THE DEFAULT LIFE: Success According To Whom?
Ask someone how their business is going and listen carefully to the answer.
“We're up 30 per cent.”
“We've taken on three people.”
“We're moving into bigger premises.”
“We've just landed our biggest client.”
“We should hit two million this year.”
All perfectly reasonable answers.
Ask someone how their career is going.
“I got promoted.”
“I've moved into senior management.”
“I've had a decent pay rise.”
“I've been made director.”
Again, completely normal.
We have numbers for this stuff.
Titles.
Salary.
Revenue.
Headcount.
Square footage.
Valuation.
Mortgage balance.
Pension pot.
Number of clients.
Cars.
Houses.
Qualifications.
We can point at them.
Compare them.
Graph them.
Congratulate people for increasing them.
What we don't normally say is:
“Business is going really well. I see my kids most evenings.”
Or:
“I'm earning roughly the same as last year, but I don't think about work in bed anymore.”
Or:
“I turned down the promotion because I like my life.”
Or:
“We could grow the company faster, but I don't particularly want to.”
Those answers sound slightly strange.
Almost defensive.
As though success requires explanation if it doesn't involve more.
That's interesting.
Because it suggests we haven't merely developed measures of success.
We've developed a socially understood scorecard.
And most of us started playing long before we asked who wrote it.
Some success is wonderfully objective
If your objective is to earn £50,000 and you earn £60,000, you exceeded the objective.
If your company needs £2 million revenue to remain viable and produces £2.5 million, useful.
If you want a particular qualification and achieve it, excellent.
If your goal is promotion and you get promoted, you succeeded.
Numbers are useful precisely because they remove ambiguity.
This isn't an argument against measurement.
Businesses that don't measure anything usually discover reality eventually, just rather more expensively.
Money matters.
Qualifications matter.
Status can matter.
Career progression matters.
Growth can matter.
The problem begins when a measure stops being a measure of one objective and quietly becomes a measure of the person.
Revenue becomes business success.
Salary becomes career success.
House becomes life progress.
Job title becomes importance.
Busyness becomes ambition.
Growth becomes health.
Then the scorecard starts making decisions for us.
Career researchers actually distinguish two kinds of success
This is not just philosophical.
Career research has long separated objective career success from subjective career success.
Objective success is externally observable.
Salary.
Promotions.
Hierarchical position.
Occupational prestige.
Subjective career success concerns how individuals themselves evaluate their career, including satisfaction and increasingly things such as meaningful work, learning, authenticity and work-life balance.
A major 2024 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior argues that contemporary career success cannot be adequately understood through one side alone. Modern careers require attention to both objective and subjective outcomes.
That sounds obvious.
Yet culturally, we still find the objective side much easier to recognise.
Nobody needs you to explain why doubling your salary counts as success.
Try explaining why refusing the salary increase was success because the job attached to it would have wrecked the life you actually wanted.
Now we need context.
External scorecards are wonderfully convenient
They save us having to define success ourselves.
More money.
Better title.
Bigger house.
More successful business.
More followers.
Better school.
Better university.
More impressive job.
Keep moving upwards.
There is comfort in this because everyone understands the direction.
You don't have to explain why you want £100,000 rather than £60,000.
More is self-explanatory.
But say:
“I've got enough.”
Now people want details.
Enough?
What do you mean enough?
Could you earn more?
Could the business grow?
Couldn't you get promoted again?
Why wouldn't you?
That last question is particularly revealing.
Why wouldn't you want more?
As though the burden of proof belongs to stopping rather than continuing.
I spent a long time using an external scorecard
Work hard.
Progress.
Take responsibility.
Become more senior.
Grow the business.
Solve bigger problems.
Earn more.
Become harder to replace.
From the outside, each step made sense.
From inside, many did too.
That's what makes these things complicated.
I wasn't pursuing some ridiculous fantasy I didn't want.
I liked succeeding.
I liked responsibility.
I liked being good at what I did.
I liked seeing the numbers improve.
I still do.
Ambition hasn't disappeared from me.
What eventually changed was the assumption that the visible score automatically represented the total result.
Because you can win on the visible scorecard while quietly losing somewhere the scoreboard isn't looking.
The scoreboard only counts what was designed to count
Revenue doesn't measure your marriage.
Salary doesn't measure whether your children know you.
Promotion doesn't measure sleep.
Business valuation doesn't measure whether you can go away without your phone.
LinkedIn doesn't measure whether you like your work.
A bigger house doesn't measure how much time you spend inside it.
None of that makes revenue, salary, promotion or houses irrelevant.
It means they are partial measures.
Every metric is.
The problem is forgetting the word partial.
Money matters more than some people like to admit
There is a peculiar reverse-snobbery around money.
“Money doesn't make you happy.”
