The Price We Pay for Proving Ourselves

Liputan6.com, Jakarta - For much of my working life, I thought ambition was a virtue that needed little explanation. We worked hard, sought bigger responsibilities, wanted to win and took pride in being recognised for what we had achieved. There was nothing particularly complicated about it. Achievement was achievement, and recognition was its natural reward. It was only much later that I began to wonder whether there was another force hiding underneath ambition: the need to prove something about ourselves.

The distinction is subtle, and perhaps that is why it took me so long to notice. Wanting to build a successful business is one thing; wanting to build a successful business because its success proves that we are capable is something else. Wanting to do a good job is healthy, but needing the job to go well because failure would make us feel inadequate is considerably more dangerous. From the outside, the two can look almost identical. Inside, however, they create very different relationships with success, failure and other people.

I have seen this repeatedly in business. Some of the most difficult people to lead are not necessarily the least capable. They can be highly intelligent, ambitious and accomplished, yet their difficulty comes from having too much of their identity invested in being right, being successful or being admired. Once that happens, a business discussion can quietly become a personal contest. A challenge to an idea feels like a challenge to the person, a disappointing result becomes something that has to be explained rather than understood, and a colleague who disagrees can begin to look like an opponent rather than another source of information.

The irony is that the more determined we are to prove our competence, the harder it can become to learn. When our sense of worth is attached to being knowledgeable or successful, criticism is no longer simply useful feedback. It becomes uncomfortable evidence that the image we have of ourselves may not be entirely accurate, and our instinct can therefore be to protect the image rather than investigate the evidence.

This is particularly dangerous in leadership because leadership is fundamentally an exercise in dealing with what we do not know. Markets change, consumers behave differently from what we expected, strategies fail, competitors surprise us and people whom we thought we understood turn out to be more complicated than we imagined. No amount of seniority removes uncertainty. If anything, the consequences of getting it wrong become larger as we move up the organisation.

Yet the more senior we become, the more difficult it can feel to admit that we do not have the answer. We have spent years accumulating experience and building a reputation, and there is an understandable temptation to believe that our position requires us to know more than everyone else. But leadership does not become stronger when the leader feels compelled to have every answer. It becomes stronger when people around the leader feel safe enough to provide answers the leader does not have.

I have learnt that there is a considerable difference between confidence and the need for validation. Confidence allows us to say, "I think this is the right decision, but I may be wrong." The need for validation makes us think, "I must be right, because being wrong says something about me." The first mindset leaves room for experimentation and learning; the second makes every decision a test of identity.

This is not only a problem for executives. Parents can become so invested in their children's achievements that a school result becomes a statement about themselves. Young professionals can become obsessed with promotions, titles and recognition because every new milestone seems to confirm that they are moving ahead. Entrepreneurs can become emotionally attached to a business idea long after the evidence suggests that it needs to change. Even on social media, we increasingly curate our lives as evidence that we are successful, interesting, intelligent, healthy or fulfilled.

None of this is inherently wrong. Ambition can be enormously productive, recognition can be motivating, and there is nothing unhealthy about wanting to do well or being proud of what we have accomplished. The problem begins when achievement stops being something we pursue because it is meaningful and becomes something we need in order to feel worthwhile. At that point, success becomes more than a desirable outcome; it becomes a form of emotional reassurance, while failure becomes much harder to tolerate.

This may explain why people sometimes behave irrationally when their reputation is at stake. They defend decisions they should reconsider, avoid difficult conversations, blame circumstances or other people, and postpone action when the possibility of failure becomes too uncomfortable. They may even pursue perfection when good enough would have been sufficient, because an imperfect outcome threatens the image they want to maintain. In business, these behaviours can be extraordinarily expensive because the organisation may continue paying for a decision simply because its owner cannot bear to admit that the decision was wrong.

There is another cost that is less visible: the amount of life spent worrying about what other people think. We compare our careers with those of our peers, quietly calculate whether we are ahead or behind, spend energy maintaining an image and become preoccupied with whether our contribution is sufficiently recognised. Taken together, these small acts of self-protection can consume attention that could otherwise be spent on work, relationships, learning or simply living.

Perhaps this becomes clearer as we get older. After decades of accumulating titles, achievements and recognition, we eventually discover that none of them is permanent. Organisations change, positions change hands, younger people arrive with new ideas, and the market moves on. Even the things that once seemed central to our identity can eventually become someone else's responsibility. That can be uncomfortable, particularly if our sense of self has been closely tied to what we do professionally, but it can also be strangely liberating.

Once you realise that you cannot hold on to recognition forever, a different question begins to emerge: if I no longer need to prove myself, what do I actually want to do?

For me, this is one of the more interesting questions about the later stages of a professional life. When career advancement is no longer the primary objective, ambition does not necessarily disappear. It can simply become less ego-driven. The desire to build, create, teach, write, mentor or contribute can remain very strong, but the motivation changes. You become less interested in what the achievement says about you and more interested in whether the achievement itself is worthwhile.

That shift can happen at any age. A young manager can make it tomorrow, an entrepreneur can discover it after a failed venture, and a student can learn it after discovering that being the smartest person in the classroom is less important than remaining curious. What changes is not necessarily the level of ambition, but the reason behind it.

The interesting paradox is that letting go of the need to prove ourselves does not necessarily make us less ambitious. It can make us more willing to take risks because our identity is no longer riding on the outcome. We can pursue a difficult objective without requiring certainty that we will succeed, listen to criticism without immediately defending ourselves, change direction without feeling that changing our mind means losing face, and give credit to others without worrying that their success diminishes ours.

Most importantly, we can fail without turning failure into a verdict on who we are.

I have also come to believe that the healthiest ambitions tend to be slightly larger than ourselves. Building a business merely to become powerful or admired can become an exhausting exercise in comparison, because there will always be someone richer, more influential or more celebrated. Building one that creates something useful, gives people opportunities and leaves the organisation stronger than we found it provides a different kind of motivation. The external results may look similar, but the inner experience is very different.

One is primarily about proving something about ourselves. The other is about creating something that matters.

Perhaps this is why some leaders become more interesting as they get older. They no longer need to be the smartest person in the room. They become more comfortable asking questions, listening without immediately responding and acknowledging what they do not know. Their authority comes less from having all the answers and more from having the judgement to know which questions matter.

We spend the first part of our careers trying to establish who we are. We collect qualifications, titles, achievements and recognition, and these things are useful because they open doors and give us confidence. But there comes a point when continuing to accumulate proof becomes unnecessary. The question is no longer whether we are good enough. It is what we want to do with whatever ability, experience and time remain.

That, perhaps, is a more mature form of ambition: not ambition without ego, because I doubt such a thing exists, but ambition in which the ego is no longer in charge. We can still want to win, still care about excellence and still enjoy recognition, without needing any of these things to tell us who we are.

There is a world of difference between saying, "I succeeded, therefore I am worthy," and saying, "I succeeded, and now what can I do with that success?" The first keeps us looking at ourselves; the second allows us to look beyond ourselves.

And perhaps that is when achievement becomes something more than a way of proving that we matter. It becomes a way of making ourselves useful.