Rosalía: Success Held From Within
The Catalan singer Rosalía, who trained in flamenco and broke through internationally with El Mal Querer in 2018, is currently halfway through her first arena tour, performing in venues from Madison Square Garden to the O2. The album she is touring, LUX, released last November, was named the best-reviewed record of 2025. By every external measure available to a musician at this stage of a career, she is at the point where the world is most willing to tell her she has succeeded. Asked recently what success means to her, she gave an answer that has nothing to do with any of it.
Rosalía: "Success is when I feel aligned between what I think, feel, and do: when I know who I am and live according to that as much as possible."
A Study Of Conviction
The commercial path after Motomami was obvious. Another record in the same register would have extended her audience and met an industry already waiting for it. Rosalía spent three years doing something else. She learned to sing in languages she did not speak, and wrote a record her audience was not asking for, about women whose values produced the work they are remembered for: Hildegard of Bingen's theology and music, Teresa of Ávila's reforms and her writing on the interior life, Joan of Arc's campaigns. The album is a long study of lives in which conviction came first and everything else followed from it.
Ambition Pointed Inward
Rosalía's quote takes the principle her album studies and states it as a definition. Alignment between what a person thinks, feels, and does is the plain contemporary version of what Hildegard, Teresa, and Joan lived by, and Rosalía is the one carrying that principle out of the historical material into ordinary language about how to measure a life. What gives the definition its weight is that she is offering it now, with the album reviewed as the best of the year and the arenas full, and locating success in something none of that can give her. The success she is describing places a person's values at the centre of their working life rather than alongside it, and asks them to measure their ambition against whether those values are still shaping the work they are doing. The recognition that gathers around a life lived this way is a consequence rather than a goal, and the leadership it produces is recognisable by the same test: a life whose visible decisions, taken across years, can be traced back to a set of convictions the person has not put down.
Rosalía’s challenge speaks to the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Transcendence. Ambition means dreaming beyond the expected path and trusting innovation to carry the work further. Transcendence means drawing from excellence and purpose to imagine what others cannot yet see.
A Call To Reflect
We invite you to sit with Rosalía's challenge. Where in your research, your Leadership in Action project, or your studies might closer alignment between what you think, feel, and do shape the work you are most able to make?