Redefining Enough
Reading Ron Carucci’s Why Success Doesn’t Lead to Satisfaction hit me like a mirror I didn’t know I needed. His story about fixating on a single missed metric—despite leading a wildly successful year—felt eerily familiar. The quiet, corrosive loop of “yes, but not quite” had become my norm too. For a long time, I chased success with an intensity that looked admirable on the outside and felt exhausting on the inside. I checked boxes. I hit milestones. I delivered. And yet, I was constantly doing mental math about what I hadn’t done—what was still out of reach, what still needed proving. Like Carucci says, “we begin to measure success not by what we’ve done, but by what we haven’t yet.” That line, ugh.
It’s easy to mistake this kind of drive for ambition. In reality, it’s learned dissatisfaction—quietly inherited from systems, expectations, maybe even well-meaning mentors. We’re conditioned to move the goalpost just as we reach it, to treat rest as weakness, to believe joy must be earned only after some mythical “there.” With support (and a lot of self-unlearning), I found the courage to walk away from a job that looked like a dream on paper but quietly chipped away at my spirit. I left not in crisis, but with clarity (well kinda, you can read more about that here, and here). I was on this new path to redefine what success meant to me—not just professionally, but personally and emotionally, too.
Since then, I’ve been on a journey to recalibrate my own “enoughness.” It’s a work in progress. Some days I still catch myself measuring impact by the wrong yardsticks. But I’m more aware now. I know that the ache of “almost happy” is a signal, not a sentence. It’s a call to question whether the version of success you’re chasing is actually yours—or one you inherited without consent. If any of this resonates—if you're high-achieving but running on empty, or wondering whether success has to come at the cost of joy—I can’t recommend Carucci’s piece enough. It’s a gentle and piercing invitation to get honest about what truly matters.
And if you want to go even deeper, Carucci’s book To Be Honest has been one of the most challenging and affirming reads on what it means to live and lead with integrity. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer real questions—the kind that shift something in you if you let them. Here’s to redefining success. And to finding our way back to ourselves in the process.
