When Success Doesn't feel Like Success: A Framework for Reassessing what Matters
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
As a professional, you’re told what you’re supposed to be aim at, right? Success is defined for you; whether its revenue targets, degrees, titles, promotions, or whatever you’re supposed to be trying to achieve next. Have you ever wondered if those are even the goals that were the right ones for you to be shooting for in the first place?
Clayton Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor best known for his work on how successful companies fail. Late in his career, after facing several serious health crises in quick succession, he turned that same analytical lens on his own life and asked himself some really tough questions: how do you actually measure whether your life is going well? His answer didn’t end up being a checklist or a plan that you can take step-by-step. He was able to develop a framework constructed around three areas: career, relationships, and integrity. For professionals and leaders dealing with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, or whatever else may be bringing on internal strain, that framework offers a way to notice when the “metrics” you’ve been focused on have lost their meaning (if they had any to begin with).
Christensen drew a distinction that shows up constantly in workplace and organizational psychology, even if it's not explicitly discussed as such. Some parts of a job, salary, title, office, perks, are what he called hygiene factors. They can make you miserable if they're missing, but adding more of them doesn't necessarily make you happier once your basic needs are met. The things that in reality, drive satisfaction tend to be different: a sense of growth, meaningful responsibility, recognition for work that matters, the chance to get better at something you care about.
The problem is that hygiene factors are easier to measure and easy to compare. You can look at a salary number and know exactly where you stand against a peer, a sibling, or what the version of you from five years ago expected. Motivation and meaning don't show up on a pay stub, so they're easy to forget and not see as a priority.
This is where burnout and high-functioning anxiety often start showing up together. Someone hits a goal they'd been working toward for years, a promotion, a partnership, a six-figure milestone, and instead of feeling finally satisfied, they feel a flicker of relief followed almost immediately by a new target. The achievement didn't change anything with the underlying feeling, because the underlying feeling wasn’t ever really about the achievement. It was about needing some kind of external proof that things are good enough.
That proof usually never materializes, at least in a way that’s satisfying.
Taking a look at what matters here doesn't mean walking away from ambition but instead getting honest about which parts of your work actually energize you and which parts you've simply been treating as proof of worth. Those aren't always the same thing (usually they’re not) and people start getting burnout and feeling like a failure.
The second part of Christensen's framework deals with relationships, but the mechanism he describes is really about what we can call resource allocation. In business, companies will drift away from their stated strategy not through one big decision, but through hundreds of small ones. Money and attention get put toward whatever feels most urgent in the moment, and the long-term priorities get whatever's left over, which is often very little. Not everything that’s urgent is important.
People do the same thing with time. Almost everyone would say their family, their close friendships, or their own health matter more than getting that last e-mail sent or taking one more late meeting. But typically, the urgent thing wins almost every time, because it has a deadline and a relationship doesn't. We have this expectation that it’ll still be there tomorrow, so its ok. Nobody sends a calendar invite that says, “Your kid really needs you this week, so pay attention." That need gets ignored, and the relationship suffers. It just happens, unnoticed, one trade-off at a time.
Most of the time, those individual trade-offs don’t feel significant, which is what makes the pattern so hard to catch. Each "I'll make it up to them later" seems completely reasonable in isolation, sure. It's only when you zoom out on your life, months or years later, that the accumulated cost becomes visible, and by then it can feel like it might be too late.
For a lot of professionals that are already struggling, focusing on the impact on their relationships can be extremely uncomfortable because it really isn’t about some massive moment of neglect. It’s the hundreds of small moments where the relationship isn’t prioritized, each probably defensible on their own, but adding up to relationships that feel disconnected.
The third piece of Christensen's framework is about integrity, and it includes an idea that's stuck with a lot of people who've read his work: it's easier to hold a standard 100 percent of the time than 98 percent of the time. That sounds backward at first. Surely 98 percent is more realistic, more forgiving, more human, right?
Christensen's point was that the moment you allow for exceptions, you're no longer making a careful consideration as to whether to make an exception each time, you're deciding how to justify the next one. As soon as "just this once" becomes part of your reasoning and decision making, it’s going to show up again under slightly different circumstances, and then again, until the exception is the norm and that original expectation of yourself is nowhere to be seen.
This goes beyond ethics in the traditional sense. It applies to the boundaries professionals set with their own time, energy, and limits. The first time you tell yourself you'll just check email during dinner this one time, or you'll just take this one call during your day off because it's important, you're probably not making a single decision. You're setting a precedent that your future self will have an increasingly hard time to not justify.
High-functioning anxiety often thrives in the discrepancy. The anxious part of you knows the boundary matters, but the part of you that's used to being reliable, responsive, and available finds a reason why this time is different, and it usually is, in some sense, but should that matter?
None of what I’m writing here is meant to make you feel guilty. The point isn't that you're failing at career, relationships, and integrity all at once and need to overhaul your entire life. I simply want you to take these three areas and see ways to notice where what you say is important and your actual patterns aren’t aligning anymore and leading to distress.
An easy way to start is simply to take notice, without immediately trying to fix anything. Tracking where your energy actually goes during a normal week, and how does that compare to what you'd say matters most if someone asked you directly? Where have you made an exception to a boundary recently, and what story did you tell yourself about why it was okay this time? These aren't questions that have perfectly clear answers, and that's fine. We’re just trying to become more aware of what’s going on.
From there, change can start happening in small, specific shifts rather than dramatic life alterations. Maybe it's protecting one evening a week without exception as a single boundary you realistically hold. Maybe it's noticing the next time you're about to pursue an achievement that's never satisfied you before, and asking yourself what you actually wanted from it? Support, praise, feeling competent or needed?
A framework of success, not an admonishment
Christensen built his career studying why successful organizations fail, which he found wasn’t because they made one catastrophic decision, but because they kept making small, reasonable-seeming choices that pulled them away from what mattered most. He came to believe the same was true for people.
The value of his framework isn't that it tells you what your life should look like; in fact, quite the opposite. It's that it gives you a way to check in, periodically, on whether the things you're measuring yourself against still make sense. Success that doesn't feel like success is usually a sign that the internal goals have shifted at some point without taking a look at whether they should. Going back to the question of what you're actually measuring, and why, is often the first real step toward a life that fits the person living it.
Other suggested blog posts: Leading from your values, Work-life integration
Written by Hunter Cook, LPC/MHSP (S)
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