What are you asking your career to give you?
A good life? Purpose? Recognition? Security? Proof that you matter?
I work with extraordinarily accomplished people. They lead companies, carry enormous responsibility, create, shape, decide, develop others. There is nothing wrong with ambition. There is nothing wrong with wanting to succeed.
I have spent much of my own life striving, building and achieving.
But I have also seen the price we can pay when achievement becomes more than something we pursue — when it becomes the place from which we derive our worth.
Then the next role matters a little too much. The next success has to prove something. Recognition feels good, but never for very long. And so we need more achievement, influence, money, relevance.
Underneath all that movement, there may be something we don’t particularly want to meet.
I have worked with clients who numb that discomfort in different ways. More work. More stimulation. Alcohol. Sometimes drugs. Not because career success causes addiction — life is far more complex than that. But because staying in motion can be easier than becoming still enough to ask: What am I actually running toward? And what am I running from?
Research on human flourishing is remarkably consistent: status, money and achievement can contribute to a good life, but they are poor foundations for one. What sustains us more deeply are relationships, connection, meaning, growth and the quality of how we live.
Contemplative traditions arrived at something similar centuries ago.
Gain and loss. Praise and blame. Fame and insignificance. Pleasure and pain.
We spend enormous energy trying to secure one side and escape the other. Yet none of it stays. Careers end. Power moves on. Bodies age. Reputation changes. Even the people we love will eventually leave us — or we will leave them.
The problem is not enjoying what life gives us.
The problem is asking what is impermanent to give us permanent ground.
I have seen what can happen when people realize this very late. When the role disappears, the applause gets quieter, and suddenly there is a frightening question underneath:
What did I give my life to?
And then perhaps an even more frightening one:
Who am I without all of this?
But I have also seen people discover, sometimes surprisingly late in life, that another relationship with ambition is possible. Not less ambition. Not withdrawal from the world. But striving, leading and creating without needing these things to tell us who we are.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper tasks of growing older — and growing up: to participate fully in this world without being completely possessed by it.
So pursue the career if it matters to you. Build something extraordinary if that is yours to do.
But every now and then, ask yourself:
If all of this disappeared tomorrow, what in me — and what between me and the people I love — would still remain?