By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
A young man came to see me once. I’ll call him John.
He was around 32, had read my book Business is Personal and wanted to talk through his mindset. When he sat down, I could see the weight he was carrying, not from failure, but from a strange, nagging dissatisfaction.
John owned a media business. Fantastic contracts with large companies. Fifteen staff. Happily married with two children. Reserve cash in the bank. A healthy pipeline. Life, by any reasonable measure, was good.
And yet he said to me: “I’m not happy. I’m not as successful as I want to be.”
My first question was simple: “What is your benchmark of success?”
I asked him to think about who he was comparing himself to. Then I left to sort our coffees.
When I came back, he was laughing.
He said that was all he needed from me. Because in those few quiet minutes, he’d realised that subconsciously, his benchmark was Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
We talked about it for a while. There are Olympic standard runners, top actors, people truly at the pinnacle of their game. And while these figures can motivate us, they can also create a gap, a space in our lives where we are never satisfied, never grateful for what we’ve actually built.
I know this feeling intimately.
At one stage, the business Thomas and I founded, Ecademy was valued at £60 million, pre-IPO. This was the year 2000. Sadly, the day before we were due to float on the stock market, it was cancelled due to the dot-com crash.
We never achieved that valuation again.
What followed was a twelve-year journey of recovery, sustaining and rebuilding what we’d dreamed of. But through all of it, our benchmark had been set. That £60 million number lived in our heads, and everything we did was measured against it.
Until we stopped.
Until we reassessed our lives, our ambitions and what we truly felt driven to contribute.
For years, we had felt insignificant. Not because we weren’t doing meaningful work, but because we were chasing the wrong benchmark.
When we finally looked honestly at what we’d actually built, it was stunning. And when we listened to that truth, adapted and created a business that gave us our real sense of significance, we blossomed again.
We then created a business, 100% committed and success was about the success of others, not our own success, constantly reviewing what our BIP100 Members needed, intimately available, totally committed to contribute.
Your significance isn’t measured by someone else’s scoreboard of their success, it is measured by your contribution and the financial output that it may and probably will give you.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: feeling significant is a fundamental human need. It is not driven by ego. It is a primal need, rooted in whether we are contributing to others. You cannot feel significant without contributing. Without others gaining something through knowing you.
The danger of the wrong benchmark is that it blinds us to the significance we already carry.
So this week, may I invite you to ponder:
What makes you feel significant to the people who matter to you?
And how do you show them that they, too, are significant to you?
Is your benchmark of success truly yours – or have you unconsciously borrowed someone else’s?
If you stripped away comparison, what would you be most proud of right now?
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