struggling with making decisions wrt major life choices

[Case]

Hi All,
Asking advice here as the advice on the mmm forum has often impressed me.

I am not a very good decision maker, when it comes to large impactful decisions, particularly if they are not clear-cut.  I get stuck in analysis paralysis, and then I procrastinate. I wish I could make more confident choices, and move forward.

What I am wondering is:
For people that have very high levels of life satisfaction, and live without regrets and feel they have purpose... how do you know what to do?  I want these things (purpose, satisfaction, living without regrets) but sometimes I feel I lack an inner sense of how to get there.
What decision making processes do you use to govern your choices?

At present I am wrestling with a choice of whether to pursue a job at a start-up company.  It would totally uproot my life, away from somewhat close family, and either uproot my wife's life (we both finely have stable reasonably good jobs), or I have to do something crazy like long distance.  The appeal of the job is that it seems pretty exciting (in comparison to my current gig which is stable but stuck in bureaucracy, plus I feel a little undervalued), and I guess it's nice to have a company trying to poach me so hard (I have just the skill set they are looking for).

I have always been pursuing FIRE, but now I am fairly close.  If I have a job I love, then I might not even retire (as long as it doesn't seriously hinder traveling).  But I don't have a clear vision of what my ideal life is... not sure what to go after.

Kind of broad question... maybe someone will relate?

Case

[honeybbq]

Painting with a very broad brush - in my mind most changes work out for the better. If I'm even considering the change in question, It's probably for the best and I should do it.

[reeshau]

Do you have experience with that kind of a work environment?

When DW starts to seem anxious about a momentous decision, my go-to is to find a low-risk way to try it out. (One way or another)



All-or-nothing decisions can get a lot of people worked up.  But very few things have to be all-or-nothing:

Want to move?  Try some extended time in your target area.  And not just at peak season, but their worst season.  Make sure it's still OK.

Want to get married?  Of course you meet their family.  Depending on your spiritual standards, maybe you shack up for a while.

New job?  Can you figure out a way to try it out for a while?  Get a side gig at a startup, or moonlight for them?

It's almost the end of the year, so think about "investing" some of next year's vacation time researching your next move, instead of just decompressing.  Shadow the guy who wants to hire you for a week.  They're a startup: not many rules to break.  If you can provide some value while your are "interning," that may only cement your requirements.

If your temporary measures are effective, the big decision will be a lot clearer.  Maybe Crystal clear.

[Metalcat]

I am one of these people with extremely high life satisfaction and I have A LOT of experience making massive life changes.

I've also done the whole sacrificing a lot for an absolute dream job that I loved, so I can speak to that as well.

First, a hard lesson I learned is that if you want to be someone with a high life satisfaction, it's very risky to put your career at the center of your life.

I LOVED my exciting dream job career. I absolutely loved it. It was amazing, I did amazing shit, and I was extremely proud of myself and my work.

Cool, nice, that's fun. It's also not nearly as important or cool or at all relevant now that I'm retired from it. It all felt so bloody BIG at the time, and it was, but I've been retired since 2020 and it's all now just "stuff I used to do."

No matter how massive and impressive your accomplishments, once you leave the world where people know about them, stories of the "stuff you used to do" feel a lot like a dude talking about his highschool football days and the time he scored the touchdown at the "big game."

No one cares.

In fact, if you are living an awesome life in retirement, you won't care either.

So are big swings for big careers worth it?

Well, that depends.

Let's get back to not putting your career at the center of your life. I LOVED my career, loved it, got high of off it, used to look forward with excitement to go to work. However, I now enjoy my overall life more. Funny how that works.

My career took A LOT from me. It compromised my health, my marriage, and my relationships. I was only able to manage 3 years of work before I hit a wall and had to step down from my first really big job and take a lower position at another place and drop down to part time.

Now, I'm lucky I had the kind of career where I could drop in title, but rise steeply in prestige of my work. Where I could drop to part time and make almost the same amount. I actually took a step up in terms of what *I* wanted from my career, but still, I put myself on a path where I radically throttled my potential so that I wouldn't burn out like so many of my colleagues. Addiction and suicide are rampant in my former profession, so it felt like a worthy quality of life decision.

That's actually when I really started loving the work. Before that I was very proud of my work and loved much of it, but was not overall happy with the career. After I made the change and cut back my hours I was deeply in love with the work. I also was so successful in my specific way that I basically became famous in the industry.

Still, the rest of my life wasn't getting the attention it needed.

I didn't retire by choice, I sustained a work-related injury (common in my field) that took me out of the game very early in my career (much less common, most people just work for decades in pain, mine was a death blow).

This was at the same time as the pandemic so my leaving the profession coincided with almost everyone in my field leaving for several months anyway, and when they went back, the work conditions were so miserable, I was grateful to be out.

I spent two solid years trying to figure out a career that would be as big, as impressive, as important, where I would be as exceptional and successful as I was before.

I had built a side hustle alongside my main career to capitalize on how well respected I was, and through that an opportunity came up to do something so much bigger than my original career. Instead of being an elite professional among my colleagues, I would co-own one of the largest employers of my colleagues. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity that would make me one of the most influential people in my profession in the country.

Cool, so I did that and I really loved that work too. However, I had just spent a year retired. I had focused on my health, my marriage, my relationships. I slept well, I exercised every day, I enjoyed cooking. Giving basically all of that up to a job, a more than full time job, didn't feel so good anymore.

Also, the stress was enormous. I was working with a partner I didn't quite see eye to eye with. I knew that I had the skill and ability to make it work, and I would have be catapulted to 8 figure NW within a matter of years had I persisted, but it didn't feel worth it.

DH and I talked for weeks trying to conceptualize how our life would be better with an enormous amount of money, but me being infinitely less present, and we just couldn't see a pathway that made sense.

So instead of doing my usual thing of making things work, being the consensus builder, managing the big personalities, and bending over backwards to facilitate them, I just put my foot down in my role and insisted on how I believed things needed to be done and the rest of them could get on board or my partner could conclude that we aren't the right fit together. She picked the latter and we ended our partnership. A year later she lost 70+% of her staff and all of her top producers.

I could have made it work, I could have made her life infinitely better, which she knew, which is why she took me on as a partner in the first place. And we both could have been just freakishly successful and very rich. But I had removed career from the center of my life and because of that, I couldn't do the things that I used to be able to do. I'm just not as valuable professionally as I used to be, because I'm not willing to make the same sacrifices anymore.

I'm also a much happier, much more satisfied person. I'm incredibly grateful that deal blew up as it did. I wasn't at the time. I felt like a total failure, but time has proven me right and it was a good experience for me to process my self-perception and identity and finally move on from feeling like I had to do something *BIG.

Now, I am NOT telling you to stick with your full job where you are under appreciated. Nor am I telling you not to pursue the big dream job.

I'm telling you not to JUST look at it through the lens of what career choices are worth it. To look at your life through a much bigger lens of what will improve your overall quality of life.

Now onto the next point. What did I do after the big business deal blew up? Well, I regrouped and started examining my life and what is really important to me.

I had to fully shift my con for of self away from my work and instead view work as something that contributed to overall well being. For example, if work keeps me engaged, that's good, but not if it engages me to a point of compromising my self care and relationships.

I built a series of indicators for quality of life:

Am I sleeping well and waking calm and rested?
Am I exercising most days and enjoying it?
Am I eating nutritious food in amounts that maintain a healthy weight and enjoying it?
Is my home clean enough on a daily basis to be enjoyable and comfortable?
Do I like myself?
Am I spending enough quality time with friends and family?
Is my marriage on average getting stronger every year?

Work is nowhere to be found in that list because work is not a quality of life goal, it's a quality of life tool. Work is what allows me to be engaged, challenged, do fun shit, and bring in income. If I prefer to work and pay for someone to clean my house, that's cool. If I work so much that my marriage suffers, that's not cool.

Work serves my life, not the other way around.

Okay, onto that whole life thing. Now, that list could make it look like my life is boring. Lol, far from it. That list is just indicators. It frees me up to do ANYTHING as long as those indicators will benefit.

If something will take away from those indicators, that's okay, but only temporarily, and only if it will increase them in the end. So for example, DH has spent this past year working more than is optimal; however, we knew it would be only a year, and the payoff after that one year is coming due and is beyond worth it and his overall happiness and well being level is massively boosted.

Those metrics also empowered us to impulse buy a house 31 hours away on a remote island we had never been to and go live a crazy adventure of building a new life there away from our very established lives back in the city. Now, we only live there half the time, but that's because I need medical care in the city, otherwise we would happily uproot and permanently move. So I also have experience with that element of what you are talking about.

I personally welcome major life changes. I'm a big fan. I don't like to stagnate and have zero fear of starting over in new places and new careers. I'm currently retraining in a whole new profession. Change can be great!
 
The question is, will this change improve your quality of life metrics or make them worse? What is your plan if it makes them worse?

As someone above said, you're looking at things in black and white, when really, everything is grey. But if you don't hammer out as partners what elements matter most to BOTH of you, you can't plan, hedge, and make contingencies that make sense.

You need to both be able to tell, immediately, if things are going in the right direction, if the trade offs are turning out to be good or bad, and what elements need to be protected the most.

Over the years DH and I have become so aligned in our priorities and perspective on what well being looks like that my entire list of indicators now boils down to one question: is this good for my marriage?

My DH and I care more about each other's well being than our own, so we each know that if we're doing something that's good for the marriage, that it's 100% good for ourselves. My marriage thrives when both of us are happy, healthy, engaged, challenged, have wonderful relationships, hobbies, enough time in nature.

As I build my new career, I very intuitively know how much of my time and energy I can devote to it without harming my marriage (aka my quality of life). The career needs to enhance my life, so all of my career goals are defined by those parameters.

So instead of contemplating if this career move is "worth it" first spend some serious time talking through with your partner what your visions and measures of success are in terms of life satisfaction. Are they compatible? How can they be achieved? How will you measure them? What are the deal breakers? What hedges can you put in place to protect the most valuable elements of your quality of life? What are the emergency exit plans if what you try is causing net damage? How will you handle if a plan increases one partner's quality of life at the expense of the other's? Would that even be possible if your goals were properly aligned?

For us, our canary in the mineshaft indicator is exercise. If I'm struggling to get my exercises done and enjoy doing them, something in our life balance is off and needs to be addressed. I have serious injuries and exercise is my main treatment, but it's also very easy for me to let it drop off below optimal levels when life gets overloaded.

It a very, very sensitive indicator that alerts both of us to overload in the system. We can't always remedy the overload right away. For example, I'm doing 5 weeks of double courses for school, my balance is WAY off. But we're very aware that our collective system is overloaded, so we enacted our go-to measures for reducing my workload as much as possible, and we both know there's a clear end date.

We take drops in indicators EXTREMELY seriously. It's what allows each of us to constantly be aware of each other's well being and our collective well being. To assess when sacrifices are truly worthwhile and when maybe they need to be rethought and restrategized.

It also makes it extremely easy to shuffle priorities. People tend to get stuck in their old priorities. They commit so much to something they decided years ago was "important" and then spend so much energy and life capital on it that even when it shouldn't be important, the sunken cost fallacy makes it feel important.

If you have clear indicators of wellness, these sunken cost fallacies have nowhere to hide. It becomes obvious when something that used to be important just isn't serving your needs anymore (or maybe never did).

For example, being "well dressed" used to be incredibly important to me. But in no way does wearing uncomfortable clothes, knee-murdering high heels, and spending hours per week on hair and makeup improve any of my quality of life metrics. It turns out that's a priority my mom set for me as a child. I committed to it for decades and believed it was important to *me*, but the impact on the metrics is clear: if I can spend 30 minutes doing stretches in the morning instead of flat ironing hair and applying eyeliner, it's just so obvious that it was never *my* priority. So I just dropped what I believed was *me* for decades.

So here's the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to say in this very long reply:

Conclusion:

If you want to be one of those people with an enormously high life satisfaction, you have to learn the very simple lesson that YOU get to define what success is.

You are your partner get to define for yourselves what benefit each of your careers need to offer in order to add to your quality of life.

For some people that means never pursuing their maximum career potential because it will pull too much from their overall quality of life. Actually, this is true for most people. That's why having your OWN definition of success clearly understood is critical, so that you don't get sucked into the performance vortex of the professional world.

For others, this may mean one partner with a massive career and a supporting partner running the domestic show at home. For yet others, this may mean two powerhouses whose conceptualization of domestic life is everything outsourced and the main support their partner provides is to understand and respect their hustle because they're the same (think two Hollywood actors who rarely live together).

All of the above options could be wonderful or heinously toxic for any given pair of people. That's why the definition of success needs to be co-created and very, very clear indicators of success established and monitored with clear response plans in place for any dip in any given metric.

So is your plan worth trying?? I have no clue. It could be the best thing ever for both of you or it could be a nightmare. It's up to you to determine what outcomes are best and how best to plan for them and more importantly plan how to manage them if it doesn't work for your family.

[the_hobbitish]

I'm in the middle of that figuring out what to do phase. I'm in therapy where this is the specific goal. I took a sabbatical from my successful and stressful career because I was burned out and unhappy with my life. The lesson I'm learning from talking about my life ad nauseum is that there's a whole lot of what I "should do" in my life and not a lot of awareness of what I want to do.

How you get to the kind of life you're talking about is to know really deeply what makes you happy and fulfilled and feel a sense of purpose. How much of this job is about feeling valued? If that's a priority, then start asking questions around whether you need to leave this job to get that or if this new job is the only place that offers it.

I'm still at the beginning of a similar journey. Once I started figuring out where I got fulfillment it starting shaping the choices I'm making about my life. I realized I can't work a full 40 hour week. I used to be addicted to the high pressure pace of my old job, but I didn't have anything left for all the activities and relationships that make me happy. I was confusing success with fulfillment.

@Metalcat is right that it can't be about only the job. You need to know with real clarity what makes you happy/fulfilled across your life. Then you can look at this one job decision and know which answer is right for you.

[Laura33]

You asked for responses from people who have their shit together and make major decisions easily.  I am going to answer as someone who runs screaming from change on general principle.  Because if I could figure it out, so can you.

First and foremost above all:  what does your wife think?  Is she onboard with the idea of moving?  Would she be able to find a comparable job and support system etc. in a different location?  If she is even somewhat averse, the answer is no.  Your number 1 priority has to be to find a location/job/life where both of you are happy.  And if you don't have that now, you keep looking until you do.

For me, the single-most important thing to consider is:  what is the need I am trying to fulfill?  What am I missing in my life -- or what do I have too much of?  We often jump to a potential solution -- exciting new job with big money! -- before we've even defined the problem.  If you define the problem properly, you often find their are solutions that go beyond the obvious one you're looking at -- and many times, those alternatives have fewer downsides.

