What Dolly Parton Made Me Think About Success

With the recent passing of Dolly Parton, I noticed something quite different about the way people were talking about her, compared with what we often hear when someone incredibly successful dies. Of course people talked about her extraordinary career, her music and everything she'd achieved over decades, but what came through just as strongly, if not more strongly, was who she was as a person. Story after story was about her kindness, her generosity, the way she made people feel. For someone who'd achieved that much and was one of the most recognisable musicians in the world, I found it striking that so much of what people wanted to remember wasn't what she'd achieved, but how she'd moved through the world. And it got me thinking about about how we define success, and how rarely most of us actually sit down and decide what that definition is for ourselves.

The definition of success we inherit

In Western culture there's a fairly established recipe for what a successful life looks like. Go to school, maybe university or a trade, build a career, progress through it, earn enough to buy a home, raise a family, take the holidays, and end up with a life that looks successful from the outside. There's nothing wrong with any of that, and I genuinely like achievement and having something to work towards, challenging myself, seeing what I'm capable of. But most of the goals we spend decades pursuing were decided when we were much younger, either consciously or because they were simply the next obvious thing to do. Along the way we also pick up a set of beliefs that come with the recipe: progressing is good, being productive is valuable, being needed matters, doing more means you're doing well. For a long time those beliefs work brilliantly. They build careers, businesses, families, lives we're proud of. It's just that there can come a point where the things that used to move us don't have quite the same effect anymore.

When the old measures aren't enough

I see this a lot in the women I work with, particularly in their 40s and beyond. They've spent decades knowing exactly what they were working towards and being very good at getting there; the next promotion, the bigger role, the financial goal, the next challenge to solve. Then something starts to shift. Sometimes it's perimenopause, sometimes burnout, a career change, kids getting older, a relationship changing. Sometimes there's no single obvious trigger at all just a growing sense that the goals which used to guide you aren't giving you what they once did. Now I do not think that means you've chosen the wrong life, or need to walk away from everything you've built. I think, more often, you've simply outgrown the definition of success you've been measuring yourself against. And this is where Dolly made me look at my own.

What would I actually want to be known for?

If I imagine people talking about me at the end of my life, what would I actually want them to say? Part of me wants the work to matter I want to keep growing my business, get better at what I do, and know it's genuinely helped people. But when I sat with whether I'd actually want my achievements to be the main thing people remembered, the honest answer was no. What came to mind instead was much more about how I'd lived: that I was kind, that I made people feel seen, that I loved the people around me well, that people felt a little better for having had me in their life. That I liked who I was and cared for myself.

And what I noticed is that once you start measuring success through that lens, it stops being something you're going to achieve one day and becomes something about how you're living today, because kindness rarely shows up in the big moments we picture when we think about being a good person. Most of the opportunities are ordinary. It's how I respond internally to the person who cuts me off in traffic. Whether I look up and greet the person at the gym instead of rushing past, thinking about my day. Whether I ask the guy at my local grocery shop how he's actually going, and listen to the answer. Whether I acknowledge the homeless person I walk past, or instinctively look away. How I speak to the people I love when I'm tired or stressed, and whether they get my attention and patience, or whatever's left over after I've given everything else away first. And, probably the one I find hardest, whether I'm kind to myself when I haven't done enough, when something hasn't worked, when I simply don't have the capacity I expected myself to have that day. Or whether kindness disappears the moment I'm the one who needs to receive it.

Maybe we need more than one way of moving through life

The more I've thought about this, the more I've noticed how differently kindness and growth feel in my body. Growth has a push to it, it is often a discomfort I have to move towards on purpose, courage when I'd rather retreat, momentum that keeps me going when staying still would be easier. That push has done a huge amount for me, and I suspect it's done the same for a lot of women like me. Kindness feels almost the opposite. There's a softness to it, it is less about chasing the next thing and more about making room, noticing what's already here, letting things come towards me instead of believing I always have to go and get them. Those who know me well know that I am not a passive person and so do not see this as that, or in fact lowering my ambition. Instead it just feels like releasing some of the force I've learnt to move through life with. Making room for both.

I think a lot of high-achieving women are exceptionally practised at pushing working harder, preparing more, solving the problem, making themselves do the uncomfortable thing and a lot less practised at the alternative: making space, and allowing something good to actually land, instead of immediately reaching for what's next. I don't think the goal is to trade one for the other. I think it's closer to expanding the range we're willing to move in.

So what do I want the measure to be?

Dolly's passing has left me thinking less about whether I'm achieving enough, and more about who I'm being while I achieve it. I'll keep challenging myself that's genuinely part of who I am, and I don't think it needs fixing. But I am making sure I am assessing the things that I am going after. Making sure they are aligned to my definition of a successful life still, not a definition I have outgrown. And I am also becoming more deliberate about the softer things that don't show up on any list of achievements: how I make people feel, how generous I am with my attention, whether I notice the person in front of me, whether I can offer myself the same kindness I so readily believe other people deserve.

So rather than turning kindness into another goal to chase, which would rather defeat the point, I have been asking myself these questions instead. Where would I like to be kinder, and what would that actually look like in the ordinary moments of my day? What would I need to let go of to get there, urgency, judgement, the need to be right? And where am I pushing because it genuinely takes courage, versus pushing simply because pushing is the only way I know how to move?

I don't want to stop pushing myself towards growth, because some of the best things in my life have come from exactly that. I just don't want achievement to become the only measure I pay attention to, at the expense of the things that, when I really think about it, matter just as much.

Maybe we need both: the push that helps us grow, and the kindness that reminds us how we want to live while we're doing it.