You want more than one kind of success
Midas could turn anything he touched into gold. Then he tried to eat.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s telling, his breakfast becomes metal. So does the coffee at his lips. His daughter comes to comfort him. He kisses her, and the living child becomes a golden statue.
The king has the power he dreamed of. He cannot eat, drink, or hold his living child.1
What interests me here is something beyond a warning about greed. Midas called one thing everything. He wanted gold, and he acquired a power that could no longer distinguish between a treasure and a daughter, or which one truly was the treasure.
We can make that mistake with money. We can make it with work, physical performance, reputation, even the endless project of improving ourselves. One ambition becomes so large in our field of vision that everything else is made to serve it.
We become very good at getting a result and forget to ask whether the result is giving us the life we wanted.
I want a strong body. I want a clear mind, work I respect, and money that gives me freedom.
I want to sit with my wife and children, eat, joke, laugh, and actually be there. I want friendship. I want the capacity to build something substantial and the time to enjoy what I have built. Above all, I want to know what my life is for, and to live it fully before God.
I want all of this. It belongs to one life.
Perhaps you are still trying to establish yourself. Perhaps you have already achieved things you once thought would change everything. Either way, you want the power to build the life you imagine and the freedom to enjoy it. You want to wake with energy, do work that matters, earn well, love deeply and feel glad to be alive.
The question is how.
My answer begins with understanding the person who must live that life. Your body affects your mind. Your mind affects the work you do and the way you treat people. Your work can create wealth. Wealth can return time.
What you do with that time reveals what matters to you. And beneath all of it lies a question no increase in income can answer on your behalf: what is all this power for?
This is the heart of what I call the Excellence Nexus. Build your life so that strength, clear thought, wealth, freedom, love and purpose make one another possible. The ambition is to bring the whole of your life into what you call success.
Your body is how you experience everything
The lens through which you see life is the body you live in.
You meet the world through your senses. You act through your muscles. A thought becomes a spoken word through breath. An intention becomes an embrace through movement. Whatever your ambitions may be, this physical being is how you participate in the world.
And this body is matter. It requires nourishment. It responds to light, movement, effort and rest. These are the conditions in which your life takes place, including the life you call mental.
Consider the difference between trying to resolve a difficult problem when you are exhausted and returning to it after you have rested. The facts may be unchanged, yet the problem no longer fills the entire horizon.
Or consider an argument. Sometimes the issue genuinely needs confronting. Sometimes two depleted people are trying to have an important conversation with almost nothing left to give each other. Wisdom includes noticing the difference.
This is one reason I take nutrition seriously. What we eat belongs in the discussion of how we feel and function. In the SMILES trial, adults with major depression who received dietary support showed greater improvement in depressive symptoms over twelve weeks than those receiving a social-support comparison. Most participants were also receiving other treatment. Food had a place in their mental health care.2
Light belongs here too. The light reaching your eyes helps regulate the timing of your body, including sleep and wakefulness. An indoor life that pays little attention to daylight and darkness is still giving the body a schedule. It may simply be a poor one.3
Then there is movement. Exercise matters, but so does the movement that never earns a name in a training programme: walking somewhere, taking the stairs, carrying things, getting up from the chair. We have bodies capable of extraordinary movement and have arranged much of daily life around sitting still. A walk can also be a way of returning to a question without remaining trapped in the posture in which you have been wrestling with it.
Yet the opposite error is just as real. You can do too much.
I learned that painfully at seventeen. I was driven. The instruction to push harder did not supply something I lacked. It fed something I already had in excess. There are people who need to stop negotiating with every difficulty and make a serious effort. There are others, like me, for whom the imperative to do more can become destructive.
My later experience of chronic fatigue, thyroid dysfunction and severe systemic inflammation deepened my search for answers. I rebuilt my health and my capacity to train, and went on to earn an MSc in Clinical Nutrition with Distinction. Those experiences made the question personal long before it became academic.
You have to understand the demand and the person meeting it. A body that needs challenge and a body that needs recovery do not need the same instruction. Ambition requires enough humility to learn what is actually happening.
