Success is none of the things I thought it was

Redefining success on my own terms

I’ve spent 20 years, or more, chasing the external markers of success that society taught me to value. Money. Power. Possessions. Output. I kept achieving until I made myself sick. And then, all of a sudden, I realised that these things weren’t making me happy. So why on earth was I killing myself in pursuit of them?!

On New Year’s Eve, I sat down to do my usual ritual, to think ahead to what I wanted to experience in the coming year. I make a big list of words that describe the way I want to feel, then I start to group together those words. I narrow down the list with more groups as themes start to emerge, until I arrive at one word that is the most powerful encapsulation of the feelings that call strongest to me. Or, usually that’s what happens. 2024 was dedicated to cultivation. In 2023, I was in pursuit of actualisation. But 2025 wasn’t playing along.

Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash

This year, before the initial list of feelings was even complete, an idea had popped into my head. It didn’t fit the format - it was two words, and it wasn’t a feeling. So I tried to ignore it. I finished my list, I started grouping words. Then I saw that the mutinous groups were lining up behind this rogue concept. At that point, I remembered that I’m all about breaking moulds and challenging convention, so I decided to go with it.

2025 is, therefore, my year of Redefining success.

This idea of reshaping the concept of success to fit my life, my needs, my desires, offered all the feelings I was looking for. Calm. Presence. Security. Fulfillment. And I wasn’t ever going to achieve any of those feelings chasing the capitalist model of success.

So, here goes.

The success brand

A concept of success that involves wealth and the accumulation of stuff is a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, the majority of us have been focused on simply staying alive for as long as possible. There’s no doubt that we are incredibly lucky to be alive at this point in time, in the affluent Global North, freed from many of our ancestors’ most pressing threats. Very few people who have the time and opportunity to read this will have to worry about starvation, destitution or keeping safe from the elements.

That’s not to say that these aren’t still issues for some - and our freedom from them should motivate us to want to help these people where we can - but the welfare state, deeply flawed though it is, provides a safety net that will keep most of us from hitting the rocks.

This freedom allowed us an opportunity to want something more from life than just survival. But, before we had time to consider what we might like our lives to look like, forces bigger than us swept in to fill the space.

As capitalism grew, businesses gained power and influence. They developed a new tool - marketing - to make people want things. This want delivered two benefits for corporations: in the short term, people would give them money to get the thing they wanted; and, in the long term, people would work hard for those corporations in order to earn the money they needed to get more things they wanted. They created brands to make these things more appealing. And, as part of this whole process, they collaborated on a brand image for happiness itself - success.

The capitalist story goes that, if you work hard enough (like, really, really hard) and buy enough stuff, you will be considered “successful”. And then, and only then, you will be happy. Except it’s becoming increasingly clear that the game is rigged and you can never actually reach the end.

No one’s blaming you for falling for it. We all fell for it. Most of us have been working ourselves to the bone, putting in absurd hours and overstretching our capacity, making ourselves ill and miserable, because we believed it would pay off in the end. Worse than that, they somehow convinced us that this was the virtuous thing to do, and that anyone who wasn’t engaged in this form of self-destruction in exchange for stuff was lazy, repellent, and even immoral.

But the jig is up now. We’ve seen that those with power peddle this line for their own ends, while putting in very little in the way of hard graft themselves. We’ve seen that, however much stuff we amass, we won’t feel any better and they’ll just tell us that’s because there’s something new we still need. They’re not incentivised to encourage us towards true happiness, because feeling depressed and anxious makes us more susceptible to marketing messages telling us to buy more of their stuff. Capitalism thrives on its subjects being miserable.

If we want to be genuinely happy - if we want to build lives that light us up and nurture our minds and bodies - then we’re going to have to define that model of success for ourselves.

This is bigger than us

This constant striving for a capitalist vision of success isn’t just killing us - it’s killing the planet. (And, since we can’t live without the planet, that means we’re killing ourselves some more.) The need to consume more stuff, the drive to produce more output, the never-ending quest for expansion and growth at all costs is putting unsustainable pressure on our natural resources. We are bleeding the Earth dry.

We’ve also done quite a bit to trash space - there is estimated to be around 9,000 tons of space junk in Earth’s orbit. That’s more than 170 million pieces of crap that we’ve just left lying around up there. As someone who lives next to a beach and regularly walks around with a bag collecting plastic rubbish that’s been dropped there, I am not especially surprised that we’ve made such a mess of parts of the cosmos that we don’t even inhabit.

The trouble with the capitalist narrative, is that it puts us at the centre of everything. It sets us apart from the planet, and the flora and fauna that we share it with. It glorifies hoarding and discourages sharing or reusing. It ridicules ideas of balance or restraint. Yet, if our species is going to be able to live on this planet (or even any other) in the future, we’re going to need to find ways to exist as part of a codependent ecosystem. We’re going to have to learn to live within our means, and within the capacity of our natural resources.

