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Her COO brags about her
Her ordinary life
Hilary Silver lives an ordinary life. She plays pickleball, walks her dog, goes to the library, and works out at the neighborhood rec center. She works from home in the same house she and her husband bought right after they married 20 years ago, when they could barely afford it, and she is a mom of two teenagers. Anyone passing her at the grocery store would have no reason to think twice.
The company she built
Behind that is an eight-figure company she built from nothing and still runs from that house every day. She makes the decisions, writes each podcast episode word by word herself, and has a leadership team serving more than 4,000 clients. She never introduces herself with her numbers, and working them into a dinner party conversation would feel strange.
What her COO does
Her friend Sarah, who is also her COO, does it for her. At tables with people who know her only superficially, Sarah talks about the podcast, the success, and the numbers, out of pride in her friend. Hilary learned this by accident, and it moved her to tears. Without a word from her, those people meet the version of her that built the company.
Her own achievement has become so normal to her that she forgets how extraordinary it is. Sarah has not forgotten.
Why do wealthy people often live ordinary lives?
The 1996 book The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, drew on surveys of American millionaires. It reported that many lived in modest homes, drove ordinary cars, and spent less than their incomes allowed. Many were also self-employed business owners rather than heirs or high-profile executives.
Why do we forget how extraordinary our own work is?
Psychologists call the process hedonic adaptation. In a 1978 study, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with a control group. The winners did not rate themselves as significantly happier than the others. The researchers proposed that a new circumstance, however large, becomes the baseline against which everything else is judged.