The question successful people are afraid to ask
I’ve known one of my dearest friends for almost 20 years now. We have celebrated a number of life milestones together, from graduating from university to getting married. As we both approach our 40th birthday (he before me – hehe), it made me reflect on some of our memories a decade ago when we were turning 30.
What did we envision? How did we feel? And what goals did we have for our lives?
The last question about goal-setting sparked a memory for me.
My friend and I were sitting in the park on a sunny summer’s day, dreaming about success. As in what would it look like in reality? The house, the car, the family, the lifestyle. I’m sure it led to some dreadful version of a vision board as a result.
Looking back, we failed to answer the real question that sits underneath it all.
How much is enough?
It is a strange question to sit with. Because most of us have been trained to treat ambition as a virtue with no ceiling. More revenue. More followers. More impact. More, more, more and increasingly now, now now. The word “enough” can feel like giving up. Like settling. Like you are somehow failing to honour the potential inside you.
The relentless pursuit of more, without ever defining enough, is not ambition. It is exhaustion dressed up as purpose. That’s what leads to burnout and depression, that deep feeling of I am failing, drowning, gasping for air. I see it with the clients I coach, and I recognise it in my own life.
The problem with always chasing
Honestly, there is so much in life we will never achieve. Things that have no finish line, no matter how hard we chase them. Take certainty about the future. No amount of planning, saving, or preparation will ever make you feel truly safe. The variables keep changing, the world keeps shifting, and you can spend enormous energy trying to eliminate risk and never actually get there. Or take the feeling of being ready.
There is always one more qualification, one more experience, one more connection you feel you need before you take the leap. Readiness is a horizon that moves as you walk toward it. The problem is not that we lack discipline or drive. The problem is that we are chasing things that were never designed to be caught.
We need to be at peace with that and accept it.
Goal-setting culture is everywhere. And it serves a function. Direction matters. Intentionality matters. But somewhere along the way, we made the chase the point. We outsourced the question of “why” to the process of “how.”
And that is a problem, because you can be extremely productive in completely the wrong direction.
Self-Influence, the series I am exploring with you in the coming weeks, starts from a different premise. Before you can lead others, before you can build something meaningful, before you can make good decisions with your time, your money, your energy, you need to understand yourself deeply. You need to ask the questions most people avoid.
Today’s question is this: How much is enough?
You can apply it to rest. To learning. To recognition. To relationships. To pleasure. It is a question for every area of life.
But the lens I want to look through today is the one we tend to avoid most. Money.
How much money is actually enough?
Back to my close friend and I sitting in the park. He audaciously set an ambition to become a millionaire by his 30th birthday. It was his north star. The number he had been carrying around since his early twenties. A million pounds. That was the goal.
I asked him a simple question. What does the life you actually want cost?
We sat down and mapped it out together. Not the fantasy version. The real version. The specific, honest version.
Here is what we came up with (roughly):
Look at that number.
Not a million pounds. Not even close. To live that life, to genuinely afford every part of it, he would need an income of roughly £320,000 per year before tax. Either drawn as dividends from a successful business or earned as a salary.
That is a significant income. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But here is the thing. It is approximately 70% less than what he thought he needed. His dream life, costed honestly, did not require him to be a millionaire. It required him to be clear.
The difference between a target and a number
Most people set financial goals the same way they set fitness goals. Vaguely. “I want to be rich.” “I want to be healthy.” The goal is more a feeling than a figure.
But a feeling is impossible to achieve. You cannot cross the finish line of a feeling because the feeling keeps moving.
I remember when I got my first professional job, which felt like the dream job after four years at university and my desire to make my family proud. The vision of that job vs the daily reality was very different. Even though I was earning more than I had ever earned in my life up to that point, I felt unfulfilled. In fact, that void led me to start a business in the evenings and weekends, Mixtape Madness.
When you name the actual number, when you sit down and do what my friend and I did, something interesting happens. The goal becomes real, achievable, in reach. It stops being a vague horizon and becomes a specific destination.
That specificity is not limiting. It is liberating. It becomes a driver alongside the other things that truly matter to you, whether that is family or specific causes close to your heart.
Because once you know what “enough” looks like, you can stop spending your most creative years chasing a figure that was never going to give you what you actually wanted.
What this is really about
This is not a financial planning letter. And I am not telling you to lower your ambitions.
I am saying something more uncomfortable than that.
Most of us have never actually asked the question. We inherited our targets. We absorbed them from culture, from comparison, from the LinkedIn highlight reel, from a number someone told us we wanted years ago. And we have been running toward that number without ever stopping to check whether it is ours.
Self-Influence begins here. Not with a strategy. With an honest question.
Because until you know what enough looks like for you, specifically and honestly, you are not pursuing your life. You are performing someone else’s.
So here is today’s Self-Influence question for you to sit with: How much is enough? Pick one area of your life, your finances, your time, your recognition, your rest, and ask it honestly. What number, what amount, what version of that thing would actually leave you feeling complete? Write it down. The answer might surprise you.
How is my friend doing today?
I write this at a time when I approach the end of a challenging period of renovating a home. In some ways, the endeavour was ‘beautiful pain’. I’m proud of the beauty we have created, but it has been a painful journey at times to get here. Through the ebbs and flows of it all, I now feel like we have more than enough. We are not at our desired dream home state yet, but when I look around at what we call home, it is something I am deeply grateful for. A safe space for the family to always know they can return to. What a privilege. What an honour.
Back to my dear friend.
My friend never became a millionaire. But he did achieve his aspirational lifestyle.
He is doing well and is happy for it too.
He has built a business that generates the income he needed. He has gone on incredible vacations all across the world, from Thailand to the Maldives. He drives a nice car. He lives in a beautiful home. But most importantly, his character is consistent; I can still lean on him as a friend, we can still sit in the mud together.
He is content now, as he knows he has enough.
Until next time.
Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE