Reflection
The Goal Loses Its Luminosity
There is one sentence you can say to almost nobody. Not to the board. Not to the people who work for you. Not to the friends who envy you, and often not to the person you live with.
I got everything I wanted, and I feel nothing.
If you have ever come close to saying it, this was written for you.
The version that does get said out loud is a cliché, and it is usually said with a small note of satisfaction in the voice. He has everything, but there is nothing inside. She has achieved it all, but there is no meaning in her life. It is a comfortable thing to say. It lets the speaker feel that the ledger balances, that great worldly achievement must be paid for somewhere, and that they themselves simply chose a quieter currency.
It is also, as a diagnosis, mostly wrong. Not about the symptom, which is real and which I see often. About the cause.
A small version of it
I should say where I am standing, because I am not writing about this from the outside.
I have no pretension to being successful in the way the people I am describing are successful. But I studied for a very long time, and I did it because I did not feel good enough. Not smart enough. I had the idea, never quite examined, that if I had a title behind my name then I would finally be all right. And I believed something about the people who already had one: that they knew something I did not know, or had mastered something I had not mastered, or, most of all, that they felt something about themselves that I did not feel about myself.
Then you get there. You stand on the other side of the thing you spent years reaching for, and what arrives is not transformation. What arrives is: so what?
You are still there. You are still you.
And here is the part that I have come to think is the whole point. It was important that I achieved it. Not because of what it gave me, but because achieving it was the only way I was ever going to discover that it was not the title that would make me feel different. Nobody could have told me. I would have nodded and carried on studying.
That is a small version of what I meet, at a far larger scale, in my consulting room.
The climb was not empty
The assumption inside the cliché is that the pursuit of success or money is inherently meaningless, and that a person who gave their life to it wasted that life.
That is not what I encounter. I encounter people for whom the pursuit was saturated with meaning. It had everything the religious life is supposed to have and which most modern lives lack entirely. A clear purpose. A demanding structure. Sacrifice, often enormous sacrifice, of sleep, of health, of relationships, of ease. An unambiguous measure of progress. A community of others making the same sacrifices, and opponents to define themselves against. It asked for their whole self and it took it.
A monastic would recognise the shape of that life immediately. The object of devotion differs. The devotion does not.
So when someone arrives at fifty five having built something considerable and tells me they feel hollow, they are rarely saying their life was always hollow. They are usually saying it used to be full, and they cannot understand where the fullness went.
The goal loses its luminosity
It is tempting to describe that as a single summit, which is the tidy version and not usually what happens.
What actually happens is repetition.
The first master’s degree means something. The first serious paycheck means something. They are luminous, and the feeling is not an illusion; it is a genuine report of something real. Then there is another promotion, another bonus, a little more money, another title, and each one arrives slightly dimmer than the last. Nothing has gone wrong. Nobody has failed. The person is still winning. And at some point they notice that what was once meaningful has quietly become empty, and they cannot say when the change occurred, because there was no single day on which it did.
Part of the reason is that the struggle has gone.
Early on, the achievement was hard, and the difficulty was doing more work than anyone realised. It demanded everything they had, which is to say it required them to be fully present, fully extended, genuinely at risk. By the twentieth time, they know the game. They have become an expert in it. They can see three moves ahead, they know which meetings matter, they know what the number will be before it arrives. The competence they spent decades acquiring has succeeded completely, and its reward is that nothing requires them anymore.
So the meaning did not leak out of the achievement. It leaked out of the effort, which was where a good deal of it was living all along.
The goal loses its luminosity. That is what they come to describe, usually badly, because it sounds ungrateful and they know how it sounds.
It also explains why the obvious remedy fails. The instinct is to find another mountain: another company, another fund, another acquisition. Sometimes a new relationship that flatters the old self. Sometimes drink. But a bigger version of the same game is still the same game, played by someone who has already mastered it. It will be dimmer than the last one, and they will have spent another four years finding that out.
Where the drive comes from
There is something I notice often enough that I have stopped treating it as coincidence.
Very high achievement usually begins as proof. Not proof offered to the world, though it looks like that from outside. Proof offered to oneself.
