A conversation with Akash Prasad, founder of To Be Alive Advisory, on success, anxiety, belonging, inherited patterns—and getting off the achievement hamster wheel.
There is a very specific kind of existential crisis reserved for successful people.
You did the things.
You got the degree.
You got the job.
You collected the impressive company names.
You became the person your younger self was supposedly working so hard to become.
And then one random Tuesday your brain goes:
Cool. So why don’t I feel better?
That is where my conversation with Akash Prasad, founder of To Be Alive Advisory, gets interesting.
Akash has the résumé that normally gets turned into a LinkedIn victory lap: UCLA MBA, experience at companies including Verizon and Amazon, and a career built around accomplishment.
But this episode isn’t really about accomplishment.
It’s about what happens when accomplishment stops being enough.
Welcome to the Success Hamster Wheel
For ambitious people, achievement can become remarkably efficient.
Goal.
Work.
Achieve goal.
Experience approximately seven minutes of satisfaction.
Immediately invent a harder goal.
Repeat until retirement or spontaneous combustion.
The dangerous part is that from the outside, this can look fantastic.
Promotions. Degrees. Money. Titles. Recognition.
Meanwhile, internally, you may still be operating from fears, expectations and emotional patterns that were installed decades ago.
Akash talks about learning to recognize those patterns instead of automatically obeying them.
Because eventually you have to ask:
Am I building the life I actually want—or am I just becoming extremely good at completing assignments I inherited from somebody else?
That question is much scarier than another quarterly goal.
“This Ends With Me.”
One of the strongest ideas from our conversation was simple:
“This ends with me.”
Most people inherit more than eye color and questionable family recipes.
We inherit beliefs about money.
Success.
Relationships.
Worthiness.
What respectable people are supposed to do.
What failure supposedly says about us.
And sometimes we spend decades living according to emotional rules we never consciously chose.
The shift happens when you can finally see the pattern.
You don’t necessarily need to hate where it came from.
You just don’t have to keep forwarding it to the next chapter of your life.
Awareness gives you a choice.
And choice is where a different legacy begins.
Anxiety Might Not Mean “Stop”
Ambitious people are often waiting for the magical day when they finally feel completely confident.
Bad news:
That day appears to have been delayed indefinitely.
Akash offered a much more useful interpretation of fear:
“My fear and nervousness is just a sign that I’m stepping onto a bigger stage.”
That changes the equation.
Nervous doesn’t automatically mean wrong.
Uncomfortable doesn’t automatically mean unprepared.
Sometimes your body is simply realizing:
Oh. We’re doing something bigger now.
Entrepreneurs encounter this constantly.
Pitching the larger client.
Launching the company.
Leaving the safe job.
Walking into a room where you don’t know anyone.
Publishing the thing.
Charging more.
Being seen.
The goal isn’t necessarily to eliminate fear before acting.
Sometimes the goal is to stop treating fear like a stop sign.
The Belonging Problem
Then we got into something even bigger: belonging.
A lot of people spend enormous amounts of energy trying to earn it.
Get into the right school.
Join the right company.
Make enough money.
Find the right social group.
Collect enough external proof that you deserve your seat at the table.
But Akash described belonging differently:
“Belonging is something that becomes obvious when you feel at home with yourself.”
That one deserves a second read.
Because if your sense of belonging depends entirely on someone else admitting you into the room, you’re handing strangers an absurd amount of authority over your life.
The more interesting version of success may be becoming comfortable enough with yourself that you stop auditioning everywhere you go.
You can still want community.
You can still want achievement.
You can still want the big table.
You just don’t need the table to issue your certificate of existence.
What Does It Actually Mean to Be Alive?
This is why To Be Alive Advisory is such an appropriate name for Akash’s work.
There is a difference between functioning and feeling alive.
You can have an extremely functional life.
Calendar optimized.
Inbox cleared.
Career progressing.
Retirement account behaving responsibly.
LinkedIn looking gorgeous.
And still feel strangely disconnected from yourself.
Being alive involves something messier.
Curiosity.
Risk.
Connection.
Presence.
Meaning.
Choosing things because they matter to you rather than because they look impressive when converted into bullet points.
And maybe that’s one of the stranger challenges of ambition:
At first, success means proving you can climb.
Eventually, success may mean deciding whether the ladder is leaning against a wall you actually care about.
Legacy Isn’t Just What You Build
At Legacy Launchers, I obviously think about legacy a lot.
Usually people hear that word and imagine something enormous.
A company.
A book.
Money.
A building with someone’s surname engraved on it.
But this conversation reminded me that legacy is also the patterns that stop with you.
The expectations you question.
The courage you model.
The version of yourself you finally allow to exist.
Sometimes your legacy is what you build.
Sometimes your legacy is what you refuse to keep carrying.
And sometimes the most successful thing you can do is step off the hamster wheel long enough to ask:
Do I actually feel alive in the life I’m working this hard to create?
Because if the answer is no, congratulations.
You may have discovered your next project.
And for once, it might actually be yours.
Listen to the full conversation with Akash Prasad on the Legacy Launchers Podcast.
Legacy Launchers Podcast explores the people, decisions, failures, reinventions and occasionally ridiculous plot twists behind building something worth leaving behind.
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