I will give you an example from my very non-Mustachian past.  I remember to this day the first time I saw the BMW Z3.  Talk about love at first sight!  Of course, it was also like $35K(!!!).  But we were newly-married DINKs, two professional jobs, we could afford it (well, technically -- would definitely have caused tradeoffs).  We went for a test drive.  OMG OMG OMG.  I said "I want the car."  DH then spent the next two hours coming up with all the reasons we shouldn't buy the car.  Every time, I said, "I don't care, I want the car."  Even got to "if we buy this car, we can never have kids, because it's only a two-seater."  I said, "I don't care, I want the car."*

Then DH got smart.  He said, "look, your Acura is 8 years old, why don't we drive a new one to see how much we can get for have the price of the Z3?  Maybe what you're responding to is the new-car tightness and smoothness and quietness more than the Z3 itself."  I agreed, we went to Acura.  Turns out they had a two-door Integra that was more performance-tuned.  It was not a Z3.  But it got me about 80% of the way there for half the price.  So we bought it, and I drove it happily (until we had kids).**

For you, figure out what is generating that ants-in-pants feeling.  Do you need more intellectual challenge at your job?  Do you want a higher-profile career?  Is it the money?  I note that you mention you're only recently settled in to a more stable life; maybe it's that very stability that you're interpreting as boredom?  After all, when you're changing things all the time and busy-busy-busy, when all that goes away you can often feel like something's missing.  Figure out whether you really are missing something, vs. whether you're just readjusting to a new version of normal.

Once you figure out what gap you are trying to fill, brainstorm all the ways you can fill it.  If your current job is boring, what can you find that might be more interesting that wouldn't require you to uproot your life?  If you're finding stability to be boring, what can you do outside of your job to shake up your life a bit?  Etc. 

Side note:  be as expansive as possible in this brainstorming.  Include even things that sound truly ridiculous, or that you've never considered before.  E.g., "quit both our jobs, sell up, and travel for two years/teach English in a foreign country/live in a van."  And "take the most demanding, highest-paid, most prestigious job I can find and dedicate myself to career advancement for X years."  You want to make sure you capture all of the various extreme options.  No, you probably won't choose any of those.  But realizing that you do, in fact, have all these choices reminds you that you are in charge of your life, and you can choose to do whatever the fuck you want to.  And that's powerful.

Once you have that list of options, you need to go through and evaluate the pros and cons of each, as objectively as possible.  When you do this, do not bullshit yourself.  Everything comes with tradeoffs.  We tend to get lured in by the BrightShiny while entirely missing the nasty little underbelly.  So force yourself to look at what your life would really be like with each option -- what you'd gain, and what you'd give up.  I call this the "even George Clooney throws his socks on the floor" analysis.  Again, the key is to not bullshit yourself.  If you're excited about, say, moving to San Francisco to work in some fast-paced tech job, you're envisioning happy teams doing meaningful work and nights out in one of the great cities in the world.  But real life is probably going to include a very cramped apartment and/or long commute, night after night at the office to keep up, an annoyed/stressed wife who either doesn't get to see you much and/or is stressed herself with work and commute, and the occasional Sunday off where both of you just crash on the couch because you're too tired to do anything.  That's the kind of thing you need to force yourself to look at. 

The important thing is to look at the job as just one aspect of your whole life; as Metalcat said, it is an important part of your life, but not the most important part.

Once you have a whole list of options lined up, with the pros and cons of each, figure out which option gives you the most pros for the fewest cons.  It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway:  you should do this analysis with your wife, because "wife will be happy/unhappy" should be one of the highest priorities for that analysis.

When you figure out the best option, pursue it.  Note that that option may well be just to stay put where you are -- and that's ok.  I have often found that just knowing that if something isn't working, I can change it makes me feel much more content.  But the key here is recognizing that:  if the first thing you try doesn't work, try something else.  There are very, very few choices in life that are actually irreversible. 

And yeah, you will make some choices that don't work out; none of us have perfect knowledge, even of what makes ourselves happy.  IME, that is the most intimidating part of change:  what if it goes wrong?  And the answer goes back to the top:  if what you're doing isn't working, go make that list of options again and start over.  No one's life is success after success after success.  Often the only way to figure out what really matters is to make the wrong choice -- sometimes repeatedly!  Because each of those wrong choices is helping us learn what does and doesn't matter, so we can choose better in the future.

And that last bit is really the key to those of us who fear change.  If we don't force ourselves to evaluate options and make necessary changes out of fear of failure, we are in fact guaranteeing longer-term unhappiness, because we are depriving ourselves of the chance to better find out what actually matters and what really does make us happy. 

As that great philosopher Rush said, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.  The way to long-term satisfaction is to choose intentionally, not by default. 


*I feel compelled to note at this point that we were in total role-reversal here.  I was always the one who wouldn't even buy myself a t-shirt without evaluating whether I really really needed it, while DH basically bought any toy that caught his eye.

**And when we were FI and had retirement and kids' college covered and were basically SWAMIs, I bought a used Porsche.  Talking about scratching the car itch!  That earlier compromise put me in position to not have to compromise at all later on.  What I have now is way, way better than what I thought I wanted then.

[Case]

I am one of these people with extremely high life satisfaction and I have A LOT of experience making massive life changes.

I've also done the whole sacrificing a lot for an absolute dream job that I loved, so I can speak to that as well.

First, a hard lesson I learned is that if you want to be someone with a high life satisfaction, it's very risky to put your career at the center of your life.

I LOVED my exciting dream job career. I absolutely loved it. It was amazing, I did amazing shit, and I was extremely proud of myself and my work.

Cool, nice, that's fun. It's also not nearly as important or cool or at all relevant now that I'm retired from it. It all felt so bloody BIG at the time, and it was, but I've been retired since 2020 and it's all now just "stuff I used to do."

No matter how massive and impressive your accomplishments, once you leave the world where people know about them, stories of the "stuff you used to do" feel a lot like a dude talking about his highschool football days and the time he scored the touchdown at the "big game."

No one cares.

In fact, if you are living an awesome life in retirement, you won't care either.

So are big swings for big careers worth it?

Well, that depends.

Let's get back to not putting your career at the center of your life. I LOVED my career, loved it, got high of off it, used to look forward with excitement to go to work. However, I now enjoy my overall life more. Funny how that works.

My career took A LOT from me. It compromised my health, my marriage, and my relationships. I was only able to manage 3 years of work before I hit a wall and had to step down from my first really big job and take a lower position at another place and drop down to part time.

Now, I'm lucky I had the kind of career where I could drop in title, but rise steeply in prestige of my work. Where I could drop to part time and make almost the same amount. I actually took a step up in terms of what *I* wanted from my career, but still, I put myself on a path where I radically throttled my potential so that I wouldn't burn out like so many of my colleagues. Addiction and suicide are rampant in my former profession, so it felt like a worthy quality of life decision.

That's actually when I really started loving the work. Before that I was very proud of my work and loved much of it, but was not overall happy with the career. After I made the change and cut back my hours I was deeply in love with the work. I also was so successful in my specific way that I basically became famous in the industry.

Still, the rest of my life wasn't getting the attention it needed.

I didn't retire by choice, I sustained a work-related injury (common in my field) that took me out of the game very early in my career (much less common, most people just work for decades in pain, mine was a death blow).

This was at the same time as the pandemic so my leaving the profession coincided with almost everyone in my field leaving for several months anyway, and when they went back, the work conditions were so miserable, I was grateful to be out.

I spent two solid years trying to figure out a career that would be as big, as impressive, as important, where I would be as exceptional and successful as I was before.

I had built a side hustle alongside my main career to capitalize on how well respected I was, and through that an opportunity came up to do something so much bigger than my original career. Instead of being an elite professional among my colleagues, I would co-own one of the largest employers of my colleagues. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity that would make me one of the most influential people in my profession in the country.

Cool, so I did that and I really loved that work too. However, I had just spent a year retired. I had focused on my health, my marriage, my relationships. I slept well, I exercised every day, I enjoyed cooking. Giving basically all of that up to a job, a more than full time job, didn't feel so good anymore.

Also, the stress was enormous. I was working with a partner I didn't quite see eye to eye with. I knew that I had the skill and ability to make it work, and I would have be catapulted to 8 figure NW within a matter of years had I persisted, but it didn't feel worth it.

DH and I talked for weeks trying to conceptualize how our life would be better with an enormous amount of money, but me being infinitely less present, and we just couldn't see a pathway that made sense.

So instead of doing my usual thing of making things work, being the consensus builder, managing the big personalities, and bending over backwards to facilitate them, I just put my foot down in my role and insisted on how I believed things needed to be done and the rest of them could get on board or my partner could conclude that we aren't the right fit together. She picked the latter and we ended our partnership. A year later she lost 70+% of her staff and all of her top producers.

I could have made it work, I could have made her life infinitely better, which she knew, which is why she took me on as a partner in the first place. And we both could have been just freakishly successful and very rich. But I had removed career from the center of my life and because of that, I couldn't do the things that I used to be able to do. I'm just not as valuable professionally as I used to be, because I'm not willing to make the same sacrifices anymore.

I'm also a much happier, much more satisfied person. I'm incredibly grateful that deal blew up as it did. I wasn't at the time. I felt like a total failure, but time has proven me right and it was a good experience for me to process my self-perception and identity and finally move on from feeling like I had to do something *BIG.

Now, I am NOT telling you to stick with your full job where you are under appreciated. Nor am I telling you not to pursue the big dream job.

I'm telling you not to JUST look at it through the lens of what career choices are worth it. To look at your life through a much bigger lens of what will improve your overall quality of life.

Now onto the next point. What did I do after the big business deal blew up? Well, I regrouped and started examining my life and what is really important to me.

I had to fully shift my con for of self away from my work and instead view work as something that contributed to overall well being. For example, if work keeps me engaged, that's good, but not if it engages me to a point of compromising my self care and relationships.

I built a series of indicators for quality of life:

Am I sleeping well and waking calm and rested?
Am I exercising most days and enjoying it?
Am I eating nutritious food in amounts that maintain a healthy weight and enjoying it?
Is my home clean enough on a daily basis to be enjoyable and comfortable?
Do I like myself?
Am I spending enough quality time with friends and family?
Is my marriage on average getting stronger every year?

Work is nowhere to be found in that list because work is not a quality of life goal, it's a quality of life tool. Work is what allows me to be engaged, challenged, do fun shit, and bring in income. If I prefer to work and pay for someone to clean my house, that's cool. If I work so much that my marriage suffers, that's not cool.

Work serves my life, not the other way around.

Okay, onto that whole life thing. Now, that list could make it look like my life is boring. Lol, far from it. That list is just indicators. It frees me up to do ANYTHING as long as those indicators will benefit.

If something will take away from those indicators, that's okay, but only temporarily, and only if it will increase them in the end. So for example, DH has spent this past year working more than is optimal; however, we knew it would be only a year, and the payoff after that one year is coming due and is beyond worth it and his overall happiness and well being level is massively boosted.

Those metrics also empowered us to impulse buy a house 31 hours away on a remote island we had never been to and go live a crazy adventure of building a new life there away from our very established lives back in the city. Now, we only live there half the time, but that's because I need medical care in the city, otherwise we would happily uproot and permanently move. So I also have experience with that element of what you are talking about.

I personally welcome major life changes. I'm a big fan. I don't like to stagnate and have zero fear of starting over in new places and new careers. I'm currently retraining in a whole new profession. Change can be great!
 
The question is, will this change improve your quality of life metrics or make them worse? What is your plan if it makes them worse?

As someone above said, you're looking at things in black and white, when really, everything is grey. But if you don't hammer out as partners what elements matter most to BOTH of you, you can't plan, hedge, and make contingencies that make sense.

You need to both be able to tell, immediately, if things are going in the right direction, if the trade offs are turning out to be good or bad, and what elements need to be protected the most.

Over the years DH and I have become so aligned in our priorities and perspective on what well being looks like that my entire list of indicators now boils down to one question: is this good for my marriage?

My DH and I care more about each other's well being than our own, so we each know that if we're doing something that's good for the marriage, that it's 100% good for ourselves. My marriage thrives when both of us are happy, healthy, engaged, challenged, have wonderful relationships, hobbies, enough time in nature.

As I build my new career, I very intuitively know how much of my time and energy I can devote to it without harming my marriage (aka my quality of life). The career needs to enhance my life, so all of my career goals are defined by those parameters.

So instead of contemplating if this career move is "worth it" first spend some serious time talking through with your partner what your visions and measures of success are in terms of life satisfaction. Are they compatible? How can they be achieved? How will you measure them? What are the deal breakers? What hedges can you put in place to protect the most valuable elements of your quality of life? What are the emergency exit plans if what you try is causing net damage? How will you handle if a plan increases one partner's quality of life at the expense of the other's? Would that even be possible if your goals were properly aligned?

For us, our canary in the mineshaft indicator is exercise. If I'm struggling to get my exercises done and enjoy doing them, something in our life balance is off and needs to be addressed. I have serious injuries and exercise is my main treatment, but it's also very easy for me to let it drop off below optimal levels when life gets overloaded.

It a very, very sensitive indicator that alerts both of us to overload in the system. We can't always remedy the overload right away. For example, I'm doing 5 weeks of double courses for school, my balance is WAY off. But we're very aware that our collective system is overloaded, so we enacted our go-to measures for reducing my workload as much as possible, and we both know there's a clear end date.

We take drops in indicators EXTREMELY seriously. It's what allows each of us to constantly be aware of each other's well being and our collective well being. To assess when sacrifices are truly worthwhile and when maybe they need to be rethought and restrategized.

It also makes it extremely easy to shuffle priorities. People tend to get stuck in their old priorities. They commit so much to something they decided years ago was "important" and then spend so much energy and life capital on it that even when it shouldn't be important, the sunken cost fallacy makes it feel important.

If you have clear indicators of wellness, these sunken cost fallacies have nowhere to hide. It becomes obvious when something that used to be important just isn't serving your needs anymore (or maybe never did).

For example, being "well dressed" used to be incredibly important to me. But in no way does wearing uncomfortable clothes, knee-murdering high heels, and spending hours per week on hair and makeup improve any of my quality of life metrics. It turns out that's a priority my mom set for me as a child. I committed to it for decades and believed it was important to *me*, but the impact on the metrics is clear: if I can spend 30 minutes doing stretches in the morning instead of flat ironing hair and applying eyeliner, it's just so obvious that it was never *my* priority. So I just dropped what I believed was *me* for decades.

So here's the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to say in this very long reply:

Conclusion:

If you want to be one of those people with an enormously high life satisfaction, you have to learn the very simple lesson that YOU get to define what success is.

You are your partner get to define for yourselves what benefit each of your careers need to offer in order to add to your quality of life.

For some people that means never pursuing their maximum career potential because it will pull too much from their overall quality of life. Actually, this is true for most people. That's why having your OWN definition of success clearly understood is critical, so that you don't get sucked into the performance vortex of the professional world.

For others, this may mean one partner with a massive career and a supporting partner running the domestic show at home. For yet others, this may mean two powerhouses whose conceptualization of domestic life is everything outsourced and the main support their partner provides is to understand and respect their hustle because they're the same (think two Hollywood actors who rarely live together).