Usually said most confidently by people with enough of it.
Money can buy housing.
Security.
Food.
Warmth.
Healthcare.
Experiences.
Choice.
Time.
Distance from terrible employers.
The ability to absorb a broken boiler without financial disaster.
These things matter enormously.
And contemporary research does not support the simplistic claim that money stops having any relationship with happiness after some universally fixed salary.
A 2023 adversarial collaboration between Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers revisited previously conflicting findings about income and emotional wellbeing.
Their joint analysis found a more complicated pattern: for the least happy group in the sample, experienced wellbeing flattened at higher incomes, but among happier people it continued rising with log income, and increased particularly strongly among the happiest group.
So no:
There is not a scientifically established salary at which money suddenly stops mattering to everyone.
Real life is messier.
But money and success are still not synonyms
That's the distinction.
Money is a resource.
Success is an evaluation.
You need an objective before money can tell you whether you're succeeding.
If the objective is:
Create financial security.
More money may be very important.
If the objective is:
Spend more time with my children while they're young.
Another £30,000 attached to another twenty hours of weekly responsibility may score differently.
Same money.
Different objective.
That is why asking:
“How much money is enough?”
without asking:
“For what?”
doesn't really work.
Enough to survive?
Enough to feel safe?
Enough to live where you want?
Enough to retire?
Enough to buy status?
Enough to stop thinking about money?
Enough to win?
Those are different games.
Comparison quietly chooses the game for us
Humans compare.
We always have.
Social comparison isn't a social-media invention.
But modern life provides extraordinary visibility into other people's scorecards.
House.
Holiday.
Car.
Job title.
Business announcement.
Fundraising.
Book sales.
Followers.
School.
Restaurant.
Body.
Everything displayed.
Recent research on social comparison and mental health emphasises that the effects are complex and context-dependent rather than uniformly negative. Comparisons can motivate, inform or reassure as well as generate distress. But digital environments have dramatically increased opportunities for comparison, and researchers continue to find important links between how people compare themselves and psychological outcomes.
The bigger question for this essay is simpler.
If you compare yourself against someone else's scorecard often enough, you can start adopting their measures without ever deciding to.
Relative position matters
Income research gives us a particularly clear example.
A study using data from more than 1.7 million people across 2,425 US counties found that people's life satisfaction was related not simply to their own income but to relative income, with social-comparison effects stronger in areas with higher inequality.
A much larger 2020 meta-analysis synthesising 357 studies and more than 2.3 million participants found both objective socioeconomic status and subjective socioeconomic status, people's perception of where they stand socially, associated with subjective wellbeing.
Think about how strange that is.
There is:
What you have.
And:
Where you think what you have places you relative to everybody else.
Both matter.
That makes “enough” extremely difficult if success is comparative.
There is always another rung.
Status is a moving target
You earn £30,000.
£50,000 looks extraordinary.
You earn £50,000.
Now your peer group includes people earning £70,000.
You earn £100,000.
You don't necessarily spend your life comparing yourself with people earning £25,000.
Your reference group changes.
Same with business.
£500,000 revenue feels enormous when you're at £100,000.
At £500,000 you're talking to people doing £2 million.
At £2 million you meet people doing £10 million.
At £10 million someone has just sold for £70 million.
There is no natural top.
Comparison manufactures another level automatically.
That's useful if endless progression is the objective.
Less useful if you were hoping to eventually feel finished.
Social status can affect more than ego
Research on subjective social status shows associations with health as well as wellbeing.
A meta-analysis of 38 independent studies including more than 142,000 participants found small but statistically significant associations between perceived social status and mental health, physical health, health behaviour and self-rated health.
Another meta-analysis found subjective socioeconomic status had a small unique association with physical health even after accounting for objective socioeconomic indicators, although much of the available evidence was cross-sectional and causal interpretation remains limited.
This does not mean status competition literally makes you ill.
The mechanisms remain contested.
But it reinforces something important:
Our perception of where we stand relative to others is psychologically significant.
Which means other people's scorecards can influence us even if we consciously claim not to care.
We also inherit aspirations
Psychologists working within Self-Determination Theory distinguish broadly between intrinsic aspirations and extrinsic aspirations.
Intrinsic aspirations include things such as:
personal growth,
close relationships,
health,
community contribution.
Extrinsic aspirations include:
wealth,
fame,
image.
A 2023 meta-analysis brought together 92 reports, 105 studies, 1,808 effects and 70,110 participants.
Intrinsic aspirations were positively associated with wellbeing and negatively associated with ill-being.
Importantly, extrinsic aspirations were not simply universally harmful on their own.
But when extrinsic goals predominated over intrinsic goals, the pattern was associated with lower wellbeing and greater ill-being.
That nuance is crucial.
Wanting money isn't pathological.
Wanting to look good isn't.
