What If Success Didn’t Have to Cost So Much?

Yesterday, instead of working, I went whale watching.

This should not have felt like a radical act. I live on Vancouver Island, surrounded by one of the most extraordinary marine environments in the world. And yet, somehow, in more than five years of living here, I had never gone.

There was always something more productive to do.

I am very good at turning my life into a project: my writing, my business, my goals, my habits, my rest. Even my joy, if I’m not careful.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what success might look like if I stopped trying to optimize everything.

Last year, inside the School of Self-Image, master self-image coach Tonya Leigh taught a class called The Elegant Success Framework.

The phrase stopped me in my tracks.

Elegant success.

Not bigger success.

Not faster success.

Not more productive success.

Elegant success.

As someone who has spent much of her life in achievement-oriented spaces, I know the conventional version of success very well.

Set a goal. Work harder. Push through. Sacrifice. Repeat.

I’ve spent more than a little time on that wheel, eventually arriving at the inevitable question:

Why am I exhausted?

What appealed to me about Tonya’s framework is that it asks a different question entirely: What if the way we pursue success matters just as much as the result itself?

Tonya defines elegant success as “achieving a desired result in the simplest and most effective way possible”. It isn’t about abandoning ambition or lowering standards. It’s about removing unnecessary struggle from the process.

That idea landed with me because I’ve spent much of the past year questioning assumptions I didn’t even realize I was carrying.

Assumptions such as:

• More effort is always better.
• Progress should feel difficult.
• If I’m not pushing, I’m probably falling behind.
• Rest must be earned.
• Success requires sacrifice.

Many of these beliefs are rewarded in the short term. You can absolutely achieve goals through anxiety. Things can be built through force. And, you can absolutely grind your way forward.

The problem is that, eventually, the strategy starts costing more than the result is worth.

Writers are particularly vulnerable to this. We’ll relax when the book launches. We’ll feel confident when enough people read it. We’ll feel successful when we hit a particular sales number. We’ll feel secure when we finally reach our self-inflicted milestones.

The trouble is that the milestone keeps moving. And satisfaction remains stubbornly out of reach.

What Tonya Leigh Calls Elegant Success

Tonya identifies several traps that keep us from experiencing what she calls elegant success.

We pursue goals to fix ourselves rather than express ourselves.

We chase what we think we should want instead of what we genuinely want.

We focus on outcomes while neglecting the experience of our daily lives.

We become rigid instead of responsive.

We criticize ourselves when we need coaching.

And perhaps most importantly, we postpone feeling successful until some future date.

One day. Someday. After the next achievement.

That last one felt uncomfortably familiar. But if we’re always waiting for permission to feel content, we may spend most of our lives waiting.

The Lesson I Needed Most

Tonya’s framework has taught me about the peace that comes with detachment.

Not indifference or giving up, but instead holding the goal lightly: showing up consistently while refusing to make the outcome mean anything about your worth.

One of Tonya’s phrases was: “I am devoted to my goals and free if they never happen.”

I’ve been sitting with that one for a while.

Devoted, but free. Committed, but not desperate. Willing to work but unwilling to sacrifice my peace of mind. That’s a very different relationship with success than the one many of us were taught to have.

On Whale Watching and Other Productive Things

The part of Tonya’s framework I’ve struggled with most is playfulness. Not because I disagree with it, but because I’ve spent decades believing that non-work time is, by definition, unproductive time. Intellectually, I know that isn’t true. Emotionally, I’m still learning.

The whale watching trip was my small act of practice. Not a productivity experiment. Not a creativity strategy. Just a decision to step away from the desk and do something I had somehow postponed for years.

We boarded a boat and headed out into the Salish Sea. Eventually, we found a family of orcas. Three of them surfaced together against a backdrop of blue mountains and endless water. They appeared, disappeared, and surfaced again. No urgency. No productivity metrics. No dashboards. Just whales going about the ancient, unhurried business of being whales.

Afterward, we found a tiny Vietnamese restaurant and lingered over lunch. Nothing remarkable happened. There were no breakthroughs, no life-changing insights, no business opportunities, no boxes checked, and no obvious goals advanced. Just delicious food and leisurely conversation. And yet I came home feeling calmer than I had in weeks. More present. More alive.

That was the part that stayed with me. The day had not been useful in any measurable way, and maybe that was the point. What if some things are worth doing simply because they are worth doing? Not because they improve our creativity, increase productivity, or move us closer to a measurable outcome. Just because they enrich a life.

Tonya argues that play is not the opposite of productivity. In many ways, it is one of the sources of creativity.

I suspect she’s right.

But I’m also beginning to wonder whether play needs to justify itself at all.

Perhaps watching whales is enough reason to watch whales.

Becoming Someone I Actually Want to Be

The longer I write, the more I suspect success is less about achieving particular outcomes and more about becoming a particular kind of person.

Tonya’s framework includes five elements: focus, embodiment, aligned action, detachment, and playfulness.

What I hear underneath all of them is a deeper invitation.

Become someone who can pursue meaningful goals without abandoning herself in the process.

At this stage of life, that feels increasingly important. I still have ambitions: books I want to write, stories I want to tell, readers I hope to reach. But I no longer believe suffering is a prerequisite for any of it.

If success arrives, I would like it to find me calm, well-rested, curious, and playful.

Still myself.

Over the past year, I’ve gradually assembled a set of personal guiding principles to help me do exactly that.

Next week, I’ll share them.