It's not what we accomplish, but who we become.
What if we measure success by how we grow, not what we've done?
Welcome to Slow Fox Life! If you’re new here, I hope you stay awhile. If you’ve been reading with me for some time, pass these posts along — I’m eager to meet more kindreds along this path. This table is big enough for everyone who wants a seat.
I’m somewhere between who I was and who I’m becoming. There’s a lot of freedom in this place — I get to direct my attention toward things that feel generative and purposeful.
But.
This liminal space forces me to confront all the ways I used to measure my life, my value, and my time.
For years, my worth was neatly summed up by what I did, who I worked for, and what I produced — always ready with a tidy answer for the dreaded performance-review question: “Describe and quantify your impact.”
Now, my days are filled with less tangible things. Old friends ask what I’m up to, and the truth is — a lot, and also nothing. Nothing I can easily measure or package into bullet points. I’m no longer churning out PowerPoints, balancing budgets, or leading global teams. The work that once defined me has given way to something quieter, slower, and far less quantifiable.
I’m allowing my mind to wander.
I’m writing. [P.S. Thanks for reading this!]
I’m figuring out how to build a business while staying authentic to what I think is possible and true, and to the conversations I believe are worth having.
Largely I’m trying to slough-off all the things I was told to want, in order to discover what it is I really do.
Success, outward achievement, status are in the water we drink. We’ve outsourced our inner knowing to the gods of clicks and likes. We’ve forgotten what we came here for. And our relationship to time — what it means and how we use it — is skewed so heavily towards immediate gratification that we can’t help but feel like failures if we don’t succeed on the first try.
But that way of thinking robs us of the joy that comes from living. Just living. A messy, meandering, wild kind of life. Which is, honestly, the only way life actually happens. The more we try to control how life unfolds, the less of it we get to live.
Perhaps in honoring the broad cycles of our lives, we might also unlock a deeper clarity and joy. Allowing our lives to unfold. With less emphasis placed on achievement and more admiration placed on growth.
No more measuring time in linear accomplishments. Instead celebrating the ways in which you bent, but did not break. Faced the sun, and did not wilt. Or grew, despite the odds.
New work — all about JOY — coming soon!
In a few months I’ll be introducing some new work rooted deeply in joy — how we experience it, how we work with it, how we harness it to build full, authentic lives. If that sounds like your kinda jam, subscribe for early access.
I feel you on the challenge of separating identity and productivity, as someone who was laid off almost a year ago and is still not sure what's next. I've grown in ways that won't fit on a resume but still dread the "So what do you do?" question.