Lessons from the Vineyard. A Different Kind of Ambition

Harvest is in full swing, earlier than ever this year.

Some of Germany’s best winemakers live close by, and over the past four years I have gotten to know a few quite well.

What strikes me is how hard they work. Pruning, selecting, protecting, often painstaking manual work. Yet they never confuse effort with maximizing output.

They work with the vine, soil, weather and season. They reduce yields and remove what takes energy from what matters. They cannot force ripening, but they can create the conditions for it.

Their ambition is enormous. It is simply more discerning.

The same continues in the cellar. Great winemaking requires precision and attention. Yet the finest winemakers intervene with finesse. As much as necessary, as little as possible.

Not because they lack the skill to intervene more. Because mastery includes knowing when not to.

That tension between striving and discernment feels familiar to me.

For much of my life, striving and adding more worked well. More knowledge, responsibility, capability, effort. I know that drive. It has taken me a long way.

But eventually development becomes more complex.

It is still about building and striving, but also about selecting and subtracting. What deserves my energy? Which ambitions am I carrying forward because they once defined me?

Perhaps most difficult for driven people: What cannot be accelerated by trying harder?

We can practice, reflect, seek feedback, challenge ourselves. I believe deeply in discipline and deliberate development.

But some things cannot be manufactured.

Some patterns need to fail us repeatedly before we release them. Some insights take years to move from something we understand to something we live.

Experience itself guarantees nothing.

You can have thirty years of experience and repeat the same year thirty times. Experience becomes wisdom only when we digest it, allow it to challenge us and stop repeating what no longer serves us.

Then there is timing.

Harvest too early and potential remains unrealized. Wait too long and something is lost. You read the conditions, accept uncertainty and decide.

Leadership increasingly looks like that to me.

The more senior we become, the more power we have to push, decide, correct, accelerate, demand, optimize.

But our ability to intervene can quietly become our inability not to.

The qualities that created our success can become the patterns that limit our further development.

At almost 60, I am not less ambitious. But I am more interested in the quality of ambition.

So look at your own drive.

Where does it create something exceptional? Where are you forcing what needs time? What are you still pushing because pushing has always worked for you?

Maturity is not becoming less driven.

It is reaching the point where your drive is no longer driving you.