Redefining Success: When Life and Work Are Already Enough

We all have an enough point.

Not a dramatic breaking point.
Not burnout.
Not failure.

Just a quiet moment where you pause and ask yourself a different question.

What do I actually want my life and work to look like now?

For many of us, that question arrives softly. Often later than we expect. And usually after years of doing what we thought we were supposed to do.

When success starts to feel borrowed

I have been thinking about this a lot recently, especially as more people I admire speak openly about redefining success on their own terms.

Jenna Kutcher shared something in a recent Substack post that stayed with me. She wrote:

Go all in on a business that matches your definition of success.
Not the one you absorbed from Instagram or a podcast or a course you took five years ago, but yours.
Pace yourself, because life is so short, and time moves terrifyingly fast.
I don’t want a single one of us to look up and realise we traded the ordinary irreplaceable moments for a version of success that was never really ours to begin with.

Shortly after, she made the decision to step away from her hugely successful podcast.

Not because it failed.
Not because she could not sustain it.
But because she reached a point where she asked herself a simple, honest question.

What is enough for me now?

We are seeing this more and more.

Amy Porterfield chose to step away from her long-running course, Digital Course Academy, simply because she could and because her priorities had changed.

Lydia Millen has also reshaped how she works, reducing her You-Tube output to one vlog a week instead of 2-3 and making new decisions about what she wants her business to support.

None of these decisions are failures.

They are choices.

The pressure to always want more

Online, success is often framed very narrowly.

More revenue.
More followers.
More visibility.
More growth.

If you are not scaling, it can feel like you are standing still. If you are not chasing the next milestone, it can feel like you are doing something wrong.

But not everyone wants more.

Some people want:

• More time

• More steadiness

• More space

• More ease

• A business that fits around their life, not one that consumes it

And that is a valid ambition.

My own enough point

For me, at 56, I started asking myself this question about a year ago.

Had I reached my enough point?

It turned out I had.

I had worked full time since I was 16, with only a three-month break after having my son. I had spent decades working hard, being reliable, building experience, and doing what was expected of me.

At that stage in my life, it felt right to acknowledge that something had shifted.

My enough stage had arrived.

That meant choosing to work three days a week, which is exactly what I do now.

I am a freelancer, and I work with two clients over those three days. I earn enough from that work to live my life in a way that feels right for me.

On the two days a week when I do not work with clients, I still work, but differently. I am slowly building an online one-to-one programme, at my own pace. I fit it around yoga, swimming, the sauna, batch cooking, and meeting friends for coffee.

I am not rushing it.
I am not forcing it.
I am letting it grow in a way that fits my life.

I am at my enough stage, and I feel deeply grateful to be here.

Redefining success later in life

One of the things people often search for is reassurance that it is allowed to change your definition of success.

Especially later in life.
Especially after you have already built something.
Especially when things look “fine” from the outside.

Here is what I know to be true.

Changing direction does not mean you failed.
Slowing down does not mean you lacked ambition.
Choosing less does not mean you are capable of less.

Often, it means you are listening more closely to yourself.

What “enough” really means

Enough does not look the same for everyone.

For some people, enough is growth, scale, and building something bigger. And that is absolutely fine.

For others, enough is:

• Fewer clients

• Simpler systems

• Predictable income

• More time outside of work

• Less mental load

The problem comes when we try to live someone else’s definition of enough.

A quieter kind of success

I am about to start reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, a book about time, limits, and the reality that we cannot do everything.

Not how to fit more in.
But how to choose what matters.

That feels like an important conversation right now.

Because life is short. Time does move quickly. And the ordinary moments really are irreplaceable.

Final thoughts

If you are at a point where something feels ready to change, that does not mean you have failed.

It may simply mean you are ready to define success for yourself.

And that is not giving up.

That is growing up.