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I started my career in 2006. The same year, The Devil Wears Prada gave us the line: "A million girls would kill for this job."

The message for millennials was pretty clear. If you landed a great job, you endured the pressure. You proved yourself. You worked harder than everyone else.

So I worked for free for six months as a part-time 'intern' at a global ad agency — just to get my foot in the door. I showed up at 7.30am on the days I was there — first one in.

I wore that like a badge of honour.

It felt completely logical. Work harder. You can have it all.

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In a 2016 interview with Bloomberg, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was asked how many hours she could work in a week.

Her response: "Could you work 130 hours in a week? The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you sleep, when you shower and how often you go to the bathroom."

That mindset stuck.

Go ask the millennial mums around you how many of them hold off going to the toilet just so they can squeeze out five more emails before school pick-up. 

(I'm pretty sure it's not just me)

For years, that's just how work worked. Work hard, prove yourself, keep climbing.

But somewhere along the way, a question started popping up in conversations with friends: 'Hang on… is this the only way this is supposed to work?'

'And more importantly, 'how do I make this work for my life?'

Then I saw a viral TikTok from Jessi Jean Cowan that stopped me mid-scroll.

She talks about the strange moment a lot of millennials seem to be hitting, where the career you worked so hard to build suddenly feels… confusing. Not because it's failing. More because it just doesn't fit the way it used to.

And the reality often looks more like this: Be ambitious at work. Be present with your kids. Finish the presentation. Make the school pick-up. Get to inbox zero. Reply to a million WhatsApp group chats. Stay across all the random admin that comes with school life. Drink enough water. Don't forget to call your mum back. Exercise occasionally. And somehow still be an interesting person.

It feels a bit like cultural ADHD — every part of life demanding attention at the same time.

Somewhere in that list, something has to give. And that's where the shift starts. I don't think what's happening here is a mid-career crisis. It's a reckoning.

The work we chose in our 20s might not perfectly fit where we're at today — and that's not a failure. 

Now we're in our 30s and 40s, we've seen enough jobs and workplaces to recognise what actually matters, and what doesn't. You start to realise that the definition of a 'successful career' isn't fixed, it's something you get to shape as your life changes.

There's more clarity, more experience and usually a lot less patience for the things that don't matter. This isn't about suddenly deciding hard work isn't worth it. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now without years of hard work behind me. 

But for a long time — like so many of my millennial friends — I measured success based on what I thought it was supposed to look like (and what other people told me it should be).

Last year I started questioning that.

Not the idea of working hard and having a career, I still believe in that, but the idea that success only looks one way.

Instead of asking how to push harder or climb faster, I started asking different things.

What actually matters now? What kind of work gives me energy? What am I good at?

But the moment you start asking those questions, people assume the answer must be something dramatic. Quit your job. Move to Bali. Start a business.

Or a friend will say, "you can always leave". But leave to where?

For most people, the reality isn't a simple choice between staying or leaving. We have mortgages, kids, financial responsibilities and lives that already exist. And we still care about our careers.

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What's really changing is the idea that there's only one way a successful career is supposed to look – and the skills you've built don't disappear just because your priorities shift.

The ability to lead people, influence decisions, solve messy problems or read the room in a meeting travels with you. It isn't tied to a job title or one linear definition of success.

When you start looking at your career through that lens, new options appear.

One useful place to start is by asking yourself a few simple questions:

What parts of your work actually give you energy — not just what you're good at? 

What problems do people consistently come to you for? 

What skills have you built that would be valuable in any role? 

What are your non-negotiables?

Those answers often reveal far more career options than we initially realise.

Once you see your career through the lens of skills rather than job titles, the possibilities widen. The same strengths can show up in completely different roles.

Not burning everything down. Just evolving the career you've already built so it works differently now.

And yes, for some people, it can feel like a compromise. For years, we were told success looked a certain way. Get the promotion. Earn more. Keep going. Be everything.

So when priorities shift — because of kids, life, or simply a different sense of what matters — it can feel like you're stepping backwards or sideways. 

And some pretty important parts of the system haven't caught up either. Work, school and childcare were never designed for households where both adults are managing demanding careers. The schedules don't line up.

Which means a lot of people – particularly women – end up trying to solve what is a structural mismatch on their own. And that tension is forcing a rethink.

More and more millennials are realising they have far more agency over what a successful career actually looks like.

Not a mid-career crisis. Just recognising the careers we started building in our 20s, don't have to look the same twenty years later.

The ambition hasn't disappeared. The definition of success, and what a career can look like, is just getting rewritten.

Feature Image: Supplied.