Redefining Success: Why Six Figures Isn’t the Whole Story

What does success actually mean?

Not the Instagram version. Not the LinkedIn version. Not the version that tells you success is six-figure months, luxury cars, 5:30am starts, and an endless grind.

Just success. For you.

In this episode, Dani and Si explore how our definition of success has evolved from a simple measure of outcomes into something heavily tied to money, status, and external validation. Along the way, they unpack the psychology behind happiness and fulfilment, challenge some of the biggest myths around wealth and wellbeing, and look at why people who win the lottery often end up no happier than before.

The conversation explores alternative perspectives from around the world, including Japan's concept of ikigai, Bhutan's focus on Gross National Happiness, and Māori ideas around community, contribution, and purpose.

As always, the discussion gets personal. Dani and Si share their own experiences as business owners, including the reality of chasing income goals, working with the wrong clients, and discovering that freedom and autonomy can sometimes feel more valuable than a bigger bank balance.

At the heart of this episode is a simple but powerful idea: you can't follow someone else's definition of success. You have to create your own.

Whether you're building a business, changing careers, or simply questioning what you're working towards, this episode will leave you reflecting on what success really looks like once the noise is stripped away.

Grab a brew and join the conversation.

About Simon and Danielle:

Simon and Danielle are both business owners, based in the East Midlands, who met through mutual business contacts and who share a love of all things business. 

Simon runs Skylight Media – Award-winning experts in Website Design, E-commerce & Marketing running since 2003.

Danielle runs Goldspun Support – a multi-faceted support service for fractional directors and small business owners across the globe, running since 2009.

Since they first met Simon and Danielle have spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about the subjects that interest them – usually over a drink in the pub – and they decided that now was the time to bring these conversations to a wider audience and invite them to join the chat. 

