Ying Somumchan was Successful, Exhausted and Asking: What’s Next?

Inside The Long Game Reset: Ying Somumchan on building a life beyond career success

After building a successful international career in New Zealand, Ying Somumchan found herself confronting an unexpected question: What happens when everything you worked for no longer feels like enough? Her first book, The Long Game Reset, turns a deeply personal pause into a practical rethink of success, burnout and what comes next.

For years, Ying Somumchan knew how to keep moving forward.

She had left Thailand for New Zealand as an international student, completed her master’s degree and built a career that would eventually span more than 16 years across manufacturing, global operations, leadership and organizational transformation.

She became a New Zealand citizen. She led multicultural teams around the world, including male-dominated teams. There were bigger responsibilities, international travel, professional recognition and the freedom that came with a career she had worked hard to create.

From the outside, it was a success story. From the inside, something was becoming harder to ignore.

“I was always thinking about the next challenge, the next project, the next target,” Ying recalls. “Somewhere along the way, I forgot to enjoy life with the people I love and the people around me. I also put taking care of myself much lower on the list.”

Eventually, health issues and surgery forced her to do something that ambition had rarely allowed: stop.

That pause would lead Ying to reassess the life she had built, step away from her traditional corporate career path and write her first book, The Long Game Reset.

It isn’t a rejection of ambition. Rather, it asks a more uncomfortable question: What if you’re succeeding at a life you no longer want?

From Thailand to Building a Career in New Zealand

Ying originally moved to New Zealand with a relatively straightforward plan: study for a master’s degree at the University of Auckland and find a job after graduation.

Reality was less straightforward.

“There were many moments when things were difficult, failed or uncertain, but my ambition at that time was strong, and I simply refused to give up,” she says.

Looking back, she credits that persistence with helping her establish herself in a new country. But being a Thai professional in a multicultural workplace also required her to reconsider some of the behaviors she had grown up viewing as strengths.

Ying says she naturally brought humility and respect into the workplace, qualities that generally earned respect in return. Then her first boss gave her a piece of feedback that changed how she approached her career: she needed to become more assertive.

Being overly respectful, she explained, could sometimes make her less effective. That feedback completely changed my working style,” she says. “I learned that being assertive doesn’t mean being aggressive.”

Instead, Ying learned to balance assertiveness with empathy and respect, an approach she later carried into leadership roles overseeing multicultural and diverse teams.

It also became one of her earliest lessons in adapting without abandoning who she was.

When Success Stops Feeling Like Success

Over nearly two decades, Ying built the kind of career her younger self had imagined.

She worked across manufacturing and global operations, took on increasingly senior responsibilities and eventually led operations and transformation across countries and cultures.

She enjoyed it.

“I genuinely enjoyed my work and loved the responsibility, the challenges, developing people and making things happen,” she says.

That distinction matters. Her eventual reset wasn’t the story of someone who had always hated her job or dreamed of escaping corporate life.

The problem was that work had gradually become too dominant. There was always another project, target or challenge. Accomplishing one simply created space for the next.

“What became strange was that I started getting used to success,” Ying says. “I would achieve a goal or receive recognition, but instead of feeling proud, my mind quickly went to, ‘Okay, let’s get on to the next one.’”

The question “What’s next?” followed her through her career. But eventually another question began appearing alongside it: What would actually make her feel fulfilled?

She describes the experience as feeling empty while standing in beautiful surroundings. The achievements were real, but the satisfaction they were supposed to create had become increasingly fleeting.

“Burnout for me wasn’t just being tired,” she says. “It was feeling disconnected from the achievements I had worked so hard for.”

When Resilience Becomes Part of the Problem

Burnout is often associated with an inability to cope. Ying’s experience suggests the opposite can also be true.

People who are particularly good at coping may be able to keep an unsustainable situation going for much longer. “I think my resilience actually made it harder for me to recognize that something needed to change,” she says.

Her default response to difficulty had always been a “can do” attitude. Problems were there to be solved. Responsibilities needed to be met. Teams depended on her. If something became difficult, she pushed through it.

Even when stress and health were sending signals, work remained the priority. “I thought being strong meant being able to keep going,” Ying says. “Looking back, I realized that resilience is not always about pushing through. Sometimes, real strength is knowing when to pause, listen to yourself and choose a different way forward.”

Eventually, her health made continuing in the same way increasingly difficult. Surgery provided the forced pause that her working life had not. And without the next meeting, project or deadline immediately demanding her attention, she finally had room to question the system she had spent years perfecting.

The Piece of Paper That Started The Long Game Reset

For most of her adult life, Ying had a clear definition of success: move forward.

Build a career. Take on greater responsibility. Lead larger teams. Achieve the next goal.

It worked, until it didn’t.

After surgery, she found herself confronting questions she had never properly made time for before.

“Why do I feel lost right now? Why does my career path no longer feel exciting? Why do I feel less purpose and fulfillment?”

