The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever

The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever

🤖 AI Prompts

The Real Price Of Your Success [AI Prompt]

Success has a cost. This prompt reveals the relationships, identity, and parts of yourself you may have traded away to achieve it.

May 12, 2026
∙ Paid

Trevor Noah talks about the loneliness.
Jerry Seinfeld talks about the perpetual dissatisfaction.
Elon Musk talks about the stress and isolation.

Success has a cost.
Nobody really talks about the cost.

We talk about the climb. The grind. The sacrifices made.

We make success sound noble.
Like it’s actually worth it.

Was the cost worth it for Robin Williams and Matthew Perry?
I doubt it. They paid everything.

I have a leadership coaching client - successful by every possible measure - who recently confided in me:

“I don’t think I know who I am outside of this job anymore.”

It wasn’t a complaint, more like a realization.

That’s what this prompt is about.

Not whether you’re successful.
Not whether the sacrifices were necessary.

But whether you’ve ever actually added up the cost you’ve been paying for what you’re building.

The relationships that quietly fade away, the versions of yourself you slowly forget, the life that was happening while you were focused on work.

Most people haven’t thought about it.
Not really.

Because doing the real accounting means sitting with a number you’ve probably been rounding down for years.

This prompt does the accounting.
The question is whether you actually want to see the bottom line.

Run the prompt now. 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Inner Circle members get this for free. Join here.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2026 Jeff Matlow · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture