Success is not a destination, but how you show up now

How Alan Watts taught me to stop chasing the future and start embodying success in the present.

“Every plan is a disservice to life’s spontaneity,” Alan Watts once said. “When we have nothing to cling to, we find our balance.”

That line kept circling in my head last year when I was figuring out how to start over, not as a content strategist, not as a journalist, but as myself.

I had just left a stable media job. There was no funding, no safety net, no brand to hide behind: just me, a queer, gender-fluid and parent to a neurodiverse toddler.

I did not have a polished elevator pitch or a roadmap, but I did have something most people spend decades trying to reclaim, which was presence. The moment I stopped chasing someone else’s version of success, I discovered what Watts meant by acting “as if.”

Here’s why success is not a distant future goal to chase, but a present state of being.

The illusion of the ladder

From school to salary jobs, we are told to work hard now, enjoy later. Sacrifice today and win tomorrow, but the moment you attach success to the future, you make your current self incomplete. You are always arriving, never being.

Watts called this “the deferred life plan.” He warned that chasing the future prevents us from ever living fully now. “We thought of life by analogy with a journey… with a serious purpose at the end,” he said, “but the thing was to be here.”

When I left my full-time job, I was not certain of the next step, but I was clear that I did not want to build another version of someone else’s dream. I wanted to create something that felt like me and not a plan. That was a posture, a way of walking into uncertainty with presence, not panic.

Acting ‘as if’ is remembering

Watts said, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” He was urging us to remember that our sense of lack is imagined and that we are already enough.

When I first began writing about being a queer parent, I had no idea how it would land. Some posts barely got likes, and others sparked quiet DMs from strangers telling me it made them cry.

I didn’t write because I had a massive audience, but I wrote as if I already had something worth saying. And by doing that, I became someone who did.

This is not fake till you make it, it feels like it while you are in it. It is accessing the part of you that already knows how to move before the mind interrupts with doubt. That is what embodiment means, and it is not a strategy, but a state.

Stop waiting to feel ready and start walking like it’s already yours

One of the most radical ideas Watts offered was that readiness is a trap. “You are under no obligation to be the person you were five minutes ago,” he said.

That quote changed how I made decisions. I stopped looking for permission, stopped over-researching, and stopped obsessing over followers and started focusing on resonance.

This was how my first digital product came to be. I did not survey my audience or A/B test headlines, but I created it because I knew someone needed it, and I built it because it was already inside me, asking to be shared.

Success was not the $5K month that followed, but it was having the courage to ship it while still uncertain.

Your worth is remembered

Watts challenged the Western obsession with proving yourself. “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your teeth,” he joked. Because the more you try to become someone, the further you drift from who you are.

When I decided not to medically transition, for now, it was not because I lacked clarity. It was because I had enough clarity to know I did not need to justify my fluidity to be legitimate, and that self-trust is success.

Every time I walk into a men’s toilet wearing eyeliner, every time I speak at a corporate Pride event as a gender-fluid parent, every time I build a business on my terms, I am acting as if I’m already free, because I am.

You do not become successful, but remember that you already are

This is what Watts meant when he said, “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”

Your existence is not separate from life’s unfolding; it is the unfolding.

So, stop waiting to launch the product, stop waiting for the title, the following, the certificate. Start speaking as if you already belong, and start creating as if someone out there is waiting for your truth. Start living as if this moment matters because it does.

And if you ever forget, remember you don’t chase success, but you embody it. You don’t earn your worth, but you express it, and you don’t wait for clarity, and you move through it.