Both Simon and Danielle are successful business owners in their own rights with big plans for the future but will never lose their love of talking all things business… and the pub.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Dani,
and I'm Si. Welcome to Business in the Broom, a podcast dedicated to Winfrey's business with the occasional cover.
We take a business story, theory, or something we just want to chat about, in debate, adjusting on our own special personality and sense of humor, combined with our experience and knowledge. We're both business graduates and have run our own businesses for many years. We can't wait to listen.
Hello. that
sounded creepy, but that's fine. I'm going for creepy
god.
Today's episode, what is success? And we're going to do it from a, I don't know, like from a personal aspect, but also from a historical, literal aspect. So, when you think about success. What do you think about
good, good one? In well, in context of business, as this is business and a brew,
it could also be in context of life. The two, when you're self-employed, both the two business owners are very inextricably, inextricably linked,
achieving your own set of goals,
and are those financial goals, personal goals, personal
goals. Well, as you said, it could be one or one thing or another. It could be life, it could be, it could be that your life goals, it could be your company's goals, it could be your own career goals. So, achieve what
yours are. Do you know what your goals are?
Yeah, I do, but I'm not going to share them.
No, I don't need you to share them.
Yeah, just in case you asked me, I was herding that one off.
No, I don't need to share them. Do you think the decisions you make in life are leading,
achieved some of them? Some of them have taken longer than I thought they would do, and some haven't taken quite as long.
Is it that maturity thing you're still trying
to crack? Yeah, that's a long way.
Be honest, we might want to let that one guy,
what's your excuse?
Sharp, for a lot of people, success is often defined by what they see online. You're almost conditioned to see things and think, oh, that's what I should want, especially if you're self-employed, because you are surrounded all the time
for things.
Yeah, like you should want to work for a beach, or have every holiday on a super yacht, or have the expensive bag, or you should want to earn six figures a month, or seven figures a month, and the reality is that for most people that's actually not what their definition of success is, but people don't spend time really thinking about it.
No, we have, we have an age where we were, well, a lot of people are beset by the constant noise from influencers who were telling you what
your
success should look like.
Yeah, the 5:30am rise where you meditate and go for a run, and then your day is set up perfectly, and you only work three hours. Any
longer than five hours sleep is a complete waste of time. Yeah, and that kind of, yes, that might be
true for some people,
but not for long
when they drop dead from lack of sleep, but it's not ever. They won't
be there to pick the pieces up. Well, they will not.
It's not true for everyone. I think so few people really stop and go, what is it I want? And because they spend so much time chasing what other people tell them they should want, when they get in, they're so unfulfilled, the
received wisdom tells them, which is actually from peer groups and people around you.
Yeah, because it's easy. If you're the only single one in a group for married people with kids, you're going to start to feel like maybe you should want to be married, maybe you should want to have children. Actually, that doesn't necessarily mean that's right for you, but that level of personal reflection is just not something a lot of people do. Not that I'm insulting people, but they just don't.
Yeah, they kind of don't
stop and think about data
to back that up. Is that your, is that your, your feet, your feeling on it? From what you've observed, that's my
feeling from what I've observed. Yeah, so go through a few bits, which was really hard to say. I kept saying, because we, because we don't do
generalizations here, do we?
Well, I do love a generalization, but no, we don't. So the word success comes from the Latin successes, not much of a stretch, which means the result of an outcome, positive or negative. So originally the word success was considered neutral, it was just a result, whereas obviously today the modern era, the post-industrial capitalist, it became very, very much synonymous with accumulation, public recognition, and upward mobility. So, you get things like, you know, the Forbes rich list, the Sunday Times rich list, Dragon's Den, The Apprentice, all the cultural templates for success are exclusively financial and hierarchical. There are very few where you are prioritizing a softer, more value-led or personal goal, you know. On the apprentice, everyone's goal is to start a business. Well, that's fine, but actually, you might not want to start a multi million pound business. You might just want to start one where you pay enough to pay the mortgage. You can see your kids every day. And it's very different for everyone,
yeah, they get very quickly filtered out, though,
yeah, they would, yeah, the psychological research on what actually makes people feel successful, so fulfilled, satisfied, and purposeful tells a consistently different story, so self-determination theory finds that autonomy, competence, and relatedness, so the sense of making your own choices, getting better at things, and being meaningfully connected to others are the primary drivers of well-being. But none of those are considered in terms of being rich or famous. A
lot of people, though, doesn't it? Is
I think that's why it's very hard to quantify.
Yeah,
you can't measure the sense of making your own choices, you can measure pounds in your bank,
but this is this tension between the two, is literally one's pulling one way and one's pulling the other. I am doing this to get to achieve these things, but actually I really just want to kind of be over here in the woods,
yeah, which
is where I often think that I want to be over there in
the woods,
yeah, but but there's a, there's a real, there's real issue for a lot of people that don't, they don't have the luxury of making that choice, though. That's that.
I would agree with it, that this only applies once your basic needs are met. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy,
yeah,
as long as the basic needs are met, the rest of it then becomes aspirational rather than well, incomprehensible, to be completely honest.
Yes, you're always seeking out the next.
I'm talking about people who have made their mortgage payments, they're not overly worried about money, they are building something, they are striving for something, they are doing something. And I remember very distinctly, a couple of years ago, my business, I set a financial target, first time I'd ever done it, and I took on a client to hit that target, and I did it quite quickly, and I was really pleased, and it was one of the worst clients I ever took on. The relationship was difficult, I was super, super stressed all of the time, and I hated it, and we ended our relationship, or I ended my relationship within a couple of months, and my income goal obviously then fell off because I was nowhere near it, but I felt so much better.
So, it's like you've been there, you've tasted
it. Yeah, I'm like that.
And then I don't like the taste of
them. No, don't get me wrong. At some point, the income levels exist, but the income levels exist for me because I want to reinvest in coaching. I want to invest in my business, so someone can take on some of the elements I don't necessarily want to do, or use an expert who can really push my strategy forward, so financially there's an incentive to succeed, but it is no longer my focus, because I make very poor decisions off the back of being financially focused, and I know that about myself.
Or was that just a bad client,
a massive lesson out of that, but thank you for,
but how about being a wonderful client?
Yeah, possibly
you'd be thinking a different thing. That's what
I took from it, and I've never set myself a financial target since.
No, no, but you took a risk, risk was worth it to find that out, but the unfortunate thing is that it wasn't quite.. it was just wasn't the quite, quite the right match.
This is my belief that the universe has a bigger plan for me. Yeah, I just believe. I remember you said
that immediately afterwards. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, some key sort of takeaways, if you like. In 1978 psychologist Philip Brickman published a study comparing the happiness levels of lottery winners and people who'd recently become paraplegic, quite the disparate groups. His finding, which became one of the most cited in positive psychology, was that within a year both groups had returned to roughly their pre-event level of happiness. So, lottery winners were not significantly happier than the control group, and people who had suffered catastrophic physical industry were not significantly less happy.