Wanting recognition isn't.
Wanting status isn't.
The question is what happens when those externally validated goals become the dominant criteria by which the whole life is judged.
This isn't wealth versus virtue
That would be incredibly tedious.
There are wealthy people with brilliant relationships, strong health, meaningful work and huge social contribution.
There are people with very little money who are miserable.
There are ambitious people whose ambition gives their lives purpose.
There are people who claim not to care about money because someone else is paying the mortgage.
Reality refuses simplistic morality.
The research is more interesting than that anyway.
The concern is not possessing extrinsic success.
It is prioritising it over everything else.
That's a different claim.
Materialism research finds a similar pattern
A major meta-analysis covering 259 independent samples and 753 effect sizes found materialistic orientation associated with lower personal wellbeing overall.
The relationship was stronger when materialism was measured as a broader value orientation or relative importance of materialistic goals than when researchers examined money alone.
More recent meta-analytic work has also found materialism negatively associated with social wellbeing measures such as relationship satisfaction and social connection, although direction of causality can run both ways and context matters.
Again, the message isn't:
Possessions bad.
It is that a life organised primarily around external acquisition may behave differently from one in which external outcomes support other things people value.
That brings us back to the scorecard.
What is the money for?
I think this question is badly underused.
Not:
How much can you make?
What is it for?
Security?
Excellent.
Choice?
Useful.
A house?
Fine.
Travel?
Great.
Supporting family?
Important.
Buying back time?
Interesting.
Freedom?
Now we're getting somewhere.
Because once money has a purpose, we can assess whether the methods used to obtain it undermine the purpose.
Imagine saying:
I want to earn more because I want freedom.
Then spending twenty years becoming progressively less free in order to increase the number.
At some point the strategy deserves review.
We do the same with houses
House ownership has become one of our clearest adult progress markers.
And for good reason.
A home can provide security.
Stability.
Privacy.
A financial asset.
Space for a family.
Something you can change and make your own.
All valuable.
But the scorecard moves.
Starter home.
Then bigger home.
Better area.
Detached.
More bedrooms.
Bigger garden.
Maybe another move.
Again, none of those desires is wrong.
But eventually the question might be:
Is the house serving the life?
Or has maintaining the house's place on the scorecard started determining the life?
The mortgage can answer that surprisingly quickly.
The car is particularly funny
Almost nobody will tell you they bought the car for status.
They liked the build quality.
Safety.
Comfort.
Engineering.
Driving position.
Resale.
Of course.
I'm sure nobody has ever bought a German badge because other humans can see it.
We are wonderfully sophisticated storytellers.
And again, there is nothing wrong with liking nice cars.
I like nice things.
The interesting bit is noticing why a particular upgrade feels like progress.
Would I still want it if nobody could see it?
That's a useful question.
Not because the answer has to be no.
Because knowing is useful.
Careers have one of the strongest public scorecards
Junior.
Senior.
Manager.
Director.
Partner.
Executive.
Clear upward movement.
Salary follows.
Authority grows.
Wonderful if that's the career you want.
But contemporary career research increasingly recognises that career success is multidimensional.
The 2024 critical review I mentioned earlier argues that objective markers remain important but cannot capture things such as sustainable careers, alternative work arrangements or subjective evaluations of success.
A 2025 systematic review similarly describes objective success through markers such as salary, hierarchy, promotion and prestige, while subjective success can include learning, work-life balance and other personally meaningful outcomes.
That matters because sometimes the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
You can keep climbing anyway.
The rungs remain perfectly measurable.
Promotion is particularly difficult to question
Someone offers you promotion.
Higher salary.
Higher status.
More responsibility.
Your instinct is supposed to be:
Yes.
Declining requires explanation.
Why wouldn't you want to progress?
But imagine the promotion means:
more travel,
more evenings,
more staff problems,
less of the work you actually enjoy,
greater availability,
more mental load.
Still could be absolutely worth it.
But “promotion” doesn't answer the question.
It's merely a bundle of trade-offs with an impressive label.
Perhaps career progress should mean movement towards the career you want.
Sometimes that's upward.
Sometimes sideways.
Sometimes fewer hours.
Sometimes more expertise and less management.
Sometimes self-employment.
Sometimes employment after years of self-employment.
The shape isn't the point.
Alignment is.
Education has a scorecard too
School.
A levels.
University.
Graduate job.
Again, this route can be excellent.
The latest Department for Education data confirms that higher education continues to produce significant earnings advantages on average, though outcomes vary substantially by subject, prior attainment, sex and qualification route.
Official 2026 analysis found graduates generally had higher median earnings than otherwise comparable people without higher-level qualifications, while returns varied considerably between subjects and courses.
So telling young people university has no value would be nonsense.
But so would telling every academically capable child that university is automatically the successful route.