All of the above options could be wonderful or heinously toxic for any given pair of people. That's why the definition of success needs to be co-created and very, very clear indicators of success established and monitored with clear response plans in place for any dip in any given metric.

So is your plan worth trying?? I have no clue. It could be the best thing ever for both of you or it could be a nightmare. It's up to you to determine what outcomes are best and how best to plan for them and more importantly plan how to manage them if it doesn't work for your family.

Thank you for the comments!  I have to ask, what line of work were you in?  Sale?  Stock broker?  Big game hunter??  No problem if it's personal and you don't want to share.

I have similar health barometric effects when too much is going on in work... or when I am stressed out.  Actually, I have been so stressed from trying to figure out these choices that I haven't stayed on top of health maintenance as much as I should.

I have definitely had periods of my life that seemed really important at the time, but in retrospect was just 'past life'.  I have had time periods where I worked harder than others, in order to reach a goal.  But, I also don't feel like I have been terribly successful in my career.  I am in R&D, and so success is often equated to commercialization.  Instead, I've had a lot of high risk / high reward projects; they have all either not worked out, or were technical successes to some degree, but either not enough to hit it big, or didn't progress for business reasons.  Something I am considering as a next step, is to have my mgmt give me a project that is lower risk / lower reward (without getting into details, the types of projects I've been on are rarely commercialized).

I probably need to learn to focus on trying to derive less life satisfaction from my work.  Actually, I got on the FIRE path when my very first industry position (11 years ago) was such a shit show that I began to wonder if I needed to pursue this life. 

Good news is that my current job is overall much better.  I actually have an overall good situation, as does my wife.  Logically speaking, it's probably stupid of me to consider this crazy start-up job.  But then I have that nagging feeling in the back of my head, that I haven't accomplished anything significant, that I haven't done enough amazing things.  That's sort of what's been motivating me.  But also there are other ways to scratch the itch.

My wife does not want to move for this job.  She doesn't like the location (frankly, I'm not crazy about it).  Actually, the start-up company seems to want me bad enough that they'll create a position for my wife (she could bring them a ton of value, actually).  But, she doesn't want it.  If I really want the job, one possibility is a long-distance relationship, where we visit each other on weekends/etc... 

Anyways, basically, this is nearly non-starter.  I've done long distance twice, it's not really a healthy thing, and it certainly doesn't work unless there is an end in sight... and I don't know what that would be.

[Case]

Do you have experience with that kind of a work environment?

When DW starts to seem anxious about a momentous decision, my go-to is to find a low-risk way to try it out. (One way or another)



All-or-nothing decisions can get a lot of people worked up.  But very few things have to be all-or-nothing:

Want to move?  Try some extended time in your target area.  And not just at peak season, but their worst season.  Make sure it's still OK.

Want to get married?  Of course you meet their family.  Depending on your spiritual standards, maybe you shack up for a while.

New job?  Can you figure out a way to try it out for a while?  Get a side gig at a startup, or moonlight for them?

It's almost the end of the year, so think about "investing" some of next year's vacation time researching your next move, instead of just decompressing.  Shadow the guy who wants to hire you for a week.  They're a startup: not many rules to break.  If you can provide some value while your are "interning," that may only cement your requirements.

If your temporary measures are effective, the big decision will be a lot clearer.  Maybe Crystal clear.

I have the option to visit the start-up, and check it out.  So I could do that. Presumably they will be trying to win me over, but I would be trying to be scrutinizing.

I have no experience in start-ups.  Don't know whether it would wear me out.

[Case]

You asked for responses from people who have their shit together and make major decisions easily.  I am going to answer as someone who runs screaming from change on general principle.  Because if I could figure it out, so can you.

First and foremost above all:  what does your wife think?  Is she onboard with the idea of moving?  Would she be able to find a comparable job and support system etc. in a different location?  If she is even somewhat averse, the answer is no.  Your number 1 priority has to be to find a location/job/life where both of you are happy.  And if you don't have that now, you keep looking until you do.

For me, the single-most important thing to consider is:  what is the need I am trying to fulfill?  What am I missing in my life -- or what do I have too much of?  We often jump to a potential solution -- exciting new job with big money! -- before we've even defined the problem.  If you define the problem properly, you often find their are solutions that go beyond the obvious one you're looking at -- and many times, those alternatives have fewer downsides.

I will give you an example from my very non-Mustachian past.  I remember to this day the first time I saw the BMW Z3.  Talk about love at first sight!  Of course, it was also like $35K(!!!).  But we were newly-married DINKs, two professional jobs, we could afford it (well, technically -- would definitely have caused tradeoffs).  We went for a test drive.  OMG OMG OMG.  I said "I want the car."  DH then spent the next two hours coming up with all the reasons we shouldn't buy the car.  Every time, I said, "I don't care, I want the car."  Even got to "if we buy this car, we can never have kids, because it's only a two-seater."  I said, "I don't care, I want the car."*

Then DH got smart.  He said, "look, your Acura is 8 years old, why don't we drive a new one to see how much we can get for have the price of the Z3?  Maybe what you're responding to is the new-car tightness and smoothness and quietness more than the Z3 itself."  I agreed, we went to Acura.  Turns out they had a two-door Integra that was more performance-tuned.  It was not a Z3.  But it got me about 80% of the way there for half the price.  So we bought it, and I drove it happily (until we had kids).**

For you, figure out what is generating that ants-in-pants feeling.  Do you need more intellectual challenge at your job?  Do you want a higher-profile career?  Is it the money?  I note that you mention you're only recently settled in to a more stable life; maybe it's that very stability that you're interpreting as boredom?  After all, when you're changing things all the time and busy-busy-busy, when all that goes away you can often feel like something's missing.  Figure out whether you really are missing something, vs. whether you're just readjusting to a new version of normal.

Once you figure out what gap you are trying to fill, brainstorm all the ways you can fill it.  If your current job is boring, what can you find that might be more interesting that wouldn't require you to uproot your life?  If you're finding stability to be boring, what can you do outside of your job to shake up your life a bit?  Etc. 

Side note:  be as expansive as possible in this brainstorming.  Include even things that sound truly ridiculous, or that you've never considered before.  E.g., "quit both our jobs, sell up, and travel for two years/teach English in a foreign country/live in a van."  And "take the most demanding, highest-paid, most prestigious job I can find and dedicate myself to career advancement for X years."  You want to make sure you capture all of the various extreme options.  No, you probably won't choose any of those.  But realizing that you do, in fact, have all these choices reminds you that you are in charge of your life, and you can choose to do whatever the fuck you want to.  And that's powerful.

Once you have that list of options, you need to go through and evaluate the pros and cons of each, as objectively as possible.  When you do this, do not bullshit yourself.  Everything comes with tradeoffs.  We tend to get lured in by the BrightShiny while entirely missing the nasty little underbelly.  So force yourself to look at what your life would really be like with each option -- what you'd gain, and what you'd give up.  I call this the "even George Clooney throws his socks on the floor" analysis.  Again, the key is to not bullshit yourself.  If you're excited about, say, moving to San Francisco to work in some fast-paced tech job, you're envisioning happy teams doing meaningful work and nights out in one of the great cities in the world.  But real life is probably going to include a very cramped apartment and/or long commute, night after night at the office to keep up, an annoyed/stressed wife who either doesn't get to see you much and/or is stressed herself with work and commute, and the occasional Sunday off where both of you just crash on the couch because you're too tired to do anything.  That's the kind of thing you need to force yourself to look at. 

The important thing is to look at the job as just one aspect of your whole life; as Metalcat said, it is an important part of your life, but not the most important part.

Once you have a whole list of options lined up, with the pros and cons of each, figure out which option gives you the most pros for the fewest cons.  It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway:  you should do this analysis with your wife, because "wife will be happy/unhappy" should be one of the highest priorities for that analysis.

When you figure out the best option, pursue it.  Note that that option may well be just to stay put where you are -- and that's ok.  I have often found that just knowing that if something isn't working, I can change it makes me feel much more content.  But the key here is recognizing that:  if the first thing you try doesn't work, try something else.  There are very, very few choices in life that are actually irreversible. 

And yeah, you will make some choices that don't work out; none of us have perfect knowledge, even of what makes ourselves happy.  IME, that is the most intimidating part of change:  what if it goes wrong?  And the answer goes back to the top:  if what you're doing isn't working, go make that list of options again and start over.  No one's life is success after success after success.  Often the only way to figure out what really matters is to make the wrong choice -- sometimes repeatedly!  Because each of those wrong choices is helping us learn what does and doesn't matter, so we can choose better in the future.

And that last bit is really the key to those of us who fear change.  If we don't force ourselves to evaluate options and make necessary changes out of fear of failure, we are in fact guaranteeing longer-term unhappiness, because we are depriving ourselves of the chance to better find out what actually matters and what really does make us happy. 

As that great philosopher Rush said, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.  The way to long-term satisfaction is to choose intentionally, not by default. 


*I feel compelled to note at this point that we were in total role-reversal here.  I was always the one who wouldn't even buy myself a t-shirt without evaluating whether I really really needed it, while DH basically bought any toy that caught his eye.

**And when we were FI and had retirement and kids' college covered and were basically SWAMIs, I bought a used Porsche.  Talking about scratching the car itch!  That earlier compromise put me in position to not have to compromise at all later on.  What I have now is way, way better than what I thought I wanted then.

Comment appreciated!

In terms of trade-offs, there are many.  The job would probably be more stressful (though maybe more exciting and allow moving faster).  The location (Austin) is not where my wife and I want to move (we're looking for somewhere with mountains that isn't hot-as-fuck; a lot of people seem to say Austin isn't weird anymore and has lost what made it special).  It would be far from my family, who now are only a 2h drive away.  And probably most imporantly, my wife has no interest in going and we'd have to do some manner of living apart.

So, pretty unlikely I will take this job.  I am debating going out and visiting them just to see what else is out there (actually my wife has been encouraging me to do this).  Per my comment to Metalcat, a lot of the motivation for this comes from my struggles with feeling fulfillment, and basically a sort of mid-life crisis.  But I probably need to think more practically how to reach my goals... and need to figure out what in the heck my goals are!

[Case]

I am one of these people with extremely high life satisfaction and I have A LOT of experience making massive life changes.

I've also done the whole sacrificing a lot for an absolute dream job that I loved, so I can speak to that as well.

First, a hard lesson I learned is that if you want to be someone with a high life satisfaction, it's very risky to put your career at the center of your life.

I LOVED my exciting dream job career. I absolutely loved it. It was amazing, I did amazing shit, and I was extremely proud of myself and my work.

Cool, nice, that's fun. It's also not nearly as important or cool or at all relevant now that I'm retired from it. It all felt so bloody BIG at the time, and it was, but I've been retired since 2020 and it's all now just "stuff I used to do."

No matter how massive and impressive your accomplishments, once you leave the world where people know about them, stories of the "stuff you used to do" feel a lot like a dude talking about his highschool football days and the time he scored the touchdown at the "big game."

No one cares.

In fact, if you are living an awesome life in retirement, you won't care either.

So are big swings for big careers worth it?

Well, that depends.

Let's get back to not putting your career at the center of your life. I LOVED my career, loved it, got high of off it, used to look forward with excitement to go to work. However, I now enjoy my overall life more. Funny how that works.

My career took A LOT from me. It compromised my health, my marriage, and my relationships. I was only able to manage 3 years of work before I hit a wall and had to step down from my first really big job and take a lower position at another place and drop down to part time.

Now, I'm lucky I had the kind of career where I could drop in title, but rise steeply in prestige of my work. Where I could drop to part time and make almost the same amount. I actually took a step up in terms of what *I* wanted from my career, but still, I put myself on a path where I radically throttled my potential so that I wouldn't burn out like so many of my colleagues. Addiction and suicide are rampant in my former profession, so it felt like a worthy quality of life decision.

That's actually when I really started loving the work. Before that I was very proud of my work and loved much of it, but was not overall happy with the career. After I made the change and cut back my hours I was deeply in love with the work. I also was so successful in my specific way that I basically became famous in the industry.

Still, the rest of my life wasn't getting the attention it needed.

I didn't retire by choice, I sustained a work-related injury (common in my field) that took me out of the game very early in my career (much less common, most people just work for decades in pain, mine was a death blow).

This was at the same time as the pandemic so my leaving the profession coincided with almost everyone in my field leaving for several months anyway, and when they went back, the work conditions were so miserable, I was grateful to be out.

I spent two solid years trying to figure out a career that would be as big, as impressive, as important, where I would be as exceptional and successful as I was before.

I had built a side hustle alongside my main career to capitalize on how well respected I was, and through that an opportunity came up to do something so much bigger than my original career. Instead of being an elite professional among my colleagues, I would co-own one of the largest employers of my colleagues. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity that would make me one of the most influential people in my profession in the country.

Cool, so I did that and I really loved that work too. However, I had just spent a year retired. I had focused on my health, my marriage, my relationships. I slept well, I exercised every day, I enjoyed cooking. Giving basically all of that up to a job, a more than full time job, didn't feel so good anymore.

Also, the stress was enormous. I was working with a partner I didn't quite see eye to eye with. I knew that I had the skill and ability to make it work, and I would have be catapulted to 8 figure NW within a matter of years had I persisted, but it didn't feel worth it.

DH and I talked for weeks trying to conceptualize how our life would be better with an enormous amount of money, but me being infinitely less present, and we just couldn't see a pathway that made sense.

So instead of doing my usual thing of making things work, being the consensus builder, managing the big personalities, and bending over backwards to facilitate them, I just put my foot down in my role and insisted on how I believed things needed to be done and the rest of them could get on board or my partner could conclude that we aren't the right fit together. She picked the latter and we ended our partnership. A year later she lost 70+% of her staff and all of her top producers.

I could have made it work, I could have made her life infinitely better, which she knew, which is why she took me on as a partner in the first place. And we both could have been just freakishly successful and very rich. But I had removed career from the center of my life and because of that, I couldn't do the things that I used to be able to do. I'm just not as valuable professionally as I used to be, because I'm not willing to make the same sacrifices anymore.

I'm also a much happier, much more satisfied person. I'm incredibly grateful that deal blew up as it did. I wasn't at the time. I felt like a total failure, but time has proven me right and it was a good experience for me to process my self-perception and identity and finally move on from feeling like I had to do something *BIG.

Now, I am NOT telling you to stick with your full job where you are under appreciated. Nor am I telling you not to pursue the big dream job.

I'm telling you not to JUST look at it through the lens of what career choices are worth it. To look at your life through a much bigger lens of what will improve your overall quality of life.

Now onto the next point. What did I do after the big business deal blew up? Well, I regrouped and started examining my life and what is really important to me.

I had to fully shift my con for of self away from my work and instead view work as something that contributed to overall well being. For example, if work keeps me engaged, that's good, but not if it engages me to a point of compromising my self care and relationships.

I built a series of indicators for quality of life:

Am I sleeping well and waking calm and rested?
Am I exercising most days and enjoying it?
Am I eating nutritious food in amounts that maintain a healthy weight and enjoying it?
Is my home clean enough on a daily basis to be enjoyable and comfortable?
Do I like myself?
Am I spending enough quality time with friends and family?
Is my marriage on average getting stronger every year?

