Success isn’t about effort. It’s about tolerance.

How to identify what you're uniquely willing to sacrifice—and whether it's setting you up to succeed

May 25, 2026

Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities.

Wishing you a great week!

I recently came across this TikTok by Kristen Lowe, which led me to this post on her Substack. And I just had to talk about it!

Lowe outlines a paradigm-shifting way to think about the cost of success—success meaning achieving a stated goal at a high level, not just making a lot of money or sitting at the top of the career ladder. Generally speaking, we believe that success “costs” time and effort, right? We understand that it could also cost money, like an upfront or continued investment in a business or in education (which is also time and effort!).

We get mad when we see people succeeding without spending these obvious “currencies,” because that means they (supposedly) didn’t earn or deserve them. Lowe highlights influencers as an obvious example of this: They’re getting lucrative brand sponsorships and podcasts and book deals, walking red carpets…and for what? Sitting in their rooms, posting on social media?

But as Lowe beautifully states:

Success is always paid for in full — just not always in the currency people can see. …when we consider how people are paying for their dreams, not just how much, our imaginative aperture is dangerously narrow.

- The Currencies of Success, Kristen Lowe

Every dream costs some combination of currencies, but only some of them are time and effort and cold hard cash. That combination differs from dream to dream. If you are only willing to shell out the traditional currencies but aren’t willing to pay the necessary, say, physical risk, public exposure, rejection, criticism, instability, etc. that your goal truly costs, then you will just fundamentally never have enough “money” to “buy” the success. Or you’ll buy it, but the sacrifices will bankrupt you!

Quite simply, you have an exchange rate problem.

She goes on to advise that rather than think about our careers, ambitions, and dreams only in terms of what we’re uniquely good at or love doing, we instead think about what costs we’re uniquely tolerant of paying. That’s our real competitive edge. Because in those currencies, we’re already rich.

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The real question: What’s cheap for you?

Anyway, I could not stop thinking about this. I wondered how I might go about discovering what sacrifices I, personally, am uniquely tolerant of and whether my dreams were “affordable” to me now, or if I needed to work on exchanging the currencies I have for others I need. (Or reevaluating if the costs are worth it!)

So, using Lowe’s posts as a starting point, I made a “checklist” of different currencies folks might already have in their bank accounts.

If you want to try this evaluation, you’re looking for statements that feel “cheap and easy to bear” to you—that’s how you know which currencies you’re rich in.

Still not sure? Try asking the following questions about each item:

Do I mind paying this cost?
Am I willing to pay this cost?
Does sacrificing this come easier to me than to other people?
What is energetically cheap for me, but seems expensive for others?
What costs can I pay sustainably over time?