I’ll start with the part that usually gets dressed up as ambition but is mostly fear...

Most people don’t want to get ahead because they love winning. They want to get ahead because they’re terrified of being left behind. Ouch.

Yep. Left behind financially, socially, professionally. Left behind in relevance. Left behind in whatever invisible hierarchy they think everyone else can see.

That fear makes sense though right. For most of human history, being left behind wasn’t an inconvenience — it was dangerous. Fewer allies, fewer resources, fewer chances to survive and reproduce. Your nervous system learned that lesson very well. Unfortunately, it learned it in a world without LinkedIn, Instagram, or performance dashboards.

So when modern culture says “beat the 99%,” something ancient lights up inside you.

Not inspiration. Alarm.

Here’s the trick though. If everyone follows the same advice to get ahead, the average just moves. The benchmark shifts. The race resets. The anxiety stays exactly where it was. There is no finish line where your nervous system finally gets the memo that you’re safe now. You just run faster and call it growth.

This isn’t a failure of motivation. It’s a design problem.

Psychologists have known for decades that behaviour driven by threat and avoidance feels urgent but unstable. It works brilliantly in short bursts and terribly over time. This is where B.J. Fogg’s work on behaviour design often gets misunderstood. He’s not saying people are addicted to distraction because they’re weak. His point is more precise — people reach for behaviours that reduce discomfort in the moment when they don’t have better ways to regulate themselves.

In other words, distraction isn’t the goal. Relief is.

When winning, achieving, or “getting ahead” becomes your main relief strategy, you’re not actually chasing fulfilment. You’re trying to quiet a feeling you don’t quite know how to sit with. And because relief fades, the strategy has to escalate. That’s how you end up needing more success to feel what one success used to give you.

You can see this escalation everywhere. Ten years ago, a decent job was enough. Then it had to be a great job. Then equity. Then leverage. Then location independence. Then an audience. Then a personal brand. Then AI fluency. Each milestone promises peace. None delivers it.

There’s a boring, well-researched reason for this. Research on hedonic adaptation — Brickman, Kahneman and others — shows that humans return surprisingly quickly to baseline wellbeing after positive changes. Circumstances improve. Identity barely budges. So the fear just relocates. It doesn’t disappear. It learns new hiding places.

This is why people who “make it” often feel a strange flatness they can’t explain. The thing they thought would end the pain just taught the pain where to go next.

Clinical psychology has been mapping this pattern for years. From Aaron Beck’s early work to David Burns’ research on self-criticism, the finding is remarkably consistent: suffering doesn’t come from effort itself. It comes from what effort means about you. When mistakes become evidence of personal defect rather than information, anxiety and burnout follow like clockwork.

And here’s where it gets genuinely absurd.

A friend loses their job and you don’t think they’re worthless. A relationship ends and you don’t think the person failed as a human being. Someone gets sick and you don’t think their value has dropped.

But when the same things happen to you, the meaning flips instantly. Failure becomes identity. Loss becomes defect. Struggle becomes shame.

If you treated another person the way you treat yourself internally, it would qualify as cruelty. When it’s aimed inward, we call it discipline.

This isn’t rare. It’s everywhere — including in places you’d expect to be immune. I once sat on a seminar call with around 300 other psychologists. When asked how many identified as perfectionists or approval-driven, roughly 70 put their hands up. These are not amateurs. Many hold PhDs. Their job is literally to help other people reduce suffering. And they are not immune.

That should tell you something important. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a human one.

Therapy rooms are full because people are running the same loop. Pain drives effort. Effort brings temporary relief. Relief reinforces the strategy. The strategy raises the stakes. Then the pain comes back, louder.

That’s not growth. That’s an arms race.

And arms races have a habit of escalating until something breaks. We’ve seen it with nuclear weapons. We’ve seen it with financial bubbles. We’re watching it now in outrage politics and attention economics and now artificial intelligence.

Quietly, we’re also watching it inside individual nervous systems. This is why the stakes are higher than personal wellbeing.

You are not mechanical. You are biological. Threat-based drive taxes the nervous system. Chronically, it disrupts sleep, learning, emotional regulation, and relationships. Burnout isn’t a mindset problem. It’s a physiological signal that something is being asked to do what it wasn’t designed to do.

This is why stories like Alex Hormozi’s land for me (of which Im incredibly grateful) . After building an extraordinary empire, he spoke with Tony Robbins recently about discovering that the dominant emotional state at the top wasn’t joy but apathy. He called it obligation. Robbins called it what it was: suffering. The tools that got him there weren’t the tools that would take him further.

Chris Williamson said recently too, when sharing on his journey and taking out all stops to work on health issues - he said it even more simply: “I miss me.”

These are important because we have witnessed their journey and these aren’t failures. They’re warnings and people have said it plenty of times before.

Here’s the part that should actually worry you. Modern systems don’t need to understand you as a whole person. They just need to understand which part of you is easiest to trigger — fear of being behind, fear of being ordinary, fear of losing status. Once your worth feels conditional, you become remarkably steerable.

This is why persuasion works. Repetition, authority, social proof, reward loops — the mechanics Cialdini described decades ago — all work best when internal clarity is missing. AI doesn’t make this dangerous by intention. It makes it dangerous by efficiency. If you don’t know what’s driving you, something else will learn it faster than you can.

The irony is that if you genuinely want to get ahead — not just temporarily, but sustainably — the leverage isn’t out there. It’s in here. In understanding your own source code. What scares you. What drives you. What part of you is reacting right now.

If you don’t do that work, something else will do it for you.

I’m not saying stop striving. I’m not saying disengage. I’m not saying drop your standards (except if your'e perfectionistic ;). I’m saying this: if your drive is rooted in fear of being left behind, the fear will never let you rest.

There is another way to be ambitious without being owned by it.

Martin Seligman’s PERMA model is almost embarrassingly basic — positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement. Notice what’s missing. Self-hatred. You can still build, compete, and aim high without turning pain into fuel.

Anything that can threaten your worth can control you. The moment your worth is no longer up for debate, the system loses leverage. a little less desperate, alright in your own skin, OK to be by yourself.

That’s not self-help. That’s self-defence.

And if you don’t learn what’s running you, something else will learn you instead.

Be well,

Chris

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