“It started with a small piece of paper,” she recalls. That exercise eventually became the beginning of The Long Game Reset. The premise isn’t that career success, productivity or ambition are inherently harmful. Ying is careful not to prescribe a single correct way to live.

Some people genuinely thrive on being busy, challenged and highly productive, she says. The problem arises when those behaviors continue on autopilot long after they stop supporting the life someone actually wants.

“The hidden cost is that we can become very successful at building a life without stopping to ask whether it is the life we actually want.”

Are You Successful, or Just Very Busy?

That question extends far beyond Ying’s personal story.

Modern working culture frequently treats being busy as evidence of importance and constant availability as commitment. For ambitious professionals, the rewards can reinforce the behavior: another promotion, a larger team, a better salary, another impressive title.

None of those things is necessarily wrong. For Ying, the issue is alignment.

“You can be intelligent, capable and achieve everything you set out to achieve, but still feel disconnected if you are following someone else’s definition of success or if one part of your life is successful while other important parts are being neglected,” she says.

The Long Game Reset therefore asks readers to look beyond career and financial achievement.

One of its tools is a “Life Audit,” which encourages people to assess different areas of their lives, including work, health, relationships, family, personal growth, energy and how they spend their time.

The point isn’t to make every category perfect. It is to see clearly where attention has become disproportionately concentrated.

“You can be financially successful, for example, but if your health, relationships or mental wellbeing are suffering, can we really call that a successful life?” Ying asks.

“For me, success should support the whole life you want to live, not just one part of it.”

Learning to Separate Self-Worth From Achievement

Pausing proved more difficult than it sounds. After years of deriving momentum from solving problems and achieving goals, slowing down felt uncomfortable.

“The hardest part was letting go of the belief that my value was connected to what I achieved or how much I could handle,” Ying says.

Her reset began by examining what gave her energy, what depleted it, what still mattered and which parts of her life continued simply because they had always been there. Then came the more difficult part: acting on the answers.

Ying eventually stepped away from the traditional career path she had spent years building and started her own business, shifting her attention toward leadership development, personal growth and helping organizations build stronger teams. It wasn’t an abandonment of her previous career. In many ways, it was a distillation of what she had valued most about it.

“I realized that what truly energized me throughout my career was not only solving business problems,” she says. “It was helping people grow, coaching leaders, helping someone find clarity when they felt stuck, and watching people discover a better path forward.”

The reset, she realized, did not have to mean erasing everything that came before.

“It wasn’t about starting over. It was about redesigning the next chapter with more intention.”

Turning a Business Tool on Herself

There is a certain irony in how Ying eventually found her way forward.

Throughout her career, she had trained hundreds of people around the world to use a problem-solving tool in business. She had simply never applied the same thinking to herself.

When she finally did, the process helped her identify patterns that achievement had obscured. She began recognizing which parts of her work had consistently given her energy and which version of success she wanted to carry into the next stage of her life.

Writing was among the things she had wanted to pursue for years but never found time to prioritize. Her forced pause finally created that time.

“Maybe this difficult chapter wasn’t just something I needed to get through,” she remembers thinking. “Maybe what I was learning could be useful to other people too.”

Her experience eventually evolved into the L.E.A.N. framework at the center of The Long Game Reset: Let Go of What No Longer Serves You, Find What Fuels You, Align with What Matters Most, and Navigate Your Own Long Game.

Rather than providing another formula for achievement, the framework is designed to help readers decide what achievement means for themselves.

A Book for People Asking, ‘Is This Really It?’

Ying says she partly wrote The Long Game Reset for herself.

But she also had in mind the many people she encountered throughout her career who appeared successful yet eventually found themselves asking the same question she did: What’s next?

They don’t necessarily need to be burned out, ready to quit their jobs or facing a dramatic crisis. Some may simply feel stuck. Others have achieved what they thought they wanted and are surprised to discover that reaching the destination hasn’t answered everything.

“If you are at a point in your life where you feel stuck, lost, or simply feel that something is missing, I hope The Long Game Reset gives you a moment to pause and look at your life differently,” Ying says.

That might mean asking what gives you energy now, rather than what energized you ten years ago. It might mean examining whether your current priorities reflect your own values or expectations absorbed from somewhere else.

Most importantly, Ying doesn’t want the book to replace one definition of success with another. “It is not about telling you what success should look like,” she says. “I hope you can see a little bit of yourself in my story, ask yourself some of the questions I had to ask myself, and perhaps find your own next chapter through the book.”

Her own next chapter looks markedly different from the one she once imagined, but it is built from, rather than despite, the years that came before it.

The international student who refused to give up became the executive who learned to keep pushing, then the leader who eventually had to learn something much harder: when not to.

“Sometimes, we don’t need to work harder or achieve more,” Ying says. “We just need to stop, reset, and decide what success means to us now.”

[PHOTO: Courtesy of Ying Somumchan]