Work is nowhere to be found in that list because work is not a quality of life goal, it's a quality of life tool. Work is what allows me to be engaged, challenged, do fun shit, and bring in income. If I prefer to work and pay for someone to clean my house, that's cool. If I work so much that my marriage suffers, that's not cool.

Work serves my life, not the other way around.

Okay, onto that whole life thing. Now, that list could make it look like my life is boring. Lol, far from it. That list is just indicators. It frees me up to do ANYTHING as long as those indicators will benefit.

If something will take away from those indicators, that's okay, but only temporarily, and only if it will increase them in the end. So for example, DH has spent this past year working more than is optimal; however, we knew it would be only a year, and the payoff after that one year is coming due and is beyond worth it and his overall happiness and well being level is massively boosted.

Those metrics also empowered us to impulse buy a house 31 hours away on a remote island we had never been to and go live a crazy adventure of building a new life there away from our very established lives back in the city. Now, we only live there half the time, but that's because I need medical care in the city, otherwise we would happily uproot and permanently move. So I also have experience with that element of what you are talking about.

I personally welcome major life changes. I'm a big fan. I don't like to stagnate and have zero fear of starting over in new places and new careers. I'm currently retraining in a whole new profession. Change can be great!
 
The question is, will this change improve your quality of life metrics or make them worse? What is your plan if it makes them worse?

As someone above said, you're looking at things in black and white, when really, everything is grey. But if you don't hammer out as partners what elements matter most to BOTH of you, you can't plan, hedge, and make contingencies that make sense.

You need to both be able to tell, immediately, if things are going in the right direction, if the trade offs are turning out to be good or bad, and what elements need to be protected the most.

Over the years DH and I have become so aligned in our priorities and perspective on what well being looks like that my entire list of indicators now boils down to one question: is this good for my marriage?

My DH and I care more about each other's well being than our own, so we each know that if we're doing something that's good for the marriage, that it's 100% good for ourselves. My marriage thrives when both of us are happy, healthy, engaged, challenged, have wonderful relationships, hobbies, enough time in nature.

As I build my new career, I very intuitively know how much of my time and energy I can devote to it without harming my marriage (aka my quality of life). The career needs to enhance my life, so all of my career goals are defined by those parameters.

So instead of contemplating if this career move is "worth it" first spend some serious time talking through with your partner what your visions and measures of success are in terms of life satisfaction. Are they compatible? How can they be achieved? How will you measure them? What are the deal breakers? What hedges can you put in place to protect the most valuable elements of your quality of life? What are the emergency exit plans if what you try is causing net damage? How will you handle if a plan increases one partner's quality of life at the expense of the other's? Would that even be possible if your goals were properly aligned?

For us, our canary in the mineshaft indicator is exercise. If I'm struggling to get my exercises done and enjoy doing them, something in our life balance is off and needs to be addressed. I have serious injuries and exercise is my main treatment, but it's also very easy for me to let it drop off below optimal levels when life gets overloaded.

It a very, very sensitive indicator that alerts both of us to overload in the system. We can't always remedy the overload right away. For example, I'm doing 5 weeks of double courses for school, my balance is WAY off. But we're very aware that our collective system is overloaded, so we enacted our go-to measures for reducing my workload as much as possible, and we both know there's a clear end date.

We take drops in indicators EXTREMELY seriously. It's what allows each of us to constantly be aware of each other's well being and our collective well being. To assess when sacrifices are truly worthwhile and when maybe they need to be rethought and restrategized.

It also makes it extremely easy to shuffle priorities. People tend to get stuck in their old priorities. They commit so much to something they decided years ago was "important" and then spend so much energy and life capital on it that even when it shouldn't be important, the sunken cost fallacy makes it feel important.

If you have clear indicators of wellness, these sunken cost fallacies have nowhere to hide. It becomes obvious when something that used to be important just isn't serving your needs anymore (or maybe never did).

For example, being "well dressed" used to be incredibly important to me. But in no way does wearing uncomfortable clothes, knee-murdering high heels, and spending hours per week on hair and makeup improve any of my quality of life metrics. It turns out that's a priority my mom set for me as a child. I committed to it for decades and believed it was important to *me*, but the impact on the metrics is clear: if I can spend 30 minutes doing stretches in the morning instead of flat ironing hair and applying eyeliner, it's just so obvious that it was never *my* priority. So I just dropped what I believed was *me* for decades.

So here's the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to say in this very long reply:

Conclusion:

If you want to be one of those people with an enormously high life satisfaction, you have to learn the very simple lesson that YOU get to define what success is.

You are your partner get to define for yourselves what benefit each of your careers need to offer in order to add to your quality of life.

For some people that means never pursuing their maximum career potential because it will pull too much from their overall quality of life. Actually, this is true for most people. That's why having your OWN definition of success clearly understood is critical, so that you don't get sucked into the performance vortex of the professional world.

For others, this may mean one partner with a massive career and a supporting partner running the domestic show at home. For yet others, this may mean two powerhouses whose conceptualization of domestic life is everything outsourced and the main support their partner provides is to understand and respect their hustle because they're the same (think two Hollywood actors who rarely live together).

All of the above options could be wonderful or heinously toxic for any given pair of people. That's why the definition of success needs to be co-created and very, very clear indicators of success established and monitored with clear response plans in place for any dip in any given metric.

So is your plan worth trying?? I have no clue. It could be the best thing ever for both of you or it could be a nightmare. It's up to you to determine what outcomes are best and how best to plan for them and more importantly plan how to manage them if it doesn't work for your family.

I will add that your comment about dual residences got my brain ticking.  I have thought about it loosely before.

It's totally not mustachian, but it would really help me deal with the problem of living close to family (in a place I've always sort of wanted to live) as well as live somewhere more exciting and colder.

[Metalcat]

Thank you for the comments!  I have to ask, what line of work were you in?  Sale?  Stock broker?  Big game hunter??  No problem if it's personal and you don't want to share.

I have similar health barometric effects when too much is going on in work... or when I am stressed out.  Actually, I have been so stressed from trying to figure out these choices that I haven't stayed on top of health maintenance as much as I should.

I have definitely had periods of my life that seemed really important at the time, but in retrospect was just 'past life'.  I have had time periods where I worked harder than others, in order to reach a goal.  But, I also don't feel like I have been terribly successful in my career.  I am in R&D, and so success is often equated to commercialization.  Instead, I've had a lot of high risk / high reward projects; they have all either not worked out, or were technical successes to some degree, but either not enough to hit it big, or didn't progress for business reasons.  Something I am considering as a next step, is to have my mgmt give me a project that is lower risk / lower reward (without getting into details, the types of projects I've been on are rarely commercialized).

I probably need to learn to focus on trying to derive less life satisfaction from my work.  Actually, I got on the FIRE path when my very first industry position (11 years ago) was such a shit show that I began to wonder if I needed to pursue this life. 

Good news is that my current job is overall much better.  I actually have an overall good situation, as does my wife.  Logically speaking, it's probably stupid of me to consider this crazy start-up job.  But then I have that nagging feeling in the back of my head, that I haven't accomplished anything significant, that I haven't done enough amazing things.  That's sort of what's been motivating me.  But also there are other ways to scratch the itch.

My wife does not want to move for this job.  She doesn't like the location (frankly, I'm not crazy about it).  Actually, the start-up company seems to want me bad enough that they'll create a position for my wife (she could bring them a ton of value, actually).  But, she doesn't want it.  If I really want the job, one possibility is a long-distance relationship, where we visit each other on weekends/etc... 

Anyways, basically, this is nearly non-starter.  I've done long distance twice, it's not really a healthy thing, and it certainly doesn't work unless there is an end in sight... and I don't know what that would be.

Oof, yeah, that doesn't sound like a great adventure that would result in a better quality of life for you and your wife.

Your issue is in defining success. You have worked hard and presumably done well, but your industry doesn't value your work unless a product is successful, even though that success or failure is largely out of your control.

You've already pinpointed though that that's someone else's definition of success. That's how others value your work and your career, but it doesn't have to be how you do.

I'll give you an example.

I'm currently in grad school. Btw, I was a health professional and I had a side hustle in finance and management consulting, since you were curious. Anyhoo, I'm in grad school for a different allied health profession now. This is my second time getting a clinical graduate degree, so I have a huge benefit of experience.

I know that our grades don't matter. They will never matter. Our passing grade is so high that literally everyone who passed knows more then enough to practice. The difference between getting a decent grade in a course and a really high grade also has little to do with relevant knowledge. The students getting the top grades aren't going to be the best clinicians, they're the one who are the most neurotic about APA formatting in their papers, who research each instructor in advance to understand their quixotic grading quirks.

They work their asses off and stress themselves into burnout for a few grade points here and there that don't and never will ever matter and that extra work will have no impact on their future ability in their career.

They're killing themselves for nothing.

However, they're in a system with its own measures of their value and they're buying into it. They don't have to, there's no need to, but they're allowing an organization to dictate to them the value of their work, and worse, they internalize it as the value of themselves.

The worst part is that the students most obsessed with top grades are actually neglecting the work it takes to develop clinical skills. That extra work of watching demonstrations and practicing doesn't get them any extra grade points, so they don't invest in it. On average, they'll be among the weakest clinicians starting out.

The point I'm trying to make is that no one has the power to tell you the value of you or your work unless you assign that power to them.

Your boss can judge your work, of course, but you don't actually have to value their judgement. What actually matters to you are the rewards and consequences of whatever someone else thinks of you. But it's up to you to decide if those rewards and/or consequences will benefit or detract from your overall quality of life.

So look at my program, OBVIOUSLY I care about passing. Not passing would come with consequences that I absolutely do not want. So I profoundly care what my instructors think of my quality of work to the point that I pass with a solid margin. However, if I lose 3-5% because of small APA formatting mistakes, I really, really don't care.

I only give my instructors evaluation power insofar as it impacts my quality of life. If one instructor gives me an 83% while another gives me a 93% for what I know is identical quality of work, I just shrug and assume they mark differently. I know the quality of my own work, I'm more than capable of assessing it by now.

So what about your work?

Why does it affect you if your products aren't commercially successful. What are the actual, real, tangible rewards and consequences for you if factors outside of your control result in success or failure of a product?

Are you paid more or less? Is your job at risk?

What is the *actual* impact on your quality of life? Beyond being assessed as "successful" despite so many elements of that success having nothing to do with you?

What value does that "success" actually have for you? Let's say the majority of the products you worked on became hugely successful, again, largely due to factors beyond your control. What would that actually mean for you? Why would that scratch the itch of really having accomplished something professionally?

And yeah, let's look at that whole professional accomplishment thing. I've done a lot of that. Really impressive shit.

None of it matters. And when you chase it, none of it ever feels like enough. I'm going to use another academic example. I remember as a highschool student thinking getting a master's degree was such a huge deal. Then in undergrad it seemed like every half decent student got a master's degree. Then a PhD seemed so impressive, but then I worked in research and a lot of the PhD were duds with dead end careers. Publishing seemed like a massive accomplishment, then I learned about first author publishing, then tenure, blah, blah, blah

I have so many friends who are tenured professors who publish like machines and guess what, they don't feel particularly accomplished or exceptional. I've worked with countless doctors and dentists drowning in imposter syndrome. I've had many dinners with billionaires who feel insecure compared to other billionaires.

There's no level of professional or financial accomplishment that can ever really scratch that itch if that's where you choose to center your life. In fact, the more you chase it, the less value each accomplishment seems to have.

Where success is AWESOME is as part of a high-quality, balanced life where it serves to improve your overall quality of life for your whole family.

Think of it metaphorically like making a meal. A really fantastic, gourmet meal that you put some effort into is a lovely part of a full day. But a meal that you literally spent 20 hours slaving to make, that you skipped sleep, exercise, you ignored your spouse, and rejected an invite for lunch with your friends just to focus on making this one insanely demanding meal? Sure, it might be a hell of a meal, but it's just a meal. Was it really worth it compared to a sandwich?

Professional accomplishments are only really satisfying when they benefit your overall well being.

Don't get me wrong, DH and I both highly value our careers and both are heavily invested in doing meaningful, high level work. But not for the sake of work itself, we do it because that's what we enjoy and that's what increases our quality of life.

Again, our jobs work for us, we don't work for them.

I won't do work that damages my metrics, I just won't, neither will DH. We would both very happily pick up and move to a crazy new location for an amazing job opportunity but ONLY if the net effect would be an increased quality of life for both of us.

And we would have a solid contingency plan in case it wasn't.

What real life benefit do you get from doing this drastic move if your general quality of life for both you and your wife actually drops? What is the end result?

Look into your future. Let's say your startup is a massive success, again, largely due to factors out of your control. But let's say your marriage is worse, or over, your health is worse, and your startup made you a ton of money.

Okay great. So what? Is that really going to feel like "success" at that point. What are you going to do, be the douchebag who tells everyone you meet that you once were part of a successful startup?

Ate you going to buy a super expensive car to communicate to everyone around you that you are a success??

Will anyone care?? Will anyone whose opinion that matters to you really care? No one I care about really gives a flying fuck about anything I've ever done. My DH is in the midst of doing extremely important work and barely anyone is even interested to understand what his job actually is.

The ONLY reason I'm excited about the work he's currently doing is because he's SO HAPPY doing it and I find it interesting so it gives us a ton to talk about. He sends me articles to read so that I'll understand his work. We're needs, so that's like, super sexy for us.

Would your wife be excited by this startup? Would it be a huge adventure that the two of you would be on together? Or would it be just you asking her to sacrifice for you to scratch a professional itch that isn't actually ever likely to be satisfied?

I know A LOT of wildly successful people. And I can tell you from experience that the ones who have a deep, profound satisfaction with their life's work are the ones who figured out how to benefit their general well being and their families along the way. It's the folks whose spouse was 1000% on board, where the vision of success was collective and very clear. Where all parties were comfortable with the trade offs because they took charge of defining what success for themselves would look like.

The miserable ones were where one party subscribed to an external definition of success, where sacrificing their well being and that of their partner/family always felt necessary. Where critical metrics of life suffered for all parties because they were living by a definition of success that they didn't set for themselves.

It's perfectly fine if this start up and all of the sacrifices it requires are what you decide is best for you. But only if you and your wife have a shared vision and definition of success, shared indicators of success, shared indicators of failure, and a solid agreement as to what sacrifices are worth it and what aren't. And most importantly, when to walk away.

Lastly, I want to leave you with one more question.

You describe your current work as developing products that may or may not be "successful" largely due to factors outside of your control and talk about how the higher the stakes, the more stress there is for you, even though that actually has little relevance to your actual ability and quality of work.

Why then would you want to join a startup where it's the exact same dynamic where your work can only do so much and the success or failure is largely due to factors outside of your control?

It seems like taking on the exact same aspects of your existing career that you dislike most and just amping the stakes up by orders of magnitude

What will this get you other than a massive increase in stress?? How does doing what you're currently doing but with higher stakes improve your quality of life??