Care for your body because you want to live through it. Strength is wonderful when it lets you do something with your life. Energy is precious when there is someone or something to give it to. Health has a purpose beyond monitoring health.
Change the conditions from which you think and act
I see the body and mind as one living whole. We think, feel, love and act through the whole of ourselves.
A frightening thought can tighten the chest. Physical exhaustion can darken interpretation. The sight of someone you love can change the way you feel before a word has been spoken. We are psychosomatic beings. The mental and the physical are woven through the same experience.
Much of this life goes on without our permission. You cannot decide how quickly your hair will grow. You do not consciously organise digestion or instruct your heart through every beat. Yet some processes sit at the meeting point of the automatic and the deliberate.
Breath is one of them.
You were breathing before you read that word. Now you can attend to it. You can alter its rhythm, and that rhythm can influence your physiological state. Research on slow breathing in healthy adults has documented changes in heart-rate variability, the variation in time between heartbeats, alongside changes in arousal and relaxation. Something usually automatic becomes an available point of influence.4
That matters because we often try to solve everything at the level of thought. We argue with ourselves. We demand clarity. We criticise our lack of composure. Sometimes a more useful beginning is to attend to the physical state from which all that thinking is taking place.
This is also why Trauma Release Exercises, developed by David Berceli, have mattered to me, and why I have written about them. Their use of bodily movement and tremoring to work with tension brought the physical dimension of emotional experience into focus. My interest begins with taking the whole person seriously. Understanding an experience intellectually and attending to its bodily expression are different kinds of work.5
The relationship runs in the other direction too. What we expect can influence what we experience and attempt.
In their famous classroom experiment, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that certain children were likely to show unusual intellectual growth. Those children had been selected at random.
The researchers reported greater gains among the children identified this way, most notably in the younger classes. The study opened a powerful question: how much can our expectations influence the development we believe we are merely observing?6
In my earlier essay on the Pygmalion and Rosenthal effects, I explored the human process beneath that idea. A teacher who believes a child has potential may offer more attention, a more demanding question, another chance to answer. A leader’s confidence may change the opportunities and feedback a person receives. Expectations enter conduct. Conduct changes the conditions in which another person grows.7
The Golem effect names the darker possibility. Low expectations can narrow opportunity and encourage a person to internalise a smaller account of themselves. Eventually, a judgement made by someone else can begin to sound like our own voice.
Think about the responsibility this places on a parent, a teacher, a spouse or a leader. What kind of possibility do people encounter in your presence? Do you challenge them with a genuine belief in their capacity to grow, or keep returning them to the worst thing they have done?
The same question belongs in your inner life. An honest recognition of a weakness gives you something to work on. A permanent verdict about who you are can close the work before it begins. There is a considerable difference between saying that you have not yet learned something and deciding that it is beyond you.
Expectation also belongs to bodily experience. Placebo and nocebo research examines how the context of treatment and expectations of relief or harm can influence symptoms such as pain. Research on placebo analgesia has identified biological mechanisms involved in that experience. This is one of the reasons I have returned to these subjects in my writing: meaning can participate in a physical experience.8
The next question is how to put this understanding to work. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, in The Tools, describe deliberate inner actions for moments when fear, resentment or avoidance take hold. Their Reversal of Desire, for example, uses imagery to help a person approach a difficulty they have been avoiding. It gives the mind an action to perform at the moment it would otherwise retreat.9
Reframing asks us to examine the meaning we have assigned to an event. An unsuccessful attempt can contain information for the next attempt. Anchoring, a concept familiar from neurolinguistic programming, seeks to associate a cue with a particular state, such as readiness. Mirroring attends to the ways people match one another’s expression, posture or conversational rhythm. These are different approaches to a practical question that interests me deeply: how can we participate more deliberately in the way we experience and respond to life?
This gives you something to work with. Attend to your physical state. Examine the meanings you give to experience. Choose the company you keep and practise the responses you want to make your own. You have a part to play in shaping the person who meets the world each day.
Then that greater capacity needs somewhere worthwhile to go.
Make money that gives you more life
Build wealth that gives you command of your time and the power to choose how you live.
