Our 20s and 30s are often spent chasing the kind of ambition we internalised growing up, or saw rewarded by the people around us. The big paycheck. The big position. Build a startup, get it funded, move into a bigger house, get the car. And then what? 

Most of us don't stop to ask that question until we're already somewhere on that ladder, looking up and wondering why the next rung doesn't feel as exciting as it once did.

There comes a point, where additional status, comfort, money, and hard work stops moving the needle on happiness. Where climbing higher doesn't feel like it leads anywhere you actually want to go, if you really listen.

For me, thankfully, that realization came early enough to do something about it. I quit a high-paying job in a growing space, to go build a jewellery brand with my sister in my early 30s. Ten years in, people still ask me, with curiosity and sometimes with a hint of concern, whether I ever feel like I didn't reach my potential. My answer is always the same: I think I am living my potential. This is what I inherited from my parents. A life that feels enough.

My father's side of the family is deeply, almost extravagantly loving. I've always thought it comes partly from their Punjabi genes and partly from the trials of life. My grandparents lived through Partition. They knew, from actual experience, that life is fickle and all you really have is now. Growing up surrounded by that kind of family, where love was not rationed, where there was always more warmth and more room at the table, gave me a felt sense of what enough looks like.

A few years into building Quirksmith, I looked around at my life and felt it. A partner who is loving and present. An apartment I genuinely loved coming home to. Family and friends close by. Work I actually enjoyed. I felt, for perhaps the first time as an adult, that I had arrived somewhere real.

And yet.

Something still didn't feel quite right. There was a persistent hum of not-enough underneath everything. And that confused me, because by every measure I cared about, my life was full. So I sat with it for a long time. And eventually I found it, it was the business!

My father ran a humble business his whole life. My mother was a teacher. For them, work was straightforward in the most beautiful way. It was the means by which they gave us a life they hadn't had themselves. That was their purpose, and it was more than enough. There was no confusion in it.

But Divya (my sister) and I had already been given that life. We had everything our parents worked for us to have. And so the question of why we were building, and what was enough business growth, had no ready answer. No template from home and no obvious script to follow.

What I had instead, without realising it, was someone else's scorecard. A scorecard I had unknowingly internalised in the first 10 years of my career. I was measuring Quirksmith against the kind of success that gets talked about in startup circles. VC-funded, hypergrowth, scale at all costs, metrics that only go up and to the right. I had internalised that language so thoroughly that I was applying it to a business that was never meant to be that, and feeling quietly inadequate because we didn't fit.

That's when I started asking a different question. Not how do we grow faster? But what would an enough business actually look like? What would it feel like to build from a place of contentment rather than from a place of chasing? Was it even possible to stay driven when you were no longer running from or towards something?

We didn't have answers immediately. But we started with the one thing we could control, we changed how we set goals.

Instead of starting with some external benchmark of success, we started from the inside. What does the team need to grow next year? What would it take to give Quirksmith enough breathing room to try something new that challenges us creatively (I call it the “play” budget)? We used those two questions to back-calculate the profits we needed, the sales that had to come in, the costs that made sense. The numbers weren't smaller, necessarily. But they had reasons behind them that came from us, not from some invisible audience.

Over time, I saw what this shift did to me, and especially the team. When a goal comes from your own internal logic rather than from the invisible standards the world has set for you, you relate to it differently. You stop performing and start actually working. The creative energy that had been quietly strangled by inadequacy started to breathe again.

Holding genuine drive alongside genuine contentment. Not letting one kill the other. That’s the balancing act really!

It turns out you can want more and still feel like you have enough. You just have to make sure the more you're chasing is yours.