I rarely meet someone who was massively, relentlessly successful and who also had a childhood full of security and love, where what they needed was simply given. It exists, I am sure. It is not the rule. Because if you feel genuinely all right about who you are, as you are, what exactly would drive you to the extreme? Why would you accept the stress, the chronic tension, the anxiety, the years of it, as a reasonable price?
The people who pay that price are usually people who struggled early, who came away needing to demonstrate their own worth, and who turned out to be willing to suffer a great deal in order to demonstrate it.
I want to be careful with this, because it can curdle into something cheap. It is not a way of explaining away anyone’s achievement, and it is not true of everyone. But it does explain why arrival so reliably disappoints. If the entire structure was built to answer a question about your own value, then completing the structure does not answer the question. The question was never in that territory. A goal that organises a life also gives that life its shape, telling you what to do on Monday and why Tuesday matters; attain it, and the organising principle is consumed by its own success. The scaffolding comes down and you discover that you built the scaffolding, not the building.
Much of the therapeutic task, at that point, is making it possible to stay still long enough for something else to happen.
Spirituality is not the opposite of discipline
The false opposition inside the cliché is that success belongs to the driven, while anything spiritual belongs to the soft and the unambitious. Successful people half believe this themselves, which is why they approach inward work with suspicion, as though being asked to become weaker.
The opposite is true. Every serious contemplative tradition asks for exactly what these people already have in abundance. Discipline. Commitment. Doing a difficult thing daily for years without immediate reward. Tolerance of discomfort. Persistence with no visible progress. These are not spiritual virtues borrowed from business. Business borrowed them.
So the person arriving at this threshold is not a beginner. They are unusually well equipped. They have spent thirty years building precisely the apparatus the inner life requires. They have simply never once pointed it at themselves.
What I actually mean by spirituality
I should be plain about the word, because it carries a great deal that I do not intend by it.
I am not talking about belief, or religion, or anything requiring a doctrine. For me spirituality means two things, and they are the same thing from different angles: being connected with myself, and being connected with other people.
Being connected with myself means being in contact with my own wound. My struggle, my difficulty, the places where I did not get what I needed. Not as an archive of grievances, but as something present and known.
And this is where it becomes the second thing. Because a wound you are connected to is what allows you to reach another person. A wound you are not connected to also reaches other people, but differently: it makes you defensive, angry, resentful, wanting revenge. The wound is going to act either way. The only question is whether you are on speaking terms with it.
That is what I mean. Not transcendence. Contact.
It is also why I do not think success and spirituality are opposed, or even very far apart. What the successful person is usually missing is not enlightenment. It is contact, with themselves first and then with everybody else.
The fear nobody sees
Something runs underneath all of this, particularly in those whose success is public.
They are frightened. Not occasionally. As a background condition of the life.
They fear judgement, because they are looked at constantly. They fear error, because their mistakes are not private and are not forgiven the way other people’s mistakes are forgiven. They fear falling off the pedestal, which is a specific and lonely terror, because everybody who put them up there would enjoy the fall.
Then they build a second layer of fear on top of the first. Fear of showing emotion, because emotion reads as instability. Fear of admitting confusion, because confusion reads as incompetence. Fear, finally, of being seen as a human being much like other human beings, which is the one thing they most need someone to see.
By the time they reach me, many have not been ordinary in front of another person for twenty years. A good deal of the early work is exactly that. Being ordinary, in a room, with someone who is neither impressed nor threatened.
The best weapon against anxiety
Before going further I should say something in defence of anxiety, because I do not want to be read as treating it as a defect.
Anxiety kept our species alive. The ancestors who felt uneasy at the edge of the treeline, who did not quite trust the silence, who checked twice: those are the ones who had children. The relaxed ones were eaten. Every anxious person alive is carrying equipment that worked.
The analogy I use in my consulting room, and which I have written about in more detail elsewhere, is an alarm. A well tuned alarm protects your house and your car. A badly tuned alarm wakes the entire neighbourhood at three in the morning for nothing at all. The problem is never that the alarm exists. The problem is the tuning.
Which is what makes money so interesting here, and so treacherous. Money does not tune the alarm. It soundproofs the room.
