What Does a Good Life Look Like? A Different Scorecard for Success

For much of my professional life, success was relatively easy to measure. Revenue, growth, profitability, market share, promotions, titles and bigger responsibilities all came with numbers or fairly visible evidence that things were moving in the right direction.

Spend more than two decades in business and you become comfortable with scorecards. There is something reassuring about numbers because they tell you whether you are ahead, behind or in need of a particularly creative PowerPoint presentation explaining why the target was unreasonable in the first place.

Life is less cooperative. Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly interested in a question that refuses to fit neatly into a spreadsheet: How do we know whether a life is going well?

A person can have a successful career and poor health, plenty of money and very little time, or strong professional recognition and strained relationships. Someone else may have close relationships and good health but struggle with financial security or a sense of purpose. A life can look impressive from a distance and feel quite different when you are the person living it.

I expected happiness. I found something broader.

That question was already on my mind when I began studying positive psychology more seriously. Before studying the subject, I could understand why the term might sound like an academic version of “think positive”.

Cheer up, look on the bright side, be grateful and everything will somehow work itself out. When life is genuinely difficult, advice of that kind can be about as useful as telling someone stuck in Bengaluru traffic to “just keep moving”.

What interested me was something much broader. Positive psychology is not only about reducing suffering or feeling happy. It also asks what helps people function well and live well.

One of the ideas I encountered was that wellbeing has several dimensions. Positive emotion matters, but so do engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Different people may value these differently, and what matters most can change across stages of life.

That made intuitive sense to me because a good life cannot mean being cheerful all the time. Life will contain uncertainty, disappointment, conflict, illness, loss and the occasional family WhatsApp group. Perhaps flourishing is a larger idea: whether, taken as a whole, life contains enough of the things that make it worth living.

What we measure receives a lot of attention

One reason professional success becomes such a dominant scoreboard may simply be that it is easy to measure. Salary and net worth have numbers. Promotions have dates. Your designation appears conveniently underneath your name.

Other forms of wealth are quieter. They include unhurried time with people you love, physical capability, mental wellbeing, relationships you can depend on, enough financial security, a sense that your work is useful, and enough freedom to decide what to do with at least some part of your own day.

These things are harder to put into a dashboard, but that does not make them less valuable. Perhaps because they are harder to measure, it is also easier to notice their importance only when one of them begins to disappear.

I have increasingly started thinking about life as a portfolio. We understand diversification when it comes to investments because concentrating everything in one asset creates risk. Yet it is surprisingly easy to spend decades concentrating most of our time and energy in one asset called career.

Someone can become richer financially while gradually becoming poorer in time, more accomplished while becoming less healthy, or more visible professionally while becoming less present in relationships that matter.

The reverse can also be true. Financial security matters, achievement matters, and purpose alone does not pay an EMI. The question is not which single form of wealth wins, but whether the overall portfolio resembles the life we actually value.

The allocation changes over time

A sensible life portfolio probably does not have one permanent allocation. At 25, achievement and learning may reasonably consume a large share of our energy. When children are young, time and relationships may demand more. Later, health, freedom, contribution or caring for ageing parents may become more important.

There may also be periods when work quite reasonably dominates. Building a business, dealing with financial pressure, pursuing an unusual opportunity or responding to a crisis can temporarily change our priorities. That is not necessarily a problem if we recognise these as seasons rather than permanent arrangements.

Problems begin when an allocation made for one demanding period quietly becomes the default for the next twenty years. I have done versions of this myself. Work expands beautifully into whatever space we give it, and it rarely sends a polite message saying, “You have worked enough now. Please spend the next two hours talking to your family.”

That is why it may be worth looking at the allocation from time to time. The useful question is whether it still reflects the life we want now, rather than the life we were trying to build ten years ago.

A broader scorecard does not mean less ambition

Discussions about wellbeing can sometimes create an unnecessary choice between achievement and a good life. I do not see them as opposites.

I enjoyed much of my career. Building teams, solving difficult problems, learning, winning business and taking on responsibility gave me satisfaction and opportunities that I value enormously. Accomplishment belongs on the scorecard, but it becomes a problem when it gradually becomes almost the entire scorecard.

For many years, one of my implicit questions was, “How successful can I become?” These days, I find myself more interested in another one: “How well is my life working as a whole?”

That second question still makes room for achievement, but it also introduces health, relationships, freedom, learning, contribution and the ordinary experience of enjoying a Tuesday afternoon without needing it to become an achievement.

It also makes trade-offs more visible. More of one thing is not automatically better if acquiring it steadily consumes something else that matters. Sometimes the price of an achievement becomes clearer only when we look at what we had to give up to obtain it.

The indicators that never appear on a résumé

Some of the most important indicators of a good life may be precisely the ones we cannot display very easily. A résumé does not tell you whether someone remained close to the people they love. A bank balance says nothing about whether they looked after their health well enough to remain independent.

A designation cannot tell you whether their children remember them as present or perpetually busy. None of these measures tells you whether someone remained curious, had friendships that survived difficult periods, enjoyed what they had, or used some of their experience to help somebody beyond themselves.

There is no universally correct balance across these things. The good life is not a standardised examination, although part of me still wishes somebody would publish the answer key.

There is also another danger. Once we create a broader scorecard, we can turn wellbeing itself into a performance project. We start measuring sleep, exercise, gratitude, friendships, meditation, purpose and every other part of life until flourishing becomes one more thing we are failing to optimise.

That would rather defeat the purpose. A broader scorecard is useful only if it helps us notice whether life has quietly become very rich in one dimension and unnecessarily poor in another, not if it gives us another set of targets to feel guilty about.

A different kind of scorecard

I still like scorecards. After more than twenty years in business, I am probably beyond rehabilitation on that front. What has changed is what I want mine to contain.

Financial security matters, as do achievement and meaningful work. But I also want enough time and freedom, physical health, mental wellbeing, close relationships, continued learning and some sense that my life has been useful beyond my own comfort.

I do not expect every part of that portfolio to be perfectly balanced because real lives do not work that way. Some periods will lean heavily towards work, while others may lean towards family, health, learning or care.

The more useful question is whether the imbalance is one we have chosen consciously, or one we discover only after something important has been neglected for too long.

For much of my career, the scorecard helped me answer, “How am I doing?” I am now trying to ask a slightly bigger question: “How well is my life working as a whole?”

And perhaps that leads to one final question. If salary, title, net worth and résumé disappeared from the spreadsheet for a moment, what else would tell me that my life was going well?

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