I don’t know if you’ve noticed this too, but people have a funny way of talking about success.
Somehow, it became perfectly normal to say:
By the time you’re thirty-five, you should be earning €10,000 a month.
You should own a house. You should be married.
The strange thing is, most people don’t say these things to be unkind. They’re usually trying to help. They genuinely believe that’s what a good life looks like because they’ve heard the same things from their parents, their colleagues, their friends and almost everyone around them.
But somewhere along the way, something changes. These stop being suggestions.
They become standards.
And once they become standards, we don’t just quietly measure ourselves against them. We begin judging everyone else too.
Someone earning €10,000 a month by thirty-five? They’ve made it.
Someone who’s still renting? They’re falling behind.
Someone who leaves a stable career to build something uncertain? That’s irresponsible.
We’ve all heard these sentences. Some of us have had them said to us. Some of us have said them too.
I think that’s the part that always bothered me the most.
Not because I think everyone should quit their jobs. Not because I think earning a good salary or owning a house is somehow wrong.
But because I’ve never been able to shake one simple question.
Who decided that?
Who actually decided these were the standards by which we should measure a successful life?
What if nobody decided?
A few days ago, while studying for my ACCA exam, I came across something that I thought belonged entirely to finance.
It turns out, I don’t think it does.
One of the things that fascinated me wasn’t that investors demand different returns from different companies. I already knew that. It was the fact that nobody actually decides what those returns should be.
There isn’t a regulator announcing that one company deserves 8% while another deserves 12%. There isn’t a committee that votes on it.
Thousands of investors simply make thousands of individual decisions. Some buy. Some sell. Some become optimistic. Others become cautious.
Slowly, a market price emerges. And once that market price exists, the return investors are collectively demanding is reflected in it.
Nobody created it. Nobody announced it.
It simply emerged.
I remember closing my textbook and thinking, Why does that feel so familiar?
Perhaps because success works in exactly the same way.
Nobody ever decided that earning €10,000 by thirty-five meant you’d made it. Nobody ever decided that becoming a manager after ten years was the definition of success. Nobody ever decided that buying a house before your friends meant you were somehow ahead.
Perhaps those standards simply emerged.
One conversation at a time. One family expectation. One promotion shared on LinkedIn. One comparison at a family dinner.
Each moment feels too small to matter. But together, they slowly become something much bigger than themselves.
A standard.
Before we even realise what’s happening, we begin measuring our lives against a standard that nobody actually created.
But does that make the standard meaningless?
The more I thought about it, though, the less convinced I was that the answer was simply to dismiss these standards altogether.
Because some of them do actually make sense.
If we have spent ten years doing something, it is reasonable to expect that we would have become better at it. As our skills and experience grow, we should, at some point, expect our income or responsibilities to grow with them.
Wanting financial security, a home or some sense of stability isn’t necessarily something society invented and somehow convinced us to want. There are reasons these things became measures of progress in the first place, and perhaps that’s why we use these measures too.
We celebrate a promotion because we understand what it represents. We feel proud when our income grows because, in some sense, it reflects how far we have come.
Maybe that’s why my thoughts kept coming back to the market.
The market price isn’t decided by one person. It emerges from thousands of people, each bringing their own expectations, information and judgement about what something is worth. Markets can get things wrong, but the price still tells us something about what all of those individual judgements have collectively come to believe.
Maybe the standards we inherit from one another are a little like that too.
They may not tell us what a good life is. But perhaps they tell us something about what, collectively, we have learnt to recognise as progress.
I think that’s worth listening to.
Not necessarily following. But listening to.
Because there is probably an equally dangerous version of this where every standard we don’t meet suddenly becomes a standard we decide doesn’t matter.
Sometimes choosing a different path really does mean that we value something different. But sometimes, perhaps, saying this isn’t how I measure success is easier than admitting that we haven’t become what we hoped we would.
I don’t think there is an easy way to know the difference.
Comparison, however, doesn’t have to become instruction.
Perhaps we can look at the standards around us, understand what they are measuring, and still decide for ourselves how much those measurements should matter.
But then there is another problem.
It is one thing to look at the life we are expected to build and decide that we want something different. It is another thing entirely to actually choose it.
Because the conventional path, for all its limitations, gives us something incredibly comforting: a rough idea of what happens next.
The moment we choose something outside that path, some of that certainty disappears. We might know what we want instead, but what we don’t know is whether choosing it will ever take us there.
And strangely, some of the people we admire most are people who once made exactly that kind of choice.
What happens when we choose something else?
I found myself thinking about Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, founders, writers, athletes — people whose stories we love telling because they achieved something extraordinary.
We celebrate them. We quote them. We call them visionary. We admire their courage.
