and brightest” is a concept that really ought to be retired in favor of the good.

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