Stop Aiming for Success. Start Aiming for Significance.
I remember getting a promotion I'd worked toward for two years. The email came on a Wednesday afternoon. My manager called to congratulate me. I thanked him, hung up, and sat in silence for about three minutes.
Not savoring the moment. Not celebrating. Sitting with a quiet, unsettling question: what exactly did I do?
I'd moved up. I had a better title, more pay, more people reporting to me. By every measure I'd been taught to care about, I'd succeeded.
And it felt like nothing.
The Success Trap
Success is seductive because it's measurable.
Track your title against the org chart. Compare your salary to what you made five years ago. Count promotions. See where you rank on the team, in the company, against people you went to school with.
The measurability is what makes success such an effective carrot. And what makes it such a poor destination.
I spent years in the US Army before moving into tech leadership. In the Army, I always knew what I was there for. The mission was real. The people around me were real. When we got something right, it mattered in a way I felt.
When I moved into software and leadership roles, the metrics got better. The meaning got murkier.
Nobody sits in a leadership training telling you to ask: does this matter beyond my career? They hand you a framework. They show you the promotion criteria. They tell you to build your personal brand.
All fine. But it aims at success. It says nothing about significance.
The Salary Thread Problem
Right now, on Reddit, there are threads getting thousands of upvotes from people who've done everything "right." They stayed loyal to a company for five or six years. They delivered. They watched their pay stagnate. Then they job-hopped for a 30 or 40 percent bump.
And they're still posting the same question.
Not "how do I negotiate salary" or "what's the best tech stack to learn." More like: I got what I was chasing. Why doesn't this feel like anything?
The workplace and salary frustration posts on Reddit aren't about money. They're about people who optimized for success and found it hollow.
More pay doesn't fix a hollow feeling. A better title doesn't fix it either.
John Blakey, a leadership coach who has thought about this longer than most, puts it plainly: stop aiming for success. Aim for significance.
It sounds like something on a motivational poster. It isn't.
What Significance Is
Significance is not grand or dramatic. You don't have to write a book or start a charity or give a TED talk.
Significance is the difference you made that mattered to someone else.
I've been thinking about the moments in my career I remember most. Not the promotions. Not the salary milestones. The moments where something I did, or said, or didn't say, landed for another person.
The junior developer I stayed late with when she was stuck on a problem I'd solved years earlier. Not because it was my job. Because I remembered what stuck felt like, and I knew how much a calm voice in that moment was worth.
The honest conversation with a direct report heading toward a mistake visible from a mile away. Not a comfortable conversation. One where I told him the truth he didn't want, and he came back six months later to say it was the most useful thing a manager had ever done for him.
The writing I started doing here, and on Step It Up HR, not to build an audience or generate leads, but because I'd learned things the hard way and it seemed worth writing down in case someone else was walking the same road.
None of those are on my CV. All of them are things I'd point to if someone asked what I was proud of.
That's significance. And it's measurable too, in its own way. Not by a number. By whether you'd stand behind it when the metrics don't matter.
How Success and Significance Diverge
Here's where it gets uncomfortable.
Success asks: how am I doing relative to others? Significance asks: what have I done for others?
They're not opposites. You need both. But the more you pursue only the first, the less the second tends to happen.
When you're optimizing for the next promotion, you spend your energy on visibility, on being in the right meetings, on managing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it crowds out the things that build significance. The time investment that doesn't show up in a performance review. The honest conversation that doesn't make you look good in the short term. The support of someone who has nothing to offer you in return.
The best leaders I've known managed both. But they made a choice, sometimes daily, about which one they were optimizing for in a given moment.
That choice shapes everything.
The Shift Worth Making
I won't pretend I've finished making this shift. I haven't.
But a few things changed when I stopped treating success as the destination.
The questions I ask in one-on-ones changed. I stopped leading with "how are you tracking against your goals?" and started asking things like "what's making your work feel worth doing right now?" The conversations got real faster.
The writing changed. I stopped worrying about whether posts would perform and started asking whether they contained something true and useful. The posts that aimed at nothing in particular are the ones people share.
The way I measure a working week changed. I still notice the outputs. But I notice something else too: did I do anything this week that mattered to a person, not a metric?
That's a different question. And it leads to different behavior.
What Matters When Nobody's Watching
There's a version of a career where you optimize every move for maximum advancement, and you succeed. You reach seniority. You earn well. You get the recognition.
And there's a version where you mix advancement with purpose. Where you do the things that don't go on the CV alongside the things that do.
The second version takes longer to see clearly. It doesn't show up on a LinkedIn profile or a salary comparison. But it's what you have when the scorecard stops mattering.
The leaders I most respected across my career (not the most promoted, the most respected) were not the ones who'd maximized for success. They were the ones who'd built something worth pointing to. Who'd changed the arc of someone else's story. Who'd done work that meant something beyond their own progression.
That's what John Blakey is pointing at. Not: don't succeed. But: know what you're building.
Research on the psychology of meaning consistently shows the difference between extrinsic markers of success and the deeper satisfaction that comes from genuine contribution. The research is interesting. The real argument isn't academic, though. It's personal.
When you're 70, looking back at your working life, the promotions won't be the story. The people will be. The moments will be. The difference you made, or didn't make, will be.
So what are you building?