But I wonder if we quietly forget the other part of their story.
If we could go back to the beginning, before anyone knew how those stories would end, would we still have admired them then?
Or would we have said exactly what we still say to people chasing uncertain dreams today?
Be realistic.
I don’t think that’s going to work.
I think you’re making a big mistake.
And to be honest, those aren’t even unreasonable things to say. Based on everything people knew at the time, they may have been perfectly sensible conclusions.
Nobody knew Steve Jobs would become Steve Jobs. Nobody knew Amazon would become Amazon. Probably not even they knew.
But that’s exactly what uncertainty means. The future hadn’t happened yet.
Looking backwards, their success feels inevitable.
Looking forwards, it never did.
We see the return. But what did it cost?
The problem with thinking about people like Steve Jobs is that, by the time their stories reach us, the uncertainty is over.
We already know how the story ends.
We see the company. We see the success. We see the return.
And when I think about the things I want for my own life, I realise I’m usually imagining them from the other side too.
I’d love this publication to become something meaningful one day. I’d love the freedom that comes from building something that lasts. I’d love to spend my life writing ideas that genuinely change how people think.
I can imagine that version of my life quite easily.
What is much harder to imagine is everything that might have to happen between here and there: the evenings spent writing after work when nobody is reading, the weekends I could have spent doing something else, the uncertainty of continuing for years without knowing whether any of it will become what I hope it could become.
And suddenly, wanting the outcome didn’t seem like the most important question anymore.
The real question was: What am I willing to pay for it?
Because every meaningful return asks for something long before it gives us anything back.
Sometimes it asks for our evenings. Sometimes our comfort. Sometimes years of people quietly thinking we’re making a mistake. And sometimes, simply the willingness to keep going without knowing whether any of it will work.
When I looked at that price honestly, I realised I was willing to pay quite a lot of it.
What if we pay the price and the return never comes?
I’m sure there must have been thousands of other people who were willing to pay quite a lot too.
People who left good jobs. People who started companies. People who spent their savings building something they believed in. People who worked evenings and weekends for years while everyone around them wondered what they were doing.
Some of them probably worked just as hard. Some may have been just as brave.
And some of them failed.
We don’t tell their stories very often.
There are no famous commencement speeches built around the company that never found its customers, the book nobody read or the business someone eventually had to close.
But I think those stories matter, because without them, it becomes very easy to believe that the difference between wanting something extraordinary and achieving it is simply how much we are willing to give up along the way.
Work hard enough. Sacrifice enough. Want it badly enough.
Pay the price.
And eventually, surely, something has to come back.
Except it just doesn’t work that way.
It is one thing to decide how much we are willing to give up for something we desperately want. It is another to give those things up knowing that the future owes us nothing in return.
Hard work doesn’t create a contract with the future.
Neither does courage. Neither does sacrifice.
Someone can spend ten years building a company and fail. Someone can write for years and never build the audience they imagined. We can do everything we thought we were supposed to do and still end up somewhere completely different from where we hoped.
Maybe that is the part we have to make peace with before deciding whether an extraordinary return is worth pursuing.
Not whether we want it badly enough. Not even whether we are willing to work for it.
But whether we are willing to make the investment while knowing that the outcome we are imagining is still only a possibility.
There is nothing wrong with deciding that price isn’t worth paying. And there is nothing wrong with deciding that, for something we care about deeply enough, perhaps it is.
Neither decision comes with certainty.
The investment has to come first.
The return, unfortunately, may not come at all.
Maybe that’s why this chapter stayed with me long after I’d finished studying it.
It wasn’t because it taught me how to calculate a required return. It was because it quietly changed the way I think about success.
Markets produce prices. Societies produce standards.
Neither appears because somebody stands on a stage and declares them. They emerge from countless individual decisions over time.
Neither should simply be ignored.
A market price contains information even when we disagree with it. Perhaps society’s standards do too.
But information is not the same thing as instruction.
The standards we’ve been using all our lives may not be universal truths. They may simply be the standards our society has collectively priced.
We can look at them. We can understand them. We can even decide that some of them make sense for us. But perhaps we don’t have to hand them the authority to decide whether our lives are doing well.
And maybe the question we need to ask isn’t simply: What kind of life do I want?
Because saying we want something is easy.
Maybe it isn’t even: What am I willing to pay for it?
Perhaps the harder question is:
Would the investment still mean something to me if I never received the return I was hoping for?
I don’t know what my answer will be for everything. Maybe that’s something each of us has to decide before we know how the story ends.
Because saying we want something has never been the difficult part.
The difficult part is deciding what we’re willing to invest when nobody can promise us the return.
