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By Maria Psarra
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We live in a culture that rewards speed, yet punishes reflection. When I ask many of my clients and friends, "What do you actually want from your life?", the silence that follows tells the real story: the story of climbing a ladder, only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall.
Many of us become remarkably adept at pursuing success, yet far less comfortable defining what it means to us personally. Money, professional advancement and status offer visible measures of achievement, reinforced by businesses, social circles and a culture that rewards ambition.
Love, meaningful relationships, enjoyment and inner peace are harder to quantify, so they often receive less attention in our calculations of a successful life. We learn to articulate what we want to achieve, but rarely examine why we want it in the first place.
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As the Abraham-Hicks teachings put it, “Everything you want is because you believe you will feel better in having it.” I would add that understanding the feeling we hope to achieve is just as important as identifying the goal itself.
Without that understanding, we risk spending years acquiring things that look impressive on paper but leave us wondering why we are not as happy as we expected to be.
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Looking Beyond Money
I have spent much of my professional and personal life around people who have built successful careers and lives that others might envy. Somewhere along the way, I became one of them myself.
Looking back on the past two decades, I am deeply grateful for what I have achieved. Yet gratitude does not eliminate the occasional question of whether I have built the life I truly want.
Some things I desire, such as longer and more luxurious holidays, can be bought with money. Others, including love and inner peace, cannot. Wealth can create opportunities, remove certain pressures and offer greater freedom over how we spend our time, but it cannot guarantee that we will feel fulfilled. Recognizing this is not a rejection of achievement.
It is an acknowledgment that professional achievement alone cannot answer every question we have about our lives.
In my work, I have yet to meet someone who, when asked what they genuinely want from life, answers simply that they want more money, another promotion or greater professional success.
These things may feature in their ambitions, but they rarely capture the whole picture. People want to feel loved, secure, content and connected to something that matters to them. They want their lives to feel worthwhile, not merely successful by someone else's standards.
The Art of Finding Purpose
Ambition itself is not the problem. I believe it is essential to growth, and I have little patience for the idea that we should stop aspiring to more. Desire drives progress, and the willingness to keep learning and evolving gives life direction.
The difficulty arises when ambition becomes detached from purpose, leaving us to pursue goals without understanding what they are supposed to give us.
Before deciding what we want to achieve, we need to understand our values and what gives our lives meaning. Our values establish the boundaries within which we are willing to pursue success, including the sacrifices we will accept and those we will not.
Our sense of purpose helps us decide which goals deserve our time and energy. Without these foundations, we can become remarkably efficient at reaching destinations we never consciously chose.
It is rather like setting sail without a destination or a captain. We may travel a considerable distance, but movement alone offers no assurance that we are heading in the right direction. We might eventually reach a shore that suits us, or discover too late that we have spent years moving away from the life we wanted.
Choosing Your Direction
Yet the pressure to keep moving rarely leaves much room for reflection. There is always another milestone to reach, another opportunity to pursue, or another measure of success against which to compare ourselves.
Stopping to ask whether any of it is making us happier can feel uncomfortable, particularly when striving for more is easier than confronting what might be missing. It can be harder still to acknowledge an honest answer if it requires us to reconsider choices we have spent years defending.
The question, then, is not whether we should want more, but whether we have taken the time to decide what more actually means. The answer must belong to us, not our friends, colleagues, employees or society at large. It must reflect the life we want to live, the relationships we want to nurture and the compromises we are genuinely prepared to make.
That answer will change as we grow older, our circumstances shift, and our needs evolve. Defining success is not a task we complete once and leave behind. It requires us to keep examining our priorities and to recognize when the goals that once motivated us no longer serve the lives we want to build.
We spend so much of our lives learning how to succeed professionally. Perhaps it is time we gave equal attention to learning how to recognize non-professional success when we find it.
Because the greatest achievement is not necessarily reaching the highest rung on the ladder. It is knowing when the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
Maria Psarra is a London-based financial advisor and founder of Iris Wealth Management. The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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