Anxiety, properly understood, is not fear of a thing. Fear has an object. Anxiety is the unknown. Will this person leave me. Will there be enough. Will this relationship hold, or is something happening in it that I have not been told about. Is this symptom anything. It is the not knowing that does the damage, and human beings have historically had one answer to it: other people. A network who would have your back. If something went wrong, there were hands.
Money is the other answer, and we should be honest about how well it works.
If you have money, you can throw it at a problem, and the problem very often goes away. Even when it does not, the feeling shifts immediately, because something has been done. A specialist can be found this week rather than in nine months. A lawyer can be instructed. A flight can be taken tonight. For a great many of the ordinary catastrophes of a life, money is not a metaphorical solution. It is an actual one.
Which is why it gets chosen, and there is a second reason it gets chosen that matters more.
To be held by people, you have to let them see that you need holding. You have to be visibly uncertain, visibly in need, in front of someone who could then think less of you. To be held by money, you need only earn it. No exposure is required at all.
So for a person already frightened of being seen as ordinary, of showing emotion, of appearing to be struggling, this is not a close contest. Money is the anxiety solution that asks nothing of you emotionally. Of course they take it.
But it is a poor substitute for a rich network of people who care about you and have your back, and the poverty of the substitution shows up late. Money answers the question what if something goes wrong. It does not answer the question does anyone actually have me. And the substitution compounds: every year of using money as the answer is a year of not building the other thing, so that by sixty the network has quietly thinned while the balance has grown.
Then something arrives that money cannot touch. A death. An illness. A child who will not speak to them. Their own ageing. And the instrument they spent forty years sharpening turns out to do nothing at all.
That is very often when the phone call is made.
Not everyone’s ladder is money
I have written all of that as though the currency were money, and for many people it is. But the mechanism has nothing to do with money in particular.
Call it the ladder of safety. Almost everyone who is both anxious and capable builds one. The rung you climb is whatever your own history taught you converts into security, and the logic is always the same: the higher I get, the safer I am, the less afraid I feel.
For some people that is money. For some women it is the body, and being thin is the ladder, which is why the anxiety rises the moment the body changes rather than when anything in the world does. For others it is attractiveness more broadly. For others it is social position: the invitations, being present wherever the important people are, knowing everyone, never being the one who was not asked.
The currency differs completely. The structure is identical. In every case it is a private system for managing anxiety, which is effortful, which is largely within your control, and which asks no vulnerability of you whatsoever. You do not have to let anybody see you need them. You only have to keep climbing.
So being successful does not always mean having a great deal of money. A person can be formidably successful on their own ladder, admired and envied for it, and not be wealthy at all.
One thing is worth saying plainly, because it is not fair. These ladders are not received equally. The woman whose ladder is her body will, at some point, be given a diagnosis. The man whose ladder is money will be given a profile in a newspaper. The same mechanism, running on the same anxiety, and one of them is treated as an illness while the other is treated as an achievement.
They arrive in the same place, though. Top of the ladder, whichever ladder it was. And then: so what. You are still there. You are still you.
The persona that ate the person
Jung used the word persona for the face we present to the world, the negotiated version of ourselves that lets us function socially. Everyone has one and everyone needs one.
In highly successful lives the professional persona becomes enormous. It is magnificent. It is the most developed thing about them, built deliberately over decades, and it works, which is the problem. Meanwhile the private person, the one with tastes and moods and interests that serve no purpose at all, has been receiving nothing. Sometimes has not been fed since university.
So one practical aim of the work is unglamorous. To start nourishing the personal self rather than the professional one. To find out what this person actually likes, as distinct from what impresses. What they think when nobody will act on it. Who they are when no outcome is attached.
Next to the scale of what they have built this sounds slight. It is not. For many it is the hardest thing they have attempted, precisely because there is no metric and nobody is watching.
A pattern I see repeatedly
One version recurs often enough to describe, not as anyone’s story, but as a pattern.
A woman in her late forties, exceptional at what she does and long established in it. Organised in a way most people are not, sensible and far sighted about her life. She has frozen her eggs. She has thought properly about the future.
