The Pressure to Succeed Depends on Where You Learned What Success Means.

I already do a lot. I write books after my daughter goes to sleep, and write posts at 4:27am after she wakes me up because of a bad dream. I maintain a website, a newsletter, a blog, a social media presence (this one is questionable), I research a lot, and I live too, because I cannot forget about that.

Also I help a lot of people. Are you a journalist from Ecuador with questions about self publishing? Of course I can answer your call. Are you an author in the US who needs to bounce some ideas to push their book? Absolutely, let us exchange voice messages. Are you a psychologist in Spain who wants to turn your study into a book? I do not do ghostwriting but I can send you a contact of someone who does. Are you an intercultural coach in Brazil wanting to understand how I do my marketing and get some tips? Of course I can send you some stuff. And those are only the ones from single week.

I can almost feel the thought coming: maybe you should stop helping people. That would save you time. Maybe it would. But I would not have the opportunity to learn too. And boy I love learning.

I have a to-do list and a very short window between the school run and whatever comes next.

And still. I see something and I think: I should be involved in that. Or I need to do this. And that. And probably that other thing too.

I would absolutely love to sit down and have everything fall into my lap. If that is how it works for you, please tell me the secret. I am not joking. I will wait.

For me it works differently. I run after things. I always have. And I have made peace with that, mostly. But lately there is a pressure that comes with a touch of sadness that I am not doing enough. Or not as much as everyone else seems to think I should be doing. Or not as much as I think I should be doing, which is its own separate and slightly more exhausting problem.

I have been turning that feeling over and trying to work out where it comes from.

The Scorecard You Inherit Before You Know You Have It

The pressure to succeed may be widespread, but what counts as success is not universal. It feels universal because it arrives so early and so quietly that most of us never examine it. But the definition of success you are carrying, what counts as enough, what counts as falling behind, what counts as a life well lived, was handed to you before you were old enough to question whether you wanted it.

In my experience, in Brazil where I grew up, success has a specific texture. It is visible and relational and celebrated out loud. The person who built something, who made something happen, who hustled their way into a room they were not invited into, that person is admired. Effort is honoured. Ambition is not something you hide.

In my experience of Switzerland, where I live, the register is different. Success is quieter and more contained. The person who works hard but does not announce it, who achieves without performing the achievement, who maintains a certain reserve about what they have built, that is the respected version. Visible ambition can read as something slightly embarrassing here.

I live between those two definitions every day. I was formed by one and I operate inside the other. And the pressure I feel is partly the pressure of both running simultaneously, each one measuring me against a standard the other one does not recognise.

The Specific Pressure of Having Chosen to Move

There is a version of the success pressure that is specific to migration and I do not think it gets named enough.

When you move countries, especially when you move by choice, there is an unspoken accounting that begins immediately. The move has to be worth it. The disruption has to be justified. The people who stayed, the family, the friends, the life you left behind, need to be shown that you were right to go. That the sacrifice produced something. That the distance was in service of something real.

That accounting never fully closes.

Which means the pressure to succeed abroad is not just about succeeding. It is about succeeding visibly enough to justify the move, consistently enough to prove the move was not a mistake, and recognisably enough that both cultures can see it and agree that it counts.

That is a lot to carry while also doing the school run and writing a book and maintaining a newsletter and saying no to the things you should say no to but keep thinking maybe you should say yes to anyway.

What I Am Actually Learning

I am not going to pretend I have resolved this. I have not. I still see things and think I need to be involved in that. I still feel the pressure from two different inherited scorecards running simultaneously, each one telling me I am not doing enough by its particular measure.

But I am getting better at asking a different question. Not am I doing enough, but enough for what, and according to whose definition.

Because the scorecard you inherited is not the same as the life you are actually building. And the pressure you feel is not always a signal that you need to do more. Sometimes it is a signal that the definition of success you are carrying was not built for the life you are actually living.

I write about this because I lived it before I had words for it. I still live it. I am just slowly getting better at noticing when the pressure is mine and when it belongs to someone else’s definition of what my life should look like.

Maybe that is what identity migration looks like in practice: learning to notice when the scorecard you inherited is measuring a life you are no longer living.

That is identity migration. That is the inherited scorecard. That is the whole thing, in the most personal version I have written it.

Parenting Unpacked is where these concepts live in full. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk