Everyone is chasing happiness. Why do we usually go chase someone else’s version of it?
I was told that the route to happiness followed this path:
Do well in school. Make your family proud. Get the degree. Find a well-paying job. Marry young, buy the property. Have the baby.
The markers of a life that looks like you are succeeding.
I was never great at listening to anyone. Haha. Call me the rebel, but I just could not stand fitting into the linear path of success. I spent years trying. But I knew I was miserable.
I stayed and persisted because I thought that was what we were meant to do.
Sound familiar?
Maybe it’s the job you took because it made sense on paper. The relationship you stayed in longer than you should have. The degree you finished even though you knew halfway through it wasn’t you.
The status quo is charming. That’s the trap.
Everyone around you is following the same path. So normalized, so universally accepted, that questioning it starts to feel like the problem is you.
Get the degree. Get the job. Get the house. Have the baby. Repeat the steps and collect the approval along the way. The whole structure is designed to reward compliance. Every time you hit a marker, someone claps. Someone says you’re doing so well. Someone tells you they’re proud.
This linear path to success is what you have been told. What everyone around you strives for. Your parents, your teachers, your peers — all pointing in the same direction, all following the same sequence. Of course you followed it. Belonging feels good. Approval feels good. Having a clear next step feels good. It’s completely natural to conform when conformity is all you’ve ever seen modeled.
But you probably had a feeling. Something that didn’t quite fit. A version of your life ticking all the right boxes and still feeling like it belonged to someone else.
You stayed anyway. Pushed the feeling down. Kept going.
Some people never look up. Some people look up and decide the discomfort of staying is easier than the fear of leaving.
And then there are people like us.
We thrive different.
0. The failed pursuit of happiness:
I was the kid who did everything right. Studied hard, got the grades, earned the approval. I went to uni because it made sense on paper & because finishing it meant I had done what I was supposed to do.
I hated going to lectures. Felt headaches any time I walked into the lab. I am still not sure how I passed any of my exams.
I graduated eventually (after failing half my units) with a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems.
Getting the degree did not make me happier.
So I tried to make it work anyway & kept pushing through. Looked for the job that would make the degree feel worth it. Waited for the feeling to catch up.
It never did.
At some point you run out of ways to convince yourself that almost is enough. Something had to change. I had to do something, anything, that was actually mine.
So I booked a one-way ticket to London & I left Australia for good.
From that point of understanding true happiness did not come from the rules of what success meant but to redefine that in my own means, here’s a few ways I had to Thrive Different:
I built my work around my life.
London cracked something open. New culture, new energy, a completely different way of moving through the world. Getting out of my comfort zone didn’t just feel good: it made me stronger. More curious. More myself.
I wanted to keep growing, keep feeling that aliveness that comes from being somewhere unfamiliar. So I started figuring out how to make work follow me instead of the other way around.
I found my space in performance marketing or Advertising, social media marketing: the kind of work that lived entirely on a screen & could be done from anywhere with wifi. Technical enough to be valuable.
Flexible enough to be free.
It was the first time work & life felt like they were pointing in the same direction.
I built from there. Location independent before it had a name. On my own schedule.
I was never that great at having a boss anyway so becoming my own boss was the best thing I ever did. This was the only way I wanted to work. It’s been this way ever since.
I chose to have my family on my own timeline.
Every woman knows this pressure. The non-stop commentary about when you’re settling down. The body clock narrative. The quiet suggestion that love needs to happen in your 20’s because that’s your prime. Mum is always nagging about this too so you have a constant reminder.
I wasn’t interested. Not until I was completely happy with myself & my life exactly as they already were.
For a long time I was this independent solo female traveller: self-sufficient, growing on my own terms & single AF for a long time while I travelled & grew my business.
Then I found love after 30. After I had fully convinced myself I’d be happy alone forever. I found my forever partner in a beach town in Mexico, who turned out to be this Italian Programmer. A business of his own, amazing cooking skills & the ability to make me laugh.
