Redefine Your Success In Your 40s

Last Updated on August 10, 2025 by Michelle

What does Redefine Your Success mean in your 40s? This is to live your life in your terms for the second phase of your life.

You generally have some breather from life in your 40s, kids are older and work is generally more established than in your 20s and 30s. Having lived half your life, you tend to ask yourself how you’ve lived your life and how you’re to live your life from the moment on.

Great time for some self reflection to redefine your success, as it is likely that you no longer value the same thing you valued earlier in life. You would see older people around you and through your experiences, you would passively have a view of what you want to be doing and what not to. How not to live and how to live going forward.

I have broken down to 4 generic criteria to aid in this very important self-reflection in order to redefine your success.

1. Relationships

Quality of relationships to humans is critical. Humans are made to connect with others and built to feel the best through connecting with others. This is because our ancestors needed company in order to survive, we needed others’ help in hunting for food and in fighting predators.

First, identify the most important relationships to you, maximum of 3-4.

Second, rate how you feel you are doing in those relationships.

Third, if you rate yourself well and are happy with how those relationships are then just continue with what kind of investments you are doing in those relationships. If you are rating low, think and do one thing you can do differently now to improve and go from there.

2. Work/Intellectual Curiosity

How much joy do you get from your work? For the first part of your life, you would have likely worked on what was the best option available to you.

Most important in your work is if you feel you are growing intellectually, if you are providing more value using your resources.

Since you are at work and hopefully have some savings from your career to date, why not find work that you enjoy doing?

Given we live longer, it’s likely that we would do multiple jobs through our lifetime. Invest some time to review what work you can do that you enjoy more to get more happiness and value out of your life in the second half of your life.

I have created a downloadable checklist to help you think through the steps once you have found what you want to do. Leave your email address here and I will send the checklist to you.

3. Financials

Again, we live longer so financials are important to ensure we are able to live the way want till old age. In order to live the way you want, you would need financials to back you up.

Planning financials early is the one most important thing and ANYONE can do this. You don’t need any qualifications for this.

You can refer to my earlier blog on financial independence to start your financial planning today.

4. Health

Arguably, health is the most important in anyone’s life. However, for most of those in the 40s, we would be having relatively good health as the critical illnesses would not have hit us yet.

Hence, it’s important to review your health before any of the critical illnesses hit you.

1. Do you sleep 7-8 hours a day? If anyone is struggling with good quality sleep, I’d encourage listening to a podcast interview with Ashley Mason who talks about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia. The best thing about Ashley Mason is that according to her experience, this method works 100% of the time.
2. Do you tell yourself it’s ok when stress hits you?
3. Do you eat healthily?
4. Do you drink 1.5l of water a day?
5. Do you exercise 4-5 times a day?
6. Do you go for regular health screenings? After you go, do you do the recommended follow ups?

If you answer Yes to all questions above, you should feel good about your health. It’s not the easiest but simplest way to feel good about your health status.

I have tried to simplify how you can think about redefinining your success in the 40s. There are thousand more things you could do, but if you have thought through the above 4, chances are you would have taken care of 90% of the areas that matter most.