It is a route.
For many, an excellent one.
The question should be what life and work the individual wants to build, not merely which option scores highest on a status hierarchy adults already understand.
“Potential” can become a weapon
“You're capable of so much more.”
Maybe.
More what?
Money?
Responsibility?
Status?
Hours?
Stress?
Impact?
Achievement?
If someone is academically brilliant and deliberately chooses work that gives them enough income and huge amounts of time for family, outdoors, creativity or whatever they care about, have they failed to fulfil their potential?
According to which objective?
We use “potential” as though human beings contain one universally agreed direction of travel.
They don't.
Potential requires a criterion.
Potential to earn.
Lead.
Create.
Parent.
Think.
Build.
Serve.
Explore.
Compete.
Live.
Different games.
Business owners get the growth scorecard
This one interests me enormously because it is so deeply assumed.
How's business?
Growing.
Good.
Not growing.
Concern.
Sometimes correctly.
A business losing customers and shrinking unintentionally may have a problem.
But what if the owner does not want growth?
Is £300,000 revenue worse than £600,000?
Depends.
What are the margins?
Hours?
Risk?
People required?
Owner income?
Stress?
Capital requirements?
Reliance on one customer?
Freedom?
If one business generates £100,000 for the owner while allowing three days of work a week and another generates £150,000 while consuming sixty hours and every holiday, which is more successful?
There is no mathematical answer until you tell me the objective.
Not every business owner wants maximum growth
Current UK data actually makes this visible.
The 2024 Longitudinal Small Business Survey found that around 71 per cent of SME employers aimed to increase sales over the following three years.
Which also means a substantial minority did not report that ambition.
Growth ambition also varied markedly by business size and sector.
Qualitative research commissioned by the Scottish Government has similarly found that business owners start companies for very different reasons, including work-life balance, opportunity and financial motives, with some participants explicitly not seeking high growth.
There is nothing defective about that.
A business is a tool.
The owner gets to decide what it is for.
Growth itself can create trade-offs
Research on small-firm growth aspirations has found ambitious growth goals can produce beneficial outcomes through strategies such as innovation and internationalisation, while also creating possible negative organisational effects when aspirations and organisational conditions do not align.
Again:
Growth not bad.
Growth not automatically good.
Growth towards what?
If the answer is:
Because businesses are supposed to grow,
we're back to defaults.
I used to think growth proved I was doing it right
More revenue.
More people.
More responsibility.
More complexity.
More importance.
There is something incredibly seductive about watching the number rise.
It is unambiguous.
£1 million.
£2 million.
£5 million.
Up is winning.
But businesses don't live.
People do.
So at some point I had to add other numbers to the invisible P&L.
Time.
Availability.
Health.
Presence.
Mental load.
Family.
Freedom.
Enjoyment.
These numbers are harder to calculate.
That doesn't mean their value is zero.
Measurement bias shapes what we pursue
This isn't statistical measurement bias in the technical sense.
It's simpler.
We naturally manage what we can see.
Revenue is visible.
Time with your family is less so.
Followers visible.
Depth of friendship less so.
Weight visible.
Health partly invisible.
Hours worked visible.
Quality of thought not so much.
Salary visible.
Autonomy harder.
House price visible.
Feeling at home impossible to list on Rightmove.
When one thing has a number and another has a feeling, the number looks more serious.
The number gets the spreadsheet.
The feeling gets:
“I really should do something about that.”
Some of the most valuable things in life are terrible KPIs
A good conversation.
Being trusted by your children.
Feeling physically well.
A marriage that still has friendship inside it.
Having enough mental space to become curious.
Knowing your neighbours.
Being able to disappear for an afternoon without everything collapsing.
Enjoying your work.
Having people you'd call at 2am.
You can measure proxies.
But the thing itself resists clean scoring.
That puts it at a disadvantage in cultures obsessed with measurable progress.
External success also photographs better
Nobody posts:
“Thrilled to announce I have decided not to scale.”
“Delighted to share that I've remained at roughly the same income because I already have enough.”
“Big career update: I refused a promotion and took Friday afternoons off.”
Maybe they should.
But we understand why they don't.
Public platforms favour visible movement.
New job.
Award.
Launch.
Funding.
Milestone.
Record month.
House keys.
Airport.
Transformation.
Social media gives us a highly selective dataset of other people's lives.
Then we compare our ordinary Wednesday with their announcement.
This does not require anybody to lie.
Selection alone is enough.
Perhaps the problem isn't comparison
It's forgetting the reference group was optional.
If I compare my writing with someone who has sold ten million books, I look unsuccessful.
Compare it with the version of me who had written none?
Different result.
Compare income with a billionaire?
Failure.
Compare freedom with somebody earning twice as much who works every waking hour?
Different scorecard.