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

This constant striving for growth is also messing up our children. Kids in the UK and US are chronically over-tested. They’re confined in classrooms and made to memorise rote facts in order to pass standardised tests, which study after study has shown is pretty much the worst way to try to learn something. It discourages deeper understanding and increases stress and anxiety in developing minds. Teachers have been trying to tell politicians for years that this approach is a shockingly bad one, but they have pushed on regardless. Why wouldn’t they listen to the experts? Because teachers don’t contribute to their campaign funds. Big businesses do, and they want children educated in such a way that they can’t think too deeply and they’re used to conforming and obeying orders.

Over the last 150 years, the ability of human brains to focus and innovate has been deteriorating, and mental health has been declining. This is largely due to increased stress, multiplying demands on our attention and expanding narratives that we are not good enough, we don’t have enough. Although our world is safer and we are more secure than we have ever been, we’re fed messages that make us feel the opposite. We’re told there’s danger around every corner, and that if we don’t work harder and buy more things that we’ll be attacked, get sick, lose our homes, be outcasts or stunt the development of our children. Generation Alpha (those born between 2011 and right now) are getting the brunt of this at the moment, and who knows what that will do to them in the long run.

We’ve got to change the story. If not for our sakes, then for theirs.

What success means to me

I’ve put myself through so much to try to transform myself into the person that I thought I was meant to be. I’ve worked insanely hard - at one point, I was working from 8am to 9pm, six days a week. I’ve undergone so much training and self-improvement to try to overcome what I perceived as weaknesses (which I now know were largely just normal traits of an introverted autistic creative). I’ve made myself physically ill from overwork, I’ve gone through periods of very poor mental health due to appalling treatment in the workplace and low self-esteem.

And, through it all, I’ve kept comparing myself to other people, thinking, “they can do it, so why can’t I?”

It took me until now - aged 41 - to realise the answer: “Because they want to, and I don’t.”

My new mantra for 2025 is, “that vision of success doesn’t appeal to me.” It might be great for someone else, but it’s not for me. Speaking at huge conferences twice a week, travelling the world giving talks, being the CEO of a huge corporation, being famous… that vision of success doesn’t appeal to me. I do like giving talks, on topics that I’m passionate about, and I’ll happily do it occasionally, but it’s not something I aspire to do super regularly, because it drains my energy. Same with travel - I like to be at home with my family. I am the co-CEO of a business, an inclusion consultancy, and I want it to keep doing well, but I’m not out for glory and million-pound profits. I want us all to make a good living from it, and I want it to do good in the world. I see it as more of a movement than a business. I also have my own business as a writer, creative wellbeing practitioner and creativity coach, which I want to make a good living from, but one that is in balance - that supports other creatives and benefits the wider world.

My vision of success doesn’t include big money and influence. Success, for me, includes:

• Financial stability - I don’t care about being rich, but I do care about knowing I can pay my mortgage and support my family (until I can overthrow capitalism altogether, I still have to live within its confines).

• Time with my family - both my father and my father-in-law, when they were working, used to leave the house around 5am from Monday to Friday, and return home after 7pm. They didn’t see their children at all during the week. My husband and I have always been clear that we do not want that life. We want plenty of quality time with our children, and with one another.

• Freedom to create - writing and creating for a living has always been my dream, but it’s not just about creating to deadlines and commissions. I also want to have space to dream and think and try ideas. To create what wants to come out, not just what someone is paying me for.

• Taking care of my health - eating nourishing, whole foods, sleeping as well as possible (within the parameters of life with two young children, one of whom likes to sleep on top of me), exercising regularly and drinking more water are top of my agenda for 2025. I’m also starting CBT therapy and making time for meditation to support my mental wellbeing. And, obviously, there’s my creative therapy.

• Nature - if I’m getting to spend time by the sea and time in the woods, then I’m rich.

• Helping people - I want to have a positive impact in the world. I want to feel that I am helping others and making a difference to people’s lives. The greatest feeling of “success” I experience is when someone tells me that my book or one of my courses or one of my workshops or my creative therapy work has benefitted them.

• Calm - I think the biggest marker of success for me will be if I ever reach a state where I feel I can relax a bit. Where I’m not worrying about what I need to do next or what I need to achieve. Where I feel able to take time to just be. I think this one might take some doing - it’s partly about building a life of security, and partly about unlearning a lifetime of conditioning, but it’s a work in progress.

None of these are value judgements. This is my vision of success because this is what will make me happy. This isn’t about setting another view of the “right” things to want. If being a high-powered CEO makes you happy, then, honey, you go for it. I’m right behind you. This is all about designing a vision of your life that includes true, meaningful joy. A joy that you can access right now, not one that will justify you making yourself miserable for years in the hope that one day it will come to pass. There’s a difference between working towards your dreams and punishing yourself in an attempt to make yourself worthy of your dreams.

Only you can decide what joy means to you, and what level of striving will enable you to reach it in a way that feels positive.

So, what does success mean to you?

This month’s Creative Wellbeing Workshop is going to delve deeper into our stories of success, and the narrative we want to construct for the year ahead.

Join me for an hour of creative therapy activities, live on Zoom, where you can spend some time nourishing your creative soul in the company of a supportive community.

Next session:

📆 Thursday 30th January

⏰ 7pm UK time

(check what time that is where you are here: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html)

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