And she has no partner and cannot find one. The men she meets describe her, when honest, as intimidating. Charismatic, certainly. Impressive, obviously. But intimidating, which in practice means they withdraw.
What makes it painful is the logic. The very qualities that produced everything she has built, the clarity, the competence, the refusal to be managed, are being read as threat. She is penalised for exactly what she was right to develop.
There is a piece of advice frequently given to such women which amounts to telling them to be smaller. It is worthless and I do not give it. The question is not her size. It is whether any part of her is permitted to be uncertain, unfinished or in need, in front of another person. Usually there is such a part, and usually it has been sealed off for thirty years, because showing it once, long ago, cost her badly.
Where it turns
The turn, when it comes, tends to involve two movements at once.
The first is the slow feeding of the private person. The second is outward: finding a way to put what has been achieved into the service of other people. Not reputation management, and not a foundation with the family name over the door. Something more direct, where the judgement and experience and hard won understanding are handed to someone who needs them.
The second usually resolves the first, and by now it should be clear why. This is the wound becoming a bridge. The years of proving, the cost of them, the thing that was never quite answered: all of it turns out to be the exact material that lets this person reach someone else who is in it now. What felt like a private failure becomes the most useful thing they own.
That is usually the point at which people stop describing themselves as empty.
What is said at the end
Imagine standing in a cemetery, and imagine you could hear them.
I am confident about what you would not hear. Nobody says I wish I had worked harder. Nobody says I wish I had made more money, or I wish I had become CEO, or I wish I had been the best in my field.
What you would hear, I think, is this. I wish I had told the people I love that I loved them. I wish I had told people I cared about them. I wish I had travelled more. I wish I had given time to the things I was drawn to.
I am not the first to notice this. An Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, spent years with people in their final weeks and wrote down what they said. Her list is almost exactly the one above, and I agree with it completely. It is worth knowing that this is not a nice idea arrived at from a comfortable distance. It is a report from people who were there.
Look at the character of those regrets. Not one of them is an achievement. Every one of them is either a connection with another person or a connection with something alive in themselves. Which is, word for word, what I said earlier that I mean by spirituality. The dying are not vague about this. They become extremely precise about it, and they become precise far too late for it to be useful to them, which is the whole reason for raising it while we are still here.
Someone will object at this point, and it is a fair objection: my work is my passion. I take that seriously. For some people it is true, and they are fortunate.
But I would ask one question of it. The word passion does not originally mean enthusiasm. It comes from the Latin for suffering. It is the word used for the suffering of Christ.
Do the thing you love day in and day out, year after year, with the weight of a career on it, and I would want to know whether the luminous part of it survives. Because if it does not, you are not left with nothing. You are left with the other half of the word.
A word to anyone still climbing
Let me end with a humble suggestion, addressed to people at the beginning rather than the far end of this.
Wanting to achieve a great deal is a good thing. I am not going to talk anyone out of ambition, and I do not think ambition is a symptom.
But there is a way of climbing that I would warn against. The climber reaches the summit of the first mountain and immediately turns to face the second. Reaches that one, turns to the third. Reaches the third, looks for the fourth. And at some point, high up and far along, it occurs to him that he has never once looked at the view. He has been on top of four mountains and has no idea what any of them looked like from up there.
Enjoy the journey. I know exactly how that sounds. It is the most worn advice there is, and I am giving it anyway, because the mechanism underneath it is not a cliché at all.
Here is the mechanism. An achievement that is never stopped for is never taken in. It is registered, filed and left. So it is entirely possible, and I see it often, to accumulate an extraordinary record of achievement and remain, on the inside, exactly the person who has never achieved anything. The proof kept arriving. Nobody ever read it.
Which brings this back to where it started. If the climbing began as a way of answering a question about your own worth, then not stopping is how the question stays open forever. You can win continuously for forty years and never once let yourself find out that you won.
So stand still on the first mountain, and look. Not as a reward, and not as a rest. That pause is the part where the thing you did actually becomes yours.
If any of this is familiar, and you would like to talk about it, you can get in touch here. I work with senior professionals in London and, by video, internationally. My work with executives is described here.
