Let me ask you something: when was the last time you stopped and asked yourself why you’re chasing what you’re chasing?
Not your boss’s version of success. Not your dad’s version. Not the guy on LinkedIn flexing his seven-figure revenue. Your version.
For most men, the answer is… never. Or at least, not recently.
We get handed a script early on. Work hard, earn money, buy the house, get the car, climb the ladder. And somewhere along the way, we mistake the script for our own voice.
The uncomfortable truth? That script was written for a world that no longer exists. And following it blindly is costing men – in ways most of us don’t even notice until something breaks.
The Blueprint Nobody Questioned
Here’s how traditional male success has been defined for decades: make money, achieve status, don’t complain. Repeat until retirement. Then… enjoy life, I guess?
The problem is, we’ve built an entire identity around external markers – salary, title, car, house – while completely ignoring the internal ones. How we actually feel. Whether what we’re doing means anything to us. Whether we’d choose this life if we had to start over.
I was talking to a friend a while back. Successful by every metric you’d care to measure. Nice apartment, a role people respected, more LinkedIn endorsements than he knew what to do with. And he said something that stuck with me:
“I keep waiting to feel like I made it. It hasn’t happened yet.”
He’s 41.
The Stats Don’t Lie
This isn’t just a feeling. Research consistently shows that men’s mental health is in crisis – and a lot of it traces back to how men are conditioned to define their worth.
When your self-esteem is tied entirely to performance and productivity, any setback – a bad year at work, a career pivot, losing a job – doesn’t just feel like a professional setback. It feels like you failed. As a man. As a human being.
That’s a dangerous place to live.
And yet, most men double down. Work harder. Earn more. Prove something to someone. Even if they’re not quite sure who they’re proving it to anymore.
So What’s the Alternative?
Good question. And no, the answer isn’t to quit your job, move to Bali, and start selling online courses about quitting your job. (Although, respect if that’s your thing.)
Redefining success doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It means raising them – just in a different direction.
Here are a few things worth considering:
Health as a form of wealth. Most men treat their body like a rental car – push it hard, fix it when it breaks, and pray it doesn’t break at the worst time. Physical health for men isn’t just about looking good. It’s about having the energy to actually show up in your life.
Relationships that are real. Not surface-level networking. Not drinking with people you’d never call if things got hard. Genuine connection, where you can actually be honest about what’s going on. That kind of relationship is, genuinely, one of the biggest predictors of long-term happiness and longevity.
Work that fits your values, not just your mortgage. This one’s hard, because bills are real. But there’s a massive difference between doing work that funds your life and doing work that is your life. One of those is sustainable. The other one eventually runs out of road.
Knowing when to stop. One of the most underrated skills a man can have? Knowing when he’s had enough. Enough hustle. Enough proving. Enough of optimising every waking hour. Rest isn’t laziness. It’s maintenance.
The Comparison Trap
There’s a particular kind of misery that comes from measuring your progress against someone else’s highlight reel.
Social media has made this almost unavoidable. Someone’s always closing a bigger deal, hitting a harder workout, raising a better-behaved kid. And if you’re the kind of person who’s wired to compete (which, if you’re reading this, you probably are), that’s fuel for a comparison spiral that has no end.
Here’s the thing though: comparison is only useful when you’re comparing yourself to who you were, not to who someone else is pretending to be online. That’s the only honest measurement. Everything else is theatre.
A Different Kind of Rich
The men who tend to radiate a real sense of success – not the performed kind, but the quiet, solid kind you can feel in a room – usually have a few things in common.
They know what they value. They’ve done some actual thinking about it, not just accepted the default settings. They have non-negotiables around their health, their time, their relationships. They’re not chasing a moving target, because they decided a while back what “enough” looks like.
That last part is radical, by the way. In a culture that constantly tells you to want more, deciding what’s enough – and meaning it – takes real courage.
Start Here
You don’t have to redesign your entire life this week. But you could ask yourself one question that might be more useful than anything else in this article:
If nobody could see what I’d achieved – no LinkedIn, no salary conversation, no social proof of any kind – what would I still want?
Whatever comes up first? That’s probably worth paying attention to.
Success isn’t a destination men were handed the wrong map for. It’s a destination they were handed someone else’s map for. The work is figuring out your own.