IDEAS + LEADERS

Expanded Notes

Clarifying the ideas that move too fast in conversation.

Podcasts reward breadth over depth. My conversation with Elena covered ground from identity formation to success inflation, but ideas had to move fast.

You know the experience: something lands, you think "I wish they'd stayed there longer", but the conversation moves on.

One concept that deserved more room is what I call success inflation, and I want to stay with it here because it names something I encounter in practice now more than ever. It is also an idea that most leadership language tends to avoid.

Success inflation describes a specific pattern among leaders who have built careers on performance, recognition, and measurable achievement. At some point, often in their late 40s or early 50s, the same accomplishments that once carried real, positive psychological weight begin to feel hollow. In other words, what used to feel like arrival - "I made it", "this feels very rewarding" - now feels like repetition. What is unusual is that the people experiencing this are, by every conventional measure, doing well. They are not failing, on the contrary, their performance metrics are strong, their peers respect them, their families are intact. What is peculiar about this effect is that the dissonance is entirely internal, which is exactly why it often gets rationalized - "I'll get over it" - or buried under more activity - "next project will feel great".

I should be precise about what this is and what it is not. It is not burnout. Burnout is depletion; success inflation is something closer to a devaluation of success, the currency you have been earning your whole career. It is not midlife crisis in the tabloid sense either, the red sports car, the sudden departure, the affairs. It is usually much quieter than that.

When high achieving individuals, "strivers",  senses this shift, they usually return to familiar patterns, to what worked in the past:  they double down. More hours, a gym routine, maybe a new side project. As though the problem were one of volume rather than substance. I mention in the podcast a line from an old Italian film: "you cannot run away from yourself even if you are Eddie Merckx". Alas, this particular problem does not respond to effort.

So what does it respond to? In my experience, inquiry. And specifically, inquiry that involves someone else in the room. Here is where it gets harder, because the narratives that drive success inflation operate beneath conscious awareness. They are stories about who you are and what you are worth that formed over decades of repetition and reward, and they do not surface through self-reflection alone. A woman I worked with came to me for time management issues; six sessions in, we discovered she had built an identity around being indispensable to her team, which made it structurally impossible to delegate. She could not see that story on her own. Nobody can. That is not a weakness of character; it is how identity works.

The first step is recognizing that the shift is real and that it does not represent a personal failure. The second is understanding that the narrative you built about who you are may no longer describe the person you have become. We do not erase our previous identities; we reconfigure them. But reconfiguration takes time, and it takes honesty, and it almost always takes a conversation you have been putting off.

The downloadable Success Inflation Self-Assessment below is designed to help you sit with these questions before deciding what, if anything, to do about them.

Success Inflation Self-Assessment

A reflective tool for leaders sensing the shift.

This self-assessment  is a set of questions designed to help you notice something you may already sense but have not yet named.

This is not a diagnostic instrument. There is no score at the end, no quadrant to land in, no personality type waiting to explain you to yourself.