[GuitarStv]

Painting with a very broad brush - in my mind most changes work out for the better. If I'm even considering the change in question, It's probably for the best and I should do it.

Looking back at life, this tends to be true for me as well.  Anything that I'm considering for an extended period is almost always a good idea to do . . . and usually it's some sort of momentum or fear that's holding me back from following through.

[Laura33]

I also don't feel like I have been terribly successful in my career.  I am in R&D, and so success is often equated to commercialization.  Instead, I've had a lot of high risk / high reward projects; they have all either not worked out, or were technical successes to some degree, but either not enough to hit it big, or didn't progress for business reasons.  Something I am considering as a next step, is to have my mgmt give me a project that is lower risk / lower reward (without getting into details, the types of projects I've been on are rarely commercialized).

I probably need to learn to focus on trying to derive less life satisfaction from my work.  Actually, I got on the FIRE path when my very first industry position (11 years ago) was such a shit show that I began to wonder if I needed to pursue this life. 

Good news is that my current job is overall much better.  I actually have an overall good situation, as does my wife.  Logically speaking, it's probably stupid of me to consider this crazy start-up job.  But then I have that nagging feeling in the back of my head, that I haven't accomplished anything significant, that I haven't done enough amazing things. 

I want to address this briefly (well, at least "briefly" in Laura terms).  Why do you feel like you need to do "amazing" things?  That's a really high standard to set for yourself.  Is it a message you internalized as a kid that you'd do Great Things?  Is it hubris, that you think you're so much better than everyone else, so why haven't you done XYZ yet?  Is it insecurity, where you need to do Great Things in order to demonstrate (to yourself and the world) that you have value?

This is where a reality check comes in very, very handy.  Assume you're in the top 1% of intelligence and ability in the US.  There are currently something like 330,000,000 in the US.  That means there are 3,300,000 people out there that are just as smart and qualified as you.  Take away the old, young, unable to work, etc., and you've still got, what 2 million?  Ask yourself:  is it reasonable to expect all 2 million of those people to do something amazing?  Hell, even if you're in the 99.9th percentile, that's still 200,000 people -- which is a hell of a lot to expect to do Great Things.  And that's just the US -- now extrapolate that over the how-many-billion world population. 

IOW, your expectations for yourself are entirely unreasonable.  You are fixating on the one-in-a-million exceptional success stories, instead of the other 999,999,999 normal, average lives.  The way to long-term happiness is not to figure out how to be Steve Jobs.  It's to figure out how to be happy not being Steve Jobs -- to figure out what you would consider a "success" that is both achievable and within your control.

This is where that analysis I talked of can be really helpful.  For me, I've been told my whole life that I'm wicked smart, was always a high achiever, dreamed of being on the Supreme Court.  Because if you're a lawyer, that's kind of the pinnacle, right?  So part of me felt I should be achieving that if I was actually as smart as everyone said.  And when I hit around 50 and realized that was not in the cards, it was a real gut punch.

So then I asked myself:  do I even want to be on the Supreme Court?  And I thought through everything I'd need to do to get there.  First, go full-time and then some -- I've been at 50-80% over the past however many years for kids and life and stuff, so that would go away.  I'd need to really develop into a litigator instead of a regulatory specialist, so that's a lot more work.  And I'd need to develop a huge book of business, so I'd spend nights/weekends at all sorts of marketing events.  Once I had that done, I'd need to jump to a bigger, high-profile firm with all the right connections, where I'd have to work 60-80 hr weeks while I continued to make my name.

I'd also need to become involved in politics, because those decisions are entirely politically-driven, so I'd need to make a name for myself in the state and national political circles.  So donating, dinners, schmoozing, backing candidates, making sure I was aligned with party values. 

Assuming I did that decently, I could become a state district court judge.  I'd then have to do an exceptional job at that, become known for exceptionally thoughtful opinions, not do anything that causes some huge political backlash.  Continue to mingle and make myself known in the political circles.  Eventually move up the ranks, get a federal district judge position, then court of appeals -- at which point I'd need to really seriously ramp up my efforts, because there are a lot of fucking brilliant judges on the federal courts of appeals.  And then maybe after 20 years or so, if I survived the political vetting process and all the stars aligned, I could make it to the Supreme Court. 

And then I ask myself:  if that's what it takes to make that career goal, do I really want it that badly?  And the very, very clear answer is fuck no.  Everything I wrote is basically my version of hell -- I am not a schmoozer, I like having my free time and time with my family/hobbiles, and I hate organized politics.  While I might like the end goal (it is a lifetime appointment, after all, so once I got the position, everyone else could go blow), I am not even remotely willing to do what I'd need to do to get there. 

And that's how I accept not doing that particular Great Thing that had always been in the back of my mind.  It's not that I'm not smart and not a good lawyer and all that.  It's that I don't want it enough to make all the sacrifices -- and that even if I am smart enough and make all those sacrifices, there's still basically a 1-in-1000 chance that everything goes right and I get there in the end. 

Of course, once that big old brass ring goes away, you have to figure out what you would consider success.  How much is enough?  What degree of success would make you happy and feel like your life was well-lived?  If you're not going to be Steve Jobs, what is good enough?  For me, I realized that it's the satisfaction of what I do:  I'm a total regulatory geek who works for big companies, but I help them untangle hard stuff so they understand what they need to do to comply, and when they screw up I work hard to negotiate a reasonable settlement that addresses the problem instead of making someone's political point.  I have had a couple of big cases where I was the driving force behind the ideas.  One of them we lost, but one of the judges made a point of laying out my ideas for future similar cases where the facts were better.  One of them I'm in the middle of right now; in fact, I spent most of the summer writing the most meaningful brief of my life, because it's something where the rule is just completely wrong and based on bad, politically-driven science. 

And yet equally important to me is that I also take the time to do college visits with my kid, take vacations with family and DH, be here most days when my kid gets home from school, watch PBS shows with my mom once a week, go on actual dates with my husband, play Tiki Tiki Solitaire and Wordscapes on my phone, watch football, read books, and cook dinner much of the time.  I'm not ready to give up the challenge of the job just yet, but I am also not willing to give up all this other stuff to have more of the job stuff.  I'm at 50% right now and doubt I will ever go back to full-time, because I'm enjoying my regular life too much.

You need to find that balance.  You seem to have the personal side in a good place right now.  So take a little time to figure out what would make you feel like a success on the job front -- something that (a) is within your control and (b) you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve.  That's your new goal. 

Note:  this will take time.  It's a big adjustment, and you're going to have many Feelings that you'll need to process.  That's ok.  You don't need to know everything right now -- you just need to be doing the work to figure it out.

[curious_george]

Personally - I don't really derive life satisfaction from work. I never really have. There is no particular job I think I would enjoy doing for 30+ years - which is one reason I simply decided to retire early instead. I enjoy doing a lot of different things, but tend to get bored of virtually everything after a certain period of time. I constantly crave new intellectual stimulation and life experiences, among other things.

As for life decisions - I had a vision of what I wanted in life. What sort of lifestyle, what I wanted to do on a day to day basis, how I want to feel. I thought about what I wanted and why a lot in high school, then created goals around achieving said life.

Freedom was important to me - so I chose a partner and career that would both be beneficial for early retirement and time freedom. I lived cheaply, made good money, and banked the difference.

Like some other people have said - I would not think of this as a black and white decision. It's very much a colorful decisions with various shades of each color.

I would spend some time thinking about what life you want to live, instead of what job you want to have. At the end of the day - all jobs suck compared to whatever you actually enjoy doing the most in life. Maybe that is running through the woods. Or having sex. Or playing guitar. Or laughing and playing card games with your friends. Or going out on dates with your lover. Or spending time swimming in the ocean. Or whatever it is that brings you the most joy in life. I doubt it's going to be your job that will be the most satisfying thing in life. No one - and I mean no one - on their death bed thinks back and regrets not spending enough time at work when they were alive. Live your life accordingly.

Life is short. In the grand scheme of things we're only here for a short time then we're gone. Do not aspire for greatness, or wealth, or impressing your neighbors or your parents.

Find what you enjoy doing and how you enjoy feeling. It's about learning about who YOU are. It's about learning what YOU want - not what society or your parents have told you to want.

What actually makes you happy?

At the end of the day you will find it is more of an inner path of development and being at peace within oneself. This isn't accomplished from desiring the world or impressing your neighbors. It's accomplished by understanding yourself and learning what you, individually, find enjoyable and satisfying in life.

For me this is largely very simple things. Eating healthy, nutritious food. Exercising. Sleeping well. Not worrying about things. Thinking about and expressing my feelings. Spending time being affectionate and intimate with my spouse. Spending time with friends and family and being playful and silly with people. I am basically a 37 year old child who happens to be a millionaire for some odd reason.

I also enjoy having very deep conversations with people and learning about them on a very emotional level. It is more about the underlying currents of how and what people feel and why that I find the most interesting about people. Not really who they are or what they do, but how they feel. What motivate them, what scares them, what they enjoy. I have always found people fascinating, and the more unique and open and transparent someone is about themselves the more interested I am.

Find what you enjoy doing. Whatever it is. And do that until you don't enjoy doing it anymore.Then find something else.

Eventually it becomes less about achieving things, or accomplishing goals, or life satisfaction. It becomes more of a perpetual process of improving who you are while accepting yourself and your feelings and other people in life.

IOW: Understand yourself. Understand what external reality you want to create and live for yourself. Understand what internal reality of feelings and attitude you want to create for yourself. Understand what you enjoy doing. Have a vision for your life that you want to live. Then ask yourself - does this help me live my best life or not?

Question everything..If it doesn't help much, then don't do it. If it does then do it.

[Case]

I also don't feel like I have been terribly successful in my career.  I am in R&D, and so success is often equated to commercialization.  Instead, I've had a lot of high risk / high reward projects; they have all either not worked out, or were technical successes to some degree, but either not enough to hit it big, or didn't progress for business reasons.  Something I am considering as a next step, is to have my mgmt give me a project that is lower risk / lower reward (without getting into details, the types of projects I've been on are rarely commercialized).

I probably need to learn to focus on trying to derive less life satisfaction from my work.  Actually, I got on the FIRE path when my very first industry position (11 years ago) was such a shit show that I began to wonder if I needed to pursue this life. 

Good news is that my current job is overall much better.  I actually have an overall good situation, as does my wife.  Logically speaking, it's probably stupid of me to consider this crazy start-up job.  But then I have that nagging feeling in the back of my head, that I haven't accomplished anything significant, that I haven't done enough amazing things. 

I want to address this briefly (well, at least "briefly" in Laura terms).  Why do you feel like you need to do "amazing" things?  That's a really high standard to set for yourself.  Is it a message you internalized as a kid that you'd do Great Things?  Is it hubris, that you think you're so much better than everyone else, so why haven't you done XYZ yet?  Is it insecurity, where you need to do Great Things in order to demonstrate (to yourself and the world) that you have value?

This is where a reality check comes in very, very handy.  Assume you're in the top 1% of intelligence and ability in the US.  There are currently something like 330,000,000 in the US.  That means there are 3,300,000 people out there that are just as smart and qualified as you.  Take away the old, young, unable to work, etc., and you've still got, what 2 million?  Ask yourself:  is it reasonable to expect all 2 million of those people to do something amazing?  Hell, even if you're in the 99.9th percentile, that's still 200,000 people -- which is a hell of a lot to expect to do Great Things.  And that's just the US -- now extrapolate that over the how-many-billion world population. 

IOW, your expectations for yourself are entirely unreasonable.  You are fixating on the one-in-a-million exceptional success stories, instead of the other 999,999,999 normal, average lives.  The way to long-term happiness is not to figure out how to be Steve Jobs.  It's to figure out how to be happy not being Steve Jobs -- to figure out what you would consider a "success" that is both achievable and within your control.

This is where that analysis I talked of can be really helpful.  For me, I've been told my whole life that I'm wicked smart, was always a high achiever, dreamed of being on the Supreme Court.  Because if you're a lawyer, that's kind of the pinnacle, right?  So part of me felt I should be achieving that if I was actually as smart as everyone said.  And when I hit around 50 and realized that was not in the cards, it was a real gut punch.

So then I asked myself:  do I even want to be on the Supreme Court?  And I thought through everything I'd need to do to get there.  First, go full-time and then some -- I've been at 50-80% over the past however many years for kids and life and stuff, so that would go away.  I'd need to really develop into a litigator instead of a regulatory specialist, so that's a lot more work.  And I'd need to develop a huge book of business, so I'd spend nights/weekends at all sorts of marketing events.  Once I had that done, I'd need to jump to a bigger, high-profile firm with all the right connections, where I'd have to work 60-80 hr weeks while I continued to make my name.

I'd also need to become involved in politics, because those decisions are entirely politically-driven, so I'd need to make a name for myself in the state and national political circles.  So donating, dinners, schmoozing, backing candidates, making sure I was aligned with party values. 

Assuming I did that decently, I could become a state district court judge.  I'd then have to do an exceptional job at that, become known for exceptionally thoughtful opinions, not do anything that causes some huge political backlash.  Continue to mingle and make myself known in the political circles.  Eventually move up the ranks, get a federal district judge position, then court of appeals -- at which point I'd need to really seriously ramp up my efforts, because there are a lot of fucking brilliant judges on the federal courts of appeals.  And then maybe after 20 years or so, if I survived the political vetting process and all the stars aligned, I could make it to the Supreme Court. 

And then I ask myself:  if that's what it takes to make that career goal, do I really want it that badly?  And the very, very clear answer is fuck no.  Everything I wrote is basically my version of hell -- I am not a schmoozer, I like having my free time and time with my family/hobbiles, and I hate organized politics.  While I might like the end goal (it is a lifetime appointment, after all, so once I got the position, everyone else could go blow), I am not even remotely willing to do what I'd need to do to get there. 

And that's how I accept not doing that particular Great Thing that had always been in the back of my mind.  It's not that I'm not smart and not a good lawyer and all that.  It's that I don't want it enough to make all the sacrifices -- and that even if I am smart enough and make all those sacrifices, there's still basically a 1-in-1000 chance that everything goes right and I get there in the end. 

Of course, once that big old brass ring goes away, you have to figure out what you would consider success.  How much is enough?  What degree of success would make you happy and feel like your life was well-lived?  If you're not going to be Steve Jobs, what is good enough?  For me, I realized that it's the satisfaction of what I do:  I'm a total regulatory geek who works for big companies, but I help them untangle hard stuff so they understand what they need to do to comply, and when they screw up I work hard to negotiate a reasonable settlement that addresses the problem instead of making someone's political point.  I have had a couple of big cases where I was the driving force behind the ideas.  One of them we lost, but one of the judges made a point of laying out my ideas for future similar cases where the facts were better.  One of them I'm in the middle of right now; in fact, I spent most of the summer writing the most meaningful brief of my life, because it's something where the rule is just completely wrong and based on bad, politically-driven science. 