Money can pay for care. It can create room to recover, to learn, to leave a bad situation, to help a parent or build something useful. It gives you options that are difficult to exercise when every decision is governed by the next bill.
I know something about the work behind substantial creation. I founded and led Hosanna Properties Limited, delivering a multimillion property development from inception to completion. I held overall responsibility for capital raising, commercial negotiations and project delivery, directing a peak construction workforce of more than fifty people.
That is why I take building wealth seriously. Capital must be raised. Agreements must be reached. Work must be organised and delivered. An idea becomes valuable in the world when someone accepts responsibility for making it real.
But money remains a tool. It has no conscience of its own. It can magnify generosity, and it can give destructive appetites much more room to operate. Money is a bad master, but a great servant.
Love people. Use money. Never reverse the order.
That principle has consequences for how we earn as well as how we spend. In Being of Service, I wrote that there is no higher calling than being of service.10 In commercial life, this begins with understanding a problem well enough to solve it for someone else. You then have to communicate the value, reach the people who need it, and organise the work so the exchange can continue.
Good intentions alone do not build a viable business. Neither does working hard at something nobody values. Useful work, commercial judgement and the ability to deliver belong together. Money measures an exchange; it does not measure the worth of the person making it.
Much indispensable human service is poorly paid, or not paid at all.
There is another distinction that changed how I think about wealth: the difference between being paid only while you are working and creating something whose value can outlast the hours spent making it.
This is central to the perspective MJ DeMarco develops in The Millionaire Fastlane. Ownership and scale can change the relationship between time and income.
A useful product can serve more than one customer. A business can develop people and processes that deliver without every action passing through its founder. A property can continue providing a place to live long after construction is complete.11
The work changes. You create the asset, then maintain and improve what you have built. Properties need maintenance and management. Businesses need customers, capable people and continued judgement. Products need support and renewal. Calling this passive income misses the point. You are changing the relationship between the work you do and the value it creates.
That is the freedom worth building: work that continues creating value beyond the hour in which you perform it.
We all have twenty-four hours on the clock. So how can the effect of those hours differ so profoundly? One person keeps selling the next hour. Another builds something that can keep creating value after the original work is done.
What could you build once, improve over time, and put to work for years? What depends unnecessarily on your constant presence? What knowledge could become a product or a business that serves people beyond the hours you personally have to give?
Take these questions seriously. Put your effort into creating something you can own, improve and grow. Judge the work by the future it is building: the people it can serve, the wealth it can create and the time it can return to you.
And when money does give you time, use it. Sit with the people you love. Take the journey. Read without looking at the clock. Give yourself wholeheartedly to work that matters. Freedom should eventually become something you can recognise in an ordinary day.
Give the people you love the best of you
When I am eating, joking and laughing with my wife and children, the question of what it is all for has an answer I can feel. They give me energy. They bring the meaning of the effort into the room.
I believe the relationship between husband and wife is the primary human relationship, and the family is a cell of society. The way we learn to love, speak, forgive and carry responsibility at home reaches beyond the walls of the home.
A marriage is also a relationship between two particular people. You cannot love a theory of your spouse and expect the person to feel understood. You have to keep learning who they are, what burdens them, what delights them, and what they are trying to tell you.
Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages has been influential for me because it directs attention towards how love is received. Affection, words, time, practical help and gifts are ways of asking a useful question: does the person I love experience the care I believe I am giving? A sincere intention can still miss the person it is intended for.12
John Gottman and Nan Silver’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work approaches the subject through decades of observation and research on couples. Its attention to daily interactions is especially important. A relationship is being made in the small moments: whether you listen, how you respond, whether you show affection, and what you do after you have hurt one another.13
Men and women bring their histories, expectations and ways of expressing need into a marriage. Understanding the differences between you is part of loving the person beside you. Learn what makes your spouse feel loved, respected and understood. Sometimes love requires a conversation you would rather avoid. Sometimes it requires enough self-command to listen without preparing a defence.