Wow,
so money doesn't actually solve everything, but did you say paraplegic
or quadriplegic?
Is it paraplegic?
Okay, all right, wow, yes, that's an adaptation that goes on there, which crikey, that's quite amazing.
It just create what it does is create a positive spike in feeling, so you will have a temporary high from having won the lottery and being able to buy your car or buy workers, but it will wear off, so you're then looking for the next dopamine hit to bring you that level of achievement, whereas I imagine if you've lost a limb, I don't know when you can start walking as an achievement, and you know when you can be left alone to make your own cup of tea is an achievement, and your dopamine points become smaller, and you're more
fascinating. Yeah,
yeah, that is quite the juxtaposition. I can't say it now,
juxtaposition.
Yes, yeah, but the other one was off Mike, so it was about a building, which no one else saw, so they won't understand it. I think
you were just flexing your vocab. Use it once you've discovered it again. That's right.
I want to reuse the word you said earlier, but I've already forgotten it rules. Dis in the middle tissation
didn't disintermediation.
Yeah, that one. I still not really sure where I should use it, but I'll give it again. Anyway, there's also the Harvard study of adult development, which has followed the same group of men and now their families since 1938 so over 80 years, and that's the longest study of adult happiness in history. Really makes me laugh. One sentence, the finding published most successfully in Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz's book, The Good Life, is disarmingly simple, simple, simple, not easy to say, though. The quality of your relationships is the most powerful predictor of late-life health, happiness, and what people call feeling successful. It's got nothing to do with wealth, status, professional achievement. The men in the study who were most socially connected in midlife were the healthiest and happiest at 80, so we're all out here, and are we? Well, not me, maybe you people are out there chasing this six figures, chasing the seven figures, and they're not actually looking at some of the things that genuinely will on reflection, maybe they're not, because there's
too much noise, and they're literally not able to pull themselves away from it. Yeah,
that's true.
Yeah,
and
well we know that we've got a generation that's actually, that's actually coming into that and seeing those as metrics that they're supposed to somehow obey, they're supposed to be some kind of part of, yeah.
And the more you hear it, the more you start to believe it. And I'll be honest, a lot of that stuff people say ain't true anyway. So, a seven figure business owner only has to hit it once it
serves the few. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
And, of course, there is, there is a cultural influence on it. So, this financial definition of success isn't universal, it's very much a Western culture thing. In Japan, they have the concept of ikigai, ikigai, which broadly translates as a reason for being, and it frames success not as an outcome, but as a daily state of purposeful engagement with the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
How brilliant.
So, it just doesn't discount the element of earning,
yeah,
but it's this intersection of everything kind of coming together in this beautiful
Nikki. Go, I know I can identify with that, because actually I do what I do, and enjoy what I do. I'm doing the rattling thing. I do what I do because I get genuine joy and interest out of it, and actually, I like the rewards. The rewards aren't just the financial, the rewards are actually the reputation and people being happy with what I've done.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah,
in Bhutan, the government measures gross national happiness alongside GDP, the GNH. I love that, the idea that societal success cannot be captured by economic output alone, which I don't think is wrong. And among the Mao in New Zealand, they've got mana, the complex concept of encompassing prestige, authority, and spiritual power earning through a contribution to community rather than personal accumulation, so it's still a level of accumulating physically, but for the greater good rather than for yourself, communist, but yeah, but they're not romantic alternative frameworks, they are functional definitions that millions of people live by, it's not,
yeah,
you know, that little weirdo group over there, it means a whole country's whole societies,
yeah, they are, they are, and before, let's say, before the industrial revolution arrived, that state was probably in play within our own societies, potentially, when that started to change is where is where those landowners and the mill owners and the exploitation, yes,
as soon as you got societal levels had aspiration.
There was an awful thing back in the 15th, 15th or 16th century, the Enclosures Act, which is where people who once occupied land that was deemed common land was all of a sudden not common anymore, and then you had to go and find an employer to work for, because you couldn't work for yourself anymore in the fields, you had to go and work for someone else to earn a wage,
which is awful,
and that's basically what we've been living the
moment at which we had to start aspiring to something bigger.
Yeah,
so interestingly, from an entrepreneurship point of view, small business owners consistently report higher life satisfaction than employees at equivalent income levels, despite typically working, which we all know, longer hours and experiencing more financial uncertainties. Like, I will literally work seven days a week.
We choose to work those hours.
Yes, yeah. If I want to go and get my nails done on a Wednesday, but then do two hours on a Sunday, I can do that. And I genuinely enjoy what I do, and again, the reason is because, according to self-determination theory, you have that autonomy, you're making your decisions, you're creating your own destiny, and I just think that's lovely. I think that if we all spent a bit more time being really honest with ourselves of what about what success meant to us personally, we would make much better decisions, not only for our business, but also for ourselves, because once you know what you're aiming towards, what your end destination is, kind of every step along the path becomes a more logical response, rather than just, man, that seems like fun, I'll do that, don't get me wrong, there's a place for spontaneity and doing the. End, and crap to see what happens.
Spontaneous space time,
yeah, that kind of, you know, the leap sideways.
Yeah,
but you can't follow your yellow brick road to happiness. That's a really bad one, because I didn't lead to happiness. But you can't follow that path to happiness if you don't know where you want to go.
That's right.
And if you're following someone else's, it
can't be someone else's formula, it's got to be your own.
Absolutely,
yeah.
And I think we need to spend more time, so I am, I am not saying a word that makes any sense. I am an advocate of business owners, especially, but everyone really taking time out to really think about what they want from life and what that end destination looks like, and then using that to take decisions along the way.
So that is self-determination, really. Yeah, which you've repeated several times through this.
It's a good word. It is.
It's brilliant.
Yeah, so that's this, I mean, this hours. Yeah, we could talk about this like for the next three days, but I have to stop it at some point, or people will get bored. We should
take the mics with us and just go and go to the pub, yeah. The drunker I get, the more,
the more erudite, that's right, the more sloths. No, now even I can't say I'm sober, but yes, so that is that is the start of a conversation that I think we might end up having many times.
Yes, yeah, we can circle back to something along this line that takes us a little bit further, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. Thanks, yeah. And I'm so glad that we steered clear of sweeping generalizations. Oh, yeah, because we don't
like those. I like those. Thank you.
Thanks for supporting us by downloading and listening to this episode,
and a massive thank you also to Dawn, Emily, Nat, and Lewis, and the BTD Studios for all your expertise in bringing our podcasting dream to reality.
We'd love it if you commented on this episode, as we'd really like to know what you think and what you might like us to cover in future episodes,
and we'll see you on the next
one. Bye.