And yet equally important to me is that I also take the time to do college visits with my kid, take vacations with family and DH, be here most days when my kid gets home from school, watch PBS shows with my mom once a week, go on actual dates with my husband, play Tiki Tiki Solitaire and Wordscapes on my phone, watch football, read books, and cook dinner much of the time.  I'm not ready to give up the challenge of the job just yet, but I am also not willing to give up all this other stuff to have more of the job stuff.  I'm at 50% right now and doubt I will ever go back to full-time, because I'm enjoying my regular life too much.

You need to find that balance.  You seem to have the personal side in a good place right now.  So take a little time to figure out what would make you feel like a success on the job front -- something that (a) is within your control and (b) you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve.  That's your new goal. 

Note:  this will take time.  It's a big adjustment, and you're going to have many Feelings that you'll need to process.  That's ok.  You don't need to know everything right now -- you just need to be doing the work to figure it out.

To your first question... I think the main driving factor is feeling the personal sense of accomplishment.  I'm sure I will feel good if others feel I'm awesome, but I'll feel like a fraud if I don't truly believe it myself.  So I don't think it's hubris.  But there is some insecurity. 
I started feeling a drive to push myself ahead at a young age.  Mostly high school, but maybe some roots earlier.  I don't really know where it came from; my parents were not harsh or slave drivers.  Actually, my Mom was more of a hippy that just wanted me to do whatever made me happy, to follow my passion. Anyways, for reasons I don't fully know, I did start to feel like I had to succeed and do really well, starting in school.  I was in the GT/AP programs and all that stuff.  I spent too much time studying.  I did always feel that drive.  I don't think I"m full of myself though; I'm smart, but not elite level.  I often did good but not exceptional. 

What I am, though, is persistent.  I don't often quit at things.  And even if I am not the most elite person, I try to pull myself up to the top.  I don't know if this all is relevant to answering your question, but in the end, I went to a pretty good (but not very top) school, and followed up with a phd.  For a phd, the pinnacle is a Nobel prize.  But I never had illusions of getting that far to the top, nor is my ego huge.  Instead, I've just felt the want to have an impact, especially through science.

This is partly responding to @TreeLeaf , but relevant.
What makes me happy?  Well, I think having impact would.  And I think there is the joy of learning in science (and in general) that I enjoy.  I also enjoy hiking/backpacking, travel, and music.  And I really enjoy having strong social connections, which is sadly something that gradually deteriorated after college and grad school, and is still a work in progress (life of a DINK who has trouble finding other DINKs that are a social match).  And family makes me happy too... and unfortunately that has been really hit or miss.  But I at least nailed it with a good relationship with my wife. 

I know, or at least have an idea, of what components are the ingredients needed for my life of fulfillment.  What is missing is the precise endgoal (the final structure in which those components take shape; e.g. live in this location, with these friends, this is my job/pursuit, etc...).  I haven't crystallized the nebulous concepts into a direction, for me to take clear action on. 

That said, I am starting to acknowledge to myself that I need to focus less on trying to prove myself to myself, and more on figuring out what will make me happy and feel purpose.  Living in the moment, instead of in the end goal... or something like... maybe.  This is probably something important, and I'm not sure how to push my brain farther in this direction, but will work on it.

[Metalcat]

To your first question... I think the main driving factor is feeling the personal sense of accomplishment.  I'm sure I will feel good if others feel I'm awesome, but I'll feel like a fraud if I don't truly believe it myself.  So I don't think it's hubris.  But there is some insecurity. 
I started feeling a drive to push myself ahead at a young age.  Mostly high school, but maybe some roots earlier.  I don't really know where it came from; my parents were not harsh or slave drivers.  Actually, my Mom was more of a hippy that just wanted me to do whatever made me happy, to follow my passion. Anyways, for reasons I don't fully know, I did start to feel like I had to succeed and do really well, starting in school.  I was in the GT/AP programs and all that stuff.  I spent too much time studying.  I did always feel that drive.  I don't think I"m full of myself though; I'm smart, but not elite level.  I often did good but not exceptional. 

What I am, though, is persistent.  I don't often quit at things.  And even if I am not the most elite person, I try to pull myself up to the top.  I don't know if this all is relevant to answering your question, but in the end, I went to a pretty good (but not very top) school, and followed up with a phd.  For a phd, the pinnacle is a Nobel prize.  But I never had illusions of getting that far to the top, nor is my ego huge.  Instead, I've just felt the want to have an impact, especially through science.

This is partly responding to @TreeLeaf , but relevant.
What makes me happy?  Well, I think having impact would.  And I think there is the joy of learning in science (and in general) that I enjoy.  I also enjoy hiking/backpacking, travel, and music.  And I really enjoy having strong social connections, which is sadly something that gradually deteriorated after college and grad school, and is still a work in progress (life of a DINK who has trouble finding other DINKs that are a social match).  And family makes me happy too... and unfortunately that has been really hit or miss.  But I at least nailed it with a good relationship with my wife. 

I know, or at least have an idea, of what components are the ingredients needed for my life of fulfillment.  What is missing is the precise endgoal (the final structure in which those components take shape; e.g. live in this location, with these friends, this is my job/pursuit, etc...).  I haven't crystallized the nebulous concepts into a direction, for me to take clear action on. 

That said, I am starting to acknowledge to myself that I need to focus less on trying to prove myself to myself, and more on figuring out what will make me happy and feel purpose.  Living in the moment, instead of in the end goal... or something like... maybe.  This is probably something important, and I'm not sure how to push my brain farther in this direction, but will work on it.

Persevere and push to the top of what though?

Pushing to the top of something is a HUGE waste of time unless there's a tangible reward in terms of your quality of life for doing so.

Let's revisit my classmates who are pushing themselves to the top of the GPA curve in a program where that's almost impossible and where they will get zero rewards for their high grades.

Most of these classmates are working parents doing this intensive full time program in their spare hours. The program has a mandate against giving 90+% grades. Each instructor has to appeal to the course lead for permission every time they give out an A+, so they just don't. A passing grade is a 70%.

These students, mostly middle age moms, are killing themselves trying to get these elusive 90s. They agonize over grading rubrics, pay for private tutors to help them understand each instructor's grading quirks, they have very well thumbed copies of APA guides to prevent making a single mistake that could lose them a single percent.

They are absolutely at the very, very top of the grades performance of the program. They will graduate with "distinction" and no one will care and it won't benefit their careers in any way shape or form.

In the meantime, they will be stressed out of their minds, their quality of parenting will decrease for 2.5 years of their children's development, their work performance will suffer, and they will graduate burnt out and absolutely crippled with imposter syndrome. Just in time to have to start their new careers as therapists...

There's a saying in clinical graduate programs that the top students make the worst clinicians, the middle students make the best clinicians, and the bottom students make the most money.

Why would anyone aim to be a top student then?

In medicine it makes sense because everyone competes for residencies. In dentistry it *kind of* makes sense, but only for the ones who want to become specialists. In a master's program that has no doctoral option, it makes no sense because there's literally no reward for graduating with "distinction" other than people being impressed briefly that you did.

So why do you push yourself to be among the best? What tangible reward other than approval from people who don't matter do you actually get??

And let's look at that approval from people who don't matter. As I said before, I've done some cool shit. Y'know what you don't really get from people for accomplishing great things?? Approval.

You get a few reactions from doing impressive shit. People who haven't accomplished nearly as much as you either don't care or they are impressed, but they either don't like being impressed by you or they get a bit sycophantic. So you get indifference, awkward resentment, or even more awkward sucking up. None of which are fun and none of which will make you happy.

People who have accomplished as much as you will either not care, enjoy your company because you are similar, or be competitive with you. Having people who have done similar things get along with you is fun and can make you happy, but you don't need to accomplish great things to get that joy. In fact, the less you accomplish, the more people can relate to you. So by accomplishing great things, you radically reduce your circle of people who can understand you, which can be lonely. Also, accomplishing great things kind of requires being competitive, so you naturally self-select for a population that is more likely to compete with you, not give you approval.

People who have accomplished more than you won't really care at all about what you've accomplished, and the ultra competitive ones will actively look down on you because that ultra accomplished level really selects for ruthlessly competitive people. Some are awesome, but the higher you go in terms of accomplishment, the more cutthroat people have had to be to get there.

So you will get some approval, but not nearly as much as you think, and most of the approval will come in forms that you don't really want, which is people wanting to glom onto you because you're successful, which is uncomfortable and creepy.

In fact, since I retired I have enjoyed people's company SO MUCH MORE because I no longer have the job title that triggers all of these unpleasant reactions that I have to manage. In fact, I now tell everyone that I'm a "grad student" unless they're cool and I want to get to know them better.

Overall, being highly successful is an incredibly effective way to make social interactions as awkward and unpleasant as possible. Being someone of note is highly unlikely to make you happy as a result of how people respond to you. So if that's a driving factor, then I would think twice about it because it ain't gonna play out that way.

Now let's talk about making an impact. That I understand, but what are you defining as making an impact??

I'll use myself as an example. I get told constantly that I should write a book. I always assumed I would write a book because that's what people in my family do. So it was just a given. However, I found forums and I get to write to my heart's content. Still, people here say "you should write a book" and I'm like why?" I write as much as I want to here and I have a pretty large audience and impact a lot of people.

What I don't get is credit or money. But would credit and money actually make it more of an accomplishment?

I impact people here. I get PMs literally all the time telling me how my words here have impacted people, how they have made substantial life changes based on things I've said to them.

I write all the time. The only thing writing a book would do is land me in the miserable world of publishing, which would NOT increase my quality of life.

So is it an impact that you want or is it credit/fame?

Take all of the credit and fame out of the equation. Would what you want to do matter? Would it actually positively impact the world? Or would it just be notable? Profitable? Something to brag about at dinner parties that few people will actually care about?

Also, unless you are Elon Musk level successful, how do you think anyone is going to know that you accomplished what you did? And by "accomplish" let's call a spade a spade, how is anyone going to know that your startup made a lot of money??

I have two friends who had a software startup in the 90s that survived the dot com crash. They built a successful software firm and have been very frequently featured in newspapers as one of the best employers in the country for decades.  I've seen them in the news or heard them on the radio dozens of times since I met them 20 years ago, but when we go out, no one knows who the fuck they are unless they're already in the industry.

If guys like that aren't having the general public recognize their accomplishments, how do you expect people will even know what you've accomplished??? Unless you tell them...

So are you going to walk around with essentially a "I'm kind of a big deal" sort of attitude just waiting for people to give you an opening to tell them how accomplished you are?? Because if you don't, virtually no one will know except for people who are already in your industry, competing with you, definitely not giving you approval.

And guess who suffers the most from imposter syndrome? Highly accomplished people. In fact, the higher up the rungs of accomplishment you climb, the more likely you are to find folks crippled with self doubt and insecurity. Constantly seeking to finally hit that level where they feel approval that they are good enough only for it to get further away the higher they climb.

I have personally never met any population more insecure than people worth 50-100M. They're way too rich to fit in with gen pop, but they're the tragically poor kids compared to the real rich kids in that arena. They're like scholarship kids at elite prep schools. They've worked their asses off their whole lives to be wildly more successful than anyone they've ever known to that point only to end up at the loser table at the charity galas because their wealth isn't nearly enough to have serious influence.

A lot of them just pretend to be upper upper middle class (or what they think is upper upper middle class) because it's easier to hide their wealth and fit in among the 5-15M NW doctors, lawyers and bankers than to be the losers among the philanthropy crowd.

I've spent a lot of my life around very wealthy, very accomplished people, which is funny because I grew up very poor. But the wealthier and more successful the population, I've found that the more miserable they are on average.

Now, I've met plenty of happy rich folks. Usually folks with a NW in the 5-15M range who have had careers where they really enjoyed the work itself, very often these exact people made a lot less money than they could have had they chosen to focus more on financial success than quality of life. These are the folks who could have been 50-100M folks, but actively avoided the sacrifices to do so.

But most importantly, they're folks who had ROCK SOLID family lives at home, excellent relationships with their kids, parents, friends, etc, and their wealth was a tool to be able to provide for their families, who were 1000% their top priorities.

These are people who got tangible personal benefits from their hard work. They made sacrifices to succeed, but only in service of an overall quality of life goal, and actively avoided sacrifices that would have caused harm to their family unit.

Pretty much universally, the thing that rich happy people have in common is that they could have been a lot richer had they been willing to do things they didn't want to do. So you could say that one of the secrets to being truly happy is to fail to live up to your professional potential...

I am NOT saying that success can't make you happy. I'm saying that you have to understand how to be happy in order for success to serve that goal, and that your absolute MAX success potential will probably require hardcore sacrifices to your happiness and well being.

If you think external approval from the general public will make you happy, then you are on a path to severe, toxic disappointment. And you would be better served to take your time and energy and invest heavily in self-exploration with your spouse as to why you feel that way and what a good life actually looks like for both of you.

So you can sacrifice your quality of life and your health of your marriage to work on a startup, which may make a lot of money (Is that success? Is that impact?) all so that someone might say "oh that's cool!" for a second when you tell them about it before they go back to telling you all about their kid's figure skating coach who just isn't pushing the kids hard enough.

Cuz that's literally what it's like to have done something "important."

[Laura33]

I think the main driving factor is feeling the personal sense of accomplishment. 

. . . .

I don't really know where it came from; my parents were not harsh or slave drivers.  Actually, my Mom was more of a hippy that just wanted me to do whatever made me happy, to follow my passion.

FWIW:  as the song says, there's your trouble.

My mom was the same.  She loves her work; I heard my whole life that she'd work even if they didn't pay her.  All she ever wanted for me was to find something I loved just as much.

And I never did.  Yep.  The one thing my beloved mother wanted for me the most, and I failed.  I mean, I enjoy what I do reasonably enough.  But not once in my entire life have I ever enjoyed any kind of work enough to do it if they didn't pay me for it. 

IMO, this sort of message can be just as damaging as "achieve achieve achieve!" can be, because it establishes a goal that is just flat-out unrealistic for some of us.  I am not my mother; while we are alike in many ways, we are very different in others.  She is fortunate to be capable of loving her work that much.  I am much happier reading a book than basically anything anyone else would pay me for.  So trying to be her -- trying to find that "thing" that fulfills me the same way her work fulfills her -- simply set me up for failure.

Frolic and detour:  I've read a lot over the past two decades that how I was parented wasn't helpful.  Yes, I was absolutely loved and supported and had it way better than a huge majority of the world's population.  But my mom's efforts to support me sometimes backfired.  I was always told I was brilliant, which as discussed above led to a shit-ton of imposter syndrome.  I was raised to believe in passion over money, which set a standard I could never reach.  I now send very different messages to my kids, on purpose:  I praise the effort, the stick-to-it-ness that led to the good result, not the result itself.

I think you need to do something like that for yourself.  You have placed career success as the primary thing you need to achieve during your life, and then you've defined career "success" as achieving some as-yet-undefined career goal -- you're not quite sure what "success" looks like, but you'll know it when you get there!  If you persist in that thinking, you will never be happy.  If you don't know what you want, how will you know when you get there?  There's always that next step, that one more thing, that brass ring that's just out of reach but that will make everything better. 

