Why So Many High-Achieving Women Are Rewriting the Definition of Success

We inherited a path to success that was never designed for this moment, or fully designed for us.

Many high-achieving women are starting to arrive at the same conclusion: the path we given, and so carefully followed, to achieve career success is not a path that will take us much further.

The Script We Inherited

Growing up, many of us were given an outline for how to be successful. Go to a great college, get a highly competitive job at a strong organization, maybe go back to a top grad school, continue building an impressive resume and set of experiences, and keep proving yourself through promotion after promotion until you reach the top. So many incredibly successful, smart women followed that path fastidiously and are now entering the middle parts of their careers with the strong foundations that path positioned them for.

But many of us eventually come up for air for a moment, look around at our careers and our lives, and feel a small nagging sense that something is off. Not because we made the wrong choices, but because we are beginning to wonder whether the script for success we inherited is going to get us the lives we actually want. Based on what I’ve seen, this isn’t just a few women. A lot of us are beginning to question this script.

Our generation of women is incredibly lucky, and incredibly unique, in that we are essentially the first full generation of women in history broadly able to pursue and succeed in ambitious careers. That is pretty incredible when you think about it. And we have the generation of women before us to thank for that.

The high-powered women I saw when I entered the workforce in my early twenties had often reached the top by adapting heavily to the white male playbook. These women did something extraordinary: they blazed trails and created access where little or none existed before.

But to do so, many had to adapt themselves to systems they did not design, and the scripts they passed down to us were shaped by how they survived inside those systems. They charged hard because they had to. They prioritized work above everything else because that was how they climbed, achieved, and proved themselves in male-dominated environments while becoming trailblazers in a much broader range of careers than previous generations of women had access to.

And they shared that path with us. They told us how to replicate their success. Through hard work, grinding, sacrifice, swallowing discomfort, and internalizing difficult moments at work, we too could succeed.

Why the Old Definition of Success No Longer Fits

But the world has changed dramatically since those women came up, and even since many of us entered the workforce ourselves. Work itself has changed. Expectations around how we work, when we work, and where we work have shifted rapidly, especially over the past decade and even more so over the past few years with the rapid adoption of AI.

At the same time, we are operating in a far less stable work environment. The promise of long-term job stability or a clear career ladder for the next twenty years (or honestly even the next year) no longer feels guaranteed. AI is destabilizing roles and entire industries. Companies are going through massive layoffs. Entire industries are shifting. The skills and experiences that are valued are changing incredibly quickly. Hard work is no longer a guarantee of security.

And I think, for many women, this is the first time we are being forced to confront the possibility that even if we follow the script we were given perfectly, it still might not result in the career and life we were promised.

In the past, there was more separation between work and home. More economic stability. Clearer career ladders. Less fusion between work and identity. Whereas now, work can follow us everywhere (I don’t know if anyone else has experienced seasons where, even when you aren’t working, you are still thinking about work…in the shower, while reading to your kids, or while having a drink with friends? I know I have).

What Questions Many Women are Beginning to Ask

I think this instability and transition is quietly driving many of us to intentionally pause. Whether we have already experienced these shifts personally, or simply sense that they are coming, we are beginning to ask ourselves:

How do I create a career and a life that are actually resilient and sustainable for me?

I think that is the question many of us are grappling with, whether we fully realize it yet or not. Because we are starting to understand that we inherited a definition of success that was not only not designed for many of us, but also was not designed for this moment in time.

Modern work was built around the white, neurotypical male career path and around someone who often had a full-time support system at home. Many women have succeeded inside this construct anyway, but often by working even harder and finding ways to make it work for them.

Just because we are succeeding inside the system does not mean we actually feel successful. I think many of us are realizing we have spent years, or decades, becoming exceptional at performing a version of success we inherited, without ever consciously defining what success actually means for us personally.

This is where I am deeply passionate. So many women who have spent years fighting to succeed inside systems that were not built for one or more of their marginalized identities still do not feel successful. They have worked incredibly hard, built impressive careers, and arrive one or two decades into that journey looking around and wondering:

When am I finally supposed to feel like I’ve arrived?

For many women, I think this marks the beginning of something entirely new. They stop asking: “How do I keep succeeding within my current paradigm?” And begin asking: “What do I actually want my career, and my life, to look like?” Do I actually want that next promotion? Do I want to stay in this organization or industry? Is it possible to be intellectually and creatively challenged without work becoming my entire identity? 

The Shift Into Self-Authorship

I think one of the greatest gifts I have ever given myself was permission to pause and ask those big questions. To experiment with new ways of approaching my career, my work, and my life. And to begin taking tentative steps toward consciously authoring my own path instead of continuing to inherit someone else’s. Because from where we are standing now, there is no roadmap. And I think that is why so many women feel disoriented, frustrated, disheartened, or scared. We are standing in a moment that calls for self-authorship.

So if you are struggling, you are not alone. And you are not unmotivated, incapable, or failing because you are not working hard enough. Give yourself the grace to recognize that we are all navigating an enormous transition together. And if you can, give yourself permission to pause in some way, large or small, to revisit the old script. To mourn the parts of it that may no longer serve you while honoring the parts that carried you this far. And then to begin the nerve-wracking, but really important, work of writing a new script. One that allows you to consciously author a career and life that actually fit you, this moment, and the future you want to create.

There is something I believe is both liberating and deeply unsettling about these major transition moments where there just isn’t a clear roadmap to guide us forward. But based on the extraordinary self-authorship work I have seen so many inspiring, high-achieving women do recently, I feel deeply hopeful.

I truly think we are only at the beginning of figuring out what comes next. And I believe the stories we begin to write today will become the foundation upon which the generations of women behind us continue to build and (hopefully) thrive.