Reference points can completely alter the evaluation while the underlying life remains identical.
That should make us cautious about apparently objective feelings of being “behind”.
Behind whom?
On which measure?
Towards what destination?
Success can become positional
Economists distinguish some goods partly through their positional value.
Their value depends not only on what they provide directly but on how they locate us relative to others.
Status naturally behaves this way.
If everybody receives the same prestigious title tomorrow, it stops being as prestigious.
If every house on the street gets twice as large, your house hasn't physically shrunk, but its relative position changed.
This creates an awkward property:
You can improve materially while feeling stationary socially.
That makes status a difficult route to enough.
The finish line moves with everybody else.
Intrinsic goals have a different structure
A close relationship doesn't become less valuable because your neighbour has two.
Your health doesn't become worse because someone has a more expensive watch.
Being present with your daughter is not reduced because another parent earns more.
Learning something you care about does not require other people to learn less.
Community.
Relationships.
Growth.
Health.
These goals are not completely immune to comparison.
Nothing human is.
But they depend less fundamentally on outranking someone else.
That may be part of why Self-Determination Theory finds such different wellbeing relationships between intrinsic and predominantly extrinsic aspiration patterns.
This doesn't mean abandon external goals
I want my books to sell.
Obviously.
I want my businesses to make money.
I want people to read my work.
I'd rather a keynote went brilliantly than badly.
I like achievement.
The answer cannot be pretending ego disappears once you've read enough psychology.
The interesting move is making sure external measures serve something deeper rather than becoming the entire definition.
Book sales mean ideas travelled.
Revenue means the business works.
Money creates security and options.
Reach lets me help more people.
Fine.
Now the metric has a relationship to purpose.
That's different from worshipping the metric itself.
Ask what happens if nobody knows
This is one of my favourite tests.
Would I still want this if nobody could see it?
The car.
House.
Job title.
Business size.
Qualification.
Holiday.
Watch.
Followers.
Answer may be yes.
Great.
You like the thing.
Maybe answer is:
Not as much.
Also useful.
Humans are social.
Wanting status is not a character flaw.
But there is value in knowing when part of the purchase is the audience.
Another useful question: what does success cost?
Not only money.
What does the promotion cost?
What does doubling the company cost?
What does the bigger house require?
What does the private school require?
What does the prestigious role require?
What does becoming the industry's go-to person require?
Time.
Travel.
Responsibility.
Stress.
Capital.
Availability.
Opportunity cost.
Maybe the trade is excellent.
But success has a gross figure and a net figure.
We are much better at celebrating gross.
This is where whole-life accounting becomes useful
Imagine two columns.
What did I gain?
What did it cost?
Salary increased £25,000.
Great.
Hours increased ten a week.
Travel doubled.
More responsibility.
Enjoy work more.
Interesting.
Now we have an actual trade.
Business grew 40 per cent.
Great.
Profit increased 10 per cent.
Owner works Saturdays.
Two new managers hired.
Risk diversified.
Fine.
Now we understand the change.
Success becomes less about whether the headline number went up and more about what the entire transaction produced.
Objective success can support subjective success
We shouldn't create a false opposition.
A promotion can be deeply satisfying.
More money can reduce anxiety.
Growing a business can be exhilarating.
Status can open doors.
Recognition can feel deserved.
Objective and subjective success interact.
Research treats them as related, not mutually exclusive.
Older meta-analytic work showed that predictors of objective and subjective career success overlap but are not identical, while newer reviews argue both dimensions are required for a fuller understanding of successful careers.
So the goal isn't:
Choose happiness instead of achievement.
It is:
Stop assuming achievement has only one valid form.
Maybe success needs multiple columns
Financial.
Relational.
Physical.
Temporal.
Intellectual.
Professional.
Contribution.
Freedom.
Whatever actually matters to you.
Not equally weighted.
Not permanently fixed.
At thirty, financial security might dominate.
At forty, time with young children may increase in weight.
At sixty, health might become enormous.
There is no universal formula.
That's exactly the point.
The scorecard should be allowed to change
This connects directly with the previous essay.
Past you may have wanted the title.
Current you may want autonomy.
Neither has to be wrong.
The objective changed.
Businesses change strategy when market conditions change.
People act as though changing their personal definition of success exposes inconsistency.
Why?
You acquired information.
Life changed.
You changed.
You are allowed to update the metric.
What concerns me most is inherited ambition
Wanting something because you want it is one thing.
Wanting it because wanting it is culturally associated with being successful is another.
Bigger company.
Senior title.
University for every academically able child.
Larger home.
Certain salary.
Retirement number.
You may examine all of those and keep them.
Fine.
But at least make them answer a question:
What does achieving this allow me to have, do, feel or contribute that I actually value?