So stop defining success as based on some end goal.  Set specific goals that are entirely within your control, and focus on those.  Don't set a goal of "I will find a new job that is more exciting."  Set the goal as "this week, I will research 10 different companies in my preferred field to see if the work would suit me and what positions may be available."  Or "I will talk to my boss about changing my role to XYZ."  Or even "I will call three career counselors to investigate whether they can help me figure things out."  And for the love of Pete, put some non-work goals on that list, too!  "I will be considerate of my wife."  Or "when my wife does X that drives me nuts, I will smile and give her a hug." Or "I will find a hobby/league that gets me out of the house and with people."  Etc. 

When you're always looking to some end goal, you miss the now.  And yet ironically, the thing that makes you happiest is being fully present in the now, enjoying and appreciating the people around you and wonderful things in your life.  So the more you can redirect yourself away from that sort of existential angst of "how do I prove I'm worth anything," the happier you will make yourself, no matter what the specific steps you take turn out to be. 

[The Beebsta]

I just came here to praise metalcat and her words of wisdom which she is always handing out freely on this forum.

I don’t know how to quote, so I’ve just copied this and I’ve put it in my phone notes marked as Metalcats words of wisdom:

I built a series of indicators for quality of life:

Am I sleeping well and waking calm and rested?
Am I exercising most days and enjoying it?
Am I eating nutritious food in amounts that maintain a healthy weight and enjoying it?
Is my home clean enough on a daily basis to be enjoyable and comfortable?
Do I like myself?
Am I spending enough quality time with friends and family?
Is my marriage on average getting stronger every year?

I must say, I definitely need to improve a lot on this scorecard. Work has become almost my sole focus and it’s not healthy. It’s not because I enjoy it or get a kick out of it, it’s because I’m overwhelmed and think I’m doing a poor job. So my solution is to work harder thinking that will somehow make me better at my job or fix things that I have no control over.

In the good news, I’m on my first day of an 11 day holiday. But I woke up at 5:20am on a Saturday and logged on to my computer to do one last thing before I go on holidays. After working until 9:30pm doing several other one last things. Gahhh, this is not healthy or helpful.

OP, it sounds like you’ve already made a decision, and I think it’s the right decision. If your wife doesn’t want to move to this location, I don’t think it will improve your collective lives. Without being too negative, could it just be ego driving you to want to want this? I get it! A shiny new job at an exciting new employer who seem to be actively pursuing you. Of course it’s an ego boost, how could it not be? But if it doesn’t improve your overall quality of life, then ultimately it’s not the right choice.

[Dicey]

There will always be more options than hours in the day.

I'm on the post-FIRE side of things and love my life. The only thing I'd change is trying to get there faster. OTOH, perhaps I wouldn't be so happy with my life as it is now if I hadn't gone through every single experience that led up to it.

Or: what Metalcat* said.

*I typed her name in with a lower case "m" and my keyboard helpfully corrected it, lol.

[Metalcat]

There will always be more options than hours in the day.

I'm on the post-FIRE side of things and love my life. The only thing I'd change is trying to get there faster. OTOH, perhaps I wouldn't be so happy with my life as it is now if I hadn't gone through every single experience that led up to it.

Or: what Metalcat* said.

*I typed her name in with a lower case "m" and my keyboard helpfully corrected it, lol.

That is hilarious

[joemandadman189]

ptf

[Villanelle]

With the spouse not on board, that would be the end of the conversation, and the consideration, for me.  Even if she is truly on board with long distance--and that would mean determining whether she was at least a little enthusiastic about it, or if she was just not vetoing it outright because she doesn't want to be the one responsible for shitting on this dream--I've seen a lot of LD relationships.  We are a military family, so this happens frequently.  And while some work, it is always for a defined time (usually one set of orders, which is 2-3 years).  And even then, frankly it seems to cause Big Problems more often than not.  Some couple recover from that eventually, but the time away and the first year or so of reintegration (which is frequently more strife-filled than the time apart) is rough. And some never make it to reintegration, or make it there and limp along for a few years before calling it quits.  Yes, it works fine for some people, but they seem to be the minority and that's not a risk I'd want to take.  I know I'd be much happier in a mediocre job and a happy marriage, than an exciting job and an ailing (or ended) marriage. 

As far as the bigger questions that would get me to that point, they would be whether pursuing this job satisfaction and externally derived sence of purpose and value is more important than my marriage. 

When I asked myself that question, I wouldn't need to go visit the start up.  And I wouldn't need to put my spouse through the stress of me going to visit the start up with them at home wondering what I will choose and whether our family was about to experience some really tough stuff, just because they wanted "purpose", dervived from a job.  Especially if this purpose isn't curing cancer or peace in the middle east.

List what things in your life are most important, then look at your 3* choices, and decide how they align with those values.

*Yes, 3.  1 Current job, 2 start up, or 3 look for something else.  I'd likely go with 1 short-term, while working toward a 3 that was better for my family.  Because my values would put my relationship with my spouse and maintaining a healthy partnership above getting to do cool shit at work and having the ego-boost that comes from being Important At Work.

[Case]

With the spouse not on board, that would be the end of the conversation, and the consideration, for me.  Even if she is truly on board with long distance--and that would mean determining whether she was at least a little enthusiastic about it, or if she was just not vetoing it outright because she doesn't want to be the one responsible for shitting on this dream--I've seen a lot of LD relationships.  We are a military family, so this happens frequently.  And while some work, it is always for a defined time (usually one set of orders, which is 2-3 years).  And even then, frankly it seems to cause Big Problems more often than not.  Some couple recover from that eventually, but the time away and the first year or so of reintegration (which is frequently more strife-filled than the time apart) is rough. And some never make it to reintegration, or make it there and limp along for a few years before calling it quits.  Yes, it works fine for some people, but they seem to be the minority and that's not a risk I'd want to take.  I know I'd be much happier in a mediocre job and a happy marriage, than an exciting job and an ailing (or ended) marriage. 

As far as the bigger questions that would get me to that point, they would be whether pursuing this job satisfaction and externally derived sence of purpose and value is more important than my marriage. 

When I asked myself that question, I wouldn't need to go visit the start up.  And I wouldn't need to put my spouse through the stress of me going to visit the start up with them at home wondering what I will choose and whether our family was about to experience some really tough stuff, just because they wanted "purpose", dervived from a job.  Especially if this purpose isn't curing cancer or peace in the middle east.

List what things in your life are most important, then look at your 3* choices, and decide how they align with those values.

*Yes, 3.  1 Current job, 2 start up, or 3 look for something else.  I'd likely go with 1 short-term, while working toward a 3 that was better for my family.  Because my values would put my relationship with my spouse and maintaining a healthy partnership above getting to do cool shit at work and having the ego-boost that comes from being Important At Work.

She is on board for the long distance, but only if I truly think it is what I need to do (in order to find optimal career satisfaction, etc).  She is supportive of my ambitions, let's say.  The visit itself will not stress her; actually it will be more stressful for me, as I would be essentially kicking the can down the road.

I do agree on the challenges of long distance relationships.  We've done it twice.

With regards to 'purpose' of a job and whether or not it is truly having important impact (best I can derive from your comment on curing cancer or peace in the middle east)... here I do not agree with you.  And, I am not seeking external validation (though this is always nice), but rather internal validation.  And as others have pointed out here, assuming I want to increase my likelihood of improved quality of life, I need to work and lowering the goal post for myself.  My ambitions may be impractical, and rely upon too much luck in order to reach high likelihood of success.

I think reaching satisfaction and happiness in life is a tricky thing.  It is essentially finding 'the meaning of life'... maybe.  I will try to shift my goals to things that are more practical, tangible, and diversified (not just career but my other passions including family).  This is prudent, and makes sense on the MMM forum, where many seek independence from traditional confines of a 'job'.  On the other hand, I might find that I really need to commit myself to some higher calling.  But maybe it is another higher calling.  And, for certain I would never throw my wife to side in the process of this.  So I will draw a line in the sand there.

[Case]

I think the main driving factor is feeling the personal sense of accomplishment. 

. . . .

I don't really know where it came from; my parents were not harsh or slave drivers.  Actually, my Mom was more of a hippy that just wanted me to do whatever made me happy, to follow my passion.

FWIW:  as the song says, there's your trouble.

My mom was the same.  She loves her work; I heard my whole life that she'd work even if they didn't pay her.  All she ever wanted for me was to find something I loved just as much.

And I never did.  Yep.  The one thing my beloved mother wanted for me the most, and I failed.  I mean, I enjoy what I do reasonably enough.  But not once in my entire life have I ever enjoyed any kind of work enough to do it if they didn't pay me for it. 

IMO, this sort of message can be just as damaging as "achieve achieve achieve!" can be, because it establishes a goal that is just flat-out unrealistic for some of us.  I am not my mother; while we are alike in many ways, we are very different in others.  She is fortunate to be capable of loving her work that much.  I am much happier reading a book than basically anything anyone else would pay me for.  So trying to be her -- trying to find that "thing" that fulfills me the same way her work fulfills her -- simply set me up for failure.

Frolic and detour:  I've read a lot over the past two decades that how I was parented wasn't helpful.  Yes, I was absolutely loved and supported and had it way better than a huge majority of the world's population.  But my mom's efforts to support me sometimes backfired.  I was always told I was brilliant, which as discussed above led to a shit-ton of imposter syndrome.  I was raised to believe in passion over money, which set a standard I could never reach.  I now send very different messages to my kids, on purpose:  I praise the effort, the stick-to-it-ness that led to the good result, not the result itself.

I think you need to do something like that for yourself.  You have placed career success as the primary thing you need to achieve during your life, and then you've defined career "success" as achieving some as-yet-undefined career goal -- you're not quite sure what "success" looks like, but you'll know it when you get there!  If you persist in that thinking, you will never be happy.  If you don't know what you want, how will you know when you get there?  There's always that next step, that one more thing, that brass ring that's just out of reach but that will make everything better. 

So stop defining success as based on some end goal.  Set specific goals that are entirely within your control, and focus on those.  Don't set a goal of "I will find a new job that is more exciting."  Set the goal as "this week, I will research 10 different companies in my preferred field to see if the work would suit me and what positions may be available."  Or "I will talk to my boss about changing my role to XYZ."  Or even "I will call three career counselors to investigate whether they can help me figure things out."  And for the love of Pete, put some non-work goals on that list, too!  "I will be considerate of my wife."  Or "when my wife does X that drives me nuts, I will smile and give her a hug." Or "I will find a hobby/league that gets me out of the house and with people."  Etc. 

When you're always looking to some end goal, you miss the now.  And yet ironically, the thing that makes you happiest is being fully present in the now, enjoying and appreciating the people around you and wonderful things in your life.  So the more you can redirect yourself away from that sort of existential angst of "how do I prove I'm worth anything," the happier you will make yourself, no matter what the specific steps you take turn out to be.

Sorry for the slow response:
One thing I do need to clarify is that I do have an idea what what success would be for me in my work.  It's having some degree of progression forward towards commercialization.  It's not often an unrealistic goal, but reaching it can be pretty hard when you tend to put on projects that are early-stage and outside of the company's wheelhouse.  So the problem is probably more that the challenge is too lofty.

My Mom didn't really want me to follow her path, or to take the path she didn't have.  She just wanted me to be happy.  I don't think my parents were really able to guide me on 'how' to get there, because they didn't have the life they were telling me to pursue.  My Mom was a SATM for years (though she did go back to working for some some years) so I think her more practical advice was long that path.  And my Dad had a challenging upbringing and then eventually got a stable govt job which he held for almost 40 years.  It's not a knock on them at all, but it is a different sort of life path than the one I ended up on.

I don't really know how I became oriented towards trying to 'get ahead' in school and beyond.  If I had to guess, I would say it is more due to societal impacts.  I grew up in a competitive region of the country.  Especially in high school, I started spending too much time studying.  I remember in Spanish class, it was just a ton of rote memorization which I sucked at, but I grinded as hard as I could and managed a B+ or something like that (one of my lowest grades).  I took AP American Civ, and it I had very little interest in it at the time.  I put in more hours in that class than anything else.  In my high school, that course was sort of a right-of-passage.  I wish I had a mentor/advisor that could have told me 'hey, you don't actually need to take this'.  I remember asking the teacher if I should quite, but she strongly encouraged me to stay.  Ended up with my lowest grade ever (C+ I think) and not much recollection of what I had learned.  Thanks, Mrs. Talton, for wasting a chunk of my wife (she was a good person, but I don't think she was very good at giving guidance or advice; she probably thought her course was more important than it was).  The only classes I was actually interested in were science ones, and so at least one positive is that I ended up pursuing those in my life.  But, there are still elements in me of 'grinding' thru challenges, rather than 'quitting' (or trying to make an informed choice that something isn't the right path).  In a sense, it is the same resistance to making hard decisions that started this thread.

It's in the past and so out of my control; I wish I had had some mentor/advisor that could have helped me in make important decisions like that.  Instead I often just grind thru things rather than making a change.  I was raised in a household that was extremely risk-averse.
I suppose I could spend some time trying to seek out a mentor.


So, reflecting on everything:
-I need to start thinking more deeply about how to be happy/satisfied in the moment, which means adjusting expectations and focusing on what is good in the present.  Probably recognizing what I have accomplished as successes, even if they aren't 'full blown' successes.
-it's important for me to start setting goals, but make sure they are realistic and defined
-Some (or most) of these goals need to be non-work things, which for me is figuring out what I want to do in a potential FIRE situation and where I want to live
-I need to work on starting to make choices that take me in the direction of those goals.

I don't think that me looking into the start-up has been a bad idea.  It's likely unrealistic, but there is some personal value in me investigating something that is almost a fit, even if it has a critical flaw.  I have never seriously interviewed beyond my initial interviews that landed me my first job.

Along those lines I have agreed to go out and visit this start-up and check them out.  I have told them that it's pretty unlikely I can pursue further, given the spouse situation, but they don't seem to mind.  They have even indicated that they may want to work with my company, even if I don't come join them.  This takes some pressure off of me, as I am unlikely to be making a complex decision about career/spouse-life.

[Metalcat]

I want to still push back on the concept of "full blown" success.

What does that even mean?

You are presupposing that some professional success is less valuable than other professional success, but yet again, you decide what the metrics are for whatever professional success is.

What *exactly* defines "full blown" success for you?

If you woke up tomorrow, how would you know you had achieved "full blown" success?

[Case]

Thank you for the comments!  I have to ask, what line of work were you in?  Sale?  Stock broker?  Big game hunter??  No problem if it's personal and you don't want to share.

I have similar health barometric effects when too much is going on in work... or when I am stressed out.  Actually, I have been so stressed from trying to figure out these choices that I haven't stayed on top of health maintenance as much as I should.

I have definitely had periods of my life that seemed really important at the time, but in retrospect was just 'past life'.  I have had time periods where I worked harder than others, in order to reach a goal.  But, I also don't feel like I have been terribly successful in my career.  I am in R&D, and so success is often equated to commercialization.  Instead, I've had a lot of high risk / high reward projects; they have all either not worked out, or were technical successes to some degree, but either not enough to hit it big, or didn't progress for business reasons.  Something I am considering as a next step, is to have my mgmt give me a project that is lower risk / lower reward (without getting into details, the types of projects I've been on are rarely commercialized).

I probably need to learn to focus on trying to derive less life satisfaction from my work.  Actually, I got on the FIRE path when my very first industry position (11 years ago) was such a shit show that I began to wonder if I needed to pursue this life. 

Good news is that my current job is overall much better.  I actually have an overall good situation, as does my wife.  Logically speaking, it's probably stupid of me to consider this crazy start-up job.  But then I have that nagging feeling in the back of my head, that I haven't accomplished anything significant, that I haven't done enough amazing things.  That's sort of what's been motivating me.  But also there are other ways to scratch the itch.

My wife does not want to move for this job.  She doesn't like the location (frankly, I'm not crazy about it).  Actually, the start-up company seems to want me bad enough that they'll create a position for my wife (she could bring them a ton of value, actually).  But, she doesn't want it.  If I really want the job, one possibility is a long-distance relationship, where we visit each other on weekends/etc... 

Anyways, basically, this is nearly non-starter.  I've done long distance twice, it's not really a healthy thing, and it certainly doesn't work unless there is an end in sight... and I don't know what that would be.

Oof, yeah, that doesn't sound like a great adventure that would result in a better quality of life for you and your wife.

Your issue is in defining success. You have worked hard and presumably done well, but your industry doesn't value your work unless a product is successful, even though that success or failure is largely out of your control.

You've already pinpointed though that that's someone else's definition of success. That's how others value your work and your career, but it doesn't have to be how you do.

I'll give you an example.

I'm currently in grad school. Btw, I was a health professional and I had a side hustle in finance and management consulting, since you were curious. Anyhoo, I'm in grad school for a different allied health profession now. This is my second time getting a clinical graduate degree, so I have a huge benefit of experience.

I know that our grades don't matter. They will never matter. Our passing grade is so high that literally everyone who passed knows more then enough to practice. The difference between getting a decent grade in a course and a really high grade also has little to do with relevant knowledge. The students getting the top grades aren't going to be the best clinicians, they're the one who are the most neurotic about APA formatting in their papers, who research each instructor in advance to understand their quixotic grading quirks.

They work their asses off and stress themselves into burnout for a few grade points here and there that don't and never will ever matter and that extra work will have no impact on their future ability in their career.

They're killing themselves for nothing.

However, they're in a system with its own measures of their value and they're buying into it. They don't have to, there's no need to, but they're allowing an organization to dictate to them the value of their work, and worse, they internalize it as the value of themselves.

The worst part is that the students most obsessed with top grades are actually neglecting the work it takes to develop clinical skills. That extra work of watching demonstrations and practicing doesn't get them any extra grade points, so they don't invest in it. On average, they'll be among the weakest clinicians starting out.

The point I'm trying to make is that no one has the power to tell you the value of you or your work unless you assign that power to them.

Your boss can judge your work, of course, but you don't actually have to value their judgement. What actually matters to you are the rewards and consequences of whatever someone else thinks of you. But it's up to you to decide if those rewards and/or consequences will benefit or detract from your overall quality of life.

So look at my program, OBVIOUSLY I care about passing. Not passing would come with consequences that I absolutely do not want. So I profoundly care what my instructors think of my quality of work to the point that I pass with a solid margin. However, if I lose 3-5% because of small APA formatting mistakes, I really, really don't care.

I only give my instructors evaluation power insofar as it impacts my quality of life. If one instructor gives me an 83% while another gives me a 93% for what I know is identical quality of work, I just shrug and assume they mark differently. I know the quality of my own work, I'm more than capable of assessing it by now.

So what about your work?

Why does it affect you if your products aren't commercially successful. What are the actual, real, tangible rewards and consequences for you if factors outside of your control result in success or failure of a product?

Are you paid more or less? Is your job at risk?

What is the *actual* impact on your quality of life? Beyond being assessed as "successful" despite so many elements of that success having nothing to do with you?

What value does that "success" actually have for you? Let's say the majority of the products you worked on became hugely successful, again, largely due to factors beyond your control. What would that actually mean for you? Why would that scratch the itch of really having accomplished something professionally?

And yeah, let's look at that whole professional accomplishment thing. I've done a lot of that. Really impressive shit.

None of it matters. And when you chase it, none of it ever feels like enough. I'm going to use another academic example. I remember as a highschool student thinking getting a master's degree was such a huge deal. Then in undergrad it seemed like every half decent student got a master's degree. Then a PhD seemed so impressive, but then I worked in research and a lot of the PhD were duds with dead end careers. Publishing seemed like a massive accomplishment, then I learned about first author publishing, then tenure, blah, blah, blah

I have so many friends who are tenured professors who publish like machines and guess what, they don't feel particularly accomplished or exceptional. I've worked with countless doctors and dentists drowning in imposter syndrome. I've had many dinners with billionaires who feel insecure compared to other billionaires.

There's no level of professional or financial accomplishment that can ever really scratch that itch if that's where you choose to center your life. In fact, the more you chase it, the less value each accomplishment seems to have.

Where success is AWESOME is as part of a high-quality, balanced life where it serves to improve your overall quality of life for your whole family.

Think of it metaphorically like making a meal. A really fantastic, gourmet meal that you put some effort into is a lovely part of a full day. But a meal that you literally spent 20 hours slaving to make, that you skipped sleep, exercise, you ignored your spouse, and rejected an invite for lunch with your friends just to focus on making this one insanely demanding meal? Sure, it might be a hell of a meal, but it's just a meal. Was it really worth it compared to a sandwich?

Professional accomplishments are only really satisfying when they benefit your overall well being.

Don't get me wrong, DH and I both highly value our careers and both are heavily invested in doing meaningful, high level work. But not for the sake of work itself, we do it because that's what we enjoy and that's what increases our quality of life.

Again, our jobs work for us, we don't work for them.

I won't do work that damages my metrics, I just won't, neither will DH. We would both very happily pick up and move to a crazy new location for an amazing job opportunity but ONLY if the net effect would be an increased quality of life for both of us.

And we would have a solid contingency plan in case it wasn't.

What real life benefit do you get from doing this drastic move if your general quality of life for both you and your wife actually drops? What is the end result?

Look into your future. Let's say your startup is a massive success, again, largely due to factors out of your control. But let's say your marriage is worse, or over, your health is worse, and your startup made you a ton of money.

Okay great. So what? Is that really going to feel like "success" at that point. What are you going to do, be the douchebag who tells everyone you meet that you once were part of a successful startup?

Ate you going to buy a super expensive car to communicate to everyone around you that you are a success??

Will anyone care?? Will anyone whose opinion that matters to you really care? No one I care about really gives a flying fuck about anything I've ever done. My DH is in the midst of doing extremely important work and barely anyone is even interested to understand what his job actually is.

The ONLY reason I'm excited about the work he's currently doing is because he's SO HAPPY doing it and I find it interesting so it gives us a ton to talk about. He sends me articles to read so that I'll understand his work. We're needs, so that's like, super sexy for us.

Would your wife be excited by this startup? Would it be a huge adventure that the two of you would be on together? Or would it be just you asking her to sacrifice for you to scratch a professional itch that isn't actually ever likely to be satisfied?

I know A LOT of wildly successful people. And I can tell you from experience that the ones who have a deep, profound satisfaction with their life's work are the ones who figured out how to benefit their general well being and their families along the way. It's the folks whose spouse was 1000% on board, where the vision of success was collective and very clear. Where all parties were comfortable with the trade offs because they took charge of defining what success for themselves would look like.

The miserable ones were where one party subscribed to an external definition of success, where sacrificing their well being and that of their partner/family always felt necessary. Where critical metrics of life suffered for all parties because they were living by a definition of success that they didn't set for themselves.

It's perfectly fine if this start up and all of the sacrifices it requires are what you decide is best for you. But only if you and your wife have a shared vision and definition of success, shared indicators of success, shared indicators of failure, and a solid agreement as to what sacrifices are worth it and what aren't. And most importantly, when to walk away.

Lastly, I want to leave you with one more question.

You describe your current work as developing products that may or may not be "successful" largely due to factors outside of your control and talk about how the higher the stakes, the more stress there is for you, even though that actually has little relevance to your actual ability and quality of work.

Why then would you want to join a startup where it's the exact same dynamic where your work can only do so much and the success or failure is largely due to factors outside of your control?

It seems like taking on the exact same aspects of your existing career that you dislike most and just amping the stakes up by orders of magnitude

What will this get you other than a massive increase in stress?? How does doing what you're currently doing but with higher stakes improve your quality of life??

Appreciate the advice, and sorry for the late response; hard to find enough dedicated time to give a legitimate response until now:

The part of your response I will mostly work on is:
"Where success is AWESOME is as part of a high-quality, balanced life where it serves to improve your overall quality of life for your whole family."

For clarity, I am not doing this for ego/bragging rights.  Those things are always nice touches, but my primary motivation in considering the start-up is personal sense of accomplishment and having impact on the world.  I comes from a my primarily technical background; I spent a lot of time in school as well as in my career developing my technical abilities, and so I feel a need to impact the world with this in a profound and important way.  That is the feeling at least.  But, I think I need to bring in more balance in my wife.  Because I have a choice; either I can pursue this goal to the end of the world (and maybe end of myself), possibly being successful or possibly not.  Or, I can try to get there but take it a little less seriously and continually focus on the other things in my life that are postive and give me value.  There can be other ways to impact the world beyond my initial scope.

So I need to be more open minded and more positive.  Be open to alternative ways to scratch to the itch, and remember that I already have a lot of positive things in my life.

[the_hobbitish]

I think what many responders are getting at is how are you defining profound and important? Unless you really give yourself a concrete measure of this goal you'll never know if you get there.

Is it that you need a certain number of people to use your inventions? Is it making your company an amount of money or share of a market? Do you want to change the way the average person does a process? Is this software or hardware? Are we talking about making a battery that lasts longer or lights that run on seawater than are providing light to poor communities?

People define important in all sorts of ways. If that's how you're defining what will make you happy then you really do need a measurable definition to get there.

[Case]

I want to still push back on the concept of "full blown" success.

What does that even mean?

You are presupposing that some professional success is less valuable than other professional success, but yet again, you decide what the metrics are for whatever professional success is.

What *exactly* defines "full blown" success for you?

If you woke up tomorrow, how would you know you had achieved "full blown" success?

'Full blown' for me, is having an impact on the world.  There are varying degrees of this.  I'll give some descriptions of common success milestones in a product development R&D:

1.  Basic technical milestone:  develop product that does desired function.
2.  Advanced technical milestone:  develop product that does something better or the best, or has a unique selling point
3.  Advance to 'scale of significance' with customer:  in my industry at least, scale-up is a big deal.
4.  Validation of success from customers at small scale
5.  Moving to full commercial scale
6.  Customer's validating success at full scale

Progressing further on this would perhaps give more satisfaction.  In my career, I have had plenty of 1s, a few 2s, trying to edge into 3s currently, but really haven't gotten there or beyond.

Beyond this generic scheme which is valid more or less (with some exceptions) for most types of product development, there is the topic of what products/technology/etc are most important, and give an individual sense of satisfaction.  I have worked on some projects in the past that were technically interesting but in terms of world impact were pretty inane.  I'm fortunate at present to be on a project which at least to me (and probably most people here) has the potential to impact the world in an important way.

So I do have some definitions.  I do believe that, on a world scale, some work areas are more important than others.  That some people work in unimpactful areas, or that some things are more impactful than others.  I should probably work on keeping that viewpoint in check (I certainly don't express it outside of my own head), as it risks developing some arrogance.  On the other hand, I believe everyone gets to decide what is important to them.

All that said, in my situation, since the challenge is high, the likelihood of success is not as high; a high risk / high reward scenario.

Therefore, I should diversify: seek more satisfaction in non-work areas, accept that my 1s and 2s can give satisfaction too, have impact in ways other than my job, etc...
That would be prudent at least.

[Laura33]

So, reflecting on everything:
-I need to start thinking more deeply about how to be happy/satisfied in the moment, which means adjusting expectations and focusing on what is good in the present.  Probably recognizing what I have accomplished as successes, even if they aren't 'full blown' successes.
-it's important for me to start setting goals, but make sure they are realistic and defined and within my control
-Some (or most) of these goals need to be non-work things, which for me is figuring out what I want to do in a potential FIRE situation and where I want to live
-I need to work on starting to make choices that take me in the direction of those goals.

FTFY

It is worth noting that none of the markers of success you identify below are actually within your control.  (My DH works in advanced tech, so believe me, I know)

[Kris]

I want to still push back on the concept of "full blown" success.

What does that even mean?

You are presupposing that some professional success is less valuable than other professional success, but yet again, you decide what the metrics are for whatever professional success is.

What *exactly* defines "full blown" success for you?

If you woke up tomorrow, how would you know you had achieved "full blown" success?

'Full blown' for me, is having an impact on the world.  There are varying degrees of this.  I'll give some descriptions of common success milestones in a product development R&D:

1.  Basic technical milestone:  develop product that does desired function.
2.  Advanced technical milestone:  develop product that does something better or the best, or has a unique selling point
3.  Advance to 'scale of significance' with customer:  in my industry at least, scale-up is a big deal.
4.  Validation of success from customers at small scale
5.  Moving to full commercial scale
6.  Customer's validating success at full scale

Progressing further on this would perhaps give more satisfaction.  In my career, I have had plenty of 1s, a few 2s, trying to edge into 3s currently, but really haven't gotten there or beyond.

Beyond this generic scheme which is valid more or less (with some exceptions) for most types of product development, there is the topic of what products/technology/etc are most important, and give an individual sense of satisfaction.  I have worked on some projects in the past that were technically interesting but in terms of world impact were pretty inane.  I'm fortunate at present to be on a project which at least to me (and probably most people here) has the potential to impact the world in an important way.

So I do have some definitions.  I do believe that, on a world scale, some work areas are more important than others.  That some people work in unimpactful areas, or that some things are more impactful than others.  I should probably work on keeping that viewpoint in check (I certainly don't express it outside of my own head), as it risks developing some arrogance.  On the other hand, I believe everyone gets to decide what is important to them.

All that said, in my situation, since the challenge is high, the likelihood of success is not as high; a high risk / high reward scenario.

Therefore, I should diversify: seek more satisfaction in non-work areas, accept that my 1s and 2s can give satisfaction too, have impact in ways other than my job, etc...
That would be prudent at least.

So….
 
If you managed to have “an impact on the world,” but no one ever found out that it was you… would that be enough?

[Case]

yes

[Kris]

yes

In that case, can you widen your definition of impact? Like, how many people do you need to impact for this to be sufficient for you? One person? A hundred? A thousand?