Rethinking Success to Embrace What Makes Me Happy
How my old beliefs about success keep me in the closet — and what I’ve learned.
For years, I used to think that success was a milestone event.
I believed that success was necessarily associated with achieving a significant income goal, or a major life goal. Success always felt unattainable because I didn’t realize that my belief about what success meant was dependent upon social norms and expectations. To be successful requires hard work, long hours, and giving up various pleasures in life.
Finally, succeeding meant public scrutiny and criticism, or if you were lucky, accolades.
Looking back, I remember publishing an article in 2017 about my fear of success that challenged my vulnerability: “Why I’m Not Good Enough: My Dirty Gay Secret.”
This was at a time when I was writing a lot about my gay identity and coaching insights about coming out. The more I wrote, and the more people started to read my work…