If there isn't an answer beyond:
Then I'll know I'm doing well,
you may be playing someone else's game.
The trouble with someone else's game is you can win it
That's worse than failing.
Failing makes you question the rules.
Winning encourages you to continue.
Promotion.
Another promotion.
More money.
Bigger company.
Bigger house.
Recognition.
You become increasingly successful according to the metric.
And because success is rewarding, it can take years before you ask whether the prize is improving the whole life around it.
That's not a criticism of ambition.
It's a reason to define ambition more carefully.
There is nothing noble about underachieving deliberately
This needs saying.
If you're capable of building something extraordinary and want to build it:
Build it.
If you want wealth:
Go for it.
If you want the CEO job:
Compete.
If you want a huge company:
Grow it.
If you want the big house:
Buy it.
This series is not an argument for making yourself smaller.
It is an argument for making sure bigger actually points in the direction you chose.
That is radically different.
Ambition should have a destination
Without one, ambition can only say:
More.
More what?
Yes.
That's the problem.
There is always another level.
Another number.
Another person ahead.
Another opportunity.
Another market.
Another property.
Another promotion.
Another zero.
At some point, ambition needs to know what it is trying to produce.
Otherwise it is simply acceleration.
Maybe this is why “enough” is such a difficult word
We'll get properly into that next.
Because enough requires you to establish a personal threshold inside a culture built around comparison.
Enough money.
Enough growth.
Enough status.
Enough achievement.
Enough possessions.
Enough work.
That doesn't mean stop forever.
It means you can distinguish continued pursuit from automatic pursuit.
Very different thing.
The dangerous question isn't “Am I successful?”
Too vague.
Try:
Successful at what?
According to what measure?
Compared with whom?
At what cost?
For whose benefit?
And did I choose the measure myself?
Those questions complicate things.
Good.
The simple scorecard was never measuring the whole life anyway.
I don't want my daughters inheriting one definition of success
This matters to me now more than it once did.
I want them to know university can be brilliant.
And so can not going.
A career can be brilliant.
So can building a business.
So can doing a perfectly ordinary job that funds a life they love.
They may want enormous professional achievement.
Brilliant.
I will support them.
They may care much more about freedom, family, travel, creativity or something neither of us can currently imagine.
Also brilliant.
What I don't want is for them to mistake:
What society knows how to applaud
for:
What they are supposed to want.
Those are different things.
Applause is not evidence
People applaud promotions.
Growth.
Awards.
Big sales.
New houses.
Graduations.
They should.
Celebration is good.
But some of the best decisions you ever make may receive almost no applause because they don't look like progress from outside.
Turning something down.
Reducing.
Stopping.
Staying small.
Changing direction.
Protecting time.
Leaving money on the table.
Deciding you have enough.
Those decisions require a stronger internal scorecard because the environment may not confirm them for you.
That is what subjective success actually demands
Not vague positivity.
Judgement.
What matters?
What trade am I willing to make?
What do I want the work to produce?
What is money for?
What role do I want to play in my family?
What kind of business do I actually want?
How much responsibility do I enjoy?
What does a good week look like?
What would I regret sacrificing?
These are harder questions than:
Did revenue increase?
Numbers are easy.
Meaning is annoyingly complicated.
Perhaps we need both scorecards
External and internal.
Money:
Is the business economically healthy?
Internal:
Do I still like the business it has become?
Career:
Am I progressing professionally?
Internal:
Towards work I actually want?
House:
Can we afford it?
Internal:
Does owning it improve the life enough to justify what it requires?
Growth:
Can we grow?
Internal:
Why do we want to?
Success doesn't require throwing away objective measurement.
It requires refusing to let one dimension pretend it is the whole thing.
The ultimate problem with the default scorecard
It is not that the measures are bad.
They're mostly valuable.
Money.
Status.
Qualifications.
Growth.
Homeownership.
Career progression.
Achievement.
All can improve lives.
The problem is that because these measures are visible, comparable and culturally recognised, they can become goals without passing through conscious choice first.
Then we organise a life around improving the score.
And only later discover that we never defined the game.
So, success according to whom?
Your parents?
Your industry?
Your friends?
Your neighbours?
LinkedIn?
The people you went to school with?
Your younger self?
The version of society you grew up in?
The business press?
Somebody you follow online?
You?
Probably a mixture.
That's normal.
Nobody invents their values from nothing.
But there is an enormous difference between being influenced by the world and outsourcing the entire judgement to it.
The score can go up while the life gets worse
That is the warning.
But the opposite is equally important.
The score can go up and the life can get better.
More money.
More freedom.
More impact.
Better work.
More security.
More time.
Fantastic.
That's success worth celebrating.
The question is whether we are measuring enough of the picture to know the difference.
Because revenue can rise while freedom falls.
Salary can rise while presence disappears.
