The Curse of Ambition
Better to Just Be Strategic
Ambition can make you one-dimensional. And eventually an early has-been in your professional life.
For example, I assume it was the ambitious who posted a query on Fishbowl Big Law. It questioned why a young lawyer from a top law school would opt to lateral from a law firm ranked 5th to one ranked 80th.
The typical response was that such a move represented smart strategy. The tradeoff in prestige - which the ambitious too often chase - could include:
“Work life balance, less toxic environment, I would be inheriting a book so the goal is I can easily make equity partner in a couple of years”
Meanwhile the corridors of business are piled up with the broken. Those range from lawyers who don’t make equity partner to techies saddled with the classification of “underperforming” and can’t find comparable work and CEOs getting the boot.
What about at the get-go if they approached earning a good living with a flexible strategy? That’s versus the closed-system determination that they have to be admitted to a major brandname law school, then be hired by an elite law firm such as Skadden, Simpson or Paul Weiss and head to equity partnership. Meanwhile the sunk cost in time and student debt is too huge to do a course correction early in the game.
Being so driven can actually undermine success. The gallows humor in law firms is the grinders wipe out fast. They are so focused on their narrowly defined goals that they ignore myriad other variables in the system of rewards and punishment. Among them is the peril of playing the sharp-elbow game before being on a power perch. That is not tolerated.
The good news is that a hard knock can shift traditional ambition into sizing up opportunity just-in-time. The classic is the late turnaround genius Lee Iacocca. After being fired as CMO at Ford, he went on to “save” Chrysler by upending all the hardened assumptions about operations in the US auto industry. The Japanese and the Germans were eating its lunch. Instead of the goal of being ranked number-one in Detroit Chrysler made its mission being best in what would be its new core competence.
It had been said that now-defunct iconic GE Crontonville professional development center only accepted employees who had already been roughed up. Likely the belief was that opened them up, at least enough to learn.
In my intuitive coaching and tarot reading I observe the most significant growth potential and eventual sustained success among those whose careers had been derailed. Magically they let go of the “oughts” ambition had imposed on them.
