This time last year, my final blog post of 2024 explored ambition, a fitting topic for a season when many of us begin to reflect, recalibrate, and set new goals for the year ahead. Recently, though, my thoughts have shifted towards a different but related idea: success, and more specifically, the timing of it.

What set this off was an odd chain of events. It began with an article about the Harry Potter actors and drifted into reading Viola Davis’ autobiography. At first glance, these two worlds couldn’t be more different. But as I sat with their stories, a single question kept echoing in my mind: Is it better to achieve success later in life, or what really happens to us when success arrives too early?

The financial security the Harry Potter cast gained so young has always fascinated me, because it highlights one of the most underrated ingredients of success: luck. It’s hard not to pause and wonder how a single acting role can generate such extraordinary wealth and open doors to decades of opportunities. We often repeat the phrase “success is when preparation meets opportunity”, but what we don’t talk about enough is the preparation part.

Some people spend years honing their craft with little recognition and often without any financial stability to support it. Yet it’s during this long, unseen stretch - the preparation period - where the real psychological groundwork is laid. It’s where self-awareness is shaped, where identity and values solidify, where humility takes root, and where entitlement has no place to grow. In many ways, this slow, deliberate season becomes the foundation that makes later success not just possible, but sustainable.

A personal story comes to mind. In my second year of university, I applied for several internships, because for me, getting practical experience early felt like the smartest way to build a career. When Gazprom, the Russian oil and gas giant, invited me to an assessment day, I felt genuinely lucky. I remember walking into the room and noticing students from top-tier universities, some from schools that ranked in the UK’s top five. And yet, as the day unfolded, I excelled in every task. I made it all the way to the final round. It came down to me and one other candidate.

I didn’t get it.

I still remember the devastation. Oh, I cried; the full, messy, absolutely committed ugly cry…. not out of entitlement, but because the opportunity felt so significant. That internship wasn’t just twelve months of experience; it was a potential pipeline into future summer roles, a smoother path into graduate programmes, maybe even a foothold into the corporate world I believed I wanted.

But because I didn’t secure an internship for that year, I made a different choice: I moved to Germany. I enrolled in a good university where I could design my own academic path and even take master’s-level classes for extra credits. I made lifelong friends, stretched myself personally, and travelled across Europe with my American friend Emily.

Psychologically, this is the kind of moment researchers call a “developmental detour”, a disruption that reroutes you towards growth you didn’t know you needed. And looking back, that’s exactly what it was.

Not getting the Gazprom internship did make my post-graduate job search harder. I didn’t land any of the traditional graduate programmes. I jumped between roles that didn’t quite fit. But that struggle turned into its own kind of education. I had always assumed I wanted the classic corporate trajectory - the ladder, the titles, the neatly defined milestones. My non-linear path forced me to confront what actually mattered to me.

Over time, I learned that I’m not motivated by prestige, hierarchy, or even money. What I value is balance, purpose, autonomy, and knowing what “enough” looks like. That clarity has become my anchor. Could I one day become a managing director or a senior leader? Absolutely. But what feels more powerful is that I’ve taken the time to find my happy place, a version of success that fits me, not the one I thought I was supposed to chase.

The contrast between the Harry Potter cast and someone like Viola Davis is striking; not because one path is inherently better, but because each reveals something essential about how humans develop. Viola Davis spent years studying at Juilliard, enduring extreme poverty, sharpening her craft in obscurity, and building the psychological resilience that would eventually carry her to an EGOT. Her success wasn’t sudden; it was layered, earned through repetition, rejection, and self-confrontation.

These are the conditions that build mastery. They are also the conditions that build identity. Long periods of effort, with no external validation, force you to ask who you are when nobody is watching. For Viola, that slow climb cultivated durability: skills that compound, confidence that doesn’t evaporate, and a sense of self that isn’t dependent on the spotlight.

The Harry Potter actors represent the opposite dynamic: massive success at a young age, before the developmental scaffolding is fully formed. When you receive financial security, fame, and access early, you bypass the period where most people build internal resources: discipline, self-belief, adaptability, and the uncomfortable but necessary ability to fail. Psychologically, this creates a fragile foundation. You benefit from luck, but you don’t always build the mechanisms to reproduce success on your own terms later.

This isn’t unique to actors. Everyday life is full of smaller versions of the same pattern: an early promotion, a start-up founder who finds rapid success without learning the basics of leadership, even a student praised from childhood for “natural intelligence” who never learns how to study. The achievement arrives before the identity is ready. When the initial advantage wears off, when the project ends, the industry shifts, or the novelty fades, you’re left needing skills you never had the chance to develop. This is where people often feel lost, exposed, or “not as good as everyone thought”. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of preparation time.

Without that long, often uncomfortable period of deep practice, you lose the opportunity to refine your abilities and discover new ones. You don’t get the experience of falling short, recalibrating, and growing stronger. When success is delayed, you gain something more durable than a breakthrough: the capacity to create more breakthroughs.

Viola Davis didn’t just get her big moment; she built the machinery required to sustain many moments. That’s the psychological dividend of later success - a dividend people with early success sometimes have to go back and painfully learn later.

And that’s the heart of the question that started this whole reflection:

What kind of success is more stable… the one you stumble into early, or the one you build slowly over years of preparation?

This is why the timing of success matters. It’s not just about when success arrives; it’s about who we’ve had the chance to become by the time it does. From a psychological perspective, this difference matters. Early, unearned success can create what researchers call “developmental skipping” - when someone jumps ahead in achievement before developing the internal capacities that usually accompany that level of accomplishment. In everyday terms, it means getting the outcome before building the identity that sustains it.

And for most of us, our journeys resemble Viola far more than the Harry Potter cast. We’re not handed a life-changing break at age eleven. We build… quietly, imperfectly, sometimes reluctantly. We stretch our abilities, discover our strengths, face disappointments, and learn who we are when things don’t go according to plan. That slow accumulation of experience becomes our insurance policy: when one door closes, we know how to create another; when an opportunity arrives, we recognise it; when things shift, we adapt.

Psychologists often talk about “identity capital”- the collection of skills, self-knowledge, resilience, and behavioural patterns we accumulate through challenging experiences. Over the years I have accumulated enormous identity capital through hardship, discipline, study, reflection, and persistence. I learned early on that in every aspect of life - not just our careers - success doesn’t rest solely on luck; it rests on layers of internal strength that can sustain us once success finally arrives.

Early success can sometimes rob us of the very experiences that build that foundation. When opportunities come before identity has fully formed, people can struggle later on with direction, self-worth, or the ability to reinvent themselves. That isn’t to say early success is bad; but it is fragile when it isn’t accompanied by the psychological development that comes from struggle, practice, and learning.

Early wins feel incredible, but they can also create blind spots. They can make us believe that the big break is the whole story, that talent alone is enough, or that momentum will simply continue. This is why the quieter, unglamorous years of preparation matter so deeply. They are where the internal scaffolding is built: the discipline, the humility, the adaptability, the grit. The qualities that help you sustain success, not just stumble into it.

Because, in the end, luck may open the first door… but it’s our preparation, our growth, and our self-understanding that determine how many more doors we’ll be able to open afterwards.

Years later, I realised this: not getting the Gazprom internship didn’t break my path, it built it. Success isn’t a race; it’s a readiness.

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