Friendship deserves that seriousness too. There should be people in your life with whom you can be truthful, people whose good you want even when there is nothing to gain. Such friendships need contact, generosity and time. They cannot live indefinitely on the intention to catch up.
These relationships also belong to our health. A large meta-analysis of 148 prospective studies found that stronger social relationships were associated with a greater likelihood of survival. Our connections to other people belong in a serious account of human well-being.14
But the research is not the reason I love my family. Their value would remain if loving them never improved a single biomarker.
This is where a philosophy of success must become large enough to include something beyond personal advantage. Love calls you out of yourself. Another person’s joy becomes your joy. Their suffering makes a claim on you. Their flourishing matters even when it asks something difficult of you.
That is part of the life we are trying to become capable of living.
Decide what all this power is for
Sooner or later, achievement meets a question it cannot answer by increasing its own size.
What is it for?
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning has been deeply influential in the way I approach this. He describes meaning through the work we contribute, the love and experience we receive, and the stance we take towards suffering that cannot be avoided. The person is called to respond to life, not merely to extract pleasure from it.15
That gives ambition a deeper purpose. You develop yourself because there is something worth doing with your abilities. You build resources because there are responsibilities you want to carry. You cultivate courage because some good things can only be reached through difficulty.
Meaning also changes the way we understand suffering. There is suffering to relieve, injustice to confront and damage to stop. We should do that work. When suffering cannot be removed, another question remains: how will I meet it, and what kind of person will I become in meeting it?
We need that depth because we are mortal. However strong you become, however much you earn, your time here will end. Remembering this can restore proportion.
A passing insult becomes smaller. An unnecessary feud becomes harder to justify. The chance to spend an unhurried hour with someone you love becomes more precious.
Legacy is already being formed in those hours. People are learning from the way we live: what we pursue, what we tolerate, how we behave when disappointed, whether our word can be trusted. Something of us enters the lives of others long before anyone writes an account of what we achieved.
This brings me to the first and final relationship: our relationship with God.
My life begins in a gift I did not give myself. I did not create the breath I first drew, the capacity to love, or the world into which I arrived. I can cultivate what I have received. I can neglect it. I can use it in service or turn it towards myself. Those choices carry a responsibility that success does not remove.
In The Doorway Data Cannot See, I wrote about the boundary between what we can measure and what measurement cannot tell us. We can calculate a return. We cannot calculate the worth of a human soul. The question of what we should become asks something of us that more information alone cannot supply.16
Faith belongs at the centre of my account of a good life. Prayer, humility and communion with God shape the purposes for which I want strength and freedom. They ask me to examine the person who is doing the wanting.
That examination can be uncomfortable. Sometimes the obstacle is fear. Sometimes it is pride, the wish to dominate, the refusal to forgive, or the belief that everything must finally revolve around us. Greater capability alone will not resolve those things. It may give them greater reach.
The life I want to build has room for achievement and room for surrender. Room to labour with everything I have, and to receive what cannot be forced. To stand before God with gratitude for the day, and with the honesty to ask whether I have used it well.
Know when to push and when to pull back
All of this brings me back to discernment.
There is no universal prescription because there is no universal person in a universal circumstance. Advice has to meet a life. The question is what this situation, this responsibility and this human being require now.
If you are avoiding the work that could change your circumstances, you may need to push. If you are continually overriding exhaustion, another demand may take you further from the result you want. If you have been withdrawing from a difficult conversation, peace may require the courage to begin it. If you are trying to control someone into loving you, more force will deepen the problem.
The direction matters as much as the effort. A practice intended to help you approach difficulty is useful when avoidance is the obstacle. It becomes a poor guide when you need to recognise injury, recover, or abandon an unworthy aim. You must remain capable of judging the practice itself.
Discernment also means understanding what this season of your life asks of you. There are seasons of intense work. There are seasons when a sick parent, a young child or your own health requires more of you. Choose your sacrifices deliberately, understand their cost and decide when to reassess them. Give the people who share that cost a voice in the decision.
The Excellence Nexus holds the whole person in view: body, mind, heart, soul, prosperity and impact. These are ways of attending to a life that is already connected. Better physical capacity can support better work. Better work can create resources. Resources can make room for love and service. Love and purpose can give the work a direction worth sustaining.
