The Currencies of Success

How to find success in what you can tolerate, not what you can do

One of the troubles with living in the era of publicly performed identity is how frequently we are confronted with images of success. LinkedIn promotions, marathon times, wedding videos shot like Hollywood trailers, first houses, and podcast appearances… if you’re online at all, it’s easy to drown in it.

In the face of all this success, it is tempting to look around and believe that getting what you want has become unprecedentedly achievable. Sure, people were getting promoted and married before social media told us they were, but something about success feels cheaper than it once did. Perhaps because teenagers can build generational wealth by dancing in their bedrooms or because any “AI-powered platform” can raise a ten-million-dollar round… but something about the visible abundance of people getting what they want has transmorphed success into the mass-manufactured version of its former self—something that once belonged to the few now readily available to anyone with a TikTok account.

The Invisible Tab

As a society, we have always struggled to comprehend the cost of success. Even in this era where whole lives are lived for public consumption, toil is rarely on display. To some degree, there is an inherent secrecy to the things that make great people great — habits practiced at hours when others are still sleeping and skills built in institutions that are heavily gated from the majority.

But even knowing that advantages are being honed and sharpened beyond our line of sight, we are still quick to discount others’ victories. We attribute wins to good timing, good genetics, and just general good luck whenever we can, and lots of us harbor a nasty impulse to make others’ success seem cheap.

These sentiments aren’t entirely unfair. To some degree, all success is built on good luck, or at least the avoidance of the kind of catastrophically bad luck that can raze any dream, no matter how fortified it is by talent and effort.

But while the hypervisibility of achievement may have made us more aware of what is possible (and who already has it), it has made us none the wiser at understanding that success is never cheap — it’s just paid for in currencies we haven’t considered.

The Currencies of Success

My theory for you is this: success is always paid for in full, just rarely in the currency you think.

No pain, no gain; no free lunch; cake that you can’t eat too… the idea that people get exactly what they pay for floats around our collective consciousness in many forms. However, when we consider how people are paying for their dreams, not just how much, our imaginative aperture is dangerously narrow. Long hours, upfront capital investments, sweat-drenched brows, late nights… these are the currencies of success that most of us are familiar with, the ones our parents and grandparents spent diligently so that we could live easier lives.

However, they are rarely the only currency people pay in, and in understanding success and carving one’s own path to it, it is critical to pay attention to the other tenders on the board.

Take, for example, successful influencers as an object of study. Rich, well-platformed, and seemingly lacking in any particular talent, big influencers are the platonic ideal of cheap success. That is, if you think that success can only be paid for in hours spent at a desk.

Anyone who lives in the public eye pays an inordinate cost for their lifestyle. They open themselves up to ruthless, anonymous scrutiny, forego the privacy that lets most of us make mistakes without significant reputational consequence, and sometimes even jeopardize their safety by exposing themselves to the world of stalkers and obsessive internet weirdos.

Perhaps there is more heads-down time and hard work in attending brand trips for a living than I’m willing to acknowledge, but traditional “hard work” isn’t their primary currency: it’s safety, privacy, and insulation from strangers’ cruelty.…. that’s what they’re trafficking in that most of us won’t.

While this is by no means an endorsement of internet influencing as a legitimate career, it is a fine example of how the true cost of things evades everyday discourse or even notice. The teenagers of Instagram may not be contributing to societal good, but we should not be tricked into believing that their success has no price attached to it.

No matter the coinage, success demands payment, and extraordinary success demands extraordinary payment, one that most people — by definition — are not willing to pay.

While this sentiment seems obvious, it runs contrary to conventional advice about success and how to get it. When we’re young, we’re encouraged to mine for our talents, to identify where we are innately better than others at one thing or another. We’re also instructed to find out not just what we’re good at, but what we love doing, so that enjoyment can be the fuel that sustains us through the inevitable ups and downs of a career.

Figuring out how to start ahead of the line and love it along the way is not necessarily bad advice. But the trouble with this wisdom is that walking the path that plays to your strengths or one you feel stimulated by does not necessarily put you on a path you can afford. You may love singing or be a natural-born litigator (for which I sympathize deeply with your parents). But if you’re not up for living paycheck to paycheck on gig work or spending long nights preparing for trials, your talents and passions may not point you in a sustainable, fruitful direction.

My — perhaps contrarian — suggestion for how to succeed beyond measure is to recognize that you are going to have to pay more of something than other people to get what you want and to identify which currency you can outspend other people in.

The Relative Cost of Everything

While most people’s dreams are expensive, they don’t always feel expensive to the people who are paying. For bankers and lawyers who buy their vacation homes with nights spent at the office instead of the dinner table, that sacrifice may feel relatively cheap compared to the alternative routes to wealth. For good ol’ corporate ladder climbers who pay their dues in foregone autonomy and the vibe-harshing banality of being uninteresting, those currencies feel far less costly than the idea of taking on financial risk. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, pay for the chance of success with a tolerance for instability since many of them don’t have a single dollar of “willingness to follow orders” lying around in their wallets.

While some currencies work more universally than others (e.g., long hours, tolerance for bullshit, etc.), success can be bartered for in many tenders, from literal money to mental stability, and the relative value of all of them is personal.

If working every weekend sounds like too steep a price for you to justify for, well, any reason, then picking a career where the winners work longer hours is ill-advised. If working Sundays feels cheap but the idea of doing a job that no one wants to hear you talk about feels painful, then you may not want to be an accountant. Don’t do well with rejection or criticism? Public performing is probably not, in fact, for you — regardless of your talent. The point is that the relative worth of any given currency is always subjective, and it’s up to you to assess.

Admittedly, there’s some inherent advantage in wanting something others don’t or being willing to pay in a currency most people choose fo avoid (like personal safety). But ultimately, what you’re most likely to succeed at is the thing with the best exchange rate between what you want and how you’re willing to get it.

Time, autonomy, flexibility, security, reputation, literal money.Relationships, moral comfort (please don’t pick this one), pride, physical safety… the choice is yours.

You just have to answer the question: which one can you always bid the highest in?

Talk soon. KL.