The cult of blind ambition
Are you chasing your dream or someone else's?
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster."
—Nietzsche
In the digital thunderdome of LinkedIn hustlers, Twitter thread bros, and Instagram "success stories," there's a piece of advice I continue to see shared, repackaged in various forms but always carrying the same core message: surround yourself with the most ambitious and successful people you can find.
The logic goes by being in the orbit of these folk, you'll naturally rise in life, pulled upwards by the gravitational forces of success and ambition. And unlike some of the other silly things these people say (waking up at 4am, anyone?) on the surface, this actually sounds well-intentioned. Why wouldn’t you want to be around people who challenge you, inspire you and make you better? Who wouldn’t want to grow?
But following this advise there’s a risk that goes unspoken, especially for people susceptible to gurus in the first place. It’s the danger of losing your self. In a desperate bid to absorb ambition and catch the same waves as high achievers, you risk becoming a satellite: a small, rotating body constantly reflecting the light of someone else’s star, but never finding the space to let your own light shine. The cult of personality in our world is real, and many are essentially just part of a kind of self-worth Ponzi scheme. And the exalted ones might make money, but contribute to rot, love credentialism, do not really care about craft. When you scratch beneath the surface they’re depressed, empty and nihilistic (save for blind sociopaths, but who wants to aspire to that).
The pressure in environments with these people both online and IRL can be intense. If you're constantly surrounded by blindly ambitious people, their opinions can start to feel like truth, their achievements the ultimate barometers of success. For many it creates an assumption this is what winning looks like, and if you're not aiming for it like they are, you're wasting your potential. Again, never mind the fact most of them are quite empty.
It’s a kind of intellectual peer pressure more insidious than the type we encountered in high school. No one is going to openly mock you for not conforming to the achiever class, but there's an implicit hierarchy, a cultural narrative that says if you’re not subscribing to certain goals, networking with the right people, achieving specific/openly seen markers of success, you’re ‘falling behind’ or ‘not going to make it.’ So people start absorbing certain values without even realizing it. They start optimizing life not around their own desires, dreams, or quirks, but around what others think is important. The divine spark inside you: the thing that makes you uniquely you, begins to dim under a constant pressure to measure up, to perform, to compete in specific status games in specific ways.
The ultimate success metric is whether you get what you want out of life. But that’s harder than it sounds because it’s easy to try to copy someone who wants something you don’t.
—Morgan Housel in his recent post “Do It Your Way”
This is not to say that you should avoid ambitious people or challenging environments. But the question to ask ourselves is: what exactly am I growing into? When you’re in a space dominated by so called ‘high-performers’ — you need to be ruthlessly vigilant about holding onto your inner compass. Otherwise, you’ll wake up one day to realize you’ve spent years climbing a mountain only to find it’s not the one you wanted to be on. Or worse, that the act of climbing has left you so exhausted you’ve forgotten why you started in the first place.
No matter who you seek for mentorship or who you look up to, never lose sight of your own spark, your own path, your own strange and wonderful adventure. Because the goal isn’t to be successful in someone else’s world (and require constant external validation). The goal is to create your own.
Great piece, Adam. This hit,
“In a desperate bid to absorb ambition, to catch the same waves as high achievers, you risk becoming mere satellites: small, rotating bodies constantly reflecting the light of someone else’s star, but never finding the space to let your own light shine.”
People want to be the high achievers, one of the ones who made it, but they never stop to ask why. People want freedom but never stop to consider how or why they want to get that freedom. As Nietzsche once said “freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.” And as you said, we need to be responsible for our own path and not just default to someone else’s.
Diversity is key here.
Not one person is ONE thing.
You work, you have a family, you have hobbies etc. - if you don't, you should.
If you're in a headlong rush towards wealth and power, your personal ties will probably suffer.
If you're obsessive about your fitness (as a hobby,) your career will likely suffer.
And so on...
I look at life as a 3 legged stool - health, wealth and relationships.
If you want to sit firmly on the ground, you should balance all 3. Yes there will be times when you'll have to do some acrobatics and will lean more heavily on one side, but that's not achievable long term - you'll eventually fall.
Look for mentors in all 3 of these categories. It will help you gain perspective.
I personally have business people I really admire, family people and triathletes. Diversity. Perspective.