It took me years to realise that I wasn’t ambitious – or at least, not in the traditional way. I cannot live at full stretch. I need a large amount of slack in all of my systems and safety margins everywhere in order to be happy. You should see how many loo rolls and tubes of toothpaste I keep in my bathroom cupboard at all times. By the number of spare toiletries I have to hand shall ye know me.

And it took me many more years to realise that, actually, that’s OK. To aim simply for a work-life balance from the beginning is fine. The only caveat is that you must make sure it is truly what you want and need to be happy, and that you are not in truth shying away from challenges because of a lack of confidence (or, of course, sheer laziness – that’s different, and we all need to sometimes kick ourselves up the arse about that).

Confidence will come in time, and you don’t want to have hamstrung yourself earlier in life simply because you were scared. But, those concerns aside, sometimes the most grown-up, beneficial thing you can do is choose the job (or the level of job) that is right for you, rather than mindlessly aim for the absolute pinnacle because that is what you have been told is the only acceptable way to go. The dominant message of an age is rarely right for everyone, and blind obedience certainly isn’t.

For some, life is about success, about accruing money, power, prestige and powering through at full throttle, and I rejoice in the fact that the women for whom this is true now have every expectation that they can do so. But everyone ultimately shares the same ambition: to be happy. And if that means being able to leave the office at six and pick up some extra loo roll on the way home – well, let us follow our bliss too.

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Lucy Mangan: being “relentlessly, tirelessly ambitious” isn’t for everyone