I couldn’t even believe I had found love this way. Still can’t. My forever partner who is as ambitious as me & shown me how to love myself entirely. We do things our own way & lived in countless countries together.
I asked him to marry me in 2022. (on 02/02/22 so he would never forget) & then
I had my baby at 35. A beautiful boy we named Tian which means Sky in Chinese.
I love motherhood now.
Being parents to him while we still don’t have a home base is the journey we define now, some see that as crazy. But we are happy right now.
Everyone has their own timeline & their own version of the story.
You don’t need to follow anyone else’s rules about when things need to happen.
The people who thrive different don’t all look the same. They don’t all start the same way or arrive at the same place. Some blow everything up & start over. Some make quieter, slower pivots. Some are still figuring out what different even looks like for them.
But underneath all of it, there are always the same things driving them.
Not goals. Values.
The kind that don’t come from a vision board or a podcast. The kind that were already in you before you had the language for them. The kind that explain why the linear path never quite fit & why you kept feeling that pull toward something else even when you couldn’t name it.
If my story resonated with you at all, I’d bet these are already yours too.
They are part of your why: embedded in driving you to do what you do.
Time.
Time is the one thing you cannot get back. Not a single hour of it.
You can lose money and rebuild it. You can lose a client, a deal, an opportunity & find another. But time does not work that way. The hours are gone the moment they pass. The years you spend in the wrong job, the wrong city, the wrong version of your life - you don’t get those back. They just become part of the story of how long it took you to start living differently.
This is why we are so deliberate about it. We don’t waste it. We don’t fill it with obligations we never actually agreed to or work that means nothing just because it pays.
We value presence: being fully in the moments that matter instead of stretched thin across everything and truly nowhere. Time with the people we love. Time doing work that actually means something. Time that feels chosen rather than consumed.
And where we can, we multiply ourselves. Systems, the right tools, delegation — so that our hours go toward the things only we can do. The work we’re actually here to do. The life we’re actually here to live.
Time is finite. We treat it that way.
Freedom.
Freedom is the ability to choose. Full stop.
Not having a boss doesn’t automatically mean freedom. Neither does money, or followers, or any external marker people point to. Freedom is structural. It’s built into how you work, where you work, what you agree to, and what you walk away from.
For me, that’s shown up as location. I have not been tied to one city, one office, one country for over 10 years. I’ve built businesses, raised a family, done work I’m proud of. from wherever made sense that season. That kind of freedom doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a deliberate choice.
Creative freedom. Financial freedom.
The freedom to say no to the wrong thing and yes to the right one without having to justify it to anyone. That’s what we’re building toward here. Freedom becomes a way of life & once you’ve lived it, there’s no going back.
Growth.
Freedom paired with direction is where fulfilment lives.
Growth is what makes all of this meaningful.
It’s the feeling of becoming better:at what you do, at who you are, at the life you’re building. Not better by someone else’s measure. Better by yours. More capable, more clear, more alive in the work and in the moments outside of it.
It shows up as learning something that shifts how you think. Winning in ways that are quiet but real. Feeling like every year you are expanding into more of yourself rather than contracting into less. That is what we are chasing here. Not a number, not a title, not approval from anyone who wasn’t on the journey with you.
Growth is how we stay fulfilled. It’s what keeps this from being just a lifestyle and makes it a life worth building.
If you read this & felt something click we should be friends..
This is that space.
For the ones who left the path, or are thinking about it. For the ones building something of their own & figuring it out as they go. For the ones who chose a life that looks nothing like the plan & wouldn’t trade it for anything.
We don’t all look the same. We don’t all build the same way. But we share something that’s hard to fake: the refusal to settle for a life that doesn’t fit & the willingness to do something about it.
That’s what Thrive Different is. Not a formula. Not a blueprint. Just a way of being & a reminder that you are not alone in it.
Stick around. There’s more where this came from.
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