Begin by making that desired life concrete.
Take a page and describe an ordinary day you would be glad to live. Include the work, the people, the way you feel in your body, and what you have time to give. Then name one larger ambition that makes that day part of a future worth building.
Look at your present efforts.
Write down one way they support that life and one way they work against it. Choose an action to begin or strengthen, and one cost you will stop accepting without examination.
You may need to earn more. You may need to learn a skill, change how you work, restore your health, or give someone your undivided attention. Make the decision specific enough to act on. This is how an attractive idea begins to become a different life.
The life you came here to live
In Hawthorne’s story, Midas is given a way to undo the golden touch. Water restores his daughter. The thing he had rendered lifeless can live again.17
Midas receives something greater than the power to turn things into gold: the power to recognise what is precious while he can still hold it.
Build something substantial. Become excellent at work that deserves your effort. Earn well. Develop your body and your mind. There is joy in discovering what you are capable of, and dignity in bringing that capacity into the world.
Let the life grow with the achievement. Have the conversation. Keep the friendship. Make time to enjoy the world through the body you have cared for. Allow money to become freedom, and freedom to become something more generous than an ever-expanding concern with yourself.
There will be unfinished work. There will be things you still want and capacities you have not yet developed. You can pursue them while recognising the goodness already within reach: a meal, a living voice, someone glad you came home. Gratitude does not end ambition. It gives you a place to stand while you reach.
To become wildly successful and love your life is to become capable of pursuing what matters, wise enough to keep it in its proper place, and present enough to receive it when it is here.
This is what I stand for. A life lived fully, in strength and love, with useful work in our hands and God before us.
You get one life. Build all of it.
On Monday, How to Build the Life You Want (Starting This Week) will help you see what your days are creating, choose what deserves your attention and put your next seven days in service of the life you want. It will be available to paid subscribers.
Hawthorne, N. (1851) ‘The Golden Touch’, in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Boston, MA: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.
Jacka, F.N. et al. (2017) ‘A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression (the “SMILES” trial)’, BMC Medicine, 15, article 23.
Brown, T.M. et al. (2022) ‘Recommendations for daytime, evening, and nighttime indoor light exposure to best support physiology, sleep, and wakefulness in healthy adults’, PLOS Biology, 20(3), e3001571.
Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B. and Gemignani, A. (2018) ‘How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, article 353.
Tsiartas, A. (2024c) ‘Trauma Release Exercises (TRE): Releasing Emotional and Physical Tension in the Self Matrix’, AndreasTsiartas.com, 22 July.
Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1968) ‘Pygmalion in the classroom’, The Urban Review, 3(1), pp. 16–20.
Tsiartas, A. (2024b) ‘The Pygmalion and Rosenthal Effect: Leveraging Expectations for Personal Growth in the Self Matrix’, AndreasTsiartas.com, 5 July.
Colloca, L. and Benedetti, F. (2005) ‘Placebos and painkillers: Is mind as real as matter?’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(7), pp. 545–552; Tsiartas, A. (2024a) ‘The Placebo and Nocebo Effects: How Mind Influences Body in the Self Matrix’, AndreasTsiartas.com, 2 July.
Tsiartas, A. (2025) ‘Being of Service: The Highest Calling of Health, Wealth, and Meaning’, Rising with Atlas, 6 November.
DeMarco, M.J. (2011) The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime. Phoenix, AZ: Viperion Publishing Corporation.
Chapman, G. (1992) The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. Chicago, IL: Northfield Publishing. Author’s explanation of the model.
Gottman, J.M. and Silver, N. (2015) The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Revised edition. New York: Harmony Books.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T.B. and Layton, J.B. (2010) ‘Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review’, PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
Frankl, V.E. (2004 [1946]) Man’s Search for Meaning. London: Rider.
Tsiartas, A. (2026) ‘The Doorway Data Cannot See’, LinkedIn, 22 January.
Hawthorne, N. (1851) ‘The Golden Touch’, in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Boston, MA: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.