Status can rise while enjoyment collapses.
A house can get bigger while the mortgage owns more of your future.
A business can employ more people while the owner becomes less able to leave it.
None of those outcomes is inevitable.
They're simply invisible if the scorecard doesn't contain them.
Maybe success isn't a position
Maybe it's a relationship.
Between what you wanted.
What you achieved.
What it cost.
And whether, knowing the trade, you'd choose it again.
That is harder to display on a social profile.
Harder to compare.
Harder to congratulate.
But perhaps that's appropriate.
A good life was never supposed to fit neatly into somebody else's leaderboard.
And before you spend another ten years trying to improve your score, there is one question worth asking.
Who decided this was the game you were meant to win?
Sources And Further Reading
Scott E. Seibert, Jos Akkermans and Cheng-Huan Liu, “Understanding Contemporary Career Success: A Critical Review”, Annual Review Of Organizational Psychology And Organizational Behavior (2024).
A contemporary review distinguishing objective and subjective approaches to career success and arguing for broader models capable of accounting for changing employment arrangements, sustainable careers, career shocks and different personal definitions of success.
Thomas W. H. Ng, Lillian T. Eby, Kelly L. Sorensen and Daniel C. Feldman, “Predictors Of Objective And Subjective Career Success: A Meta-Analysis”, Personnel Psychology (2005).
A foundational meta-analysis distinguishing externally observable career outcomes, particularly salary and promotion, from subjective career outcomes such as career satisfaction. The authors found overlapping but distinct predictor patterns for the two forms of career success.
Daniel Spurk, Andreas Hirschi and Nicky Dries, “Antecedents And Outcomes Of Objective Versus Subjective Career Success”, Journal Of Management (2019).
A major review arguing that objective and subjective career success should be conceptually differentiated while recognising that each can influence broader career and life outcomes.
Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers, “Income And Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved”, Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences (2023).
An adversarial collaboration reconciling previously conflicting findings about income and emotional wellbeing. The analysis found no single universal income threshold beyond which happiness ceases increasing: flattening was concentrated among the least happy portion of the sample, while wellbeing continued rising with log income for happier groups.
Jacinth J. X. Tan, Michael W. Kraus, Nichelle C. Carpenter and Nancy E. Adler, “The Association Between Objective And Subjective Socioeconomic Status And Subjective Well-Being: A Meta-Analytic Review”, Psychological Bulletin (2020).
A meta-analysis synthesising 357 studies and more than 2.35 million participants, examining associations between objective socioeconomic measures, perceived social standing and subjective wellbeing.
Felix Cheung and Richard E. Lucas, “Income Inequality Is Associated With Stronger Social Comparison Effects: The Effect Of Relative Income On Life Satisfaction” (2016).
Using data from more than 1.7 million people across 2,425 US counties, the study found relative income effects on life satisfaction were stronger in areas with greater income inequality, consistent with the importance of social comparison and reference groups.
Ethan Zell, Jason E. Strickhouser and Zlatan Krizan, “Subjective Social Status And Health: A Meta-Analysis Of Community And Society Ladders”, Health Psychology (2018).
A meta-analysis of 38 independent studies and more than 142,000 participants finding small but significant associations between subjective social status and mental health, physical health, health behaviour and self-rated health.
Danielle Arigo et al., “Social Comparison And Mental Health”, Current Treatment Options In Psychiatry (2024).
A contemporary review emphasising the complexity and context-dependence of social comparison. Digital technology creates increasingly frequent comparison opportunities, but comparison can be beneficial, neutral or harmful depending on direction, target, context and individual differences.
Emma L. Bradshaw et al., “A Meta-Analysis Of The Dark Side Of The American Dream: Evidence For The Universal Wellness Costs Of Prioritizing Extrinsic Over Intrinsic Goals”, Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology (2023).
A systematic review and meta-analysis of 105 studies, 1,808 effects and 70,110 participants. Intrinsic aspirations were positively associated with wellbeing. Extrinsic aspirations were not uniformly harmful in isolation, but patterns in which extrinsic aspirations predominated over intrinsic aspirations were associated with lower wellbeing and greater ill-being.
Helga Dittmar, Rod Bond, Megan Hurst and Tim Kasser, “The Relationship Between Materialism And Personal Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis”, Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology (2014).
A meta-analysis of 259 independent samples and 753 effect sizes found higher materialistic orientation associated with lower personal wellbeing, with stronger associations for broad materialistic value orientations than for measures focused narrowly on money.
Department For Education, “Graduate Labour Market Outcomes (LEO): 2023 To 2024” (2026).
Official English data comparing graduate and postgraduate earnings and employment by qualification, subject and individual characteristics. The data show meaningful average economic returns to higher education while also demonstrating large differences between subjects, prior attainment groups and pathways.
