What do you expect to achieve in life? Are you lined up to be the next captain of industry or a Nobel prize winner? Or would you rather not work at all?

Not everybody dreams of jet setting around the globe, calling upon a porter to unload the designer luggage and taking a limo to an important meeting. There are people who don’t think that a cottage and a white picket fence is the pinnacle of life.

Very often I think that I should feel guilty for not being super-overachiever. Why am not already managing at least fifty people? Why is my salary less than six figures? Why hasn’t my profile filled pages of a glossy magazine? It doesn’t happen often, but very occasionally I think that I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the road.

And then I get to chat to a person like ‘A’, who came to see me today. We talked business (which I am selling and hopefully she will be buying) and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of working for ourselves, in our respective villages, for just about enough money for childcare and the occasional week away.

We could both work for big corporate organisations, earning stacks of money and shopping at the expensive end of the high street. But we decided that each of us would rather spend more time at home. More time gardening. More time having dinner with our loved ones. Less time commuting to a big town or a city.

‘A’ has several business ventures going on and so have I (well, a couple of jobs, anyway). We both have time to train our dogs (opportunity lost in Fred the dog’s case I feel). We both like spending time with our respective husbands (well, it is Valentine’s tonight, so I thought I would at least mention him). And the variety of jobs keep our brains ticking.

And, speaking for myself, it’s a great way to be. I will not become the next JK Rowling, Marie Curie or Arianna Huffington, but I walk my dog through a fabulous woodland in the mornings, cook from scratch, grow my own tomatoes and talk to my chickens every day.

Happiness achieved.