📚 Series: Redefining Wealth on Your Own Terms
- The fish that never needed to change (You are here)
What counts as wealth beyond the metrics that came with the job
The coelacanth is one of the oldest living creatures on earth. It survived mass extinctions, shifting oceans, and millions of years of change by adapting imperceptibly. Its exterior stayed unchanged while everything around it shifted.
What made it successful was also what kept it contained, optimising for the conditions it knew. The coelacanth never needed to ask whether those conditions still served it.
You do.
In corporate organisations there is a consistent pattern when it comes to determining success: measurement of observable behaviours, completed actions, and numbers that can be tracked over time. Anyone who has sat through a performance review will recognise the framework immediately. You adapt to the process. The process confirms you are performing. Corporate culture and wider society reward performance in consistent and tangible ways — pay rises, bonuses, promotions, the house, the car, the life that looks exactly as it should from the outside. They are external validations, and they are real. What they cannot reach is the internal question of what wealth actually means to you.
When I left corporate life, I wasn’t unhappy. I had every traditional marker of wealth. Something was missing. It took me a while to understand that the framework I had been working inside was never designed to account for it.
What also struck me wasn’t my own uncertainty. It was everyone else’s. The conversations focused almost entirely on what I was giving up. Then came the questions: What if it goes wrong? What if it doesn’t work out? What about your pension?
Nobody asked what if it goes brilliantly.
Economists measure wealth through assets and purchasing power. Psychologists, particularly self-determination theorists Deci and Ryan, frame it around autonomy, competence, and relatedness. A growing body of behavioural research measures it through discretionary time — the hours in your day that actually belong to you. Each captures something real. Each draws its boundary somewhere short of the whole picture. The question worth considering is which definition you have actually been working from, and whether you ever consciously chose it?
What counts as wealth, in the corporate framework, has one answer: what can be counted. No column for fulfilment. No KPI for meaning. No category for freedom, the freedom to choose how you spend your time, what you contribute to, what kind of life you’re building. The reward system was built to measure what could be counted and stopped there.
What if the way you’ve been measuring wealth was only ever one possible framework?
Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash
About the Creator
After years in corporate, I know the pressures, pace, and expectations of high-performing careers. I also know what it feels like when success on paper no longer brings fulfilment.
For over a decade, I’ve supported professionals, leaders, and entrepreneurs who sense they’ve drifted from what matters and are ready to navigate a more aligned, sustainable path forward.