UK Department For Business And Trade, Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024.
The 2024 survey found around 71 per cent of SME employers aimed to grow sales over the following three years. Growth ambition varied substantially by business size and sector, demonstrating that expansion is widespread but not universal among business owners.
Scottish Government, “Behaviour And Motivation Of Businesses: Qualitative Insights” (2019).
Qualitative research into SME owner motivations found business ownership arose from diverse goals including work-life balance, opportunistic entry and material motivations. Some owners actively did not prioritise high growth, illustrating the variety of objectives underlying apparently similar businesses.
Ann Elida Eide et al., “Growth Aspirations In SMEs: Managerial Determinants And Organizational Outcomes”, Journal Of Small Business And Enterprise Development (2021).
Research examining growth aspirations in 249 Norwegian SMEs found ambitious growth goals connected to strategic activity while also identifying possible negative organisational effects and trade-offs associated with growth ambitions.
Research Gaps
Success is not one scientifically agreed construct.
Career research distinguishes objective and subjective success, psychology examines wellbeing and aspirations, sociology studies status and stratification, and entrepreneurship research examines performance and growth. This essay deliberately combines those perspectives around the everyday concept of “success”, but no single academic model captures the entire argument.
Objective and subjective success should not be treated as opposites.
Higher salaries, promotions, business growth and status can contribute to satisfaction, security and wellbeing. The research supports distinguishing them, not assuming external success necessarily undermines internal success.
Income matters differently at different income levels and for different people.
The 2023 Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers analysis rejects a simple universal happiness plateau. It does not establish that additional income produces the same wellbeing benefit for everyone or that money is among the strongest determinants of wellbeing at every income level.
Income research cited here is primarily US-based.
Taxation, healthcare, housing, welfare provision and cultural attitudes differ between countries. Absolute income levels from US research should not be transferred directly to British households.
Social comparison is not uniformly harmful.
Comparison can provide information, motivation, reassurance and social learning. Effects depend on who is compared, whether the comparison is upward or downward, how attainable the target appears and the individual's circumstances.
Relative-income findings do not prove conscious status competition.
Associations between neighbours' income, inequality and life satisfaction are consistent with social-comparison mechanisms but may also reflect housing markets, neighbourhood characteristics and other contextual factors.
Subjective social status evidence is substantially observational.
Meta-analytic associations between perceived status, health and wellbeing do not establish that feeling lower status independently causes poorer health. Reverse causality and confounding remain important limitations.
Intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations can coexist.
The 2023 meta-analysis does not imply that wanting money, recognition or appearance is inherently detrimental. The more concerning pattern involved extrinsic aspirations dominating the person's wider aspiration profile.
“Extrinsic” should not be interpreted as shallow.
Someone may pursue a high income to support children, create security, fund charitable activity or buy autonomy. The same outward objective can reflect very different underlying motives.
Materialism is not identical to wealth.
Materialism research concerns the importance placed on acquisition, possessions and status-related material goals. Wealthy people are not necessarily highly materialistic, and low-income people can hold strongly materialistic values.
The business-growth evidence does not establish that remaining small improves wellbeing.
Some firms benefit enormously from growth and some owners genuinely want expansion. The relevant claim is only that growth is an owner-dependent objective rather than a universal definition of successful entrepreneurship.
The UK SME survey measures stated growth ambition.
Not reporting an intention to increase sales does not reveal why the owner made that choice. It may reflect lifestyle preference, market conditions, age, constraints, pessimism or strategic consolidation.
Higher education has outcomes beyond earnings.
Using earnings as evidence for the economic value of university does not capture intellectual development, professional access, civic participation, friendships, identity or non-financial benefits. Conversely, a degree's cultural prestige does not guarantee it is the optimal path for a particular individual.
Graduate earnings vary markedly by background and subject.
Average graduate advantages should not be interpreted as guaranteed individual returns. Current Department for Education data explicitly show variation by prior attainment, sex, qualification route and subject.
The essay's “scorecard” is a conceptual metaphor.
There is no single social scorecard formally assigning value to salary, houses, titles and qualifications. The argument describes a network of cultural signals, comparison processes and institutional measures that can collectively create widely recognised indicators of success.
Personal definitions of success can also become dysfunctional.
Rejecting external measures does not automatically produce wiser choices. A personally invented success criterion can be unrealistic, self-serving or damaging to others. Agency requires considering responsibilities and consequences, not merely personal preference.
Values change across the life course.
Research increasingly recognises careers and wellbeing as dynamic, but the essay's recommendation to update personal success criteria is normative. There is no validated interval at which people should formally redefine success.
Internal satisfaction alone cannot judge organisational performance.
A business owner may feel successful while the business is financially unstable, employees are poorly treated or customers receive inadequate service. A useful scorecard requires both subjective and objective information.