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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

That's only if you measure success along a single axis (income).

I've historically measured my professional success over many other axis, which has lead to a detriment of income. I was fine with this in my 20s to 40s, but now in my 50s it seems a mistake. When young, you have the belief that you can always make up the money later, or the effects of not having it are small. When it is later, you realize how little of a window you have left.

So while I would agree that professional success should be measured on multiple scales, if you were to run a PCA on the multiple dimensions then income should be the largest principle component.

NOTE! I am speaking only of success in your career. However, since this is where most of your energies during your adult life go, it is a dominant factor in your success in other areas.

The hypothesis here is that there is a trade-off between making bank and living a pleasant life, whatever attributes one wants to associate with "pleasant", maybe low professional stress, maybe time spent with loved ones, maybe waking up when the world is already spinning at full speed.

There might be a weak positive correlation at the population level between (broadly speaking) "being miserable/not having a good time/give up life for money" and "income", but at the individual level what we can say is that there are millions of people in the world making good to very good to great money while having the time of their lives day after day.

I might be one of those, for now. In the future, who knows.

Agreed. That's why I wrote,"but I consider that money far from ----financially---- making someone "a very successful 40-year-old"."

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