Deep within us lives an unquenchable desire — the desire to succeed, to fulfill our full potential, to be happy. That desire drives us from our earliest days; it guides us through growing up, through education, through our first steps at work, through the building of a career and a life. But somewhere along that road, the (whole) world convinces us that we have to choose: either we chase professional success, or we devote ourselves to personal fulfillment. As if these were two separate paths that never cross.
And so we begin to live a divided life. We become jugglers of our own happiness, shifting time and energy between work and family, between career and health, between ambition and peace. Forever afraid that something will slip, that one of the balls will roll away. And anyone who has ever tried to stand on one leg knows that it is not a question of whether, but when, we will lose our balance. We were not made to live by halves, to balance between the parts of ourselves. We were made to be whole.
The text this excerpt comes from, I wrote thinking of all of us who have, at least once, believed that success must come at a cost — and that the cost is our own life. Health, relationships, peace, sleep. We tell ourselves it’s only “just a little longer,” and then that period stretches on for .
The other evening I read Dušica Đisalov’s LinkedIn post. I don’t know Dušica. She is not my client; she has never taken any of my programs, and we have not yet met. For all those reasons, her testimony is precious to me — because it is entirely her own and entirely honest. She did not write an ordinary book recommendation. She opened her own wound and told the story of what she went through and how she found her way back to herself.
I’m sharing her story here in full, with deep gratitude and respect.
Whose powerful personal story I’m sharing
I think this matters for context. Dušica is a Delivery & Operations leader with 18 years of experience in IT, the financial sector, and large corporate environments.
Today she is a Senior Project Manager and Development Lead at one of our largest IT companies, and at the same time a Program Manager at an international agency, where she leads delivery across six teams. Her path led through Howden, M&I Systems, NIS Gazprom Neft, Société Générale, and AIK Banka — from banking and the corporate sector to leading global technology projects. When someone who has led teams around the world, stabilized the most complex programs, and anchored the most demanding clients stops and says that the greatest success is learning what we need to subtract from life — then we, too, should pause and listen.
Her personal motto is: “Be a rainbow in someone else’s storm.”
I read these details on LinkedIn.
Dušica’s post — a moving story about returning to herself
How many times have you burned out? I’ve stopped counting.
How many times have you told yourself: “I’ll hold on just through this period”? And then that period lasted for years.
Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when, for years, you believe you’re worth only as much as you produce.
There were periods when I worked 12, 14, even 16 hours a day. All my focus, energy, and time went to work, as if it were the only thing that mattered in life. When you live like that, your other life roles slowly disappear. There’s no time for friends, a partner, family, hobbies, rest — and least of all for yourself.
The biggest problem is that for me this didn’t last a year or two; it became a way of life that went on for a very long time.
At first I was driven by the fear of scarcity. If you don’t have a job, you have nothing to live on. Later, that fear was replaced by the need for validation. You get used to being a good performer, and then you start maintaining that status at any cost. There’s always someone younger, more rested, full of energy — and you just speed up the pace instead of stopping.
And so you spin like a hamster on a wheel, convinced there’s no other way.
Only when I began to work on myself honestly did I realize that the problem was never the work. The problem was the patterns I had carried with me for years. One by one, I tore them down and replaced them with healthier habits that led not only to results, but to a better quality of life.
Along that road, I read a great many books, went through various trainings, and tried countless tools. Very little of that literature managed to bring personal growth and professional success together, in one place, in a practical way.
That’s why I wholeheartedly recommend the book set “Being Successful in Life” and “Being Successful at Work” written by that dragon of a woman, Dragana Vujović Djermanović 👑
I especially admire Dragana for her authenticity, her humanity, and the way she has built her path. She has shown that great results don’t have to come at the expense of your values. She speaks and writes honestly, simply, without overcomplicating. She doesn’t try to impress with big words, but to help. In her books, I found not only inspiration, but concrete tools we can apply right away.
If you’re looking for books you’ll return to again and again, gradually changing habits that no longer serve you — you’ve found them. This is a practical guide that will help you achieve results without losing yourself in the process.
Sometimes the greatest success is learning that life is not only the addition of everything we’ve achieved. Life is also the subtraction of what no longer serves us, the multiplication through the strength of connection, and the division through the art of giving and receiving.
I wish I had learned this ten years earlier. Maybe then I wouldn’t have had to put myself back together from scratch so many times.
I hope this recommendation will, for at least someone, shorten the road I walked for years.
Dragana Vujović Djermanović, thank you for existing and for motivating and inspiring us by your example 💜
Four Lessons — the Mathematics of Life
Near the end of this moving post, Dušica precisely describes the steps of aligning life and work.
These are, in order, the four chapters of my book — the four operations that add up to a success worthy of a human being. Here are those lessons, distilled, as our small gift to everyone who strives for wholeness:
- Add yourself up before you set out. Know who you are — not by the titles and functions that fade or change color, but by the values, strengths, and virtues that remain when all the labels fall away. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
- Subtract what doesn’t serve you. Burnout isn’t cured by rest alone, but by the courage to set down the burdens you never had to carry — imposed roles, other people’s expectations, patterns you’ve dragged along for years. As Dušica says: she tore them down one by one. Progress is often the result of what we subtract, not only of what we add.
- Multiply through relationships and small steps. The strength of a network isn’t in the number of contacts, but in the quality of the connections. And great results don’t come through sudden leaps, but through consistent small steps. You don’t have to be the best every day — it’s enough to be the best you can be on that day.
- Divide in order to multiply. What you give selflessly — attention, knowledge, recognition, your own story — comes back to you multiplied. With her testimony, Dušica shared the most vulnerable part of herself, and in doing so surely made that hard road she walked for years a little easier for someone else. That is division that multiplies.
In Lieu of a Conclusion
I’ve read her post many times. And every time it shook me, because I too have lived through the scars she describes. Every day in my work I go through this with people, and even with all my experience, personal and professional, it’s no easier for me to hear it and relive it again.
I was writing for you, Dušica. I was writing for myself. I was writing for us. And I didn’t know whether, to whom, or how what I shared would ever matter. But all those days and nights I spent in the very situations you so bravely describe — and all of my work — take on meaning if only because they were of use to you. Thank you, endlessly, for gifting me this feedback.
And to you who are reading this — if you recognized yourself in even a single sentence of Dušica’s story, if you too are counting your burnouts or stopped counting long ago: you are not alone, and your road back to yourself does not have to take years. You don’t have to choose between work and life. Start with the basic operations — add yourself up, subtract what drains you — and slowly return to yourself the wholeness you deserve. Because you deserve to be all that you can be. Anything less is too little to devote your one unique life to.
And something entirely personal, to close. These days it is exactly two years since I made the decision to write “Being Successful,” and exactly one year since I approved the printer’s proof before it went to press. On that birthday of the book, the most beautiful possible gift arrived: confirmation that my giving — everything I poured onto the page through this shared experience — has multiplied, and multiplied through some of you I have never met.
All is one. And we are all one. And that is why it is never all the same whether we burn out — or burn as pure light, shining as an example to others.
2020
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